It’s time for the Om Doctors to visit, the medical students from MCV who come as part of their geriatrics class to study a geriatric. I give them tongue depressors with OM on it, and we have a great time. Succinctly put, an Om Doctor is a doctor who is both outside of the patient and is the patient at the same time. An Om Doctor is in empathy with the patient as him/herself and outside of the patient. 

Connecting this to geriatrics, how can you as you grow old and suffer sickness, old age and loss keep your mind fresh. How can you age and stay young at the same time? How can you see your old world as a new world while still living in the old world?

Or to flip to religious language, how can you have the Old Testament and the New Testament as the same book? We cannot stop getting old but we can stop getting old. If we identify with the objective view of the world as me being outside of the world, operating on the world as a doctor on the patient, then I suffer sickness, old age, and death. 

But if at the same time, I discover, I realize through and through that I am the world and the world is me, the You are the Center of the world while at the same time being outside of the world operating on it to make it better. When you are outside of the world we must try to make it better because something needs fixing. 

But when you are the world and the world is you, there is nothing to fix because you and the world are One, and there is nothing to fix. You and the world as OK because you are One. 

So there you have it. The Om Doctor is a doctor (you) who is both outside of the body (world) and is the body (world) at the same time. But the primary viewpoint is that of OM, of unity, and from that unity, the idea of how to fix the world (which is you) rises. 

Today’s Zen Fit asks the question: Can doctors fix sickness, old age, and death (loss)? Is there the cessation of OSD? Buddha said there is. But we know from experience that there is no cure for life. OSD is a fact and relief is always temporary. Yet, the Buddha says there is the end of it. What does that mean? We should be curious, don’t you think?

Whether we suffering from OSD depends upon our viewpoint, our way of being in the world. And it is also what we mean by suffering. Buddha called it Dukkha, or psychological pain of separation from the world, our own experience and a divided self, a wound that cannot heal.

Well, as an old person of 83 I do have a dog in this show. How do I stay fresh? How do I keep doing these Zen Fits every morning where I speak from the heart, from the spontaneous mind and share insights that I don’t even know what I’m going to say. What you see in these Zen Fits is real-time spontaneous talk. In Buddhism, these are called Dharma talks. In Christianity, if I were a Christin, it would be speaking in the Spirit.

I have discovered through years of seeking and practice that there are two viewpoints of reality, but only one is on our cultural map, so we are locked into a viewpoint of being outside of the world, myself, and life. We get a few breaks, miracles we call them, but they cannot be sustained. So life becomes just more trips to the doctor’s office, or therapist, or yoga class, to get fixed. We need an OM Doctor. We cannot get off the cross of OSD (old age, sickness, and loss) .

Let’s talk about the Mythos of the Silent Service. As you know I see metaphors, and for me, life in submarines is a myth or metaphor for my whole life as we all feel the compartmentalization of life on the surface. 

I was sent to movie projector school and was lifted off the Cubera at sea by helicopter and flown to the carrier where I was then catapulted off to a movie school. While on the carrier I was like Huck Finn, innocence abroad. All the sailors were is correct uniform, and the ship’s police were everywhere to write you up. It was a regimented ant colony whoever everyone knew only their specific job and compartment. Everyone was saluting everyone. 

But on my boat, it was like a tribe where you had a close relationship will everyone and there was little navy ritual. I wore fry boots instead of regulation shoes. The mythos here was between a society that is organic and one that is regimented by the Law. 

The next level of mythos is that of the fear of the submarine by the surface people. The sub went where the surface ship feared to go, down into the sea. For the surface ship, that is death. For the sub that is safety. 

On the surface, the sub bobs around and cannot keep up with the surface ships, but beneath the surface, the sub is at home and swims like a whale that comes up to breath and charges its batteries. Only then is it vulnerable. 

People who follow the Way of the Sub do not cling to the safety of the fleet and prefer to go alone. They spend considerable time submerged and discovering how to swim into the unconscious and come up with treasures of wisdom. 

People of the Silent Service can either surface and sail with the fleet of religion and ideology, but at the same time, they watch with curiosity the absurdity of the surface world where no ship thinks for itself. 

People of the Way often feel something is wrong with them because they are not happy in the fleet. What are those ships afraid of? Why do they travel in convoys? Oh….they are afraid of the deep. If I try to get a surface ship’s interest in the deep, they turn away like a flock from a wolf. 

So right there I have mapped the mythos (story) of my life. We all have a story, a mythos that when we put on our metaphorical eye outlines our shape of life, the shape of water, if you watched the movie. Our personal mythos appears when we get older and have enough repetitions of our course to see a pattern, like the zig-zag of a surface ship trying to fool the hunting U-boat, or death. 

Another layer of the Mythos of the Sub is that the submarine is ambiguous, like a frog it is at home beneath the sea and at home above the surface. The frog is a mythological threshold being because it can dive beneath the surface of the conscious world and retrieve the treasure that have been lost or buried there. Remember the Princess and the Frog? 

Submarines used to be called “pig boats” because you stank. There were two showers for a crew of 80, and when you went to sea they were filled with food. You had to eat enough before anyone could take a shower. I frankly don’t remember taking a shower on the sub. A submarine bath was catching that drop of water under the faucet and washing your eyes. When I came home, my wife would hold my clothes with a stick as they reeked of diesel oil mixed with other unknown substances. 

I extended one year of my four-year enlistment to get married and help my wife finish at Longwood. Right after we were married the Cubera went to the Med for three months. It was then I discovered my love of writing in letters. I guess I’m still doing that here. 

In a way, I have never left the Cubera, as I hear the call of meditation in the morning, and I never feel at home in the Blackstone fleet. I listen to the ocean around me, passive instead of active. I am more at home now asking questions instead of believing answers. I am finally OK being a frog. If you drop your golden ball in the pond of the world, I’ll get it for you.

I occasionally meet a fellow submariner, and we fall into a deeper zone than the surface chit chat of the crowd. We instinctively know each other because we are not identifying with our reference to our place in the fleet. Our reference is the deep and the unknown. Our conversation is one of exploration instead of recounting an experience in the fleet.

I occasionally meet a fellow submariner, and we fall into a deeper zone than the surface chit chat of the crowd. We instinctively know each other because we are not identifying with our reference to our place in the fleet. Our reference is the deep and the unknown. Our conversation is one of exploration instead of recounting experience in the fleet.

I had joined the navy to find out what I wanted to do with my life, and what I found out was that I wanted to get out of the navy. When I met and married a Longwood girl who was going to be an English teacher, I saw a course. I loved to read, study and write, so I could become an English teacher. I had a plan. I had a course. Instead of Me being alone there was a WE. I had not yet dived beneath the surface of my sea. There were monsters to feel, and monsters to kill. Davy Jones Lockers has many surprises for me.

How does one become a submarine, a frog that can be at home beneath the surface of the mind. Freud calls that which is beneath the surface of consciousness the Unconscious. But that is a misnomer because it is not the opposite of consciousness, as if one had a choice. When you are on the surface of the mind you are in a collective reality that is agreed upon by the surface ships. All the ships use the same map so you can go places and not run into each other. The ocean is navigated by having fixed points, like a North Star or an island, but some fixed form. The ocean itself is unfixed. When you are alone at sea, it’s as if you were at the center of a vast plate. And as you moved the whole ocean moves around you. 

Then when you see land, suddenly you know where you are on the plate and that land becomes the center of the plate and you are on the rim of the plate. Being at sea alone is a mystical experience, for many. You are the world and the world is you. There is no two, nothing to give you a place on the map in time. Being at sea alone has a timeless dimension. It is only when you have a reference on the horizon does time and time’s suffering come back. Now you have a history again. 

The question for the submariner is how can I be both alone and at the center of the world, and at the same time belong to society, to a fleet of surface ships? Our logic and cultural conditioned says we can only be one or the other, On being alone, then Off being alone and belonging to a fleet. But the Law of the Ocean is that one must obey both imperatives, not one or the other, but both at the same time, yet they cancel each other out.. This is the paradox of the journey. 

When I’m alone, I have a longing to be a part of something greater, but when I’m a part of the fleet, I have a longing to be alone. This tension between the two ways of generating our art gives birth to our creativity. It is in our art that we are at home in both worlds, obeying both commandments. It is only when we create ourselves that we can be both the creator and the created.

I hope you watch this Zen Fit and read what I’m writing as this is a real-time exploration of our own personal dilemma of being alone or being with the herd or group. We must be unique, the center, and we must be a part of something greater; but how can we do both at the same time? We end up because of our logic being one or the other: feeling alone, in exile, or feeling at home, a part of a group. How can we be OK being on or the other when we must obey both commandments or imperative simultaneously? When we try to be one or the other, or are forced to be one or the other, we suffer. We must be both, we must e the One that is two, but we cannot. 

How do we navigate through these pairs-of-opposites? We need some dolphins.

I chant the Heart Sutra in the morning, and the Heart Sutra is about the awakening of prajna, the mind that doesn’t rest on form. This is the mind that transcends suffering because it doesn’t weigh everything like a butcher. It just acts, and through its creative action creates the world it lives in. It’s like a clean kitty little.

I’ve been looking for the “perfect kitty” litter. The best is First Step because it clumps the pee and shit so you can lift it out, leaving clean odorless litter behind. Fresh Step ZEN is Prajna, a mind clear of the shit of worry about tomorrow.

So I recommend Fresh Step Zen. Sprinkle the Heart Sutra on the mind and your worry about tomorrow will clump and you can lift it out, leaving a clean sandbox to play in all day.

A Fresh Step mind loves to make stuff in the sandbox. It grabs this form (for me ideas) and that form and makes new forms. Then at the end of the day, it smooths out the world it has played in and goes home for a scotch.

OK, we are talking about finding a home not dependent upon conditions, which is location and time. In Zen, you are always already at home. But this unconditional home is not a thought but a feeling, a way of being at home in the moment. Being At Home is the end of the comparing mind that is always comparing this experience with a better one you have stored in your memory “of home.” 

We are looking for home now in the right place, within. But those who search for “home” within will notice that you cannot find it there either. What can we do? 

We need a daily practice that takes out the kitty litter. We need a practice that clumps the memory of home and removes it from the sandbox of the day. Children play in the sandbox. But adult fills the sandbox up with regrets, grievances, doubts, fears, and desires. The sandbox is always full of yesterdays. 

Your practice (we may call them spiritual practices like meditation, mantra, study, devotion, etc.) clumps the pain and removes it from the sandbox of the mind. Now you can play. Now you can take a Fresh Step. Like the Navaho Sand Painter, you don’t cling to anything, not even your best art.

The Shape of Water, a great metaphorical movie, is about how culture or world view shapes the mind that dwells within it like a fish. Facts are like flotsam in the bowl and take the shape of the bowl, bending to support the affirmation of the bowl’s story. Culture, the fishbowl of culture is shaped by a story, a narrative that is unconscious to a great degree. People shaped by the bowl are characters in the movie, so to speak.

Those shaped by the Liberal bowl are not unlike Bacon and Newton looking at the shape of the Middle Age world view. The scientific viewpoint is always that of the view outside of the bowl, while the Storyboard viewpoint is that from inside the story bowl.

So the liberal viewpoint is always amazed at how facts get bent by the Story Bowl, even by those like Lindsey who contradict themselves as the bend to support their story of reality.

It was fun picking up items on my artifact shelf and riffing. It’s always interesting how a theme will thread its way through the talk as if it were written ahead of the talk. By surrendering to the moment, a hidden intelligence, a hidden writer, if you will, pens the talk and all the random dots become connected as the talk unfolds. I like that. 

This proves to me that life itself is intelligent and wise when you surrender yourself and your plans, fears, and expectations to it. The riff becomes your rap. The riff becomes your art that appears out of your random movements, a collection of dots that make an unexpected or intended picture.

A Zen Fit is the joy of being liberated from the Cross of the suffering mind, the mind that must calculate, plan, and struggle to be. A Zen Fit is the realization that you don’t have to know anything, do anything, be anything in order to Be. A Zen Fit is the sudden realization through and through that you are OK. There is no place to go in order to be You.

Watching this talk I remind myself of a magician with props or Glen Beck when he was using whatever was handy to deliver his message. We need props for the mind. I call them metaphors, working forms, working donkeys who can help us carry the gold we find along the way. A metaphor helps us carry insights by giving them a form. A metaphor is like a turd that bunches the flies of thought. Or a rose that draws the bees of the mind and gives the ideal some form, like a child hugging its teddy bear.

Speaking of metaphors, when I was a newspaper writer I did a story here in Blackstone on the bridge clubs that local women used to enjoy, before women had to work, and it was important when you gave a bridge party to “carry out the color scheme.” This means that your table setting would carry our a single color theme so that your presentation has integrity and coherence, a referent to the whole or single idea that held the collection together. 

A metaphor is like that. A metaphor is a single idea that holds the opposites together in gives the mind’s eye a reference to an unseen whole that integrates all the form in one reality. We call that whole grasp of the whole Understanding. I understand means I see the whole that contains all the parts, the picture that is made up of dots. Everything fits. That’s a Zen Fit.

This talk started out with the question about the shape of the Republican mind, and conversely, the shape of the Liberal mind. Are they both in the same Cultural Fishbowl? Two schools of mind in the same bowl, both unconscious of the greater bowl because each one thinks the other school of fish is in a separate fishbowl. Each school thinks they are in the open water and the other school of fish is in a bowl that shapes their school of fish. 

If that is true, that both the Liberal and Conservative Viewpoints are fish minds swimming in an unconscious fishbowl, is there a viewpoint that is not shaped by culture, by the condition the mind swims in? 

Zen is the Transcendent Way, the Middle Way that Sees through the fishbowls of the conditioned mind. 

We’re using the metaphor DC and AC current to understand the difference between thinking and knowing. The West invested its energy in thinking and choice (alternative current) while Buddhism invests in Direct Knowing. (I See). So we explore these two ways of knowing through the metaphor of the electrical current we use to light up our civilization. 

Whenever we have a choice, we are using Alternating Mind. So even the choice between Thinking or Knowing is the limitation of alternating mind. With Direct Knowing there is no choice. There are no possibilities. There are no alternatives. 

When you see your hand is on a hot plate, you don’t think about it; you don’t believe you have your hand on a hot plate. The seeing (knowing) your hand is on a hot plate is the action of taking your hand off the hot plate. There is no gap between seeing and action. 

With alternating thinking mind, there is a gap between thinking and action. We think this gap is normal because we think the alternating mind is the only legitimate mind. This mind makes stuff. But because we have dismissed Direct Knowing, we suffer. 

In Buddhism, Direct Knowing is the primary original mind, and the thinking mind is secondary. You know what to do, and then you think about how you are going to apply your knowing in time. The practice of Zen Buddhism (my favorite flavor of Buddhism) deconstructs the thinking current to reveal the direct knowing that lies beneath as the ground circuit. Direct Knowing is our face before our parents (alternating mind) is born.

The movie King’s Speech was a movie metaphor for discovering your Direct Knowing or your Word. The king stuttered, which is AC or alternating mind. But he was the King and he had to speak the Word, he had to discover his true voice. “Speak but the Word and My soul will be healed” goes the Catholic prayer. Speak but Direct Knowing and my alternating mind will be One mind. 

In alternating mind everything comes in pairs of opposites. Noah’s Ark is as metaphor for this reality. The One is Two, so whichever you choose, you are guilty for not choosing the twin. When there is no choice, there is no guilt. When you KNow what to do, there is no guilt because there is no choice. 

Direct Knowing is direct action. It is in the gap between thinking and doing that creates existential guilt and its handmaiden anxiety.

Awakening (enlightenment) is simply Direct Knowing that penetrates Alternate Thinking knowing. Alternating thinking fixes reality (experience) in form so we can catch a bus. Direct Knowing fixes nothing. Knowing unfixed everything. Thinking fixes everything into this and not that. Direct Knowing breaks through the up versus down, good or bad, and just knows and that knowing IS action, is Being. Knowing is Being, Being is Knowing. In yoga that is Satchitananda. In my mythology we project Direct Knowing as our Savior, the Knowing rides in on a horse and restores unity.

We’re on a roll this morning. I hope you pick up and follow this exploration that works with our understanding of DC and AC as our working metaphor. You need a working metaphor in order to get a grasp, a Gestalt of our working mind. We are our mind, we are our OS, so we need a working metaphor as a tool that open up the OS while we are in it. Psychology is working on someone else’s mind, but not your own. Your mind is missing. 

Zen is opening up your mind while you are opening up your mind. Zen is direct knowing that penetrates the alternate thinking of the conscious mind. Direct knowing is, therefore, not thinking consciousness. Direct know is the pond upon which the bubble of thinking consciousness floats. Direct Knowing bypasses the dysfunction of thinking and the Thinker.