It’s Toasted. What’s your lucky strike?

April 13, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Watching Mad Men last night, I think for the third time, I had an It’s Toasted moment. If you recall, the first of the series was about Don Draper coming up with It’s Toasted as a way for Lucky Strikes to bypass the dilemma of not being about to advertise their cigarette as being good for you, since the gov. had made it official that smoking killed you.

It’s Toasted was the Zen moment that breaks out of the Koan, or double-bind. Draper did not know what to say, but he was supposed to know. Double-bind: He didn’t know/he was supposed to know. So he just sat and let others talk for he had nothing. I know nothing.

Then at the last moment, as the executives were leaving the room disgusted with the advertising agency, Draper asked how they made the cigarette, and they said: “it’s toasted.” But all tobacco companies toast the tobacco. Draper wrote on the board: Lucky Strikes. IT’S TOASTED.

They liked it and Draper has saved his reputation.

IT’S TOASTED is a metaphor in my talk for the Way of Transcendence, the Way out of the double-bind of the mind when you are caught between two imperatives that you must obey, you must, but they are contradictory and cancel each other out.

When caught in a dilemma what do you do? First, you sit in Not KNowing. You don’t fault yourself for Not Knowing because that is the truth. You don’t Know. You don’t come up with a phony made-up answer, nor do you deny or repress or avoid. You sit in the Not Knowing. In Zen this is called Shikantaza, just sitting.

Then you look around at what’s given. What’s. lying around. What seems irrelevant. Nothing is irrelevant because you don’t know what’s relevant. That’s the beauty and power of Not Knowing. You are empty, but aware, attentive, not disengaged, but engages like a cat watching a mouse hole.

You are poised potential. In the Not Knowing, something simple, something already given will suddenly grab you. A single Idea is born between the mutually but contradictory frames of reference. AHAH! In Zen that’s Satori.

IT’S TOASTED! This is the lucky strike.

The Easter in Avatar

April 12, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

The Easter message of Avatar is that Jake Sully is the metaphorical Christ who goes to the cross (the verticle and horizontal cross of Sky People and Navi), and the no-man’s land when he didn’t know which world was true, was the three days in the tomb, our of which he rose as the Avatar, the Awakened One.

When we view Easter as a historical event only, we miss the transformative power of Easter to radically change our lives from being on the cross to being resurrected from the cross, or as the Buddha defines it: the cessation of suffering, the end of feeling in exile, an alien in my own experience.

When your mind is liberated from its fixation on time, the past, and history, your mind is suddenly and wonderfully free to see Easter everywhere. Easter becomes Dharma, of a truth that liberates you from fear of death, the cross of loss. When your mind, your soul, is liberated from the Cross of Loss, there is no loss because nothing can be taken from you. Attached to no form as history, as being in time, you are free from time, from worry, anxiety, and future. Nothing bad can happen because you are always now, and there is no good or bad in just now. There is only Just This Now, and there is no time here, no future here, and no fear here.

Now is the resurrection that puts all the fragments of the Cross back together. Now Fits.

When you are Now, you are not alienated from now. And what you are thinking and feeling is always already Now. That is meditation. You accept what you are thinking and feeling as being just this. There are no good or bad snowflakes. There are just snowflakes. There are no good or bad thoughts. There are just thoughts. When there are just thoughts, you are free from the tyranny of good or bad thoughts, positive and negative. You are no longer being shocked by the positive and negative polarities of the circuit of your mind.

The mind is just thoughts, just snowflakes, and you are not the snowflakes because you can observe, you can notice them indifferently, without concern, without worry and fear…ah…worry and fear are just thoughts.

The Dark Night between Good Friday and Easter

April 11, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Today we are between Good Friday (death on the Cross) and Easter Sunday (resurrection from death on the Cross). This is the intermediate zone, the meat in the Easter sandwich, the Dark Night of the Soul (moon). This is no man’s land between the pairs-of-opposites death and life, Up and Down, In and Out. Here in this space between death and life, we don’t know which is which, we don’t know what is good, what is bad, what is up and what is down. This is the intermediate zone of ambiguity.

This is the psychosis of Easter when we have lost our reference to death or life, past or future. Nothing is fixed here. I. have no compass. Everything is dark. I don’t know where I am….but here I rest. Here we don’t resist or struggle. Here I’m OK with ambiguity. Here I’m OK not knowing anything, not knowing what to choose. Here I cannot choose. And when I cannot choose this or that, I don’t have the power of choice. When I don’t have the power of choice, I don’t know who I am. I cannot choose myself.

So we hurry over Saturday, we hurry over this abyss of not knowing to get to Sunday and the flowers of Easter and the celebration of being free from the tomb, the Dark Night of the Soul.

But it is here in the tomb that the seeds of the Resurrection, the seed of New Birth is planted. Death is the seed, and when planted in the tomb of Not Knowing, it gives birth to a new idea, a new understanding, a new way of being in the world, a new life, a new business, course or relationship.

The space between death on the cross and liberation from the cross is the most important space of all, for this is the bridge from death to life, from the repetition of the past (karma) to a New Testament, a new way of being.

We celebrate Easter ritually as a calendar day, but we don’t know how to celebrate Easter, practice Easter in our everyday mind. When the Cross comes, when suffering, upsetting events, negativity comes, we want to get rid of it, fix it, deny it, remove it and blame it on something or someone. We don’t know how to sit with it. We don’t know how to nor react to it. We have not been taught how to be Teflon to negativity instead of Velcro.

Our whole consumer culture is built on creating new products and services to get us over the space between death and life, between the negative and the pleasant, and between discomfort to comfort. We don’t know how to sit with What Is, with Just This. We don’t know how to be OK with Not Knowing.

My understanding of acceptance here is not being passive to an external problem, but discovering the empty space within where we can discover or create a solution to the external problem. What are the conditions necessary for a creative response to a problem that has never existed before? Where do you go if nothing in the past will work with this problem? You must enter the Dark Night of the Mind where you can rest with Not Knowing…because that is the truth: you don’t know what to do. How can we enter that Not Knowing space and be OK, and be sensitive, and be watchful, alert when there is no answer? How can we stay engaged when there is nothing to engage?

Good Friday Corona

April 10, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

The time to plant is on Good Friday Corona when the spade of change turns over the soil of your life, breaks it up, fragments your world so the seed of potential can be planted. When Corona comes, can Easter (spring) be far behind?

But Easter is not a reenactment. Easter, the living Easter, is not remembering, not an affirmation of faith, and not a holiday and a church service. Easter is not a duty. Easter is not a hunt. Easter is when death and life are held together in one Act, in one Intention, which the Cross represents. But the Cross of Easter as a creative burst of renewal in your life is not referenced to the past. Like a recipe to be tried in your kitchen, you have to use what’s in your kitchen. You cannot go to the History Store and get the ingredients from the Bible. You have to use your everyday life as the ingredients for the Easter recipe.

You use your hurt, you use your mental and emotional states, you use your pain, your suffering of the Cross for the ingredients of Easter. Life is suffering. Life is a cross. You must use the suffering you have for the resurrection, for the rebirth, and for the spring burst of life and renewal.

Jesus and the Cross are both history, something that happened in the past, but that reference is not his transformative power. Like medicine in a bottle, you have to take the medicine not just read and believe in the label. The medicine in the Easter Bottle is that you choose to suffer. You welcome Corona. You invite, and your practice inviting, welcoming all that is given to you. You welcome both the waxing and waning moon, both the up and the down of your life. You welcome, you get on willingly the emotional roller coaster of the news and your everyday life. You joyfully participate in the Cross by not resisting what’s given, by not resisting Corona (metaphor).

While there is a gap between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, there is no gap in the application of Easter, in turning Friday into Sunday. When upset happens, when the Cross happens, let not the Friday thought be entertained. This is not bad. This is Good Friday, Good death, Good upset…for it is in this Friday that Sunday is born. In this sunset, the sunrise is also born. They dance together like Fred and Ginger Rogers.

Corona, the sound of one hand clapping

April 9, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Retirement is the stage of life for the wisdom quest. Suddenly, you are naturally “living in this world anonymously, completely unknown, without being famous, ambitious, cruel.” The weekly calendar loses it meaning since there are no more “blue Mondays, hump day, TGIS Friday, or weekend rapture. Every day is just this day. And here one begins to contemplate mortality.

The reality map we used in the first half of life to climbed the Mountain of Attainment no longer works. But there is no culturally supplied map in the west. Just watch TV in a stooper or play golf.

In the East, the last stage of life is that of wisdom quest. The children, the job, the work in the world is naturally dropped. Now you can turn within and find the inner source of contentment instead of seeking it in time. Now there is no more time.

Corona with its home confinement is giving us a taste of retirement from the world. Are you ready for your wisdom quest?

The wisdom of Corona is that no one is special. We all get Corona and die. You have no righteous rights. The proliferation of rights and identity through being special comes to an end with Corona. Corona is the great leveler.

Since the 60s, which broke up the monolithic culture of the 50s where only white men had rights, there has been an avalanche of new rights. Black rights, women, rights, gay rights, on an on, new rights are being born as the cleaver divides life into new rights, and with every new right, there is an opposite right to oppose it. Rights always come in pairs-of-opposites.

And then Corona comes to end the butcher’s cleaver of creating new pairs of rights. With Corona, no one has rights. No one is special, excluded, safe. There is no righteousness with Corona.

This meditation has evolved into an investigation in the proliferation of Rights since the 50s. And now that proliferation has come to an end with Corona. The Age of New Rights has created gridlock, cultural wars, and dysfunction, which Corona has brought to light. In the Age of Rights, whatever rises in the news is immediately divided into the yin/yang of Rights.

Whatever your rights are, they take away from my rights. This is the Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee of Rights. We are all on the Butcher’s Table where the cow of life is chopped into more and more rights.

The illusion of the Age of Rights, is that there can only be right and no left. The right is right by eliminating the left. We only want the sound of one hand clapping.

he Age of the Right suffers anxiety and the frustration of dysfunction because of our Logic of Identity that has been the dominant logic of the western science. Everything is what it is. A is A and cannot be both B and A at the same time.

This logic works perfectly in a material world conceived as a machine, but fails when trying to understand life, which is ambiguous. Lifes comes in pairs-of-opposites. Life is Noah’s Ark. Left is right, right is left. There is no up without down, and down without up. They cannot be separated. You cannot only go up. The One that is two is ambiguous, the UP/Down One that is up or down. UP/Down is the One that is two, but our logic of identity which says up is up and down is down and they exist separately cannot understand the wholeness of life that is beyond good and evil.

The logic of Identity is the fall from the Garden, the logic of the Apple that has been divided into a good and bad half, and that it is possible to have only the good half without the bad half. We don’t realize that everything is defined by what it is not. Nothing stands alone. Everything is relationship, and relationship is ambiguous, the two that is one, each standing alone but mutually dependent upon the other and cannot be separated.

Corona is the sound of one hand clapping. This is a famous Zen Koan. What is the wound of one hand clapping? Well, we know the sound of two hands clapping, the right hand slapping the left hand. This has been out politics for the last 50 years, the clapping of the left and the right against each other applauding the returning of the same play over and over. Endless clapping. Endless conflict. Nothing advances. When the right or left tries to go something, the other hand rises to stop it. Each gives birth to its opposite hand. The whole body has been lost. The reference to the One body, one America has been lost in the identity with one or the other hand. The Body, the One America is the sound of One hand clapping.

We have lost the silence, the transcendence of the One over the cacophony of the many. But Corona comes to stop the noise, and in the silence, we can hear the sound of America once again.