The Sound of Rapinoe is about breaking out of the cultural egg and the liberation and joy one feels at being reborn. As a metaphor Rapinoe points to this basic desire and joy that stirs inside us all. If we have taken refuge in the Egg and the logic that holds it together, when someone breaks out of the egg and dares to celebrate it, we feel our now contraction in the egg. We deny our own wings. We blame the person dancing outside of the egg for our pain, and then crucify them or stone them to get rid of our remembrance that we have not be born, that we are still in the egg of culture. 

All of our metaphors for this dance of freedom become our heroes, are spiritual and moral leaders. We put them in statues and make them decorations for our egg. We honor their stone forms, but when someone actually breaks out of the egg, we stone them with the rocks from our statutes. 

Even our Confederate generals are metaphors for the one who dared to break out of the egg, in this historical case, the egg of the industrial north. When we make the egg breaker a monument, we can be sure we are still in the egg.

Our first wedding was in the Baptist Church in Blackstone. I failed at that marriage in the mid 70s and got a divorce; then I failed at divorce and we got remarried in a Siddha Yoga group wedding, but were unable to get a marriage license in NY State in time for the wedding, so it wasn’t until we had a civil wedding at the Nottoway Court House did we get an official marriage license.

Just found this picture of the civil wedding, the third wedding. I surprised Tilly with this one. We were passing the court house and I asked here to come in with me for something, and the justice of the peace was waiting. BAM! The deal was sealed. If you haven’t read the previous posts, I had not gotten a NY marriage license because they required a blood test that I hadn’t scheduled, so we were to get one and our guru would sign it later. We never did.

Not wanting to broadcast that we have been living in sin, it just got put off. One day at Yogaville when we had taken my uncle and partner for a tour, I was standing at the gift counter with Tilly, my uncle and partner seating right in front of us as if in church, and a ordained swami was at the desk, I just picked up a ring Tilly was buy and put it on her finger and asked her to marry me. BAM! The civil wedding followed quickly.

Our Siddha Yoga Wedding was a spiritual wedding between two pieces of white bread. Our two kids were there and we camped in a local camp ground for a few weeks at the South Fallsburg Ashram. Twenty couples from around the world were in this great wedding on Guru Purnima Day, which is the celebration of the Guru’s Moon, the largest moon in July. 

We returned to Cleveland were we had come to practice you—I had come to practice yoga in 1972—and opened a Siddha Yoga Meditation Center. A few years later we sold the house and went to Ganeshpuri, India, Swami Muktananda’s home ashram. From there we came to Blackstone and planted our tree of many fruits in the house my wife grew up in.

Wedding anniversaries are no big deal to us since we have had three of them, and the middle one, the important one is floating, always on the full moon of July.

So I create this metaphor today with our Siddha Wedding that had no license as the spiritual center, a magical wedding blessed by our guru, a cosmic wedding we felt. Indian weddings are very rich. 

Our other two weddings were worldly weddings, earth weddings, bookends for our heavenly wedding. 

From the view point of the eternal wedding one can see the patterns of the temporal marriage, and they, the patterns of your marriage because a source of humor, the food for a comic. The fights and fits of our marriage make us roll on the floor in laughter. 

Just yesterday I noticed a pattern. Hey, even after 59 years, I’m still discovering our marriage patterns, the groves our needle runs in. Whenever I ask my wife if I can throw out some jar she has emptied and left on the counter, it is always: Yes, you can throw that out. 

But when I don’t ask if I can throw it out, inevitably, I should not have. She finds my sin in the trash: “Hey, I use this to store my seeds.” I have turned my wife into a Trash Lady who digs in the trash to find what I shouldn’t have thrown out. 

Marriage is ironic. When I try to do good, I lay the foundation for doing bad. No matter how hard I try, I cannot be perfect. No matter how god I get, I must save some space for being bad. Life is a balance of good and bad. A happy marriage always restores balance. In balance, the good is the bad and the bad is the good…and that balance, when discovered, always evokes laughter. When you can laugh, you are in balance. 

We do have a few pictures from the Baptist Blackstone wedding, and this is the best I think. I was on a submarine at the time, and I extended my four year to five when I got married to help tilly finish Longwood and begin her teaching career. 

I remember when I told my sonar chief (I was a sonar man)that I was getting out of the navy, and he, shaking his head, patted the sonar gear and said: You take care of this gear and the Navy will take care of you. In 20 years you can retire and take it easy.

I didn’t stay in the navy. I was getting married and, while I didn’t know it, I was getting a better deal. I would pat my wife instead of the sonar gear. If I took care of her, she would take care of me, loving me more than the navy would ever do.

So what’s our anniversary present? A new more powerful pond pump for our Buddha Pond. Love is the spiritual pump of a marriage because it endures all ripples.

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 We have two guest cats in our house and then like to relieve tension, as cats do, by scratching a post or, in our case, our rug. The cat transmutes the pain of tension into the scratching. So in order to accolade the cat’s needs and save my rugs, I got coconut fiber welcome mats, and the cats love them, bypassing my rungs for the mats. 

We all have our scratch mats. Where do you go when tension hits and a negative emotion sweeps over you? Do you have a scratch mat? My scratch pad is a house walk-about. Fortunately, my house ha big rooms all interconnected so I can walk over a mile a day in my walk-about. I also practice mantra repetition when I walk, using a wrist male. My mind, my fingers, my feet, and my breath all do the walk-about. Tensions I feel in the daily household encounters are transmuted into insight. 

When you have a Scratch Mat, you can transmute the base negativity into the gold of inner peace and insight. All my scratch mats have welcome on it. Welcome your tension, transmute the negative energy into gold, be happy.

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We are all in a labyrinth of our own personal story or mythology, and we keep repeating ourselves; We think we are out of the trap of the labyrinth, and BAM, there’s that Wire in the Sandwich, and we are still stuck. Why? We didn’t have Ariadne’s Thread. 

What is the Thread, the golden thread, but our surrender to our inner Theseus, our inner wisdom, on in the TV show, the surrender to Mr. Ed, the widows horse (remember that show?) Ariadne’s Thread is our Prajna (Zen) or inner wisdom that can tell the difference between the real and the unreal. 

You see, the Labyrinth of our mind is a Story, a myth. The Minotaur doesn’t really exist, yet we believe it does, and our belief in our inner minotaur creates the labyrinth that houses him, and that labyrinth is the very world we live and act in, our personal world of ME. 

The awakening of Prajna or Ariadne’s Thread comes spontaneously when we realize that we are in a labyrinth of our own making. We SEE that we have been here before, at this turn before, at this place before. We see the pattern instead of the situation. In the Labyrinth of the mind/world the situations are always different, but the pattern is the same. We cannot see the forest for the trees; we cannot see the patterns for the situation.We think we are seeing the situation for the first time, but no, we have been here many times before in our wanderings in the labyrinth of our conditioned mind.

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.