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THE FAILURE OF THE JETSONS

July 13, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

I grew up in southern CA in the 40s when polio was the plague, especially for children, and when there was a spike, public events were shut down. At the movies, there would be a short fundraiser for the March of Dimes to eradicate polio, and then a vaccine was discovered. Were is polio today? But if we are not vigilant, it can come back.

This a metaphor for spiritual practice. When you have an “awakening” you discover the vaccine to the polio of the Ego—which is a paralysis of your life— but if you are not vigilant with a practice of meditation, the polio comes back.

I grew up in the modern age (we are now in the Postmodern age) where science was the priest and the doctor. Science and the tools it invented would bring about the kingdom of God on earth, it was believed. Whatever problem came upon us, science would solve it, and vaccinate us against it so it would not return.

If an airliner crashed. science would discover its cause and remove it, so we would be safe. When was the last time one of our big airliners crashed? I remember when it was common. But the point is that when it comes to machines, anyway, we can through cause and effect logic, vaccinate the machine from further disease, or crashed. Remember how computers use the crash and freeze up all the time?

Why did we stop believing in vaccines? When did and why did we start believing that if science came to help we should not open the door, not accept its remedy to our dis-ease?

One of the features of the Postmodern age is that—thanks to Quantum—we realize that the scientist is not perfectly objective. When it comes to fixing life, that’s us, the scientist is like the alchemist of the Middle Ages: the scientist is subjectively part of the experiment he chooses to determine the objective results. There is no pure objectivity when it comes to fixing life.

We no longer live in the paradigm or world Idea of the modern age where the external world is like a machine that can be fixed if you discover the cause of any effect. The Jetsons failed. We no longer believe in Scientific Utopia.

We know that the scientist participates in the effect, the cause of the effect he examines. The observer and the observed are one.

We have come to distrust the study that claims to be objective because every study comes with an opposite study claiming the opposite. What was defined as bad, often is discovered to be good. Who do you trust?

This is the double-bind of the Postmodern Age. Everything is suspect. Everyone has their spin. This creates the conditions for a dictator, the One who will tell us the truth since we cannot choose.

The Catholic Church before it was debunked by the Protestants, was the only source of Truth in both heaven and earth. Truth has been in free fall ever since.

The Modern Age that was born out of the womb the Church at the end of the Middle Ages, was a masculine age. The scientist with his probing penetrating scalpel of analysis will discover the truth by excluding not truth. You get to the One by eliminating the false, the error and the sin.

The Holy Roman Catholic Church was really the ancient worship of the Earth Goddess in the form of the Virgin Mary. It was She who accepted everyone. It was She who healed the sick…The Goddess includes all. Her instrument is not the sharp knife of analysis that dissects, but intuition and compassion, the inclusive acceptance, an expansive force that expands boundaries, that embraces differences to reach the Truth or the One.

The Protestant/science reformation was masculine, the OT God who came to conquer the Goddess and judge the wicked and exclude the sinners.

As the Reformation progressed, the success of science in controlling nature and removing discomfort replaced the priest.

But in the 50s, just as the priests in the Catholic Church sold the sacraments, the scientist sold objectivity. Camels are good for you because the doctors recommend them.

The Postmodern age we now live in is a reformation in the way we know what’s true. The holy Catholic science is breaking up, and there is a pagan revolt of the heroic individual who will not be subservient to any authority….

This creates a new Catch 22 where yes is no and no is yes….The question now is not What is the Truth? It is no longer Out There to be discovered by science.

Well, I cannot leave it here, leave you. hanging. We are in a resurgence of the Goddess, the one that the Reformation suppressed. Remember the Puritan Witch Hunts…ala Hillary?

What has failed us, what has come to the end of its string, is the masculine way of knowing through exclusion, through the chopping up of life to find the cause of suffering. It is the chopping, the butcher that is creating the wound.

The way of the Goddess is coming back. “The mother comes to restore balance,” says Avatar. Everywhere, the goddess principle, the female way of knowing is returning. Inclusion instead of exclusion; intuition instead of sharp analysis. Turn towards the Whole instead of focusing on the part.

We cannot get to the other shore by finding out what’s wrong with our boat. We have to build a bigger boat, one that has not existed before, a boat that includes both science and religion, exclusion and inclusion, faith and reason.

The truth we must seek is Who am I? When neither the scientist or the priest can tell me, where do I go? What is the Way?

And this boat building, this raft, if you will, begins with you, not with mankind. Who are you? You are greater than you think you are. Stop analyzing yourself, picking at your faults. Put down the butcher’s knife and the bull will roar.

You need a Reformation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized, ZEN FITS

The Venmo Revelation

October 11, 2018 by admin 1 Comment

Some money was transferred to me through Venmo, but after a week I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t in my bank account. The Venmo said it was paid, but I wasn’t getting it. Went to the bank and they were as mystified as I was.

Yesterday I opened the Ap and started fiddling with it, and I noticed that I had the money in my account ready to go, but I needed to push the Transfer button. BAM! Now my account was empty and I was notified that the money had been transferred.

That is always the case, isn’t it. We have all the power we need, but we have to activate it. Our manual for life never has instructions on how to activate out power. We always have to fiddle with it. So that is the fine print instruction in the manual. When all else fails, fiddle with it.

Then we come upon the trigger that releases the lock. And we are always surprised that it was there all the time, on the other side of our assumptions.

The Revelation for me is that the world is not a hostile place. We are not aliens in our own home. That is an assumption. Who knows where I got it, but primarily we get it from the get go when we are born into this culture where like a fish we are shaped by the bowl we swim in. How does the fish get out of the bowl. It can’t. 

However, culture is like a bowl of glass in floating in an ocean. The fish can’t get to the ocean. It knows the ocean is there, but swims along the wall of glass, feeling the contraction but not knowing why, so it blames things inside the bowl for the pain of the bowl. 

The only way out of the bowl is to discover that there is no bowl. The bowl is the shape of our mind, like the womb shaped the fetus. Seeing that the bowl really isn’t there is like being born into the greater real world. You suddenly feel no invisible walls and restrictions. You discover that the bowl of culture and the bowl of your Ego is the same bowl. You are FREE. You look back and you can’t even see the bowl you were once entombed in.

Culture itself creates the sense that I’m alone, in exile, an alien in a hostile meaningless world. Given that terror, I create sub-cultures of meaning in which I can swim, but this just creates a sub-bowl culture that bumps into other sub-culture bowls, and each fears the other will break its glass and destroy the last wall against chaos and not-being.

So how does one break through the glass wall of assumptions? What does fiddle with it mean? You fiddle with something, with box you can’t open or with an idea in order to see what you don’t know, but the fiddling cannot happen when you assume you know. When I’m confronted with a box I can’t open (box is a metaphor), my karma is to assume I can’t open so I defer to my wife who assumes she can open it. But that is in the physical world. 

When it comes to Idea Boxes, I fiddle with them until they open to a new understanding. The closed box moves from closed to open. Culture opens to me and reveals a bright new expansive world that I could not see from inside the box of culture.

Fiddling with something means you are curious about it, and being curious about it means you have no personal investment in it. One can only fiddle with something is a state of Not Knowing. You fiddle with something in order to know it.

So if I want to know God…I’m going to have to fiddle with God from the place of Curiosity. My path began when I decided I was an agnostic or atheist, in college, agnostic I guess, because I then became totally curious, ultimately concerned curious, about God…I wanted to open this box, damn it. 

So every way you investigate the box, that is not it..not this belief..not that…not this…not that..you keep fiddling. One day, when you least expect it, the box pops open—Culture pops open—is a big blast of Insight. WOW…and then the box closes up again. But you are encouraged. You fiddle some more.

Filed Under: Uncategorized, ZEN FITS

Trump as the Bad Boy archetype

October 3, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

Trump really believes that he is above the law so that gives him license to create the presidency as Performance Art. His rallies are like tent revivals designed to juice up his base by reaffirming their faith. They have faith in him because he is breaks the rule, plays outside the laws of decency. Trump is the Bad Boy. Some women like bad boys, their fatal attraction. The Bad Boy is an archtype for adventure, for going where no man has gone before. And the Bad Boy is going to take you on an adventure, and it is an adventure because it is risky. There is no adventure without risk, without danger. 

Good boys are safe, bad boys make you feel alive. Good boys present a good public image, but good boys hide their bad boy from sight. But once in a while, the bad boy comes out.

America presents itself as a collective image as being a good boy, Christian, democratic, and always with good intentions. But others see our Bad Boy side. I find it telling that the moral Christians, the good Christians love this Bad Boy, because he gives their “bad boy” expression. By affirming their bad boy, they no longer feel that bad boy must stay in the closet of the unconscious. There is nothing more liberating for the Good Boy than being permitted to be bad. 

Sailors know this for when they are in a foreign port, the good family sailor at home can become the bad sailor on a broad. It’s called Liberty. 

So Trumps appeal is the intoxication of the good who can also be bad at the same time. No more internal conflict. I can be a good virgin and have sex at the same time. 

KAV is a good boy who lets his Bad Boy out in the liberty of frat parties. But during the hearing, his bad boy leaked out.

When we look at the relationship between the members and the cult leader, the members take a feminine role and the leader the male role. The Bad Boy is a man who can do things for you and To You. Once you get on his motorcycle you can’t get off until the ride is over.

There are so many ways we look at Trump. Trump as an archetype of the Bad Boy is a new one, as far as I can see. An archetype, a C. Jung term, is a collective image that activates the unconscious forces of the unconscious where our true psychic energy lies. The Madonna with child is an archetype. Bernie Sanders as the wise old man is an archetype. Hillary as a controlling mother is an archetype. Monroe is an archetype of the eternal seductress. Reagan as the man on a horse from the west is an American archetype of the hero savior.

Archetypes in the collective unconscious are used by advertising (political and commercial) and movies to activate the energy of the mind into action. The archetype is as projection of our own psyche onto an external image, and we must possess that image in order to retrieve our own energy that has taken an eternal form. We love that image because that image is ourself.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Apocalypse Now of Trump

August 17, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

I felt the call to watch it again recently, then I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness….Where is that place at the headwaters of the river in my life. Where did Kurtz go? The book and movie is a metaphorical map that is both factual in that it takes place in space/time, but it also takes place in that intermediate zone where our known and unknown meet..at the headwaters of our own mind, the mysterious place where our river of life is created…what is the wisdom hidden there?

I was watching an Anthony Bourdain adventure to the headwaters in the Congo to visit a remote tribe, and they had a feast where as guest he had to kill the pig. Oh…the terror, the terror of life eating life to life. Is life death? Is death life? Are they the same? One or two?

Did our hero have to kill Kurtz to live? Was Kurtz the sacrificial animal? Kurtz was the fisher king in the Romance of the Grail; he had the wound that would not heal. When Percival won the grail and healed the Fisher King, he did not take on the wound of the king. He because the king without the ground. Did our hero in the movie take on the wound of Kurtz when he went back into society? Did he have a boon? Had he won enlightenment like Indiana Jones at the headwaters of his mind. What was the act that healed the wound?

Watching this clip I thought I was watching the Sky People slaughter the Navi in Avatar with their flying machines. The American inaction of Vietnam was an America Myth or Story of itself being superimposed over a jungle. The Triumph of American Will. What was real to the Americans was their Story or Myth (the Stench of Lies) not the destruction of human life. Reality was bent by the myth of the Story. 

The same thing is happening today with Trump and the GOP. The Myth of the American Savior Party, the Triumph of Will, is being superimposed over the real ground of America, so in order that the Myth to be true, America must be destroyed like Vietnam. When your story is about the Triumph of the Will, a savior complex, there has to be an enemy to fight. This is the Don Quixote syndrome. The dragons are really just windmills. You own people become your enemy so you can save them.

This morning I see Apocalypse Now in a new light, the NOW light. Life is always a contest between our story of life and real life, between the unreal and the real. We fear the Apocalypse, we welcome the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse is ambiguous, two faces of the same coin. Life is death; death is life. Ambiguous isn’t it…and that’s the Terror…the Terror of Kurtz. 

Ah…another insight. Our hero is assigned the duty of killing Kurtz. How does he do that. He is Arjuna in the Gita, a warrior who has doubt about his role because the cause or the war is ambiguous; you kill you family as well as your enemy. So Arjuna quits and seeks wisdom at the headwaters of his being, Krishna. 

In the end our hero rises out of the river reborn. He now kills Kurtz cleanly, without doubt and confusion; he does his duty and returns to the madness with wisdom, whole and human.

Apocalypse Now has many metaphorical layers; it’s a Realization Feast. But you can only go as deep as you are ready for, a depth that you will accept. You only get the teacher (teaching) you deserve. If you cup is full, you can’ pour anything else in it. This movie is meant to empty your cup. Can you go to the Terror, the Terror in. your own well? Can you go the center of the labyrinth of you mind where the Minotaur lives? Can you kill the Minotaur, Capt. Kurtz? Can you get out of the labyrinth alive, or do you wander in the maize for the rest of your life, many more lives, perhaps? Can you kill your own Pain Body, Capt. Kurtz the Minotaur within? So many insights to discover in this movie that is a metaphor not only for our collective mind now, but you who are also Now.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Apocalypse Now, trump

The FBI and the Priest

July 12, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

What is the Protestant view of grace and how is the different from the Catholic. Today’s congressional hearing reenacts these two views. The FBI is the catholic view that grace flows through the office of the institution and a agent’s personal views do not effect his performance of his office. The Republican view is Protestant in that the bias of the office holder corrupts the power for the office. A flaw in character is a flaw in the office. Clinton got impeached on this view. However, Trump gets a free pass. Reality is as we want to perceive it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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Ed is a Zen Writer and story teller who finds insights in the truth of his life in everyday mind and events. Learn more

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