This talk was born out of my everyday life, a birthday party last night and a friend getting locked out of his car. The Zen of the Catch 22 is seeing the double-bind of Catch 22 as the Koan of Life itself. Life evolves by creating Catch 22s. You either transcend through a creative act or idea, or your self destruct, but There Must Be One….You have to resolve the Catch 22 that divides the One into a civil war, a mind divided against itself. Catch 22 is the Horn of Dilemma. Right cancels out wrong; wrong cancels out right, and the two horns are separated from the whole Ox.

Our abortion war is a Catch 22. All our cultural wars of values are Catch 22. My whole life has been a Catch 22. The final release is falling down on the floor laughing at the absurdity of it all. And in that laughter, you are whole. The phenomenal world of form is world after world of Catch 22s. When the One is divided, Catch 22. The perception of form creates the Catch 22. This versus That. The. transcendent One is THIS/THAT.

But the One cannot be known because when something is known as an object, that knowing creates the Catch 22. Damn….trapped again. The leap is to the unity of Awareness or conscious itself. I AM THAT….which is prior to the Catch 22 of form. THAT is prior to, transcends or is beyond conscious experience, which is bound to form and the Catch 22. THAT….is Zen.

All relationships are Catch 22. You have two worlds in a relationship, each with its own center, each with it desire to be One. And yet in relationship there are Two. The dance or struggle between the two is the desire of each to obey the commandment Let There Be One…but there are two and they cancel each other out since from the view of each world, each is absolutely right.

Relationship if it is to survive is a continuous surrender to the ONE that is the Relationship. The surrender is not to the other’s world, the other’s will, but to the transcendent Relationship, the ONE that is Two. We may call this Love. Love transcends the Catch 22. That is why love is laughter. Surrender is laughter, because surrender is the cessation of struggling to escape the straight jacket of the Catch 22. This struggle, this tension is what Buddha called Dukkha, the suffering of separation of the two halves of relationship.

But this relationship is not just with your spouse, but with the world itself. We ARE relationship. We don’t stand alone as a fixed thing. We are not nouns. We are relationship, but as long as we cling to our Oneness, thinking we are obeying the divine commandment To BE the ONE, we miss the mark.

The ONE is relationship, and relationship is always transcendent of the Two. Relationship is a dynamic Unity that is always creating itself out of the tension between the poles of relationship. Truth is One. Mind with two faces.