Izzy’s Fire is Your Fire

November 8, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Our local Friends of the Library in Blackstone hosted an author, Nancy Wright Beasley, an active creative woman in her 70s who was life inspired to write about the Holocaust from her heart felt center, from the inside, from the subjective view of those who survived by being hidden in basements and holes in the ground. Izzy’s Fire and The Little Lion are about the hero’s of the holocaust and the indestructible spirit of man in the most unimaginable horror, the Holocaust. Both books are read in schools, honored by Holocaust museums, and on Amazon paperback and ebooks.

But I want to talk about her work as metaphor because this morning I’m suddenly grabbed by a greater meaning of the author and her books, one that is OUR meaning, the heart truth meaning that is universal, a meaning that grabs me and won’t let go. Metaphor as I use the term (see Joseph Campbell) transfigures the objective meaning of the author and books to YOU as YOU. We feel that the author, the books and I are One. This is the Lion’s Roar of the Buddha, the Awakening of the One that has no second.

The author describe the moment when she was literally grabbed or possessed by the power of the holocaust and her life changed. She burned with “Izzy’s Fire” to write these stories. Pacing the floor at night until she found the voice of Izzy. Then the book began to write itself

This Subjective, or metaphorical story is that life itself is a holocaust. Everyone alive now is dying and is going to die, shot by the Nazis of death. Life is death (all life dies and is dying) but the creative Heart can leap forth and create heart felt truth out of any holocaust in our life. The author herself is a Metaphor for being “grabbed” by life, this flower that will grows through a crack in cement.

The Nancy Beasley as Metaphor points to her work as content, but also at the same time points to her universal message as the awakened Heart of us all. Je Suis Nancy Beasley rings the metaphor when we suddenly are grabbed by her heart awakening as our own heart awakening. I and Nancy Beasley are One in that awakening…yet at the same time we are two, she and I, yet she is two, the author and her work.The One is the Many at the same time—but logic says this cannot be. In the truth of the Heart we are all One in this burst of joyous laughter in the cold face of the Horror, the Horror of the Holocaust of life. .

The Anxiety Loop of Terror

November 1, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

In the talk I make the analogy of a whirlpool in a stream—an anxiety loop where one feels threatened and swallowed—where suddenly you find yourself standing on the bank seeing yourself in the whirlpool. You are outside seeing yourself as a subject/object in the whirlpool. When you are in a whirlpool or feedback loop, you are emotionally held there. That is the clue. First negative (fear) then positive (I’m winning) emotions feed the energy of the loop. Becoming interested in seeing the feedback loop starts the awakening of Zen and seeing the Operating System of the mind from the bank while you are in the whirlpool.

Anxiety is a sure sign we are caught in a self swallowing feedback loop where anxiety feeds anxiety like a hall of mirrors. A panic attack is the end result of this whirlpool. The feedback loop of the “War on Terror” is a collective whirlpool that sucks the whole nation into its vortex. Fed by the warm waters of the Media, when this Loop is triggered—Was it a terrorist act or not!—the anxiety becomes global even. Oh, how powerful the ISIS cult feels when they can trigger this Terror Hurricane with a breeze. This has nothing to do with death per se, but everything to do with the Terror of Self-swallowing, the Horror of the Vortex of our own mind consuming itself. Sinister politicians capitalize on this Anxiety Loop to maintain their power. Need I name which political party does this with the same efficiency as ISIS?

An Anxiety Loop occurs when you feel the loss of your Center or ME. You feel like you are being swallowed by something unseen, but that unseen is you. Anxiety is not fear of something but the fear of something unseen, so the anxiety comes from not being able to be aware of the threat as an object. The object is formless, yet the fear rises…of what? We. don’t know, therefore, we have anxiety. Frantically, anxiety latches onto anything that could be the Threat Object, for then you can remove or kill the object and be free of the anxiety. When when the object is formless, the substitute object (or scapegoat) just accelerates the anxiety, because the removal of the scapegoat is not possible since the scapegoat is a substitute for the unknown. No matter how many scapegoats you remove, the black hole of fear remains. This anxiety loop occurs in collective or social minds and individual minds as well. When it occurs in the collective, the individual minds get swept up in the whirlpool, adding to the collection anxiety. Each feeds the other in a self generating nation panic attack. We will create phony wars in the hope of ending this anxiety loop.

The Horror! The Horror!

October 31, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

How can we stop out awareness or consciousness from swallowing itself. The ancients called this the Uroboros, or snake that swallows its self. We often see youtube where a cat or dog chases its own tail and we laugh. But our horror movies are all about being swallowed by the abyss, by the Evil Eye. This evil eye is our own Eye aware of itself, but instead of seeing God or the Beloved in a virtuous circle of expanding ecstasy, we see the abyss of being swallowed and disappearing. The Uroboros can go either way: into ecstasy or horror. Humanity is always living on the edge of this abyss.

Halloween is when we get to play with the Horror of self being swallowed by itself, so we love the horror at Halloween, we embrace the Horror, we pay money to see and feel the Horror in movies, because Awareness-AS is still present. We know the horror movie is not real because of Awareness-as, this Eye that never sleeps, that does not have an I that can swallow itself. Awareness-As stabilizes the horror of the Uroboros. It’s kind of like being in the waves of the ocean while you feet are on the bottom. You are standing on Being, on the ground of being, which is your awareness-as being. But when the waves lift you up, you feel a little fright. You could be swallowed by the ocean…by your own consciousness that has lifted off of the ground of Awareness-as Being. The panic caused by your mind lifting off the ground of being creates the need to cling to others in a circle to keep away the shark of the Uroboros, of being devoured by one’s own mind.

Mindfulness in Buddhism is the ground of Awareness-as, pure awareness prior to Awareness-of this or that. Awareness-of is dual consciousness of a subject and object. Awareness-as is One consciousness that is prior to duality. This ground is always present because whatever we are aware-of is in the field of awareness-as. Awareness-as is upstream of awareness-of separate things in the world, both inner and outer.

The practice of meditation arouses Awareness-as so that Awareness-of will always be grounded in being, in the real. Awareness-of when it lifts off from Awareness-as becomes vulnerable to the self swallowing of the Uroboros. Awareness-of then must insulate itself in protected world ideas of group think. Awareness-of become a Me as World. And this ME as world is affirmed by joining like ME Worlds. Walls go up, armies are armed, and the world is battle field of ME Worlds fighting to stave off the self swallowing Uroboros.

The Gravity of Time

October 30, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I hope you stayed with me on this talk as it was done on the wave, inviting you to discover the Idea as I bring the Idea into language and the talk. Essentially, we are looking at a different view of Time. We are not in Time, we ARE time, and Time has memory that accumulates so that we are constantly looking at the world through the frustration of a dirty time. In order to see clearly as our Awareness wants to do, we have to keep peering through a thicker and thicker time. The gap between the Awareness of Now as Being Time NEW and the perception of Time as OLD is the experience of suffering, or all the negativities of the mind.

The Law of Identity which is the Law of classical logic and our thinking mind says categorically that you and I are something, a thing, an identity of a One. And in order for that One to exist, it must exist in space/time as an object. This World View creates the common sense idea that we are things in time. I can change my mind, but as mind I can’t change the world, which is also me, because this Idea of Time/Space exists outside of me, as if I were a piece of flotsam on the ocean of space/time.

But when the view or World Idea shift from being in time to Being Time, everything changes. Now I’m not a thing but a wave. All is impermanent, said the Buddha. All things are empty. As a wave instead of a thing, I am the world and the world is me, while at the same time I am in the world as someone catching a bus. Are these two views incompatible? Yes.

But since you are Time, time is ONE time. There are many times in the cosmos. Time is ONE, therefore, you as time are One. This Present moment is TIME, so this present moment as TIME is the unity of you and the world as TIME, as an ongoing creative wave self generating itself as TIME.

This changes everything. The tension between the world as being in time, and the world AS time, generates the yearning to restore unity, to restore the ONE where everything is fresh and new again, no longer weighted down by the gravity of accumulated time.

We have two directions to take when this tension becomes intolerable: creativity (love) or violence. Violence is failed creativity. This predicament demands a creative leap of faith that actually leaves the old diving board of accumulated Time which is the Known. We leap into the Unknown spontaneously on faith that Unity exists waiting for us. But we can’t know what the unity is because it has not existed before. Remember, as Time unfolding everything is always creatively new. The Old cannot know the NEW, and from the view of the old the New looks like death.

Lion (movie review)

October 21, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

For me all ways are the Buddha Way, and all movies are extended metaphors of the Way Home. The legend and teaching of the Buddha are the Way Home that is driven by the sense of a Paradise Lost. Because we live in a space/time world that is mapped linearly from here to there, we believe we have to get somewhere to find our Home. And the Lion was a story about finding home at a particular location. However, the emotional story of the movie, the story that you as the viewer feels is Here. The movie is Home. The movie as metaphor is your home, at least while you are traveling in the journey of the movie.

Here is where we have to make the shift from the objective (the movie) to the subjective (you as the center, you as the movie). Just as the hero in the movie had to remember his Home when he came upon the Indian food he remembered in the streets with his brother, when the smell reminded him like the perfume of a lost lover, we have remembrances of our lost home.

We human beings are wanderers in search of Home, that mystical place where we are absolutely OK, where there are no apologies, that place where we belong. There is no feeling that can substitute for it authentically, but so many products and beliefs are sold as pacifiers when this longing is awakened. This longing for the lost mother is universal. For the child the Mother and the World and the child are One. And so we search for our lost unity with the world.

In the movie the little boy is snatched from abject poverty and dropped into unimaginable luxury of our everyday middle class world. And yet, he still didn’t feel at home with all these substitutes, with this artificial paradise.

Izzy’s Fire is Your Fire

The Anxiety Loop of Terror

The Horror! The Horror!

The Gravity of Time

Lion (movie review)

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