OH, a good first viewing. (sounds like a funeral home). I hope you can follow my jumping around here but the point I get down to is the one I’ve been making in different ways every evening. DON’T ARGUE WITH LIFE!. And this is Good Friday. While we celebrate this as a historical event (nothing wrong with that), if you really want to have a Good Friday and a Good Resurrection—which is the cessation of your mental suffering—then practice the Cross as Jesus practiced it: Don’t argue with the pain of life, the upsets, the disappointments, being unfriended, all the little and big upsets in your expectations of how life should be. That is the truth of the Cross and Resurrection, not its historical reference. That is the Truth that is transformative. Truth works!

Another point: the crucifixion and the resurrection are the same moment, not two events separated by time. When you don’t argue with a situation that formerly you complained about and felt the victim of, you get an immediate Resurrection. Again, this is present moment truth, not historical truth. So the resurrection is Insight. The Resurrection is Satori (in Zen) or compassion, or a solution, or even on a very mundane level, the answer to a crossword puzzle you have been arguing with. You see arguing is struggle. Not arguing is surrender.

This is Buddha Cross and Resurrection when he awakened: “Through the round of many births I roamed without reward, without rest, seeking the house-builder. Painful is birth again & again. House-builder, you’re seen! You will not build a house again. All your rafters broken, the ridge pole destroyed, gone to the Unformed, the mind has come to the end of craving.”

The House Builder is you pounding nails into your hands and feet on the cross of your life.

The idea that Jesus died for me removes the. responsibility of dying myself, but not the physical death but the psychological death of my hanging onto the cross of suffering. Why do I suffer, we ask at some time in our life, especially when something we love, have ultimate concern for, dies or is taken away. Now that is when the Cross hits us in the head. Where is Justice? Where is the promise; I have done everything right, for god’s sake. Why ME?

Ah now we are hanging from the Cross. Is Jesus going to get you down? Oh, we say, This will pass. God has a purpose….But I still hurt.

What the cross means to me is that we suffer but we can participate in it without argument. Life cannot be divided between positive and negative. Life is positive/negative. Not arguing with life means accepting life as being ambiguous this way. Life is death/death is life. You can’t separate them. Life lives on death. We recoil and become a vegan.

Accept the Cross is accepting the truth of life without argument. American like to argue. We believe that life should be all comfort, and no discomfort. We argue with any discomfort. This should not BE!