We are looking at the Impeachment trial as existential confrontation between two ways of viewing reality: the fundamentalist view that fixes reality in the Story of Reality versus a view that has no story. Creative Design, reality based in a story, versus Evolution, reality based in change and verified evidence. The world according to Trump versus the world according to verified evidence, or Just the Facts. Story versus Facts. Democracy and the world as we know it is on trial here.

In the Middle Ages science and religion were mixed like a martini. One single world view held all possible views of reality, of what’s real. Alchemy was the science, Scholasticism was the theology, and the Bible was the reference for all verification of knowledge and exploration.

The 16th century broke the dome and let verification by evidence challenge assumed idea of the structure of reality. Descartes separated science from religion, giving religion the subjective meaning realm and science the objective realm of knowledge.

But the success of the Objective science in predicting future and controlling nature let to it being the dominant view of the modern world, and the subjective view and Consciousness became a ghost in the machine. Now that dome of the world as a machine is breaking up, and once again we are in transition for a new world view that contains both how and why, facts and meaning.

The problem is our classical logic which says truth must be either this or that but cannot be this/that. That is ambiguous, and logic and science hates ambiguity. That is the realm of art.

But religion as a subjective truth began to, had to, compete with science for validation on the objective logical field since that is the only field in the modern world. Then we get the quest for historical factual validation of the Bible, like the location of Noah’s ark. the Bible can only be true if it is factually and logically validated, like you validate a scientific theory.

The Theist references all knowledge on the Idea of an external personal god that exists separate from the cosmos, from experience, from Me. That Idea is the fixed center of reality and allows a coherent Idea or view of reality to be lived in. This external Idea of the unmoved mover is a projection of our own fixed sense of self. They both rise together, God and Me. Remove one, remove the other. Siamese twins.

The atheist just says I’m not that. Both the Theist and atheist rise together as a relationship. Siamese twins.

The true religious mind is driven to transcend and resolve Theism/Atheism…and in my view, that’s Zen.

The quest is to transcend duality, but no matter what Idea you arrive at is it always going to be This and not That, and that is duality. Duality is the Operating system of consciousness, and logic is its alchemy: The One is always chopping into two so consciousness always remains as the crucible in which life is experience.

But consciousness is a modern god. Other cultures do not worship it. Our being is greater than the little mahout riding on the elephant.

Consciousness solves the dilemma temporarily by projecting the One that has no second as God. We imagine the resolution to our own dilemma and chase it in time, which is duality.

Trump is the personification of this pitfall. His Story of reality trumps facts. Tump regresses to the Middle Ages to stabilized the impermanence of the quickly changing modern world. Trump believing in his Story of Trump stabilized the world and makes change subordinate to his Story. That tower is coming down before our eyes..

I have studied Campbell since I first read his book Hero with a Thousand Faces. He has been one of the primary inspirations in my life.

Campbell also talks about the benefit of seeing life mythologically, or as metaphor, which he says myth really is. Myth is art and art is metaphor. Seeing life mythologically is seeing life as a teaching. The teacher is the student of life, and life teachers through myth and metaphor, through art. 

And when your teacher within is liberated from form, then everything becomes the means for the end of learning/teaching. Teaching informs the teacher as well as the student.

Campbell is a study of the integrative mind, a mind that restores unity in the fragmentation of modern society. That unity is the IDEA that breaks forth suddenly without warning, and usually after a struggle, to bring peace to the seeking mind, at least for the moment. The fragmentation continues, so the integrating mind never stops, never settles with a fixed idea of reality. Life is always in flux, always changing. Life is change. Life is time. And the integrating mind gets high on surfing this wave, of maintaining balance of the waver of impermanence.

Campbell integrates the fragmentation of the modern world/mind through a story, and it is only story that can give meaning to the incoming confusing data of the senses. But the story Campbells uses is the story of myth, the ancient stories that integrated the ancient world and the minds that found meaning in them. 

So what Campbell does is integrate the stories so that we can pick up the pattern and in that pattern, in that recipe, find the Story in our own fragmented world. These stories are the universal theme of the conquest of darkness, of consciousness integrating the hidden forces of one’s own psyche. The myths why stories of people and animals are metaphors of our own psychic forces for which we have no maps in our modern world.

Oh, we have psychology—Freud and Jung—but these maps are about things: who am I? What story am I in? Where is my myth? What is my purpose? Science won’t tell me what that is.

I am IT! You are IT!

“God disguised as myriad things

and playing a game of tag

has kissed you and said

‘You’re it..I mean, 

you’re REALLY IT’

Now it does not matter

what you believe or feel

for something wonderful, 

Major-league Wonderful

is someday going to

happen.” 

Hafiz

When we fall in love, each says the other is IT, but there is only one IT seeing itself as that one IT. This creates a virtuous vortex of ever-expanding I AM IT. 

The Art of Zen is to fall in love with the IT that is all ITs.

The Subjective is I AM IT! But if that is the only view, inflation occurs. The Subjective must be balanced with the Objective (there are infinite ITS) The balance is ambiguous for they are both of equal value and stand-alone, but opposite. This gestalt image makes the point. 

The OW and the YW stand alone but they are ONE, separate but cannot be separated. Satori or Eureka is the realization that I am THAT or IT. That and IT are One but separate.

We are exploring in this Zen Fit how we impose our grammar upon reality and then believe reality fits our grammar of the three persons: First, Second and Third Person. First Person is I, Second person is You, and Third Person is IT or person, place of thing, but IT covers all as Object. First Person is the invisible person. 

Our materialistic worldview believes that reality is made of ITS, even you. So in this space/time grid, everything is a particle. The First Person is not on the map. The action or waver cannot be caught as an IT. 

So to understand how our grammar frames our world is to see the problem with language, which is out thinking. Thinking is language, and thinking first the laws of our grammar with a believed in subject and object as being two separate entities. This separate is the cause of our suffering, our dissatisfaction with what we write in our book of life.

I used to be an English teacher for three years in the 60s. I failed. I found that the kind of teaching that wanted to come out of me didn’t fit the institution of the textbooks. So at that bipolar stage in my life, it was either my way or the highway. I spent the 70s trying to fit into some institutional system, but I just couldn’t fit the laws of grammar. The poet would not be chopped up by the butcher. 

In the late 80s, I got a job writing for the Courier-Record and I learned to fit my poet in the prose of the Newspaper. Poetry is First Person, Prose is Third Person. There are different laws for each person. 

This is what the Buddha discovered. When you believed in the laws of thought, which is Third Person, you activate the laws of old age, sickness, and death. This is the wheel of Samsara or sorrow of the world, In Christianity, this is the Cross of crucifixion. How can we get off this cross and its Law, it’s grammar? 

How can you be both the Poet and the Prose, the Sacred and the Profane? That is the Hamlet question. This is the question I work with.

When you let your Word flow, there is no error, no red lines, but when you submit it to the English teacher and the Law, you are full of errors. 

When you release the Poet, your first concern cannot be with the Law and fitting into its logical compartments. But at the same time, unless there is the Law of writing, you are just creating gibberish. 

There is creative spontaneity and there is control through the Law. Obey the rules. How can I be free and spontaneous and still be within the Law. Even Jesus worked with this question. 

Our politics is about this question. Don’t shove your law down my throat! 

We are not digging deep enough into this question to find an answer.

Grammar makes us stutter. Grammar makes us fear being wrong, getting red-lined: What will the teacher think? What will others think? Our language is the way we express our Word. Our word is laced with fear, we stutter. There is hesitation. Thought keeps asking if I am doing OK. English as our language, when taught as the Law, is not unlike religion where the primary concern is obeying the Law of God. 

We notice that we guard our speech when we discover we are in the presence of an English teacher or minister. I’m not saying we don’t need English teachers and ministers, but that we have been conditioned to guard ourselves when in their presence. This is fear of judgment. 

What is judgment but being fixed by the eye of the Other as an IT. We fear our First Person being fixed as an IT, an object defined and frozen, pinned on the wall like a dead butterfly. When we are First Person free from being judged, we fly.

When we soar as First Person a law unto ourselves, we are a Trump. So First Person needs the Third Person checks, All ITS, all Third Person IT must conform to the law of IT or things. No thing can escape the law of cause and effect. But if you believe you are First Person with no laws of grammar, then there is going to be an inflation of the Person and a tremendous tension will build between the maverick First Person and the laws of the Third Person. 

The Third Person will pull the First Person back into the grammar by force of gravity. No person is above the law, not even the First Person.

The artist, the writer who discovers a metaphorical unity of First and Third Person will sell books and then movies. The create a character, either in their art or as their act that is like the gestalt picture posted. The metaphor, the art is both old woman and young woman, both First Person and Third Person. Through the Art, the viewer perceives art as IT but feels his/her own First Person I. The art awakens our sleeping First Person I AM.

The question is how can I be both First Person I am as the center of the world, and Third Person IT, one of many objects in the world. The IT world must conform to laws of nature and man, but the First Person as center of the world is free because where can the First Person go that he/she is not at the center, or at home. The GPS navigator is a metaphor for the First Person. On the GPS the IT world boots around you. Whenever you move on the IT map, you are still at the center. But without the IT map, there is no movement. The GPS just sits there.

As First Person, we feel constrained by the IT world. Why is that? We feel constrained because of our Grammar or culturing conditioning separate First and Third Person. The Truth is that the WORD is both first and third person, both I and IT, subject and object. When one rises, the other rises. They rise together, neither causing the other. But we believe in our grammar that they are separate, that subjects are going stuff to objects like billiard balls on a grid. 

If I’m an IT and a Subject, then I believe that as a Subject and can change my IT self. But let’s go back to our gestalt image. Can the Young Woman (First Person) change the Old Woman (Third Person)?

While our grammar says Subjects act on Objects when it comes to answering the question who am I? Our grammar doesn’t work. The subject and the object rise together, the One that is two, so the subject cannot change the object without changing itself at the same time. When I think I have fixe a problem of me as IT, the problem just comes up in a new way, because the Subject believes it is outside of the object, an observer of the object me as IT. But the subject and object are the same mind, in grammar the same sentence, the same Word. A subject by itself or object by itself doesn’t say anything. Like the GPS, it just sits there. And something that just sits there and doesn’t move cannot be measured, and what cannot be measured is not in time. We cannot even perceive it.

The only thing I remember and hold about Helen Keller is her description of the moment she realized the IDEA of the word. Alone in this unfathomable darkness without the primary senses of sight and hearing, her teacher put her hand under running water and wrote the symbol for water in her other hand. Keller describes the awakening her soul with the bursting light of the Idea that the felt sensation was WATER…suddenly, there was a mediator between Knowing and the Known…it was the Word.

But her genius is that as she began to build the Idea of the world out there, even though she could not see or hear it, she kept her seat in the Knower that Knows before the world (our parents) is born or created.

This brings new meaning for me of my favorite Catholic prayer or affirmation as I see it: “Speak but the Word and my Soul will be healed.” The question is who speaks it? Do I wait for God to speak the Word? Or Jesus? Or do I speak it, and who is it that speak this Word, and what is the Word? Oh, the darkness of the unknown surrounds us when we begin to ask questions. Who do we think is going to answer us? 

Who is the Knower that Helen Keller was before, her face before her parents (the world) was born? We are all this Knower when we are born before the world is formed by language and defined names and forms. “What that, Momma,” the child asks as he builds a world in which he will live, a world of Words. But what is the original Word? 

For Helen Keller the symbol of water in her hand was connected to the felt sensation of this fund—you see I have no word for water that is not a symbol for water. What is the original water before it was named? Only Hellen Keller knew. Who was she before the name? Who are you before the name? 

This is our forgotten face, our buried face, our Beloved face. And we spend our whole life digging up landfills of accumulated names and forms looking for her. 

In today’s Zen Fit I’m exploring what a Zen Fit is. We all have them but we have no name for it. We are like Helen Keller when it comes to awakening because our western tongue has no words or names for it, and even when there is a name, like “awakening” we think the name is the thing, so we are never satisfied because the believed in the name is dust in our mind. We. remain thirsty. 

Who are we before our names are born. This is why Helen Keller gave me a Zen Fit this morning. When the Idea that the sensation of water in one hand and the symbol of water in the other was One yet two, that was Zen. That was Satori. That was Eureka of Archimedes when he had the Idea of water displacement that solved his problem of measuring the gold in the king’s crown without destroying the crown. 

This Idea that bursts upon us creates a new whole, a new world. For Helen Keller, it was the Word that creates a world in which she could live and connect with others, a known world. But for her, fortunately for us as well, she stayed in her original Word, the Knower before the known was born as the words. She was the Word and the Word was her. Before the Word Helen Keller did not exist as a center of the world. But when we believe in the words as real, then we lose our center. Do you see?

The IDEA that bust upon the dark mind of Helen Keller was that the symbol of water and the feel of this moving cool substance was One. The Idea connected the unknown with the known (the symbol) and made communication and relationship possible. Helen Keller was born with that Idea. A world was born. In the Bible, we go right to that moment when the Word is God and God is the Word. 

The Word God is like the symbol Water in Helen Keller’s mind. There is this unknown nameless Being that I am, before there is distinction, and the Name of God, the Word burst upon my mind, and I realize that the name, a symbol, and this unknown being that I am in the darkness before the name is One, a metaphor that holds the known and the unknown. The Word that creates both me and god. 

But then in the accumulation of words, language, knowledge, culture, religion, we stake out territories with our words and believe that our words are God and yours aren’t. We have lost our original Word.

The IDEA that bust upon the dark mind of Helen Keller was that the symbol of water and the feel of this moving cool substance was One. The Idea connected the unknown with the known (the symbol) and made communication and relationship possible. Helen Keller was born with that Idea. A world was born. In the Bible, we go right to that moment when the Word is God and God is the Word. 

The Word God is like the symbol Water in Helen Keller’s mind. There is this unknown nameless Being that I am, before there is distinction, and the Name of God, the Word burst upon my mind, and I realize that the name, a symbol, and this unknown being that I am in the darkness before the name is One, a metaphor that holds the known and the unknown. The Word that creates both me and god. 

But then in the accumulation of words, language, knowledge, culture, religion, we stake out territories with our words and believe that our words are God and yours aren’t. We have lost our original Word.

In this Bible quote I notice that In the beginning, I was the Word. In the beginning, was the word, but I read it, in the beginning, I was the Word. This is a shift from the Word being IT to the word being I AM. Both views are true but incompatible. So we need an IDEA that can hold both at the same time.