THE FAILURE OF THE JETSONS

July 13, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

I grew up in southern CA in the 40s when polio was the plague, especially for children, and when there was a spike, public events were shut down. At the movies, there would be a short fundraiser for the March of Dimes to eradicate polio, and then a vaccine was discovered. Were is polio today? But if we are not vigilant, it can come back.

This a metaphor for spiritual practice. When you have an “awakening” you discover the vaccine to the polio of the Ego—which is a paralysis of your life— but if you are not vigilant with a practice of meditation, the polio comes back.

I grew up in the modern age (we are now in the Postmodern age) where science was the priest and the doctor. Science and the tools it invented would bring about the kingdom of God on earth, it was believed. Whatever problem came upon us, science would solve it, and vaccinate us against it so it would not return.

If an airliner crashed. science would discover its cause and remove it, so we would be safe. When was the last time one of our big airliners crashed? I remember when it was common. But the point is that when it comes to machines, anyway, we can through cause and effect logic, vaccinate the machine from further disease, or crashed. Remember how computers use the crash and freeze up all the time?

Why did we stop believing in vaccines? When did and why did we start believing that if science came to help we should not open the door, not accept its remedy to our dis-ease?

One of the features of the Postmodern age is that—thanks to Quantum—we realize that the scientist is not perfectly objective. When it comes to fixing life, that’s us, the scientist is like the alchemist of the Middle Ages: the scientist is subjectively part of the experiment he chooses to determine the objective results. There is no pure objectivity when it comes to fixing life.

We no longer live in the paradigm or world Idea of the modern age where the external world is like a machine that can be fixed if you discover the cause of any effect. The Jetsons failed. We no longer believe in Scientific Utopia.

We know that the scientist participates in the effect, the cause of the effect he examines. The observer and the observed are one.

We have come to distrust the study that claims to be objective because every study comes with an opposite study claiming the opposite. What was defined as bad, often is discovered to be good. Who do you trust?

This is the double-bind of the Postmodern Age. Everything is suspect. Everyone has their spin. This creates the conditions for a dictator, the One who will tell us the truth since we cannot choose.

The Catholic Church before it was debunked by the Protestants, was the only source of Truth in both heaven and earth. Truth has been in free fall ever since.

The Modern Age that was born out of the womb the Church at the end of the Middle Ages, was a masculine age. The scientist with his probing penetrating scalpel of analysis will discover the truth by excluding not truth. You get to the One by eliminating the false, the error and the sin.

The Holy Roman Catholic Church was really the ancient worship of the Earth Goddess in the form of the Virgin Mary. It was She who accepted everyone. It was She who healed the sick…The Goddess includes all. Her instrument is not the sharp knife of analysis that dissects, but intuition and compassion, the inclusive acceptance, an expansive force that expands boundaries, that embraces differences to reach the Truth or the One.

The Protestant/science reformation was masculine, the OT God who came to conquer the Goddess and judge the wicked and exclude the sinners.

As the Reformation progressed, the success of science in controlling nature and removing discomfort replaced the priest.

But in the 50s, just as the priests in the Catholic Church sold the sacraments, the scientist sold objectivity. Camels are good for you because the doctors recommend them.

The Postmodern age we now live in is a reformation in the way we know what’s true. The holy Catholic science is breaking up, and there is a pagan revolt of the heroic individual who will not be subservient to any authority….

This creates a new Catch 22 where yes is no and no is yes….The question now is not What is the Truth? It is no longer Out There to be discovered by science.

Well, I cannot leave it here, leave you. hanging. We are in a resurgence of the Goddess, the one that the Reformation suppressed. Remember the Puritan Witch Hunts…ala Hillary?

What has failed us, what has come to the end of its string, is the masculine way of knowing through exclusion, through the chopping up of life to find the cause of suffering. It is the chopping, the butcher that is creating the wound.

The way of the Goddess is coming back. “The mother comes to restore balance,” says Avatar. Everywhere, the goddess principle, the female way of knowing is returning. Inclusion instead of exclusion; intuition instead of sharp analysis. Turn towards the Whole instead of focusing on the part.

We cannot get to the other shore by finding out what’s wrong with our boat. We have to build a bigger boat, one that has not existed before, a boat that includes both science and religion, exclusion and inclusion, faith and reason.

The truth we must seek is Who am I? When neither the scientist or the priest can tell me, where do I go? What is the Way?

And this boat building, this raft, if you will, begins with you, not with mankind. Who are you? You are greater than you think you are. Stop analyzing yourself, picking at your faults. Put down the butcher’s knife and the bull will roar.

You need a Reformation.

Is Trump Don Draper in Mad Men?

July 12, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

People elected Trump because they thought he was Don Draper. COVID is good for you because it’s toasted.

The opening of Mad Men says it all about the Trump House of Cards. Crumbling, crumbling, disintegrating under his feet. Always patching up, plugging holes. People will know, people we see that I’m a fraud, a lier, and con game.

Trump is a Zen Koan: a rat stuck in a bamboo tube unable to go back, unable to go forward, and unable to stay where it is. Through the media we keep working and working with this enigma, trying to break the code. No matter what we come up with, it always ends up in MU!

Trump is the personification on the media screen of the pure image man, the American psyche caught in its own selfie, a hall of mirror reflections going into a vortex.

The Image Man must keep climbing higher to avoid falling. But the elevator always has a down.

My vision, understanding, of Trump is not gathered from information on the media, from the split screen of the talking heads. Trump is beyond this or that, this fact or that fact, this or that evidence because the evidence is always equal but opposite. No matter how much weight you put on the Bad Trump, the Good Trump restores zero. The teeter-totter keeps going up and down. Trump is the fulcrum.

I can only understand Trump from the viewpoint of the park bench that sees the whole teeter-totter, not from one end of the board or the other, the left or right end.

What is the Image Man, this modern self or self-image America has created? What is an image but a reflection in a mirror? What does the image need? The Image needs the Mirror to know it because the image knows it is not real. The image needs others to see it, to like it, and if not like it, to hate it. But the main thing is to be seen, to be known by the other, for it is through the eye of the mirror that the Image knows it is real, that it exists. If no one sees the image, if no one sees ME, then I fear I will not exist. So I keep reaffirming myself in the mirror of the other one way or another. I must get the mirror’s attention.

The fallacy here, the lie, the illusion is the mistaken belief that the Mirror of Knowing is in the eye of the Other. “Are you looking at me?? If that eye is a. stranger, we are terrified, but if it is the eye of a lover, we are rapturous. Same eye.

We want to be known, to be liked, to be somebody. For the image man, it is only the Eye of the Other, the eye of the public that can validate me. Otherwise, I’m falling, falling like Don Draper.

The Image Man is a lie. We know in our heart of hearts, in our basic knowing that I am not an image. I am the mirror. I am Knowing itself. I am the Mirror in which my image is created. But when I believe that I’m separate from my own Knowing, my own mirror mind, then I project that Knower onto others and try to get others to know me, see me, make me beautiful and respected, and famous, or just somebody.

The image wants a body. The image wants to be reall, but it looks for its validation in the wrong places.

Is not everything a reflection of you? You like this, you don’t like that. That is that but not a reflection of you. You like the doughnut. You want the doughnut. You want you. Whatever you desire, is you. We always desire ourselves, the image always desires what it believes will complete it, make it real. But what we desire is an image of ourselves, a reflection in our invisible mirror.

You see that? What I see is a reflection in the Knower that is me. I know it. I see it. I want it. I don’t want it…it is all what I know…I am the mirror…yet I see myself not.

Oh…wonderful…wonderful to see that. Where can I go that I am not?

Where is the Knower of ME? We fall in love and for a while, my lovers knows me as I know myself, and in each other’s eyes, we soar to the stars. But the mirror gets dust, and the up that had no limit comes down, back to earth, and I feel I have lost the Knower of Me.

Do we look for the Knower in the wrong place? Does the reflection, the image look for its mirror in the wrong place? Is the truth out there? Is the mirror out there? is the knower of Me out there?

This is the question to ask. Who asks this question? The Image or the mirror?

Corona the Kudzu Virus

May 7, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Here in Virginia, we have kudzu, a ground cover imported from Asia that looked like the answer to keeping highways neat and attractive. However, there were no nature checks in our environment, the Kudzu had a will to power that was unchecked. It covers trees, houses, and you if you don’t keep moving, to create a surreal landscape of where monsters are rising from the swamp in nightmarish forms.

Nature balances itself, the Universe is sum zero, always in a balance of forces, or else it would explode like your engine when it throws a rod, or gets out of balance.

Hitler was a kudzu dictator because when a Will to Power is. unleashed without checks and balances, it must keep expanding to maintain its rush of energy, it’s joy of power.

The joy of power, the will to power is also the fear of losing power. Joy and fear are two sides of the same coin. When the joy of power is there, fear is not far behind. The joy is the momentary rapture of not having any fear. For the moment your power is free from fear, but the slightest pause in the momentum opens a crack in the belief and fear comes in, fear of death, of loss comes in.

Looking at Trumpism, and the GOP that supports it, in this Kudzu metaphor, one can see that Trumpism is a will to power and a fear of losing power at the same time. Regulations must come down. Liberals must be put down as they check the power. Judges must be appointed that don’t check the power of the Right. Power, power, power….

“The Mother (nature) comes to restore balance.” (Avatar) Coronavirus has come the check the Kudzu of Power.

The GOP for the last 50 years has been enthralled by the rapture of unchecked power, and when Trump came alone as the messiah of unchecked power, the GOP had to buy a ticket on his train.

Is Coronavirus the Holocaust of the GOP? Does the virus (nature) come to restore balance?

But let’s look at the everyday experience to see if this Will to Power is true. Look at marriage. This is the field where two wills to power act out their strategies. In a relationship, only one partner can be the Center, the source of power at a time. When both assert the Will to Power at the same time, it’s two tomcats having a power fight. The relationship explodes in violence.

So marriages usually work are a contract where one partner exerts will to power alternately, carefully avoiding a conflict of will when both incompatible will to power rise simultaneously.

When that happens, when both rise together and neither can be the One in Power, the couple either has great sex, or one shoots the other.

The point here (if there is a point) is that when two incompatible Wills to Power rise simultaneously, there can be only one Will standing, the One without a second and if no compromise or creative resolution where the two wills can oscillate power, violence erupts to destroy the challenger, and each Will to Power believes it is the legitimate One or Center.

In traditional historical marriages, the male is the center pole, and the female dances around it. Order in society is maintained because there is no contest for power in the family. The female gets power by manipulating the male into doing her will. Peace is maintained as long as he thinks it’s his idea.

Every relationship that lasts is a strategy in which harmony between two wills to power triumphs over violence, where creative strategies overcome violence and death. Violence is failed creativity.

Coronavirus and the Toxic Trump

April 25, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Trump inadvertently created the toxic metaphor that will kill him. Nothing destroys an expert quicker than self-created ridicule. This metaphor—Trump is poison—is going viral faster than Coronavirus because Trump, believing he knew more than the doctors, went beyond the outer limits of sanity.

Finally, the President has no clothes. The towering image of Trump is falling, falling.

What is different about this metaphor is that when the Left says Trump is poison, the Right has immunity, but when Trump says: I am poison, the Right’s immune system breaks down because it is caught in the Perfect Trap of two contradictory Trump commandments: I know the Truth/ my truth will kill you.

Catch 22 is a circular reality that is obviously absurd—especially from the outside— but believed to be rational on the inside. Those inside the Catch 22 bubble see any criticism of the insanity inside the bubble as insane. A Catch 22 reality is an inverted reality deathly afraid of its bubble popping.

The Catch 22 egg is cracked from the inside where it is weakest. Trump is cracking his egg from the inside.

Narcissism is an expanding bubble that must keep expanding until it pops from its own force. Corona has created a new environment where Trump is given the freedom to make himself absurd even to those inside his bubble.

Impeachment has no effect because Trump’s Egg is designed to resist all attempts to break it from the outside. From the inside, it is very, very weak. At some point, when the bubble has reached its limits, it will suddenly burst. ( I know I’m mixing metaphors here, egg and bubble)

Prevented from holding his rallies, where he could safely pump up his bubble, he tried to pump it up on national evening briefing, where he employed his blowhard strategy of the rallies to a context that had natural checks. He overreached because here he was speaking to the nation instead of his base in a closed environment.

The double-bind Trump now finds himself in that his strength is being president of his adoring base which is basically in a confrontational relationship with the rest of the nation. When called upon to be president of the nation, he losses the wind given to him by his base. The double-bind or Catch 22 is that when he is President of the nation, he destroys himself as president of his base, and when the president of his base, he destroys himself as president of the nation.

So what does he do? The only thing he can do is flip-flop back and forth between these two mutually exclusive presidents, first one then the other.

The American President as defined by the Constitution and my mythology is the ONE that has no second. The President is the First Person, the mythic role that is the One person who is also the many. Individual citizens vicariously, metaphorically, become the One American through the Presidents as the One. Through the mythic mysterious alchemy of the President, the many are One, and the One is many.

We experience this alchemy in archetypes like Elvis. His fans feel Elvis is singing directly to each of them personally. I and Elvis are One. Every girl is dancing with Elvis at the same time.

In Hindu lore, this is the dance of Krishna and the Gopis, the cowherd girls he met with at night in the forest where each dances with their lord personally at the same time.

So Trump in his rallies is dancing with each of his fans personally at the same time. Each feels that Trump is speaking directly to them personally. I am Trump and Trump is me. This is the dynamic of a cult leader. Both the leader and the cult energize each other, growing high and high in the rapture of Oneness, which is the release from the limitations of individual consciousness and identity.

Coronavirus had denied Trump his charging station, so he must find new ways to charge his image and keep it expanding, keep it feeding on rapturous attention.

The utter simplicity of Corona

April 14, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

When life gets complex, it becomes dysfunctional, and the imperative Let There Be One is activated. We see this imperative at work in every aspect of our individual and social life, in nature as well. This is the categorical imperative of the universe itself. Let there be One.

Corona comes to simply America, particularly our health care system which has become too complex given our worship of choices. Too many choices create dysfunction. The mind, the system is overloaded. It yearns for simplicity. We all yearn for simplicity, for the One.

Evolution is the process of complex to simplicity, the many to the one, and the one then become complex and inviting a new simplicity. One could say (I do) that evolution is the intention to the One, to unity, to simplicity. This drive to simplicity happens in everything and everywhere if you become aware of it.

People like living in small towns because life is simple here. On Friday at “rush hour” I can to the post office and the bank in ten minutes. We go camping, go to nature to find simplicity. Periodically, we go through and throw out all the tools we once bought to simplify our life; like Thoreau, we simplify. Of all our movie heroes, Forest Gump was the most simple.

Coronavirus is a very simple organism. It takes root in our modern society because of its complexity. When complexity comes, Simplicity is not far behind. Corona is simple because death is simple. Death is the ultimate simplicity, and when death comes, everything gets real, and reality is very, very simple.

Our meditation this morning is on Simplicity and Corona is our working metaphor. Simplicity has to be discovered. Simplicity is transcendent of the complex, and when we are living in a complex system, and we experience the pain of its dysfunction, we long for a simple solution, but we don’t know what it is. The simple cannot be found in the complex. And the complex is complex because of redundancies, useless repetitions, like our mind when it is caught in a mono-duologue or thought vortex. We go round and round looking for a simple way out. Thought itself is complex.

Corona is like diabetes: there are the Corona laws that you must obey. Keep your social distance, stay out of crowds, wear a mask, wash your hands, etc. These of the Law of Corona and if you don’t obey them, just like the laws of diabetes, you get sick. Very simple.

In order to control the simple, you have to get simple yourself. The complex cannot control the simple. Corona will simplify our heath system. Corona will simply our political systems. For the last 50 years since Nixon our politics have become dysfunctional, too complex. No one can choose the simple solution, the obvious solution. The simple get embroiled in the complex and dysfunction reigns.

Corona as death is very simple. Death is the ultimate simplicity. Nothin is more simple, more One than death. Death is the One that has no second. But simplicity feels like death to the complex. Simplicity always comes as if from outside, outside the complex. The religious would call simplicity God’s Grace. Or a natural disaster, one might say. But simplicity always brings the unknown. The Complex has no idea, cannot imagine what simplicity would be like, yet when simplicity comes, we recognize it immediately. Our basic nature is simplicity. We recognize what we already always are, but we only know it when we see it.

Steve Jobs would push his designers until they created the simplicity he knew was there, but could no know until he saw it. Don Draper in Mad Men pushes for the simple slogan and will not know it until he sees it as an Ad Satori. That’s IT! A single idea resolves the complex problem.

Zen is the ultimate simplicity. Zen art is very simple. Zen furniture, decorations very simple. Tea ceremony is very simple. Zen is One taste. Just This is the simplicity of Now. Now is the One that has no second now. Eckhart Tolle is Zen this way. Buddhism meditation and mindfulness evolves to the simple, the empty. Empty is very very simple. Empty is the One that has no second, and because it has no second, Very simple. Simple is the One that is unambiguous. Yet the Simple Empty One is not unambiguous. Empty is also full. Empty is full, full is empty.

Is this simple enough for you? You are the One that has no second. But, here’s the irony, the One that has no second is both inclusive and exclusive. You are the One that includes the many, the two faces of the One. Zoom out and. you no end to you: zoom in and you find no end to you. There is no boundary to you.