TV changed our consciousness by shifting our reference from local family networks to the TV god in the living room. The TV screen became the center as ME. Through it one had access to the greater world, but the price tag was hidden. 

I first saw TV in 1950 at a friend’s house. I watched Howdy Doody and a vegetable cutter ad. Howdy Doody is gone but the vegetable cutter ads remained as the search continues for the perfect vegetable cutter. Nothing is ever good enough. Tomorrow will always be a better way to cut vegetables. TV  is ad delivery system, the psychological fuel that ran mass industrial consumerism. 

The system is designed to create dissatisfaction with life and the need for products that will relieve the suffering. My antidote is Zen Buddism. The political ad says to “take back America” (from some imaginary hijacker)  but Zen says take back your mind from cultural conditioning. 

The truth in advertising is that we are Howdy Doody dancing on the string of subliminal messages. TV is the Maya or illusionary world of electronic forms we believe are true. 

There is nothing wrong with TV when we can see through it and not be captivated by it. When TV becomes metaphor it can be used to restore your true center. Awareness must rescue your captivated mind and sense of self. Like the puppet Pinocchio we must become real.

We can break through the maya of TV and electronic media by asking the question: Is this true? Especially now with the proliferation of social media memes: is this true? 

Media is the externalization of thinking. Medi is a collective mind thinking, and in Buddhism there is a Sanskrit word for the proliferation of thinking, Papanca: 

“This term is used to describe the tendency of the mind to 1) spread out from and elaborate upon any sense-object that arises in experience, smothering it with wave after wave of mental elaboration, 2) most of which is illusory, repetitive, and even obsessive, 3) which effectively blocks any sort of mental calm or clarity of mind.”

Doesn’t that describe the electronic media. When something comes into the media camera, it comes into Media consciousness and then. you can watch the Papanca spread out like a ripple when a stone is dropped in the pond. What was a pebble becomes a rock. And with the outgoing ripple, an opposite backlash ripple is created. In a few minutes the pond once flat surface is churned into a broken mirror reflecting nothing but a Picasso painting. 

Only by taking your center back from the Image screen can you restore clarity.

Happy Birthday Rush now 71 years-old. Rush was the oral Fox News, a storyteller of radio, whose right-wing message went directly into the bloodstream of America bypassing the defense mechanisms of rational thinking. Our co-pilot while driving, Rush steered us into the world we now live in that is polarized into male and female political parties. In the world according to Rush. Liberals are like women, emotional, fickle, and unable to govern because in their secret heart the long for a strong Republican man to lean on. Rush was that no BS American man.

Rush is the John Wayne of radio, the confident voice that cuts through the confusion and messiness of democracy.  Rush is that true compass to follow in the traffic jams of modern life. Rush led us to Trump, leaving us has his voice fades from the radio in a rubble of tribal infighting and the ruins of the principled Republican party. 

Rush was Trump before Trump was Trump, a true political entertainer. When in doubt or confused, caught between conflicting ideas, Rush would rush in to tell you what to think and sort things out. Rush would put your car on auto-pilot and take you where he wanted you to go. Rush is a radio cult. 

A radio cult is more powerful than a visual cult, like Trump. Trump is a visual performer on TV. You see him in action. But you don’t see Rush. You hear Rush in your heart which is a sound organ. The eye is a visual organ, but it puts distance between you and your object. There is no distance between the hearer and the sound. 

Rush doesn’t have to say “let my voice by your voice,” like Trump. The mere sound of his voice makes him your voice while driving through the traffic of modern life. Like a GPS Rush takes you to a simpler world where Liberals are always wrong, and you, if you follow Rush, are always right.

As I meditate on Rush this morning, I always remember him as the bombing voice that breaks through the static of the car’s radio on the long drive. He was always there on some station, cutting through the fog of the modern world. Rush told us who was to blame for our feeling of being lost, off course, or using the wrong map. Like a GPS navigator Rush was in the center and his intention was logged into our navigator was always taking us home. That was the power of Rush. 

Rush as at the radio was in his spot, just like Sheldon Cooper. He didn’t need a script or a prompter. When you find your Spot, your Word just flows out of you. Your word liberates you from the mind’s Liberalism. 

You see what I’m working with here? Rush liberated Rush from his own mind’s confusion, weighing, comparing, indecision, or his own Liberalism. That is what our art does when we discover our Spot. 

But Rush needed a foil for his Rush Word, his Rush Man, and that was Liberalism, the messiness and confusion of democracy. Rush as a radio art brought peace and certainty to his own mind, and ours as his listeners. Listening to Rush our compass didn’t wobble. 

But as all art is a drama of some sort, the conflict Rush created so Rush could cut through it was the demonizing of Liberalism. By making Liberalism the enemy, Rush always had bones to throw his dogs because modern democracies are liberal scientific materialism which is based on the fundamental belief that man and nature is basically rational. Rush offered no solutions, no policy, nor way out; Rush just offered a finger pointing to the problem which was our government itself. 

This creates a mythic solution to liberal democracy. Just say NO to liberalism and government. Just dismantle the Government and you will be free like Rush. The Rush to dismantle the very administrative and institutional framework that holds our society together is on with Trump. Trump is the vision of Rush.

We are coming to the end of the Age of Rush and the Moral Majority, Pat Robinson, and the policial televangelists. The Cultural Cold war that replaced the cold war between the USSR and the US is dying of exhaustion and dysfunction. Trump is its Last Stand of the heroic white man who holds the line against the tribal minorities. Rush was its voice.  Podcasts are replacing him.

The World according to Rush is a subjective world view. You are his voice, his voice is you, and that is subjective. You are not able to check what he says with objective facts or context. There is just the One Rush View, and this gives you the sense, the feeling that you are at the center of the world, with Rush. You are not alone since Rush is there as the tent pole is a big subjective tent of ME. 

FORGIVENESS; WHAT’S IT GOOD FOR?

So when Jesus said to forgive those who crucified him because they didn’t understand what they were doing, he was talking about people in “group think” being caught up in the current of their karma, unconscious of what they were actually doing. But forgiveness does not mean being passive.

Forgiveness does not mean allowing oneself to be swept out to sea in a riptide of karma. However, forgiveness does show you how to swim using the karmic riptide to get out of the riptide. Forgiveness means non-resistance that resists. Forgiveness reveals the action in inaction. 

Forgiveness is a creative action not tried before, a surprise, or a discovery. In Buddhism, forgiveness is the Middle Way.

I’m looking at forgiveness in a new way here, not as something I do but as a surrender of me as being separate to me as being relationship. 

We ARE relationship. Nothing stands alone. A soup can does not exist by itself. A soup can is a relationship and a individual can. it is both, like the electron, both a wave or relationship and a particle standing alone in space/time. 

We all know what relationship is. A metaphor for the joy and perfect time of relationship is Fred and Ginger. When they dance, they dance as one. We love that. We all long for that dance, the dance of Two as One. We call that dance Romance. We dissolve into a relationship, into love, into Oneness. We feel part of the whole. We feel we are no longer in exile as a single thing against the world. 

When we feel—and relationship is a feeling, a way of being—relationship it can be with anything: our pet, our car, our craft, our art, our dance, our sports, and our war. We do extraordinary feats when in relationship. 

Forgiveness in this understanding is a shift from being alone and against the world as the other to being atonement with the world or the other. We shift from being a particle to being a wave, a relationship. We shift from being Aware OF to being Aware AS. 

We shift from conflict to participation. We shift from being separate to becoming whole, or One, but that Oneness is always upstream of being two, or one alone. Relationship is not of two objects holding hands. Relationship transcends the objects in relationship and pulls them like gravity into was a new way of being that is dynamic and creative and joyous, because it is free from the suffering of being alone.

To put it succinctly, forgiveness is relationship. When you are in relationship, you are in forgiveness. When you are standing alone, you are out of relationship and by the nature of your being a separate thing, you are unforgiving.

Relationship and not in relationship is Quantum Physics; the electron as a particle or thing in location is not in relationship: the electron as a wave is in relationship. Both viewpoints are valid, yet contradictory. How can we be separate and belonging or in relationship at the same time. That is the Hamlet question. To Be (a separate thing) or not to be (be in relationship) that is the question. We must be both, that is the answer, but we cannot. That is Zen.

Because we cannot be separate as a defined thing and in relationship at the same time, we have a wound in consciousness, for we must be separate and belong to a whole, two imperatives that must be obeyed, but they cancel each other out. Buddha says this is the cause of our suffering and discontent. Nothing is ever perfect. 

The truth or the One that contains the two (being separate and belonging) is Zen or the non-dual traditions. The One is not two, yet is Two. A paradox. A dynamic unity that is not fixed by a constant discovery, a creative act, which is life itself. Life is a creative act of the Two becoming One, and then becoming two again…a fountain of Now not a linear steam of time, yet there is the stream of history.

I’m exploring the sacred and how the Ayatolla and the Nixonian conservative Right are the same. Both are seeking to restore the sacred; in Iran the sacred is Islam and the cleric is head of the state/religion. The laws of the state and God are the same laws, and that law is sacred. Obey or lose your head. 

In the West, however, since we have a secular society, the nation must be the sacred, and obedience to the nation is sacred, and the President is the head of the sacred nation. America is the sacred nation and the President is its emissary or symbol. If you are against the president you are against the sacred. You see how Iran and America are just shadows of each other. No wonder we are in conflict. We are always fighting our shadow, says C. Jung.

If you look at the Islamic clampdown on the liberation of women and creative energy of the 60s and 70s, it was the same conservative clampdown of Nixon in the wake of the 1968 chaos of the Dem convention where the experiment in freedom of the 60s all came undone. We need a wide-angle mind here. 

What was the 60s anyway in the wider context of Western history but a crack in the cosmic egg of a viewpoint of reality that had been dominant since the Enlightenment and the birth of science and the Newtonian universe that ran like a clock. God and the subjective viewpoint had been bypassed, and material form was in the saddle and rode mankind. Where was value? Where was the sacred now? Everything was reduced to the pursuit of pleasure through consumer goods. That was the utopia of the 50s. Buy a new fridge and you will be in the Kingdom of God. 

Nixon brought back the sacred by inviting the Souther Evangelicals into the secular fold. Ironically, America and the Brits dethroned the Iranian democracy and set the stage for a conservative control of the rambunctious female liberated society. Let’s face it. Democracy liberates Feminine energy, creative energy and throws off the corset and the shackles of social conformity. Whos in control here? 

After the break out of the 60s and the chaos of the. 70s when men were women and women were men, the Father came back to put the children in line and bend them back into social obedience. Patriotism didn’t mean a revolt of free conscience to follow your own dream, no, it means being obedient, it meant duty to society and order. God and nation are one and you cannot question either. 

In this wide-angle lens Conservative America and conservative Iran are the same. No wonder we hate each other; each is the shadow projection of the other. The Conservatives are religious hypocrites,  clerics disguised as secular politicians. And the Iranic clerics wear their religion upfront. Both have one thing in common; they suppress the female principle and energy of inclusion and freedom of the body and expression. 

Right means control and security; Left means experimentation and risk. Each is a manifestation of the two hemispheres of the human brain. Rational versus intuition; thought versus feeling; mind versus body. 

The interesting thing about a wide-angle lens (if you know photography) is that win that lense you see the whole background and everything is in focus, but nothing particular is important. But, then, once everything is in focus, we can zoom in on particulars, always remembering that the reference is the true background, not a green screen projection. 

Both the Iranian revolution and Nixon were afraid of reefer madness and declared a war on drugs and the liberation of women/our bodies. 

How do we dance? When I got married, maybe before I got married, I took dance lessons at Fred Astaire studio (Fred wasn’t there) to learn the steps of ballroom dancing, and I felt confident once I had a plan, steps to follow, a path if you will. But without the steps, I was terrified, awkward, embarrassed, and exposed. 

I got married in 1960, so I was coming out of the 50s where life was planned. Only the Beatniks were breaking out with no steps and dancing alone. (metaphor). 

In a nutshell, my whole life has been  learning of how to dance without programmed steps, a path and a plan, and as a couple. Could I dance alone? Was I Zorba or Fred with Ginger? 

So I got married. As Zorba said, the whole catastrophe. I would dance as a couple and follow the steps I learned in the ballroom dance studio. Life would be a ball.

Dancing alone on the ballroom floor means you have nobody. You are exposed. All eyes are upon you. “What’s the matter? You couldn’t get a date?” Dancing alone divides your mind Eye into two eyes: one eye is you dancing, the other eye is the Other looking at you and measuring your performance. How dare you exist the malevolent eye says. What gives you the right to break from the plan, from the conventional steps? Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ? And so the Other Eye goes. So I felt quite incapable of dancing alone. The exposure was just too great. I would seek safety and security dancing as a couple. 

Having been married now, dancing as a couple, for 60 years now (would you believe that?) I’m still learning how to dance alone, while still dancing as a We. it is not easy to break out from the security of a pattern, from a dance step, while you are in the pattern. 

That is the thing here. It is easy, and our only recourse, when we feel trapped in a pattern, unable to dance spontaneously, that we just exchange partners. But how can you dance alone while dancing with a partner? How can you be spontaneous—and that is what dancing alone means—while following a dance step? How can you be Zorba and Fred and Ginger at the same time? 

Well, there is no dance step or path to the answer here. This is the pathless path.

Discovering how to be spontaneous in a pattern, how to be empty in form is Zen. Zen is not a pattern or path, but the illumination of seeing into the pattern, through the pattern, into its emptiness. Look at a whirlpool. It is a pattern of water, but it is empty. You cannot see a whirlpool by itself. The whirl is water, the water is the whirl. Form is emptiness; as pattern all things are empty, including you, yet you are the pattern. you cannot figure this out.

We are always trying to get free from a pattern when it becomes a problem; a problem pattern. We are taught to exchange a problem pattern for a new pattern, a new way of thinking, perhaps. But thinking comes as a pattern. Thinking is a pattern. But we are also taught that the Thinker stands alone. Here is the problem. The Thinker is the thought it thinks, so the Thinker is a pattern, an unconscious pattern to be sure because the Thinkiner believes it is not its thought. Like Yahweh, the Thinker believes it is outside of the patterns of thought, or creation. Our world is created by thought and its unconscious patterns. 

The goal of life is to be conscious of the patterns. That is Zen. The patterns are made transparent. What’s left? The Seer is left, the face before your parents (thought patterns) were born.

When a loved one dies, what happens? There is a hole in the pattern that was our loved one. The relationship is when our pattern is grafted into another pattern and as a relationship, a new pattern is created. Deth is a hole in the pattern. The form that moved in the pattern is gone so there is nothing upon which to fix the pattern, no twig upon which to hand the web that was our other. 

When we restrain from creating another pattern, a pattern of blame and Why Me? Grace can flow through that wound. For in that death, for a moment we are free from our own pattern. A familiar pattern held in place by our loved one also holds us in a pattern. Death is the end of patterns, for a moment. But new pattern comes rushing in to fill the emptiness, and once again we suffer the contractions of being looped in a pattern. 

Grace is what we feel when we are free from being locked unconsciously in a pattern. Grace is compassion, the joy of liberation from the pattern and at the same time the sorrow of being held in a pattern. Christ is the joyous participation in the patterns of life, in the cross. Christ chooses the pattern joyfully.