Discovering its limitations, I left Christianity and went East to Yoga and eventually Buddhism, and when I returned to my native religion I came in through the back door and discovered the Mystical back room of Christianity that has been sealed off from the congregation. Instead of separation from God, nature and myself, the message was now unity with myself. My exile was over.

When you heat Christianity, the ice of tribalism melts, but you have to leave the ice field in order to find the flowers.

The teaching of Jesus is like a Zen Koan. One has to penetrate it, become the teaching, become his words until you are speaking them a Jesus speaks them. But in the orthodox teaching there is an infinite gap between you and God, you and Jesus. And this gap reinforces your sense of separation for God and yourself…you are God and God is you. You are God discovering Himself, always surprised. 

The teaching of Jesus, not the image or form or person of Jesus as an object both in history in in y our mind is present as a puzzle, a spiritual Down. You go to the Master and ask: Am I God or Not? The Master says MU! (which means NO, but a NO that is not NO but just a hammer blow to the question itself. That hammer blow that smashed the question and the pain of separation, and the exile is Jesus when Jesus is your voice, you true nature that transcends the Me versus World. 

Jesus is MU! Jesus is that which is before your parents were born. Jesus Christ is your true Self..the Self that has no second, the Buddha Nature that is prior to all the many forms of nature.

The same with Eckhart Tolle, or any other non-dual teaching.  When first encountered the Tolle teaching is about something, about you, about all these new concepts like Presence and the NOW. One is still in the conceptual mind but with a new road map. 

But as one practices Tolle, listening to the talks over and over, a gradual shit occurs from the objective (Tolle teaching being form) to the Subjective and the Tolle teaching begins to speak you. Je Suis Tolle. You begin to speak the teaching, not as a teacher informing others, but as your own own living word. 

Now you are reading and being between the lines of the teaching and its concepts. You become the space between the words and thoughts; you become the emptiness where you and Tolle are ONE. 

The teaching leads you out of the duality of the teaching where the teacher, the teaching, and one being taught are one. And yet you are still separate from Tolle. The form is the teaching, the emptiness is its source, the one source that has no second.

Eastern teachings are from the East, and we live in the West, and it is not easy, certainly most difficult, to switch cultural paradigms and ways of viewing reality itself. It’s like a plastic overlay map on the natural terrain of our birth culture. Each map by itself does not cover everything, but in our choosing mind we think it must be either Christianity or Eastern traditions. That is not true. 

In our own quest, we have to discover a new world view that contains both maps, that which works for us that harmonizes both cultures, both views, since both have valid truths. 

Each of just must become a hybrid that integrates the ambiguity of the two world views. By holding and harmonizing the tension our lives becomes vibrant and always questioning, always growing, always alive to the mystery of Now.

When Jesus Christ is made into a person, a form, a thing in history, instead of being a quest, Jesus becomes an idol, a fixed center around which we stave off change and mystery.

The GPS is a metaphor for a historic shift in paradigms of reality in the West. On the flat map of the Newtonian world, you are a thing moving on a stable space/time grid. You must conform to the map, plotting the right course and not going wrong, and you are an idiot if you do. There is only one right way.

But on the GPS, the map or world boots around you. If you don’t move, the world doesn’t move. When you move, the world moves with you like the outside of the inside of a cup. And, you are always going to your chosen destination no. matter what turns you make. You are never an idiot. There is no guilt on the GPS map.

The GPS navigator is a metaphor for Buddhism and a shift of you from being on the periphery of life to being at the center.

When the mythological dome of the 1,000 year Middle Ages ended, the modern age was born and man lost his center and orientation in the world. Now the earth orbited the sun, just another planet, and then man himself was just another species evolved from lower species. What the hell? Joseph Campbell said the modern man was in free fall. The Age of Anxiety. 

It is through myth and metaphor that we can return to our lost center, that we can find the axis of our wheel, no longer condemned to live on the rim of our life taking all the crap. 

Trump was elected because he “restored center”—not of the nation, all the people, but just his people. Like Moses he showed his people the Center, but not in them, but through Trump. I will be your center, your voice, he said. This is a False Center, a False Idol.

Eastern teachings flooding into our culture in the 60s because they offered a new paradigm that showed us where the lost center was: Inside us. 

The GPS Navigator is a technological metaphor for our lost center.

What’s changed is monolithic advertising to a single audience. Now advertising is fragmented and appeals to target populations. The glory days of Madison Avenue and Mad Men are over. 

The Church of the Trinity (ABC, NBC, CBS, was broken and fragmented by cable, and now the internet breaks up the Church of Cable. On the internet everyone, every computer, is the center of the web.

The robins nesting above my front door have flown their nest. How quickly from egg to wing they fly.

The robin and worm both know their nature. It is my nature to wonder who am I.

I roam the lawns of my world, head cocked, listening, then hopping to a new spot. Ah, the worm of insight stirs.

I jumped from the nest too early-premature awakening I presume-and for decades I had to be fed by gurus and philosophers while I flapped on the ground, my wings not fully grown.

Learning to fly is all about trying. We try and try but flight only happens as a surprise, when the egg of failure hatches.

ZEN FITS…I love the double meaning of this. For me Zen is a metaphor, not a religion or Tradition that requires belonging to or adhering to a particular system. For me Zen is like Eureka, a surprise awakening insight, or IDEA that. unifies what one has previous experienced as confusion, a dark night of uncertainty and doubt. Suddenly, you break out and fly. 

Zen is not a fixed state of mind or being, but a practice of leaping out of the conditioned nest of the mind. We fly and try and try and fly…life is a continuous leaping out of nests. When we leap from one nest, we find ourselves in a bigger one, and it is the grown of consciousness that makes us discover the edge of the larger nest, and when we discover it, again we try to fly from it, again and again. At the end of our flying, we fly again.

My talks are a Zen Flying. I have a seed idea, turn on the iPad to LIVE and flap my lips. I don’t know where the ten minute flight will take me. But I trust the Zen Fits.

Upon reading this amazing detailed documentation of events (even tracking the digital trails like native hunter through the maize of internet digits) it is a road map to impeachment or indictment when the president leaves office. The prosecutors have their work already completed. 

Basically, this novel documentation facts all backed up by multiple sources does not tell us who Trump is; we can see for ourselves. Trump is not what he says he is, but what he does. This is pure behaviorism, pure science, the report. Only objective verifiable facts are admitted. No story, no emotion, no spin, not assumptions. 

Trump does not come out of this report with any glow of the Office. To me he comes off as Hitler in his Berlin Bunker, being attacked from all side, deranges and panicked, he grabs at any straw to stave off his end..the exposure he has feared all his life that he is a hollow con man. 

Trump thought if he wrapped himself in the power of the President he would have created an armor that would protect him from exposure. But his own shadow has done him in.

I  see us at the cusp of a Reformation similar to the death of the Middle Ages (the mythological age) and the birth of Reason. Man cannot live by reason alone, so faith and mythology has returned, but not as a leap forward to a dynamic new unity of faith and reason, but to a regressive look back to the security of an authoritarian mythology where the Center is reestablished and anchored down with rope of delusion. 

The Center must hold. Even our Ego is the center of our psyche, the modern center, if you will that is portable like the smart phone. We no longer invest in physical centers like Notra Dame and a cosmic mountain to sustain our psyche and ward off psychosis. The center of the modern world is portable, just as the Bible was a portable church. And now our Smart Phone is our center. The paradigm of the Internet is the post modern paradigm in which we live. 

Each of us is the center of the universe, if you have a Smart Phone and can afford a phone account. This is the new generation. 

But the older generation still hungers for an external center in which it can invest its power and find stability and certainty in a group, in a people. This is Old Testament mythology where it is a People who have the covenant with the Center (God). 

So Trump is like that. He is an Old Testament mythology, an external proper in which the People are restored and given meaning and purpose. He must be believed in and followed because his people have invested their power in him, and if he were to fall, they too would fall back into the terror having no center, which is a form of psychosis. The modern world is like a snow storm of information and data coming from everywhere. Without a stable center, one is swept away and loses orientation, a white out. 

The modern Ego as image (see Mad Men) is a fragile flat wafer; like a leaf it can be swept up by any breeze. 

Upon reading this amazing detailed documentation of events (even tracking the digital trails like native hunter through the maize of internet digits) it is a road map to impeachment or indictment when the president leaves office. The prosecutors have their work already completed. 

Basically, this novel documentation facts all backed up by multiple sources does not tell us who Trump is; we can see for ourselves. Trump is not what he says he is, but what he does. This is pure behaviorism, pure science, the report. Only objective verifiable facts are admitted. No story, no emotion, no spin, not assumptions. 

Trump does not come out of this report with any glow of the Office. To me he comes off as Hitler in his Berlin Bunker, being attacked from all side, deranges and panicked, he grabs at any straw to stave off his end..the exposure he has feared all his life that he is a hollow con man. 

Trump thought if he wrapped himself in the power of the President he would have created an armor that would protect him from exposure. But his own shadow has done him in.