My neighbor Jim Hasbrouck got 500 Tibetan prayer wheels from a friend going out of business, and I got one of the biggest today. There are Buddhist prayers inside, but I wrote one of my own and put it in the wheel. I won’t tell you what it is. But if you get insight from my writing, my prayer is answered.

Now we all pray, sending thoughts and prayers everywhere, and even more so on social media. I mean, we send someone prayers for the dog being sick. The slightest upset or problem gets a prayer on Facebook. But these prayers are easy since they are just an act of thought.

But Buddhist Prayer wheel, however, puts some muscle behind the prayer. The wheel gets the body involved and make the prayer real. If something is not invested in real action and form, it’s just a thought, a wisp of smoke, a wafer so thin it floats like a snowflake. But when you put your body into your prayer you can create a snowdrift.

Thoughts and prayers are easy, but if you write your prayer and put it in a Tibetan Prayer wheel along with ancient prayers have been chanted for thousands of years, well that puts some weight behind your heartfelt wishes. Of course, you then have to spend some time spinning the wheel to send out the prayers.

Jim Hasbrouck is selling these beautiful prayer wheels on eBay, but you can message him here and go directly to the source.

The purpose of Buddhism is to restore center. Our Western culture is a mind culture, a thought culture that is separated from the body and action, so we think we are doing one thing but actually doing the opposite. The mind has been disconnected from the heart. Wisdom and compassion have been cut asunder, The eagle flies with only one wing at a time, going in a circle instead of straight. 

Buddhism, Zen in particular, is the sudden healing of this wound, the Heart Sutra that sews the mind and heart back together.

In our rational society, we don’t believe in magic prayer wheels, yet we believe in thought prayer, setting prayerful thoughts as if they are magic, as if our prayer will turn the hurricane. But we don’t realize that if I pray that the storm miss me, it hits someone else, who is also praying. Is the cosmos a battle of prayers? Prayer dog fight like in WWII? Haha…my prayer shot down your prayer. The storm hits you instead of me. If that isn’t magical thinking I don’t know what is. 

So what is so magical or unbelievable about a Tibetan Prayer Wheel?

Prayer centers you, but what kind of prayer? When you are at your center, the heart, you have no needs but the needs of others, so your prayer is always an intention to restore and maintain center, but not just. your center, but the center of everyone. There is only One Center. 

When we lose our center, that is when we pray to restore center. But the truth is we cannot lose out center because we are always at the center of the world, the center as the Knower and the Seer. I SEE. That is the center. I am seen. 

When we flip to being the Me on the outside, on the rim of the wheel, I make myself and my feelings and thoughts into IT, and my center is outside of myself looking at it, or, as I discover in my talk, you project that “outside Me” onto other and worry about what they are thinking about me. I want the externalized ME to like the Me that is at the center. 

When we experience stage fright, that is a panic attack of the externalized ME that paralyzes the Self, and freezes the oscillation between the two me’s. 

The Prayer Wheel, as I explore in this talk, is a metaphor of the Two Me’s: the wheel as a center and the ball on the chain that spins the wheel. But you can see the Primary ME is the Center ME and not the external ME that orbits my center like a dying and resurrected moon.

OK, we are really connecting dots now, so hang in there. The Wheel spins because there is a center and an orbiting ball, the Two Me’s, just as the moon orbits the Earth. 

When I misplace my center and put it in the orbiting moon, I’m always looking for my lost center in the wrong places. Our American culture is a society of the misplaced center. Even Trump ran on Restoring the Center (America). Religion is about restoring the Center, which it calls Jesus. 

Whenever we make our Lost Center another IT, we are still on the outside looking at IT as center and wondering why we still feel in exile. 

When we SEE through and through that our center cannot be an IT, the turning point happens and there is a shift to our real Center of the Knower. I SEE. 

As long as I invest in what I see, some IT, external or internal, I am still circling my true center, going round and round the stable center. We can call that karma or Ground Hog Day or a Merry-go-round.

Just watched Catch 22, the classic dark comedy of an insane world where the only way out was an insane act. Ahah! Avatar. Jake Sully said that the only way out of the Catch 22 he found himself in where he is caught between two equal but opposite world views, was the insane act of leaping on the Last Shadow, a metaphor for a leap of faith that has no logical outcome, that has no possible gaining idea. And that’s Zen.

Jake Sully was caught between two world views, one objective, one subjective. The Sky People is our modern objective world view where everything is an IT, and the Navi is our subjective world view where I the world and the world is me. For the Modern view, I am separate from the world as IT; for the Navi or Idealism, I am connected to the world as I-thou. These two views are both valid but incompatible, as you cannot view the world as separate and as a unity both at the same time, yet one must. There can only be One World, One Me, but here there are two Me’s, two views, but there can only be One. I am caught in a Catch 22 our dilemma out of which I cannot choose. 

As in Catch 22, our hero escapes the Catch 22 by in insane act of leaving the island (world) in a tiny lifeboat, an insane act. But just as Jake Sully, he leaps into the ocean with no logical outcome. The Catch 22 dilemma of opposite but mutually dependent views is the trap of ambiguity, where logic fails us, where empirical science fails us. Sanity has become insanity. When sanity is insane, one has to become crazy in order to be insane. 

But the Catch 22 is that if you choose to be crazy to get out, you cannot get out. My favorite Gestalt image of ambiguity is Catch 22 where you cannot choose the view of the Old Woman or the Young Woman because each is the other, the One that is Two.

OK….we are looking at the two views that create the Catch 22, the dilemma where everything you do is lose/lose. At the root is the two centers of our consciousness, of human consciousness. You can experience these two views right now. Look at the mouse on your desk. That is an IT and you are outside of IT perceiving it. This is I-IT consciousness. 

Now relax just be aware of the room you are in without focusing on anything. There are no selected IT. You are the center of the room. When looking at the mouse or chair, that IT is the center and you are on the periphery. When you are at the center of the room, awareness as the room, that is the subjective view. When you are looking at something in the room, that is the objective view. 

Both views are valid but uncomplimentary but mutually dependent. There are two Me’s here, two centers. But there can only be One ME. 

The dominant view of the Western rational world since the Enlightenment has been the objective view because that is the view of science and it works to control nature as IT. But I as. ME, as consciousness has become a ghost in this machine. I am not on the objective map. But I must be because I exist. So I create a Story of reality in which I as a person have value. This Story of Me is created from a selection of facts in the objective world, facts or evidence that proves my story is real and give Me value. 

Ah, now we can see Trump as a metaphor for the Subjective View trumping the Objective view in order to make ME the center of the world, a ME that has no second, because ME cannot be divided into two ME’s. When that happens we have a civil war or two tomcats in one yard.

We are caught in Catch 22 when the Subjective View bends objective facts to fits its perimeter. The water of objective facts is bent to fit the story bowl that holds it. Unless everyone is forced to live in that fishbowl story of reality, there is going to be those who don’t see reality according to the fishbowl. But the Catch 22 is that your view and the opposite view of reality is in the same fishbowl. There can be only one reality. The catch is that whatever reality you choose is still in the same reality as that which you don’t choose. The situation is ambiguous. Again I post my gestalt image of ambiguity to make the point. Both views are ambiguous in that both are separate yet both the same. And that cannot be, yet it is. This is the Catch 22 of our human consciousness…a wound from which we must leap in order to heal.

Just watched the original movie Catch 22 last night. Reminded me of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the movie is a metaphor for the crazy world we are in right now where every yes is a no, and every no is a yes. There is no exit. All sane efforts lead back to madness.

2020…Catch 22 with zeros…and the zero is wholeness. Starting over…Hopeful.

Reflecting on the movie the next morning, the movie begins without hero wanting to go home because he has flown the required number of missions, but the commander keeps extending the number needed to retire. The only way out, the doc says, is to say you are crazy. But if you say you are crazy you are not really crazy, so you don’t get out. 

The movie ends with our hero actually going crazy. This reminds me of Zen Koan where the master gives the monk a Catch 22 puzzle and there is no way out for the monk but to “go crazy.” If he tries to be crazy, the master hits him. 

When you are in an insane world, the only sanity is total insanity, an insanity that does not depend upon sanity for definition.

Understanding ambiguity is understanding the Double-bind trap where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. You all know what this dilemma is, and how it feels. When caught in the DB, we are in a vortex of worry that has no end. We must reach out to some friend or a lighthouse to stabilize the whirlpool of the mind or else we fear we will be sucked into a fate worse than death, the oblivion of non-existence, of having no center as ME. This loss of Me is worse than death, so suicide is ofter the only way out for some. 

Understanding and working with ambiguity is a lifelong practice. I call it Zen. Zen is the Logic of Ambiguity. It is also the language of art.

In this gestalt metaphor for ambiguity what is your face before your parents were both. What is the inkblot before the old and young woman were born? Once you see the old and young woman, can you restore your innocence, the inkblot before you saw them? Zen is about restoring innocence, your world before you were young or old.

This gestalt image of ambiguity is a better understanding of the yin/yang. Each is the other, yet each is different. They are not opposites juxtaposed to each other in a struggle for dominance, for each is the other.

The only way out of the yin/yang ambiguity, the trap, is to see that both are the same, yet different…that seeing is a single Idea, an action that is the heart sutra that knits the wound. Zen calls it Satori. Ahaha! I see. I am the opposite and the opposite is me. I love my enemy as myself.

I would say they do not reflect the other for then you have two, but that they are the other, and are not the other. The Old woman does not reflect the Young woman in the gestalt. In practical terms, if you look in the mirror and see an old face, you know it is an old face because you know the young face, but we think the young face is gone, and we have plastic surgery to restore it. 

But in truth, the old face is the young face…There is no gap in the One except that made by thinking there is.

If I say that I am old and not young, there is a gap. If I say I am young and not old, there is a gap. Who am I? I am neither young or old. I am timeless. there is no gap there, no calculation measuring mind. There is no gap between You as the Observer and the Observed which is Just This. That’s Zen. You are IT! 

But at the same time, you are not IT, so you can catch that bus.

That is a brilliant cartoon that captures the space between thought, the gap or pause between the yin/yang. When you focus on one image for a few seconds, the other image pushes through, and then when you focus on that the other image emerges. The focused mind cannot rest on either image because each image is the other image. But that moment of total rest is the space where Moses parted the Red Sea. That space is the Break Through Koan of MU! 

Is the image an old woman or a young woman. Which is it? 

MU!

LET THERE BE THE ONE is the universal commandment of life and the cosmos that must be obeyed. There cannot be two ONE. If you look at the screen this is written on, there are not two screens (unless you have a walleye, that is) Even Yahweh says for there to be no gods before him. Truth is the One that has no second.

But there are two ONEs. Look at a google map. If you zoom in you keep going within until you come to the One that cannot be divided. And if you zoom out you come to the One whole that cannot be divided. At least one can do this in imagination.

The two forces at work here are exclusive, or reductionism that cuts away all that is not the One. The other opposite but equally valid force is inclusive: you reach the One totality by including, not eliminating what is perceived. The exclusive way is that of science and the intellect; the inclusive way is that of art and intuition.

In MLK quote, the personal way is that if exclusion and reduction where you cut away all that is not You. And the social way is that of inclusion, where you keep including more and more persons to fit your social One.

MLK is speaking to the balance between the drive to the ONE through both ways, inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion is a centripetal force going outward and exclusion is centrifugal force expanding outward.

A balanced system is both forces in balance. The cosmos is always a balance of these two forces. If the cosmos wasn’t in balance it would explode or implode. The but balance is dynamic, not static.

Our American society is a dynamic unity of these two natural forces. The balance points is always shifting between the Person and the Social. We can say the Right leans toward the Person and the Left towards the Social. Our political struggle is always a shifting game of restoring balance. When we lean too far to the Right, the Left restores balance. When we lean too far to the Left, the Right restores balance.

Today it is obvious to everyone that we are in a period where the imbalance between the two ONE’s has built up great tension, like an earthquake fault line that is ready for the big one. 2020 will either maintain the tension of too much Yang (exclusion) far past the breaking point, or it will release the built-up tension to restore our dynamic unity of the ONE.

The True ONE is a dynamic unity of the two Ones, the Person and the Society. Dynamic means that it is always creating balance, and not resting in a static position. The See-Saw keeps moving as the Two One struggle to meet in a dynamic ONE.