Civilization is a Hurt Locker

January 1, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

We’re talking about the movie Hurt Locker tonight, the movie as metaphor. What is the Hurt Locker? This movie is disguised Buddhism because the Hurt locket is Duhkha of the suffering of life that is fragmented by choices, fragmented by divisions and complexity. Hurt Locker is about the simplicity of war because here there are no choices; just on or off, life or death. But do we have to go to war and deconstruct bombs in order to be free of the Hurt Locker?

I’ve spent the last few days throwing out my accumulated choices, all the past stuff I’ve saved and stored because there was only incoming and no outgoing in my office. So there was a bunch of clean-up energy that rises at the end of the year. Restoring order is the way we simplify our lives, Choices like cereal brands have a way of multiplying. We can’t get down to the simple on/off ground of life. When you get down to ON/OFF you have no choice but to be ON, to choose life. Life is not divided at this level. There is no Hurt at this level.

The Hurt comes from divisions of life into choices. When you have to choose, you create the Chooser. And the Chooser is a fictitious person, someone who chooses. When you get down to ON/OFF, there is no Chooser. There is no on separate from the choice because life cannot be divided into a choice. You are not making a choice, like a potter makes a pot, you are the choice.

And this takes us back to our discussion on Time. When you get down to the Hurt Locker, you are not a chooser in time making a choice in time (choice requires time), you ARE time. There is nothing outside of time. There is no you outside of Time to make a choice.

But, remember our previous talk when we looked at horizontal time and vertical time. Horizontal time is making a choice to catch a bus or not. In Vertical Time you are what you do. This is Primary Time, timeless time, while making a choice to catch a bus is secondary time. The Metaphor Hurt Locker contains these opposites and as metaphor generates energy through the tension of the opposites, energy you need to make the leap from horizontal time to vertical time…which is not a choice.

Mona Lisa Smile with Julia Roberts

October 1, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Okay, a good talk because it asks questions that go right to the heart of our everyday lives. If. question doesn’t go there, it is not worth asking. But most people don’t ask questions that go there because it creates disturbance in the field. We pull back into conformity and don’t agitate our heart, we don’t disturb our soul. We don’t want to know who I am.

And so we sleep, content to fight superficial cultural wars. We shy away from heartfelt questions. The questions Who am I is a direct route to Virtue.Virtue is integrity, wholeness, authenticity, true nature….yes, our true nature is Good and virtuous. But in order to be truly human we have to discover that virtue, we have to uncover it, we have to dig for it. Virtue is not given.

Virtue has to be won. Virtue is born of the double-bind between this and that, between this commandment and that commandment. Virtue is born from the conflict between the outside of the cup and the inside of the cup. The outside of the cup is shaped by culture, the inside of the cup is our heart. Virtue is when we make the inside and the outside the same cup. That is the Holy Grail the heals the wound that separates the mind from the heart, the wound that won’t heal.

I hope you listened to the talk. Virtue is being morally good. The movie I use as a metaphor Mona Lisa Smile is about the virtue of young women in the 50s who moral duty was to become wives and abandon any desires to have a career. The question of our time is whether being morally good is a creative act or an obedient act, and if it is an obedient act then who do we obey? Our church which is now politicized? Do I hate gays because it is morally right? Big problems here, as you point out.

The next question is whether Virtue is integrity or division. Can one be virtuous and be conflicted? This is where sex comes in. If I must be chaste in order to be virtuous, but I’m in love and want sex…what is virtuous? Celebrate priests get into great trouble here.

Okay, we have arrived at the understanding that Virtue is not given but must be created. And virtue is created out of a conflict between mind (culture) and heart, or thinking and feeling. Our thinking mind thinks culture. When culture is divided like it is now, our mind is divided. We can’t find the station of the heart through the static of the mind’s thinking. Culture gives conflicting commandments. Its messages are duplicitous. The Stench of Lies is everywhere.(Apocalypse Now)

When culture is divided, who do we turn to? Virtue is not out there. Virtue is inside the heart. Virtue and faith are not separate. Culture is truth believed in: Faith is leaping beyond belief. Faith is being born again…born from the womb of culture and religion because religion is culture’s partner. Religions and science are the two wings of culture, but they flap in opposite directions so culture goes in a circle. But Virtue bypasses the dysfunction. You go it alone. You go straight.

A Universal Idea to save America

September 1, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I hope my talk doesn’t get bogged down in division over healthcare. I was using universal health care as a metaphor for the Single Idea that changes your world. This Idea when it is conceived actually CREATES the world it needs in order to take on form. That is the meaning of the Creative Idea….We have no idea how powerful a Single Idea is. But we have all experienced its power in one way or another.

Falling in Love is a Single Idea that transcends but includes the polarity of me looking for a perfect mate. Suddenly, we know: I am in Love. Or I’m going to marry that person.

Or the child sees a ballerina and knows at the age of 5 that is who she is going to be. The Single Idea that creates your world does not change it, using the conditions that exist as a horizontal translation, like a new cup…no, the Single Idea is the creation of a new way of drinking tea, a way that never existed before.

So lets not get bogged down here in the polarity of health care, but use this as a way of seeing what a Single Idea is before it takes on some material form. We live in a world created by Ideas. And the news new idea depends upon all the previous ideas that have come before it. Yet the new idea is entirely new and has never existed before, yet it is dependent upon the conditions as a diving board from which you leap.

We are all looking for the Land of Eureka! What are the conditions in which it can be discovered, since we can’t find it at the end of any path. There are no means to get to the Other Shore of Eureka! However we can created the conditions for the landing on the Other Shore.

Postcards from Arjuna #15

September 10, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment

As the embodied soul continuously passes in this body, from childhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. Such a change does not disturb the minds of the who know the truth. (Chapter 2, Verse 13)

This is a tricky quote for me to answer because of my Buddhist understanding that nothing is permanent, even the soul. Buddha broke right here with the prevailing yoga view of India that there is a monad or clear soul that transmigrates from body to body until it reaches maximum clarity, and then having achieve Zero, merges with the infinite and is reborn no more. Buddha bypassed this idea of the soul for the same reason he bypassed the idea of a personal God that existed outside of impairment reality.

But then, does anything exist outside of Creation? Is there any place or view that is at rest? Einstein said in his theory of relativity that there is no place of stillness or rest from which you can measure the universe. We are all like on a moving train trying to judge the movement of another train passing us. We think our train is still and the other train is the one moving. But this illusion is shattered when you step off your train.

But the Buddha is the Awakened One, which means the One that is absolutely One, without a second. So whatever this One is, this One is not moving, this One is not moving train. This One is Still, Silence, and without definition or boundaries. Like the clear sky, it does not move with the clouds of form. What is that?

But Buddha says Awareness, pure Awareness, when realized, as Buddha Nature you are deathless…Awareness is not born and awareness does not die. A mind who knows this is not disturbed whether there is a soul or not, birth and death…Impermanence does not disturb a mind that is still.

In this tradition to realize the mind that knows the Truth, the mind does not rest on any form, idea, belief, emotions, thought, perceptions…the mind is clear, yet at the same time joyously embracing life.

Do you feel full or empty?

July 22, 2016 by admin Leave a Comment

Friday with ET: “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral, which always is as it is.” Elkhart Tolle from The Power of Now
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Good morning. The cause of unhappiness in America is never America but your thoughts about it. Beware of the thoughts about America you are being told. Separate them from the story of a fallen America, which has become a metaphor for a fallen you.

The cause of your Fall, your being exiled from happiness, is not any situation, because they are neutral. You emotions and thoughts do not exist in any situation, in America. The America you believe exists, is in you. You are America and America is you. Change you thoughts about America, and you will change you.