Trump inadvertently created the toxic metaphor that will kill him. Nothing destroys an expert quicker than self-created ridicule. This metaphor—Trump is poison—is going viral faster than Coronavirus because Trump, believing he knew more than the doctors, went beyond the outer limits of sanity.

Finally, the President has no clothes. The towering image of Trump is falling, falling.

What is different about this metaphor is that when the Left says Trump is poison, the Right has immunity, but when Trump says: I am poison, the Right’s immune system breaks down because it is caught in the Perfect Trap of two contradictory Trump commandments: I know the Truth/ my truth will kill you.

Catch 22 is a circular reality that is obviously absurd—especially from the outside— but believed to be rational on the inside. Those inside the Catch 22 bubble see any criticism of the insanity inside the bubble as insane. A Catch 22 reality is an inverted reality deathly afraid of its bubble popping.

The Catch 22 egg is cracked from the inside where it is weakest. Trump is cracking his egg from the inside.

Narcissism is an expanding bubble that must keep expanding until it pops from its own force. Corona has created a new environment where Trump is given the freedom to make himself absurd even to those inside his bubble.

Impeachment has no effect because Trump’s Egg is designed to resist all attempts to break it from the outside. From the inside, it is very, very weak. At some point, when the bubble has reached its limits, it will suddenly burst. ( I know I’m mixing metaphors here, egg and bubble)

Prevented from holding his rallies, where he could safely pump up his bubble, he tried to pump it up on national evening briefing, where he employed his blowhard strategy of the rallies to a context that had natural checks. He overreached because here he was speaking to the nation instead of his base in a closed environment.

The double-bind Trump now finds himself in that his strength is being president of his adoring base which is basically in a confrontational relationship with the rest of the nation. When called upon to be president of the nation, he losses the wind given to him by his base. The double-bind or Catch 22 is that when he is President of the nation, he destroys himself as president of his base, and when the president of his base, he destroys himself as president of the nation.

So what does he do? The only thing he can do is flip-flop back and forth between these two mutually exclusive presidents, first one then the other.

The American President as defined by the Constitution and my mythology is the ONE that has no second. The President is the First Person, the mythic role that is the One person who is also the many. Individual citizens vicariously, metaphorically, become the One American through the Presidents as the One. Through the mythic mysterious alchemy of the President, the many are One, and the One is many.

We experience this alchemy in archetypes like Elvis. His fans feel Elvis is singing directly to each of them personally. I and Elvis are One. Every girl is dancing with Elvis at the same time.

In Hindu lore, this is the dance of Krishna and the Gopis, the cowherd girls he met with at night in the forest where each dances with their lord personally at the same time.

So Trump in his rallies is dancing with each of his fans personally at the same time. Each feels that Trump is speaking directly to them personally. I am Trump and Trump is me. This is the dynamic of a cult leader. Both the leader and the cult energize each other, growing high and high in the rapture of Oneness, which is the release from the limitations of individual consciousness and identity.

Coronavirus had denied Trump his charging station, so he must find new ways to charge his image and keep it expanding, keep it feeding on rapturous attention.

When life gets complex, it becomes dysfunctional, and the imperative Let There Be One is activated. We see this imperative at work in every aspect of our individual and social life, in nature as well. This is the categorical imperative of the universe itself. Let there be One.

Corona comes to simply America, particularly our health care system which has become too complex given our worship of choices. Too many choices create dysfunction. The mind, the system is overloaded. It yearns for simplicity. We all yearn for simplicity, for the One.

Evolution is the process of complex to simplicity, the many to the one, and the one then become complex and inviting a new simplicity. One could say (I do) that evolution is the intention to the One, to unity, to simplicity. This drive to simplicity happens in everything and everywhere if you become aware of it.

People like living in small towns because life is simple here. On Friday at “rush hour” I can to the post office and the bank in ten minutes. We go camping, go to nature to find simplicity. Periodically, we go through and throw out all the tools we once bought to simplify our life; like Thoreau, we simplify. Of all our movie heroes, Forest Gump was the most simple.

Coronavirus is a very simple organism. It takes root in our modern society because of its complexity. When complexity comes, Simplicity is not far behind. Corona is simple because death is simple. Death is the ultimate simplicity, and when death comes, everything gets real, and reality is very, very simple.

Our meditation this morning is on Simplicity and Corona is our working metaphor. Simplicity has to be discovered. Simplicity is transcendent of the complex, and when we are living in a complex system, and we experience the pain of its dysfunction, we long for a simple solution, but we don’t know what it is. The simple cannot be found in the complex. And the complex is complex because of redundancies, useless repetitions, like our mind when it is caught in a mono-duologue or thought vortex. We go round and round looking for a simple way out. Thought itself is complex.

Corona is like diabetes: there are the Corona laws that you must obey. Keep your social distance, stay out of crowds, wear a mask, wash your hands, etc. These of the Law of Corona and if you don’t obey them, just like the laws of diabetes, you get sick. Very simple.

In order to control the simple, you have to get simple yourself. The complex cannot control the simple. Corona will simplify our heath system. Corona will simply our political systems. For the last 50 years since Nixon our politics have become dysfunctional, too complex. No one can choose the simple solution, the obvious solution. The simple get embroiled in the complex and dysfunction reigns.

Corona as death is very simple. Death is the ultimate simplicity. Nothin is more simple, more One than death. Death is the One that has no second. But simplicity feels like death to the complex. Simplicity always comes as if from outside, outside the complex. The religious would call simplicity God’s Grace. Or a natural disaster, one might say. But simplicity always brings the unknown. The Complex has no idea, cannot imagine what simplicity would be like, yet when simplicity comes, we recognize it immediately. Our basic nature is simplicity. We recognize what we already always are, but we only know it when we see it.

Steve Jobs would push his designers until they created the simplicity he knew was there, but could no know until he saw it. Don Draper in Mad Men pushes for the simple slogan and will not know it until he sees it as an Ad Satori. That’s IT! A single idea resolves the complex problem.

Zen is the ultimate simplicity. Zen art is very simple. Zen furniture, decorations very simple. Tea ceremony is very simple. Zen is One taste. Just This is the simplicity of Now. Now is the One that has no second now. Eckhart Tolle is Zen this way. Buddhism meditation and mindfulness evolves to the simple, the empty. Empty is very very simple. Empty is the One that has no second, and because it has no second, Very simple. Simple is the One that is unambiguous. Yet the Simple Empty One is not unambiguous. Empty is also full. Empty is full, full is empty.

Is this simple enough for you? You are the One that has no second. But, here’s the irony, the One that has no second is both inclusive and exclusive. You are the One that includes the many, the two faces of the One. Zoom out and. you no end to you: zoom in and you find no end to you. There is no boundary to you.

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.

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?