I’m trying to find a theme that unites my meandering talks and gives them metaphorical coherence, the loaf of bread is transcendent of the flour, so I’m searching for a metaphor or transcendent Idea that pulls or draws the talks forward so that our understanding expands with each cup of flour. I’m looking for the yeast that makes the talks rise.

Culture is what we can all relate to because like fish we are swimming in it, but we can’t see the bowl of American Culture we swim in, just as the flour can’t see the loaf of bread. Yet the Idea of the loaf is in the ingredients, just as the Idea of the Oak is in the acorns. We are all across falling from a giant Oak tree called American Culture. When we are born into this culture this Idea is planted in the fertile and living soil of the child.

At adolescence we leave our child reality that is anchored in our body mind and transfer our identity to culture and our new social image. “What are you going to be?” becomes the terrible double-binding question. The question implies that you have no being now; you have to become something now. What is it?

I remember that anxiety ridden question when I was in high school. So I said I wanted to be a doctor. Why not? And I went to UVA. But it only took a semester for me to realize that I didn’t want to be a doctor in my heart. So I became a drunk instead. Realizing I had no future there, I dropped out and joined the navy to find out what I wanted to be. I learned that I wanted to BE our of the navy. And so it goes. The journey inside the bowl of culture is from one pursuit to another, the search for our final being, our resting place. But it is always framed in time. Tomorrow is a better place. Even death is a better place. We will BE tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes in culture.

We are looking for Being in the wrong place. We are looking inside culture. The split mind that is looking for itself is induced by culture. Our parents give it to us because they are the personification of culture for the child and the child is programed to imprint the parents culture as a matter of survival. The imprint of culture becomes unconscious, transcendent of experience even. All experience is within the bowl of culture.

Sensing that this split in mind cannot be healed by culture and its pursuits, we being the “spiritual path” of personal healing. We being to make the opaque fish bowl of culture transparent to the field of reality, to the real ground of reality that is not split. Reality is not split. Only the reality of culture is split into a duality that is in conflict with itself. Culture is schizophrenic with alternate realities competing to be the One reality.

Our talks here are a journey to the center of the mind where we can find the IDEA planted by culture when we were a child that I need something more to be complete. The Idea of Time is planted in our subconscious where we can’t find it, and from there is shapes our world into me as an image seeking completion in the future, through the remedies provided by Culture. As you can see this is where Catch 22 comes from. No matter what we do or pursue we always lose in the end.