Welcome to all who are just dropping in to Zen Live. What’s I’m doing here is actually doing Zen live. One can’t teach Zen. Once can’t learn Zen. One can’t imitate Zen. One can teach life. One can’t learn life. One can’t imitate life. You have to live Zen. You have to live Life….but how?

I don’t know how. Because if I know how I could tall you. A better question is: How do you play? Ask a child that and see how far you get. How do you lift. your arm? What does a strawberry taste like? Right here you can see the limitations of our semantic language culture that creates and then we live in an alternative reality of Words and thought.

To leap out of, to leap beyond the fish bowl of the language matrix is to leap beyond the concept of Death. The Death Star in Star Wars. This concept holds the semantic universe together as its Eye. With this concept in place, the universe is a hostile land. And you can’t play in a hostile world. Play is OK for children, but they have to grow up and live in a playless land. When J.Krishnamurti says Truth is a pathless land…he is saying the same thing. Truth is play. There is no path to play. Play is creative discovery with joy. Truth is creative discovery with joy.

It take a lot of work to extract the seeds from a cotton ball, and the thorns are there to prick your fingers, leaving drops of blood on the Snow White cotton. Picking the seeds of enlightenment from the cotton ball of Culture leaves a bloody trail. The Cotton Culture doesn’t want to give up its seeds. The Mother wants to remain your mother. The Womb doesn’t want you to leave.

But you must. When it is time to be born, you must be born. The womb can’t stop you. Birth is the play of the fetus. Like the caterpillar, the fetus has no idea what the new womb will be. The worm has no conception of wings and freedom from the womb of the cocoon.

And so it is when we are born. We fly on the wings of childhood and then we enter the cocoon of Language Culture. We forget the freedom of childhood, the Duck Finn of your youth, except at HS reunions when we remember our shared youth with nostalgia, a life once lived, a paradise lost forever.

The irony is that the less control, the less predictability I impose on my talks the more energy and informative they are. Our culture says just the opposite. Prepare, plan, hone and polish, then speak. Don’t go unprepared. But then, culture says Think Outside the Box. Do you see the double-bind of culture right here? Be prepared. Be spontaneous. BAM. Catch 22.

And this is how Culture binds us. From the mother who tells the child to try and be good to the teacher who make the child memorize knowledge and expects creativity, to the boss who wants innovation and conformity simultaneously. Even religion when it tell us to Love God with all our heart is creating an impossible commandment: you can’t try to love. What all these double-binds do is create hypocrisy, which is a split mind with the body doing one thing and the mind doing another; with the non-verbal mind living in a grounded reality while the mind lives in the abstract reality of culture, and the gap between the two is the measure of our suffering and despair.

So we want to look into this with clear and brave eyes, to see what the Cataracts of Culture are. Why is everything so cloudy, so gradually cloudy that I never noticed when it was clear. The the Clouds of Culture increase from childhood on until without knowing it we are living is a dim darkness.

The dilemma is that in order to see from outside of the box. you have to use the box. In order to see through the Semantic Cataract Culture you have to use the language of Culture because that’s the only language we have, unless you use the language of dogs and cats and Zen masters.

My Zen Live Talks are taking pecks at the Cosmic Culture to make a few cracks and let in some light from outside the box. This light that filters through the Culture Cataract is Insight. Each Insight is a dot that doesn’t fit the picture of Culture, and we connect them slowly, getting rather excited as an unknown picture begins to form.

But we have to beware because usually what we do with these dots is create a conspiracy theory or an Alternative Reality that is just as sub-reality of the same Culture. Catch 22 again. The real picture the dots of insight connect is that there is no picture and no image. If you create a picture of a new reality and then live in it, convincing others that your reality is outside of the egg, you have just created another egg that gives the illusion that you are free.

So keep going. Don’t stop connecting the dots. You will eventually arrive at a cataract free mind, a sight without cultural floaters, a clarity that is free from the abstraction of Culture and the restrictions of Cultures Grammar and correctness.

It take a lot of work to extract the seeds from a cotton ball, and the thorns are there to prick your fingers, leaving drops of blood on the Snow White cotton. Picking the seeds of enlightenment from the cotton ball of Culture leaves a bloody trail. The Cotton Culture doesn’t want to give up its seeds. The Mother wants to remain your mother. The Womb doesn’t want you to leave.

But you must. When it is time to be born, you must be born. The womb can’t stop you. Birth is the play of the fetus. Like the caterpillar, the fetus has no idea what the new womb will be. The worm has no conception of wings and freedom from the womb of the cocoon.

And so it is when we are born. We fly on the wings of childhood and then we enter the cocoon of Language Culture. We forget the freedom of childhood, the Duck Finn of your youth, except at HS reunions when we remember our shared youth with nostalgia, a life once lived, a paradise lost forever.