What is the opposite of random?

Trees are the answer to the question -
"What is the opposite of random?"

The Discussion Prompt for tomorrow's meeting is ready for your viewing pleasure.
DOWNLOAD HERE

Dear <<First Name>>,

The Prompt is ready for download, and it's a good one. As always I will do my best to bring as many copies as I can tomorrow, but if you're able to print a copy at home to bring with you it would be much appreciated.

The letter below is an optional read because I know it's long, but some of you will probably enjoy it, and it sets up our meeting quite nicely.

We're very excited to see everyone again after all our summer adventures. There's so much to talk about! Can you believe this is our 26th Book? Cosmic!

Speaking of cosmic, the Cosmic Door Prize for tomorrow is amazing. Get excited. Friends and first timers are always welcome. Don't be shy.

Curiosity is a prerequisite for insight, so prepare to be amazed and we'll see you tomorrow evening at The Wild Detectives at 8:30pm.

Dear Questers,

The last time we all saw each other was back in June when we were discussing our 25th book “The Secret Destiny of America” by Manly P. Hall. Topics included the Order of the Quest, the Society of Unknown Philosophers, their plan to (re)establish the Platonic Vision on earth over the course of thousands of years, Francis Bacon and the New Atlantis, the hidden societies that shaped and still shape America, the symbolism and strategy of the UNFINISHED PYRAMID, and the nascent idea of the TIME WHARF.

At the time we didn’t really know what the TIME WHARF was yet. It was an UNFINISHED PYRAMID you could say. So over the summer a ‘Steering Committee’ of sorts was formed and we brainstormed, “What might the TIME WHARF actually be? What could it all mean?”
When we started all we knew was that we were going to bury it shortly after the Great American Eclipse on August 21, 2017, and then unseal it roughly 7 years later on the the morning of April 8, 2024 when the next TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE passes directly over Dallas. (You can go ahead and RSVP for that right HERE)

Everything else, from where we were going to bury it, to what we were going to put in it, to what our ideal and purpose for it would be, we discovered/created together.

(Truth be told, our gatherings turned out to be far more frothy and inspiring than I imagined they would be. Holy smokes! The TIME WHARF took on a life of its own and very quickly. I’d like to give a great big thank you to everyone that has helped out, contributed, and participated with the TIME WHARF, it couldn’t have happened without you. It has truly been a collaborative experience that’s lead to something greater than the sum of all its parts. I hope it’s been as rewarding for you as it has been for me so far.)

I will not attempt to share all the Secrets of the TIME WHARF here, those are reserved for ILLUMINATED CURIOSITIES to discover. But there is something important and relevant that’s at the heart of both the TIME WHARF and what I hope to talk about at book club on Tuesday, and that’s the relationship between AWE and NONDUALITY.

What exactly is the relationship between AWE and NONDUALITY, and why does it matter?

As we start to talk about this it’s going to get tricky because NONDUALITY is outside of language, but we need language to get there. It requires a special sort of skill, a special type of “grip” so to speak. It’s why we’ve been learning to use language like a THORN TO REMOVE A THORN and constantly reminding ourselves that the MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY.

The MEANING is not contained within the language, the MEANING is what the language is pointing towards. Don’t get trapped by the TRIGGERS. Keep this in the front of your mind as we wade deeper.

What is the TIME WHARF?

The TIME WHARF is the STARTING POINT of a story about learning how to relate to the present moment without needing a “story” to relate to the present moment. But first you need The Story - to get out of the “story”. It’s a little paradoxical. It’s nondual.

Personally, I don’t feel like I’m fully alive unless I’m playing in paradox, which is why if we were going to start at the end, the moral of The Story is that TRAUMA repeats itself through NARRATIVE, so in order to let go of Trauma, good or bad, we eventually have to let go of narratives altogether, good or bad.

But - we aren’t going to start at the end, because a quantum leap like that is hard to wrap your head around. Moving from a linear to NONLINEAR worldview is a delicate process, it’s a Hero’s Journey really. If you’re not ready and you try jumping directly into the NONDUAL without The Story first, there’s a good chance you’ll trigger your psyche’s flight response. Humans are like inverted sensitive plants, and if you aren’t artful in your approach, it’s very easy to trigger the consciousness recoil buttons. When that happens, instincts take over, and any chance of expanding anybody’s understanding, including your own, is lost.

Human Understanding expands by degrees, gradually, in steps, like a rose unfolding its petals as it blooms. The vine of connected consciousness grows limb by limb, so in order to avoid triggering the Worldview Shutdown Mechanism that’s implanted in each of us these days, we need a better story than the one we’ve been given. We need a narrative that’s suited to be a vehicle, a launching pad, a place to plant our pole as we vault out of the binary and into the NONDUAL.
We need a narrative that’s wet, real wet.

We need a narrative we can use like a THORN TO REMOVE A THORN.

We need a narrative that’s FROTHY.

When the ‘Steering Committee’ got together and thought about it some more, we realized the experience of TOTALITY (standing directly in the shadow of the moon during a TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE) is synonymous with the experience of AWE.

MOMENTS OF AWE temporarily short circuit the mental operating system and transcend the limitations of reason. They are like Zen Koans that point the mind at itself. They shock the brain for a moment, and our TRUE SELF glimpses NONDUALITY. AWE is TRANSFORMATIVE.

When you’re standing in the blazing sun and the moon - which is 400 times smaller than the sun - manages to turn day to night and back to day again in a matter of minutes, it is nothing short of astonishing. If you are there, standing on planet earth in the right place at the right time, and you feel the temperature drop and see the birds get restless and hear the crickets come out, it literally leaves you AWESTRUCK.

I couldn’t speak from experience on this subject at our last meeting, but now I can. For the Great American Eclipse on August 21, 2017 we drove up to Carbondale, IL and experienced the phenomena first hand, for 2 ½ minutes of total blackout, and I can tell you personally that it lived up to, and exceeded, all the hype. Seriously, it was incredible. BEYOND WORDS.

We realized that what we have on April 8, 2024 is another opportunity to experience the spellbinding AWE of TOTALITY, but this time right here in Dallas, because as “luck” would have it - we’re directly in the PATH OF TOTALITY. (Notrandom)

But the more we kept thinking about it, the more we realized AWE is actually all around us, all the time. There is a never ending supply of reasons to be in absolute AWE of our existence if we can just get out of our own way and manage to open our IDENTITY enough to see it, to remember it, to realize it, to experience it. When we are young and still connected to the NONDUAL universe, everything makes us WONDER.

Life is enchanted and everything is connected.

But somewhere along the road of life though we forget this. We get older and we lose our SENSE OF WONDER, our SENSE OF AWE and REVERENCE for the incomprehensible beauty, complexity, and mystery of existence.

We get too big for our britches and begin to think we know more about reality than we really do, and this is to our own detriment, because A VITAL SENSE OF WONDER IS PROFOUNDLY IMPORTANT TO THE QUEST FOR SEJNES.

Our intention for the TIME WHARF, and the Story, and You, is to help re-enchant what our relationship with the universe can be. Our goal is to get people in the unconscious habit of finding beauty in every moment. In the process, I think we’ll arrive there ourselves.

So if AWE is all around us, we thought, why should we have to wait until 2024 to experience it again? Maybe, just maybe, we can learn how to STEP INTO AWE in other, more accessible ways, on a daily basis, at will. Perhaps there are some tools and techniques we might be able to learn that can aid us?

Which brings us to TREES, Mighty Trees, and what I’d like to talk about at book club.

Behold!

If your view of the world is WET enough, if your view of the world is WOKE enough, TREES - just like Total Solar Eclipses - can become PORTALS INTO AWE for you. (BHAVANA)

So my INTENTION for our meeting is to highlight enough about how cosmically, mind-blowingly awesome and mysterious TREES are for the purpose of reinvigorating our SENSE OF AWE for NATURE and learning how to use TREES as PORTALS for passing in between DUALITY and NONDUALITY in a useful way, just like TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSES do.

Easy, right?

SEJNES: It behooves us to never lose our capacity to be in deep, genuine, heartfelt AWE when we’re standing next to an enormous, ancient redwood tree, or any other tree for that matter. Trees are portals into vast realms of knowledge concerning the underlying patterns of things. PHYLLOTAXIS is not just a figure of speech or some random word we say. Trees are direct reflections of DIVINE INTELLIGENCE in action, and visible for all to see. Trees show us Nature’s blueprint, which is our own blueprint. The Garden of Eden is in your skull, and your brain is the TREE OF KNOWLEDGE in the center of it.

Why Trees?

Because Trees are the answer to the question - “WHAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF RANDOM?”

May this be the cornerstone of a new USEFUL VISION.

I hope everyone is excited for our 26th Helping Friendly Book Club this Tuesday 10/10 at The Wild Detectives. I know I am. Can you tell?
Friends are welcome, the Cosmic Door Prize may be the best one yet, and I have a huge announcement about the Helping Friendly Book Stands. The evolution continues.

Always be PHYLLOTAXING.

To all my relations,
Cole

#STEPINTOAWE

“But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods. Scientific research aimed at understanding the astonishing abilities of this partnership between fungi and plant has only just begun. The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other. It takes a forest to create a microclimate suitable for tree growth and sustenance. So it’s not surprising that isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests. Perhaps the saddest plants of all are those we have enslaved in our agricultural systems. They seem to have lost the ability to communicate, and, as Wohlleben says, are thus rendered deaf and dumb. “Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes,” he advocates, “so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.” - Tim Flannery

Connect with us.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

- Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front