Death comes to wake us up

July 15, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

WE NEVER SURRENDERED

It’s interesting that the two super national Egos we defeated, Germany and Japan, became economic superpowers, while we are losing it. Their unconditional surrender restored their sanity.

There has never been unconditional surrender in America’s mind. Americans don’t surrender. Nuts, we say. The Civil War did not end. Only in unconditional surrender does a mind, does a nation become One. Unconditional surrender is a spiritual act.

All wars are civil wars…Ours never ended so we have maintained our schizophrenia of the split mind, a mind fighting itself. This has made us very creative and very, very violent.

Families always unite are funerals and weddings, for the most part. Death and rebirth, the funeral and the wedding are one family with two viewpoints. When nations are threatened with death, like we were in WWII, we united and found our power.

Today we are disunited, have we feel we have lost our power. Today we are divided and we rage against the other we blame for our division, our death. But it is death that will save us.

Global Warming is a death, but it is in slow motion. Like smoking cigarettes, the death is off in the future, so you have time. But with COVID, death is here and we have no time, no time to deny death. Death comes to kill denial that death is real. Death comes to kill the denial that life is real.

The Pain of Heaven

July 14, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

What is the goal of Amazon if it has its way. I watched a WWII documentary last night on the 8 years war of Japan with China. Starting with Manchuria, Japan waged a brutal war to take over the whole of China. Does Amazon want to take over the whole world?

What does Amazon do, basically? It spots the discomfort of waiting: waiting in line, waiting for a package, waiting to choose the best product…it then comes up with a technology that bypasses the discomfort of waiting, the discomfort in the gap between desire and its fulfillment.

That is Buddhism, the removal of the gap between craving and the attaintment of craving. Of course, Buddhism is that which sees the fallacy in this gap, the pain in craving.

Is Amazon a consumer Buddhism? Is Amazon a perversion of Buddhism that seeks the end of suffering, the pain of time? Buddha says the cause of dissatisfaction is craving. Amazon bypasses it through the Satori of a new technology. Is there no stopping Amazon? Do we want to stop it?

What is the Promised Land here, the Utopia according to Amazon?

I think it’s the Jetsons. Remember that cartoon story. By now we should all be living like the Jetsons with flying cars and robots serving our needs like the servants of the royal family.

Put on the wide-angle lense. From the front porch of my 100 year-old house on Main Street in Blackstone horse and buggies used to pass. Now there is a steady stream of cars and trucks. The whole world seems to pass by my front porch. Where are they going? Somewhere in time, somewhere in time.

But I sit on the timeless front porch of this old house. Will an Amazon robot deliver a package tomorrow. Will the cars and trucks eventually be still in our utopian future where everything will be delivered to my front porch. My wife got a new bicycle, and it was delivered to the front porch.

There was no going to the bike store, checking out the bikes, riding them, testing them, choosing one and then going home with it ready to ride. The process was removed. While we did have to wait for the bike to be delivered, in the future that can be fixed, I’m sure, and we would get it the next day. Damn time…let’s get rid of it, the pain of waiting for my desires to be filled. We want it all NOW!

The fallacy here, which we all can see at one time or the other, usually from the Front Porch, is that life is a process, like cannot be separated into means and end, process and result, and the pleasure is not in the result but also in the process. When we remove the means or the time to get something, and make life all about getting there faster and faster, the meaning of getting there is lost…So life has no meaning when this Fallacy gets embedded in our lives.

There is no more Front Porch. You are just in traffic all the time. No matter how fast you travel, you never get anywhere.

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.

Death comes to wake us up

The Pain of Heaven

THE FAILURE OF THE JETSONS

Is Trump Don Draper in Mad Men?

Corona the Kudzu Virus

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