Where is this mystical zero, this source of the pattern, this empty space that sees the pattern of form? All form comes in a pattern.  Nothing is fixed. No form stands alone as itself like a soup can in space. For you, zero is your music. For me my writing. f his Tampa pattern, always quick to point out how easy everything was there, which always included the good weather. But anyway, Tommy was a pattern, not a fixed thing. 

And what is a pattern but a system that contains opposites, for a pattern is not a straight line but a wave of positive and negative peaks, each balancing the other for in a wave the crest and the valley balance each other. It is the tension between these two opposite energies that keep the wave of time, one’s pattern going. 

So there is an Ed pattern.  We are created by our patterns, and we struggle within them as we are attracted to the positive peaks and resist the negative valleys. Why can’t the wave be all peak and no valley we complain. 

When we identify with the body/mind of the physical moment, we believe we are the conductor of the pattern or the victim of some external force. But our consciousness is then held hostage by our own pattern that we cannot see, just as the swimmer cannot see the current that pulls him against the direction he wants to swim. 

Waking up to the pattern is Zen. What is it that can see the pattern while one is swimming in it? The pattern, if it were a river, would be the great Mississippi.

When my yoga teacher in 1973 said I had “inconsistencies in my lower nature” he was describing my pattern, of which I was unconscious, so I was caught in its opposite currents. When I swam one way, I was also being pulled in the opposite direction. I was always swimming against the world, while the world (the other half of my wave pattern) was restoring balance by pushing against me. The ocean restores balance. 

Unconscious of my pattern, I was always trying to just have the peak, yet the valley was always balancing the peak to maintain zero….ah…that zero is Zen. That zero is the awareness of the pattern. 

The pattern is made of positive and negative numbers. When I add five positives, the pattern adds five negatives which I experience as the world being against me. I then blame the world for my pain of not achieving the peak without the valley. But from Zen or zero, the peak and the valley are One that is two. There is no pain in the valley when I am not resisting the valley when I accept the valley and the peak as one wave. 

Seeing that, I stop investing in the expectations of the pattern, the dream that life can have only peaks, only positive ups, and no downs, for the up and the down define each other. They dance together like Fred and Ginger. 

Where is this mystical zero, this source of the pattern, this empty space that sees the pattern of form? All form comes in a pattern.  Nothing is fixed. No form stands alone as itself like a soup can in space. 

It is here that we rediscover that which is not the pattern of our life, that black hole from which our pattern springs forth like a fountain. We are all  patterns in the world. But music is its source…and joy. 

Trump’s killing of an Iranian general reminded me, with great foreboding, of the assassination of the Archduke that started WWI.

When two powers are locked in a contest to be Number One in a region, like two tomcats in the back yard, the yowling will escalate until the twitch of a whisker will launch the fury until one is dead if one doesn’t limp off.

When neither side, America or Iran can deescalate the build-up of fury, a saturation point is met where you just need on tap to release the pent-up energy, which then has no checks.

We see this building tension of frustrated forces in America as well. The quest to be Number One, to restore unity, law, and order has invested in violence instead of creativity.

In America, the election of a new president is a creative act. But on the world stage, only when great world leaders rise in a confrontation is a creative resolution possible. Where is Mandela, or Gandhi in the Middle East?

Is the fire destroying Australia a portent of the fire in the Middle East that just needs a single match to start?

All wars are religious. I read that somewhere. Haven’t you heard that? The purpose of religion is to restore unity, to restore the One. It’s right there in the Hebrew Bible. Yahweh says let there be no other god before me. “I am the One.” 

When a people, a nation, a society, or any One is divided into a polarity, and each pole must restore the One by eliminating the challenger, you have a civil or religious war. Either they come to a creative solution or they will if equally matched, destroy each other, mutual suicide. 

But when one side wins, and the other half of the One, or society, must submit to its “evil twin” the religious war continues fermenting underground until it erupts another day, perhaps in a new costume. We can witness this in America today, as the civil or religious was that consumed us is still being fought in proxy wars. We have yet to discover that single Idea of a new America that transcends yet contains the values of the polar twins. 

The Middle East is a battlefield of ancient wars. America seems to be the stick that enjoys stirring the sand into all-encompassing sand storms. When one cycle of violence dies down, we stir the sand to provoke a new storm. At some point, the fury cannot be contained. 

The Bluetooth of the Heart in this Zen Fits talk is a metaphor using my big Bluetooth Amplifier playing music from my iPhone throughout the house is the metaphor for our own heart music playing in our world, the house our mind builds. 

The Bluetooth of the Heart tells me when I’ve strayed to far in the mind and the signal is lost. It used to be that I was always disconnected looking for the signal that I knew was there. Now that I’ve found it, I can hear when the signal drops off, for it tells me in a loud voice. I quickly return to my alignment with the Dharma of the Heart, and the music picks up as if I had never left.

When I go the edge of the kitchen, the connection with the Music is broken and the speaker announces “Bluetooth disconnected.” And when I feel the pain of being disconnected from the source of life, my heart, I come back within range and the speaker welcomes my return: Bluetooth connected and the music comes back. Actually, the music is always there, but it is us that leaves it. 

And then, noticing, feeling that I’m disconnected I begin looking for the connection in time, maybe in the backyard, or even another town. I keep increasing the distance between me and my Bluetooth as I search for it, my Beloved. Yes, Beloved, for that is the way we feel about our Heart Music. 

Bluetooth music is not in the speaker, not in the portable phone; Bluetooth music comes from the universe through the form of the phone and the speaker. Like a sacrament in the Catholic Church, grace flows through these instruments. We need the phone and the speaker to capture the music, we need our mind to capture the music of our hearts in form, in me as a form in the world of forms. But the music comes from emptiness. 

Be empty my friend.

Ah, the metaphor of the Bluetooth of the heart is extended. While it irritates my wife when I go to the far edge of the Bluetooth’s signal and it announces that I’m disconnected, I like it. It reminds me of how ofter I get disconnected from my own heart. Let’s look at this; let’s flesh it out. 

The mind functions in an objective world where everything is disconnected. But the Heart functions in the subjective world where you are the world and the world is you. These are two incompatible views of yourself in the world. With the mind’s objective factual view, you are you and you are not the Bluetooth. But in the subjective world of the Heart, you are the Bluetooth and the Bluetooth is you. This world is communicated through metaphor and story. But its reality is felt, like music is felt, like the wind in a sailboat is felt, like the jerk of the train when it starts.

Connecting some dots on this New Year’s Eve: I’m with a gift card I purchased Karen Armstrong’s “The Lost Art of Scripture” in which she says that the modern age as lost this art of interpreting scripture through the lens of the Zero. (I added the zero)

Let me explain. Last night I was watching a documentary on the history of mathematics and it was India that first discovered zero as a number. Up until then all the number systems of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and China were based on countable forms. But the zero was empty, so whatever number it was attached to, that number was liberated from its form. 

So here we are the last day of 2019. Tomorrow will be 2020. are we going to be liberated by adding zero to 22? We have been in Catch 22 for the last 50 years, and now we are just going to add zeros to the two. How do we get out of Catch 22? Just add zero. 

So what does zero mean in my crazy mind. Zero is emptiness in Zen, or transcendence. The unnamed, unknown God. God is Zero. Getting back to Armstrong, modern mind has lost the zero in scripture. God hs become just a thing, a big number. But God as zero is not at the end of numbers but part of every number when you add zero to your mind. 

Form is emptiness; emptiness is form is the Zen equation. When zero is forgotten, form is just form. Everything is just what it is, what it is defined to be, a fixed form. When everything is fixed, everything is set and defined, and the infinite dimension of your life is lost. We feel trapped, contained, and defined to the past and the known. Zero is the unknown potential in our life. 

Armstrong is saying (I’ve only read the first chapter) that modern man locked in a material world of numbers without zero, cannot transcend himself, for his God is locked in there with him. 

The literal interpretation of scripture is a modern deviation, a cul de sac, from scripture as art. When scripture becomes merely history, God has no zero. There is no window in the Bible. Everyone argues about what they already know. God has left the house. 

Like ancient India, we have to discover the Zer0

My Shell station has new gas pumps I noticed yesterday while filling up my car. Pumping gas has been a respite from my goal-driven day. Before you get on the road you must pause and pump gas. It’s very Zen. You just pump gas.

But now the new pump had a video screen. LOOK AT AD, it demanded. The pure functional act of pumping gas, my rest stop from the driven mind, had been invaded.

What will be next? Will refrigerators come with video screens with running ads? What about toilet time? Is our consumer culture, now liberated from TV and print, going to consume our private spaces?

LIke pond algae, advertizing is looking for new clear spaces in our lives to fill that last bit of solitude we have left.

Pumping gas used to be just pumping gas. Now it’s pumping ads into me. How much can our minds take? 

Commercials create dissatisfaction so they can sell you satisfaction. I remember when pulling up to a gas station was being treated as royalty coming to visit. One guy pumps gas, the other one washes windshield and checks oil and tires, all done with a smile and appreciation. Consumers used to be treated like kings and queens for shopping or flying. 

Now the consumer is just an object to be consumed, a being not to be served but something to be squeezed from the last nickel. We live in a culture where everything is just another IT. The Sky People of Avatar.

There has been a gradual shift in our society aways from treating the consumer with respect and extra service to a society the consumes the consumer. Advertising shifted from just telling you about the product, to telling you how dissatisfactory your life is, that you need something, and then the ad tells you what you need. This has created a fundamental dissatisfaction with modern life, with ourselves. We always feel something more is needed.