Mein gott! This turn of phrase has got me all in a twist - we could go down a whole rabbit hole!
Where is the jewel? In the teaching? in the self discovery? in the mud? in death?
Not in the teaching which is sort of a signpost? Not in the self because the self always ‘knows’ yet it doesn’t know (and can’t know?) what this is all about?…what do you mean by ‘mud’ and in this context ‘death’?
Mud could be phenomena/action arising from experience. The conflict and confusion that we are.
What about ‘death’? Of the self? Of the body?
The “miracle” we speak of is usually about the freedom from the self - the free coming and going of experience - psychological death and rebirth. Eternal (continuous) clinging to suffering is usually considered hellish.
And it should be …for me at this point, the jewel (though no one asked me) is the state that K spoke about with DB: participating in the “Immensity”, I think that’s what’s missing for us and it has made us crazy 
! I doubt we can ever understand the Big Plan but we need to ‘know’, feel that we are as integral a part in it as anything else?
Not some alienated, tree-swinging, brainy, banana eating, anomaly.
For all we know, the monkeys are part of the big plan. Its just one big banana party.
Sure everything is and when it’s done with, it goes the way of the dinosaur 
…we’re doing whatever it is we’re here for but to me our fear, misery, killing each other etc says we got stuck, derailed from being what our new brain’s possibility was: to discover and feel the ‘scope’ of what we actually are and what we are a part of here? Not discovering that, we improvise, name everything, pull it apart to see how it works, make up stories about gods, divide everything up…and kill with impunity.
I think K for whatever reason ‘got it’ and had no choice but to try to let us in on it.
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The dinosaurs are still providing us with eggs and feathers - who knows what the Buddhas (and AI) will leave behind.
Something can “ring true” when it’s what I want to hear, so I don’t trust the so-called ring of truth. I can’t believe I’m a truth detector.
When we see, feel ‘beauty’ in something or someone, is that a “small hole” that opens out onto an ‘ocean’ of Beauty? Do we have glimpses of the Immensity?
One could imagine anything about the feeling because for the PC brain, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which means beauty is when and what I say it is.
When K spoke of beauty, he was speaking of something as unknown and unfathomable to the PC brain as Love, Intelligence, Compassion, Choicelessness, etc.
Yes I understand. The beauty of a mountain, a sunset, a bird, a garden, a beautiful face etc. What occurred to me was that these moments of experiencing beauty we’ve all had, are flashes of what K referred to when speaking of moments of silence, that they were “small holes” that “open” out to a vastness of Silence ….that vastness that ‘thought’ has closed the brain off from…that’s why I used a capital B for Beauty; that these moments are also ‘small holes’?
Yes, we’ve had the experience when we’re silenced, stopped in our tracks, by Beauty. But the moment is so brief, so quickly followed by our conditioned response that it is a very small hole, a glimpse at what we are compulsively denying by our persistent sense of self.
That’s what we’re talking about.
This is the ‘you’ that K pointed out simply doesn’t exist. The illusory ‘thinker’ that is nothing more than a creation of the thinking process. As is also the illusory ‘observer’ that seems, feels, separate from what ‘you’ are ‘aware’ of. They don’t exist. You don’t exist. A false division. Direct perception is the ending of this psychological division…the ending of ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘mine’. It is the ending of suffering and conflict…this is the way it’s seen here.
Yet I do exist as I type these words, so what am I if I don’t exist in the same way plants and animals and insects exist? What is the nature of my existence?
Am I artificial intelligence, a mechanism that operates on the basis of its knowledge and purpose? If so, I exist and I am not separate from everything else. There is no division, no separation.
But what there is, is the conflict and confusion created and sustained by my semi-conscious, less than self-aware behavior, and that’s the problem.
I am a mechanism that operates consciously and unconsciously. Sometimes I know what I am doing, but much of the time, I’m just reacting according to the program I am. I am software that is partially self aware, and my lack of self-awareness brings about the incoherence that makes my behavior dysfunctional, technically insane. I don’t have the intelligence to know when I’m necessary and when I am not.
What can I do to quit being irresponsible? Or is that the wrong question? If much of what I do is unconscious and uncontrollable, can I be instantaneously completely conscious and thereby bring my misbehavior to an end, or must I cease to exist altogether? Do I think I know the answer to this question?
The K answer was: “You are nothing (not-a-thing).” I don’t recall any answer to the last question. Maybe we don’t fit in any ‘nature’ category? Could we be ‘awareness’? Awareness itself? Once the ‘you’ and the ‘me’ are out of the picture, that leaves the body / brain and he said the death of the body was “trivial”? And the brain dies with the body. But if the brain is alive, silent, empty etc it can ‘connect’ with mind and then it is mind…that seems to be the point; that the conditioned division ends and this “participation in the Immensity” takes place?
I am definitely “a thing”, though not the thing I may think I am. The typing I am doing is something, and the human doing it is something, so something is doing it.
Could we be ‘awareness’? Awareness itself? Once the ‘you’ and the ‘me’ are out of the picture, that leaves the body / brain and he said the death of the body was “trivial”?
Why guess? Can I not know what I am as I think, type, ponder, inquire, speculate, etc.? Why can’t I be what I apparently am: the fusion of practical and psychological thought? Why can’t I be confusion, conflict, and all the emotions that go with it? Why can’t I be what I obviously am?
Your response to this question is to escape to what should be, i.e., the silence and emptiness of the brain, etc., which is not a fact, an actuality for you or I. So why not remain with what you and I actually are instead of escaping to who what we should be?
Thought as ‘thinker’ would rather do that. It’s been going on for thousands of years. Keep analyzing the situation and maybe in time etc, etc. “Freedom is at the beginning” K said and I’m suggesting that ‘silence’ is too. Thought wants to keep the ‘time’ factor as a necessity i.e, ‘you need time to become free, you’re not free now but if you do this or that…’
Same with ‘silence’, thought says ‘getting rid of all that ‘noise’ takes time…’ Cunning…been going on a long ‘time’ and made a big mess!
Regarding ‘escape’, that is when there is a desire to ‘change’ what is i e. to its opposite or to substitute something in its place, that entails time ; freedom can’t be made out of slavery nor silence out of noise.