Corona in the rearview mirror

April 8, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (TS Eliot)
__________

Notice the ambiguity in this poem? (1) we shall not cease exploring (2( at the end of exploring. (1) arrive where you started (2) see what you have already seen for the first time.

Let’s pull this cotton ball apart. To see my wife, my house, my pets, and even me for the first time means that I have finally dropped the filter of the known, the lens of memory that gives me a view through the rearview mirror. I see the present moment referenced to the past and what I have defined as my world.

There is the view through the front window and the view through the rearview mirror. The rearview mirror cannot be removed because I need it in order to live in a consistent world. Otherwise, I would be like Alzheimer’s, forgetting who and what the world is after I read it. So obviously, we need the rearview mirror in order to catch a bus. But if all we have is the rearview mirror, we drive into a ditch.

So we need the known (rearview mirror) and the front window (the unknown) Why is the front window the unknown? We have never driven in this moment before. But as long as we are looking in the rearview mirror, we believe we have been here before. It is the known.

Enlightenment is ambiguous. You drive with both the Known and the Unknown at the same time. But here’s the trick. One of the views must be primary and the other secondary. Our culture makes the Known of the rearview mirror primary, the only view.

But we know the front windshield must be our view of the road, but we cannot use it since all we believe in is the known. We then project the Unknown present moment road into the future and drive towards it, the pot of gold over the horizon, but we never reach it because all we can see is where we have been.

Obviously, the problem is that our materialistic culture seeking the security of the known sees everything through the lens of its logic and stored knowledge. The spiritual path is discovering that our primary view or way of knowing is the front windshield and that the rearview mirror is secondary, useful for catching a bus, but not for know who and where you are.

Seeing where you are for the first time is creativity, the way of creativity. When we can hold the known and the unknown together without reacting, without resistance to the ambiguity, the Creative Knowing leaps forth, and you see for the first time. The Known becomes transparent to the new.

If you want to know what the rearview mirror feels like, it feels like resistance. It feels like “THIS SHOULD NOT BE HAPPENING.” When the road changes, we don’t say this road should not be happening. This is the only road we have. This is why we like to ride motorcycles. We have to dive on the road that is given. You have to be present, awake, aware, attentive or you die.

But in a car, most of the driving can be on autopilot of the known. Corona jerks us awake. The road is always fresh and unknown.

Home Alone with Corona

April 6, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Being Home Alone with Corona is turning us into Buddhist monks (if we want). Siddhartha (the Buddha to be) left his pleasure palace and discovered old age, sickness, and death, and he was shocked like we are shocked when we are told we have cancer. THIS SHOULD NOT BE! But what can I do about it? Then Siddhartha saw a renunciate, a monk, a yogi, and was told that he was seeking the cessation of old age, sickness, and death.

Now old age, sickness, and death are metaphors for mental suffering, the surfing of time. When old age, sickness, and death come, you are out of time. Corona is a metaphor for being out of time. Being home alone is being out of time, out of the future, out of a place to go, out of something to do, out of entertainment, our of our usual habits and expectations.

Being Home Alone we confront just being here with nothing to do. I must discover how to sit with myself, to be with myself as a monk in a monastery with nothing but a room, a bowl, and a cushion.

Who are you before time began? Who are you before the future was important? Who are you before you had something important to do. Who are you? When we are lost in time we avoid relationship with the present moment just as it is. When we are lost in time, we avoid our self.

Corona is making us contemplate time and thinking about time, and time’s suffering. The Buddha said his teaching simply two things: suffering and the cessation of suffering. The cessation of suffering, of time and thinking, come spontaneously when you discover your essential goodness of Being within. You need nothing, to go no place or learn anything to be better than you are right now. If you cannot get to the Buddha, the Buddha will come to you.

The movie Home Alone is about being Home Alone, with nothing but your basic intelligence and being invaded by negative thoughts, negative mental states. Your parents are gone. All your protective systems are gone. You are home alone left to your own resources. You have to become McGyver. You have to become creative.

Corona comes to make us become McGyver, to make us creative, to invent our way out of this fix, this invasion. The Government, apparently, (thank you Mr. Trump) won’t help up. We are on our own with the invader.

When Corona Cat Comes

April 5, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

What are those marbles from my fishbowl doing in the sink? I asked myself this Sunday morning as I was getting my coffee. Wait, where is my Beta fish tank?

That Damn CAT! My daughter, a Corona refugee has a black cat. First, it spilled a glass of water and ruined her laptop and now my Beta Globe. Every morning for years when I sat down for breakfast I would tap on the glass and call Fishy up for its breakfast. We had a relationship. Everything I know about enlightenment, I learned from that fish.

We should start calling Jane (that’s the cat’s name) Corona, the Corona Cat who comes to destroy all you hold dear. One moment you are having breakfast, and the next you are splattered all of the flood, your whole world in broken bits, and you flop around gasping for water.

What can you do but dance. Just don’t cut your feet on the broken glass.

_________

The world is a fishbowl, and I am the fish. Worlds can break, but as long as I have the water of God I’m OK.

It is only when I invest in the bowl, do I flop on the floor gasping for God.

I swim in my world of imagined shapes, and what I believe in shapes my mind. But the water is just water no matter what mind or world I swim in. I am always swimming in water going nowhere. Where can I go that water is not? I am always in water thinking I’m going somewhere in time.

The mind/world/bowl is transparent so I think I’m swimming in the kitchen. I cannot tell, I don’t notice that I’m swimming in a tiny globe.

My world is a fish globe, a tiny drop of the ocean, and in it, I’m content for where can I go that the ocean is not?

At weddings we break the glass and stomp on it (Jewish weddings), at a toast, we throw the glass in the fireplace. We launch a ship by breaking the bottle. Drink the Corona Toast and celebrate.

When the fish globe breaks, we dance. with joy, not for the loss of the world, but from the liberation of knowing that I’m not attached to it. All that went into holding the globe is now free energy. What shall I be?

We are held prisoner by invisible shapes, a transparent bowl of the mind. When that bowl breaks I am thrown free in unlimited possibility.

The anxiety of the fish globe is that I know the ocean is somewhere, but no matter how far I swim I cannot find it. When the globe breaks I see that it was but a circle of time.

When Corona Cat comes, my world is a pushover.

_________

When the fish globe breaks, it is not another globe we go to. What breaks is the imaginary globe we wish we were swimming in. “The world could be better than this,” we think, bemoaning the shape of our life.

When the fish globe breaks, we suddenly realize that we must swim in the globe we’ve got. There is no other bowl than this one, no other water than this. This is IT!

How wonderful! Now I swim as if I’m swimming in the world for the first time. Everything is fresh and original. This is the best shape I could be in, the shape I’m in now because it is the only possible shape.
________

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(TS Eliot)

________

There is no dance
but on the broken glass.
For it is here we find
the Blood of Jesus.

_______

For me when something of value breaks, I get a great metaphor. My writing pours out of the crack in the dam. My spirit rushes to the sea, free once again to swim with the clouds.

Corona, the end of the Rebelion

April 4, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

The Right has created itself as the Rebel, the One that is outside of the Mainstream Liberal establishment for the last 50 years. In order to take the Rebel posture, like the adolescent one has to say I am NOT the parent. So whatever the parent says, I won’t do it. I am not that, even when what the parent says is for my own good.

Trump is the personification of this adolescent posture of the immature male whose development has been arrested. He is against the mother and must control women. And he must control mother nature, always the One that is outside of the Many. Competition, the survival of the fittest, not empathy and cooperation are his mantras.

Whatever rises in the news, the Rebels must cleave it into Them and Us (rebels). Instead of restoring the cow, the rebel can only butcher it.

If science says to wear a mask, I’m not going to do it. Science is the established way of knowing, the cooperative way of knowing. The Rebel relies on his own instinct, which always says to not do what the mother wants.

The modern liberal secular world that was born in Europa in the 16th century has created a dominant objective view or way of knowing that has disappeared the subjective viewpoint of value, purpose, and meaning. When you are just a thing caused by chance in a meaningless universe, Who am I? gets reduced to being just an IT, a marble in a stupid game of marbles signifying nothing. Who am I? In this objective material universe, I am just a ghost in the machine. Science cannot answer this question because all it can do is describe you as an IT, a thing with qualities, like a butterfly pinned to the wall. But who am I, says the butterfly.

The GOP after the 60s rebellion of this subjective viewpoint that exploded then as the Baby Boomers, a generation with a burning question, Who am I? began to answer this question politically, and with the invitation of Evangelicals into the party, religiously as well. GOP became the party of values, the party of personal identity. Who am I? I am a Conservative!

And who is a Conservative? A Conservative is NOT liberal, not Democratic, Not Clinton, and Not Obama, Not Hillary, and not the parent. The Conservative movement became a rite of passage to being a true individual, a self-reliant man who is free from Mommy (Hillary).

Trump came along to give this movement a face, flesh and blood, its hero, the One who has come to is true man.

Trump mystic, his value is in his rebellion. No matter what the Parent Main Stream society says, Trump does the opposite. He scores points this way.

And along comes Corona. Now we have to listen to the parent (science and the experts) or die. Trump’s rebellion has no cause now. The evidence is plain and clear: obey Trump and die.

Corona is like diabetes. Diabetes has laws you have to follow. Diabetes is a new parent to our rebellious child. If you don’t eat the way Diabetes wants you to, you will die. Corona is like that. Corona has laws you must follow. Our rebellious child resists. “I don’t want to stay at home. I want to party.”

Corona says cooperate, play like a team, a national tribe. Our rebellious child says NO, I want to do it my way, like Frank Sinatra. That’s the American Way. The Rebel says I want to be unique, and the way I can be ME is to not be You, to disagree with you, to argue with you, to resist You. I can be ME by avoiding a relationship with the whole, with the mainstream, with the parent, with the family.

But now as the body bags pile up, the rebellion is running out of steam. We survive by going with the mainstream instead of swimming against it.

Corona lifts the rock

April 2, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Corona lifts the rock  When you lift a rock on an ant colony, there is momentary chaos, but soon the whole colony as an organism moves on. Corona has lifted the rock over our civilization of interconnected networks, and there is momentary panic, but we can see the ants creating a new social network, a new way of relating, a new colony that we could not imagine before Corona.

While we have played out this faith that there is a basic intelligence, creative intelligence in us politically by polarizing society into good and bad halves, Corona lifts the rock on political polarization itself.

We can no longer take refuge in our political and religious viewpoints that define our view as being the truth and other views as being not true. Corona comes to destroy the bipolar world that pits itself against itself. Corona unifies us against a common enemy, and that activates our basic goodness, our basic creative intelligence that has been held hostage and put to sleep by our polarization, by the mythos of duality, of survival of the fittest and the myth of the Chosen People.

Just as an ant colony recreates its colony America is recreating it’s interconnected colony through new neurons, new pathways, and electronic systems. Our electronic network is in place as the foundation for this shift to home production, to interconnected isolation. While our food supply systems remain intact, it is our subjective connections, personal connections that are shifting.

I’m reminded of the shift when the rock came down on the film technology of cameras and the digital and home printing replaced it. I was there. As a film photographer, I took the pictures but these external developers and printers were the spokes for production. When Digital cameras produced quality equal to film, the photographer became the spokes, a wheel unto himself. Instead of mailing my production to Kodak, I printed, imaged, and framed my work. Saved money but increased the workload. But I had more control over my art.

The same rock is coming down on our entertainment networks there were once dependent upon expensive studios, productions, huge audience halls, tickets, advertising, the whole interrelated spokes that produce the work of the creative artist. Now, all that external system is gone, overnight.

Suddenly, creative artists are producing their art from home, just as the digital photographers produced their art in their studios.

Corona comes as the destroyer and the creator. We are living in Hindu mythology now with Shiva (the destroyer) and Brahma the Creator rising out of the Source intelligence Vishnu.

Corona lifts the rock and drops the rock at the same time. Let’s bring these ideas closer to our everyday life. When loss comes (death), a rock drops on us. We go through the stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, then acceptance and with that, renewal, a creative reinvention of our life when what we depend upon is gone. The source of this reinvention is within. Death is the loss of what we externally depend upon to give us a sense of being fixed, of our world continuing, a belief that today’s world will be here when I wake up in the morning. “I’ll talk to you later,” we say, affirming this belief that you will be there later.

When the rock drops, there is no later. But the acceptance of death/loss and the creative reinvention of our life/world is the lifting of the rock.

The practice of Zen and non-dual traditions is to shorten the gap between the rock coming down and the rock lifting, to shorten the stages of grief. When that gap is. zero, death and life, the rock coming down and the rock lifting is always Now, this present moment. The belief that life is fixed is an illusion. The belief that I am fixed is an illusion. That belief is the belief in time. Time is an illusion when viewed from Now, from the viewpoint of the ambiguous rock that is both coming down and lifting at the same time.

A metaphorical mind, a mythological mind is liberated from the literal interpretation of our reality. Corona is a coronavirus, a real thing, but it is also Shiva. or any other frame of reference that sees beyond the boundaries of dictionary definitions.

Why Corona? Why Us. What did we do? Is this a punishment? Is this the End of Time? OMG. This should not be happening! I grieve. I’m in despair.

Movies, great movies are myths and extended metaphors that give us a way to see beyond our literal borders, which are our prison when change comes. When Shiva comes, we need a bigger boat of understanding.

The question in this meditation on Corona as a rock lifting, what does it expose? is there a sleeping basic creative intelligence in all of us, sleeping because our culture of dependence on external systems has put us to sleep. When everything is supplied by external forces, why turn within? Why rely on your own resources. Everything is just one click away on Amazon.

Is there basic goodness, a basic creative intelligence that always knows what to do in me? My old guru said: God dwells within you as You. This basic goodness is joyous when it rises because it does depend upon external conditions that are favorable.

Our sense of happiness and well-being is conditioned to depend upon favorable conditions. We long for the moment when everything is just perfect. When all the bills are paid, and nothing breaks down, and there is no loss or unexpected upsets. No problem, we keep saying. But the moment “Shiva the destroyer” comes, we experience the stages of grief.

Corona in the rearview mirror

Home Alone with Corona

When Corona Cat Comes

Corona, the end of the Rebelion

Corona lifts the rock

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