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.

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 2 Comments

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.