Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you, as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox. Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you, as a shadow clings to a form.
                                                                                                                                    -- Buddha

The god Indra has a net, made of all the stars. In each star, you can see the reflections of every other star, so by understanding a single star, you understand the whole Universe. Each star is connected and reflected in every other.

The connections that bind us and draw us to each other are powerful and sometimes unending and sometimes maddening as we struggle to keep hold of the reasons not to do something we'd like to do. Attraction is real, visceral, physical--what is there past raw egoistic pleasure-gratification? The raw lust remains, the only constant, like suffering and death and perfect ice cream sundaes and good luck and bad luck. It's an element, like the weather--approaching it differently, with a pure and unselfish mind, doesn't make it go away or even change very much, but then I can be in that relationship with clarity and honesty, and suffering will not follow me as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footprints of the ox, as has been the pattern for so many years. That seems more than worthwhile.

I'm discovering I can do some impressive things with energy these days, like the gates I've passed through and the way I've opened up has just cranked up the flow of energy through my body, especially this week after aikido classes. I'm vibrating a lot--in my body, I perceive the energy as a very small but fast vibration; sensing other energy, I usually feel a kind of pressure, which I guess you could think of as vibrations from outside pressing against my hand. So doing any kind of energy thing with someone, the two things in my head are either an image of the energy flowing, or (and I've just started with this and it seems it may be more powerful) trying to receive the other person's vibrations and at the same time bring them into resonance with my own.

Wacky stuff, this. But I've yet to hear another plausible explanation for what I feel, what others can feel, and the palpable effects we all have on each other, unexplainable by placebo effect because we didn't know they were coming. I mean, I feel like a hippie, but damn, yannow? It's as real as anything else I perceive.