The Holy Church of Consumerism

August 23, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

It is very difficult to divest from our pain because our Consumer Culture is a Pain Culture. If you just look with fresh eye at the barrage of commercials that have inundated our mind with the coming of TV in the 50s, you can see a shift in the household hearth from the radio of the 30s and 40s to the TV. This was a shift from a oral tradition to a visual tradition.

I remember my first TV in. 1959 at a friends house where I watched Howdy Doody and a salad cutter commercial. Oh, how great life would if we just had this magic kitchen cutter that would take the drudgery our of the kitchen. This was the Philosopher’s Stone that would free us from wandering East of Eden, the hidden entrance to the lost Paradise where life would be easy and without labor.

Right there the Devil’s Seed was planted; Salvation through the next new thing. Just like you could buy salvation in the late Middle Ages through the corrupt church, now you could buy salvation through consumer products. But where did the pain come from that one needed to be freed from? The pain is implied in the commercial. The commercial is the farmer who plants this unconscious Pain Seed and then provides relief from it by his magical solution.

The American Consumer Economy is not unlike the Holy Roman Catholic Church that subdued pagan Europe by planting the fear of hell and salvation through the Sacraments.

Modern commercial products are the symbolic sacraments in our Consumer Church. But with each promise that this new product will end the emotional pain of being incomplete comes another dose of pain.

Religion doesn’t go away, it just changes form. The Church doesn’t dissolve, it just puts on new clothes, and not necessarily the robes of religion. It’s not the content but the shape the content comes in that is the message. The content is conscious, the shape is unconscious…unless you make the unconscious conscious.

In a world where only things exists (materialism) where is salvation but in things, since only things exist. There are physical things and mental things. Salvation in religion is through mental things that exist in time of the mind. Salvation in secular society is through products that exist in commercials, where the glow is added to mere form.

The Commercial is the alchemy that turns the base form into the gold of promise from from the pain of feeling incomplete. This is a false idol that is always a temporary fix. There is no salvation if form but in our material world, there is no alternative but to invest in physical and mental forms. This is why the West has turned to the Eastern traditions of non-duality whose reality map includes the formless as your true center.

A Recipe for Fascism

August 20, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

BOURDAIN’S LAST UNKNOWN PART

Last night I watched the last CNN Parts Unknown on Netflix where Bourdain went to Rome. Much of his inquiry, other than food, was on the left overs of Mussolini and Fascism. Amid the ruins of the Roman Empire (a state that was a religion) and under the shadow of the Vatican (the seat of a religion that is a state) you have the remains of another dream of uniting a society under one all encompassing rule where religion and the state are One Mythic unity.

As Bourdain pointed out, Fascist architecture glorifies the monolithic state and erases the value of unique individuals. Stark and massive, like an abstract machine gods, Mussolini’s public works are deserted. One couldn’t help, at least I couldn’t, see in Bourdain’s “food trip” a subtle reference to Trump as an American Mussolini. Reason and the individual’s power of dissent and say NO to authority is devoured by the Fascist monolith.

One comes to Rome to see the left-over dreams of Empire that the people cough up when forced down their throats. All the people really want to do is eat, drink and make love in the Italian sun.

The Choice that makes history a swinging pendulum is between the Many and the One: do you want rule by the many individuals, or rule by the One. Joseph Campbell traces this either/or choice to the mythologies or social order of the Levant (Middle East religions) and pagan Europe before it became Christina under the Holy Roman Church whose center was in Rome. All the tribe of Europe had to bow to this religious emperor. Of course, it all broke up and created the secular nation state of Europe and America. But still the longing for unity is an eternal force. Parts must have a whole. The spokes of a wheel must have a hub.

When the individual parts get unruly, get violent, the wheel wobbles, and some Authority, some wheelwright is longed for that will restore order to the house. A Father is brought in with a whip to make the children obey. That Liberal Mother has lost control. She just lets the kids do what they want because she loves all of them equally. We need Law and Order. The pendulum of history swings back and forth over who shall control the House, the mother or father. We need an authority who will make us all go to church and be obedient to the Law that is the same in both state and religion. And that is the recipe for Fascism that comes in many uniforms, but it always feels the same.

When the State comes in as the unifying power, the children that identity with the Father feel his power, and they only feel it when they exercise it, and they exercise it by putting down the children who don’t identify with the father. The good sons are against the bad sons. The irony is the both good and bad sons feels they are the good sons: The sons who are one with the Father are Good because they restore the Law of the Father; the sone who are against the Father are Good because they restore the Law of the individual, who feels the power of being a unique individual by rebelling against the Father.

The Lost Son of the Sun

August 15, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

How can I live in a world without shadows? How can I escape the labyrinth of my karma where my days seems to be on a recurring wheel, a fate of living on some eternal Ferris wheel that is going no where. So I tell a story here about remembering the gold buttons your Father the Sun God gave you. When I forget that I am the Son of Light, I cast shadows on the screen of the world coming at me as my the future, and I fight like a challenged knight of the Round Table. A winner or loser, the world seems to be an endless succession of knights, of fate to be defeated, and eventually, too old and tired I leave the field of batter with regrets for my lost battles. But something is missing.

I have forgotten my gold buttons buried in my dresser drawer. When I remember the Sun God, the Light is directly overhead and I look at the world and there are now shadows. for that moment in vision anyway, that moment not of remembering a gift from the past, from a Sun of the past, but a Reminder that the Light of the Father is not eternal to me in time or even external to me now. I am that Light. The son and father are ONE! BAM! The shadows of my lunar mind and Ego disappear.

No longer do the forms of the world come at me as obstacles and attackers, no longer do I feel the victim, no longer do I feel cursed with this burden of a world that never works with me, but always against me, a world to be overcome or controlled. No longer when the Vision of Light breaks through my shadowed world of clouds as Insight…insight that comes from the Light within, not without, not from some distant Sun, some authority or external Father.

Master Chef: The Profane Priest

August 14, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

This is my third talk on Anthony Bourdain and his adventures as mystical poems, if you will. While I don’t know what Bourdain thought he was doing, I’m finding that his work was revelation of the sacred in the profane, the spiral in the everyday world. As Buddhism says: Samsara (the world) and Nirvana (the sacred) are One. So the Master Chef is a Priest, and the death (killed pig) is transmuted through fire into the life of the people, but with great joy and passion in the creating and eating of the Eucharist. The transmutation of Death into Life is the power of all religions and ritual, but we think it’s just on Sunday. We have lost the sacred, so like Bourdain we are cursed to wander the earth looking for it.

Our profane mind, our worldly mind separates death from life, even assigning God with creation and the Devil with destruction. In the East God is both creator and destroyer at the same time, at the same time. So life is ambiguous. Everything is dying, everything is being born. Death gives life, life brings death. Life is the One that is two.

Seeing that is the Zen Satori. The Koan of life is cracked. God is no longer divided and dismembered. It is through SEEING that we are made whole. The Now becomes sacred.

Compare the Communion in a main stream church and the communion with a Master Chef. Both have the same ingredients: fragmented ingredients, the death of a sacrificial life, the fire of transubstantiation (the funeral pyre) turns death into life and joy. But you can see the difference between the dead ritual meal, and the living meal, the dead Eucharist and the living Eucharist. The Church holds the sacred hostage, and just serves it out in wafers on Sunday. But in real life, you too can become a Master Chef. You too can become a priest. You too can turn death into life. You too can discover the sacred in the profane, the One in the many, the whole in the parts.

The Mystical Body of Anthony Bourdain

August 13, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

The mystical Body of Bourdain is the mystical body of cooking itself, which is a Eucharist we all participate in everyday to some extent. But Bourdain by making a show if it, creates a ritual that to me is a metaphor of the Catholic Mass, which itself is a metaphor of the Dying and Resurrection of Life the eats life to live. Life must die so life can be born. Life gives itself unto death so that new live can be created. Whether we like that or not, that’s the truth. Most of us in the squeamish West can’t handle that truth. We don’t like to see animals killed for our meal in the village market. We like it all packaged and renamed. We avoid this truth of life that is death. Life and death are ONE. You can’t separate them, but we try.

VIEW TALK HERE

The mystical Body of Bourdain is the alchemy of the chef who through his magic transmutes the fragmented animal and vegetable parts into a meal that brings unity to the family of man, a communion if you will. Through eating together we find unity together. Our fragmentation is healed through the unity of the Mystical Meal. The master chef is the Sacrificial Priest. His ingredients are what’s given in his region, and through his personal unity of body/mind (his art) he restores unity in his guests or family. Great cooking is magic.

Great food is great taste and great taste is a blend of opposite flavors and textures. Our taste buds instinctively know what is whole and what is not, what is complete and what needs something else.

Bourdain’s mystical adventure is visiting parts unknown in a quest for completion through the experience of taste. He metaphorically captures our own quest for completion and satisfaction in experience. Perhaps when he realized that he could not find completion or peace in his life through new tastes, he decided to really go to parts unknown. (Who knows).

Every moment is the crucible where the old become the new, where the known dies into the unknown and rises as the known. Every moment of the Now is where clear and distinct ideas become ambiguous, and a new Idea is born (or not). In mystical language every moment is the breaking of the body (crucifixion of Christ) and the Resurrection of the Body, both simultaneously. When we know the spontaneous union of opposites, that is the Christ Consciousness (Awareness) that transcends the fragmentation of consciousness in names and forms.

Mystical means transcendent of experience. Experience is fragmented; Transcendence unifies this broken bread into a Single Idea that contains all the fragments. This Single Idea is the Parts Unknown. It is the unknown known.

The modern world is crying out for unity, for its lost center. Scientific materialism makes stuff, but it doesn’t restore our center because it’s flat and we see ourselves as just so many ants crawling on the earth like as if it were a ripe fig. Each ant wants to get as must sweetness before it dies. This is a Wasteland, a Flatland that has been wiped clean like a white board of all the ancient myths that once made us aware of the Tree instead of just the figs. We find our unifying myths in movies and Romances of the Quest for unity, which I see Parts Unknown as metaphorically.

Like Percival of the Arthurian Round Table, Bourdain is questing for the Holy Grail, that meal, that food that will give final satisfaction and end his need to keep searching parts unknown. The Holy Grail (metaphor alert) is the completion of the Quest and the search for meaning. Bourdain’s quest for satisfaction or completion in food is a metaphor for our quest for meaning in the material world. Can we find satisfaction, completion, and the end of the pain of seeking in material form, in the next best thing? Can we find it in time, in parts unknown?