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Avatar and your lost paradise

August 14, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

We’re connecting the dots between Anthony Bourdain’s search for Paradise which is the end to his wandering, his search for peace, for home, and Avatar which is a metaphorical map—not unlike Indiana Jones treasure maps—to our inner paradise or God within. But whatever you call it it has no name because there is no path to your inner paradise. You have to create it. And like the Master Chef in Bourdain quest, you have to use the local ingredients in your life: your history, your negativity, your turds, all that you are that is your life are the ingredients for your meal of paradise. 

That means that your paradise is not out there in time over the horizon. It is always within as now. So as Christ says, you are in the kingdom of God but you can’t see it. You are in Pandora but you can’t see it because your mind is that of the Sky People, or Thought people who live in a world constructed of ITS. There is no center in this world of relativity, said Einstein. All the external center of the world have been destroyed by science and our IT mind. There are no Home Trees. Everything dies. 

But we know paradise exists, we know our center exists, our home exists, our God exists, because if paradise didn’t exist we wouldn’t long for it. We just can’t find it in the mind our society has give us. Therefore, we, each of us are on our own, to discover the hidden clues, that secret door, the hidden path no one travels on. We have to go alone. You can’t go in a crowd, in a church or chosen people. And there are no maps because the path must be created by you our of your life, not someone else’s life, out of their ingredients. You have to be an original cook. There are no recipes. 

It takes a life of trial and error to become a Master Chef. You just have to have the heart felt intention to find your paradise, your Spot. 

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Anthony Bourdain, Avatar, lost paradise

Master Chef: The Profane Priest

August 14, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

This is my third talk on Anthony Bourdain and his adventures as mystical poems, if you will. While I don’t know what Bourdain thought he was doing, I’m finding that his work was revelation of the sacred in the profane, the spiral in the everyday world. As Buddhism says: Samsara (the world) and Nirvana (the sacred) are One. So the Master Chef is a Priest, and the death (killed pig) is transmuted through fire into the life of the people, but with great joy and passion in the creating and eating of the Eucharist. The transmutation of Death into Life is the power of all religions and ritual, but we think it’s just on Sunday. We have lost the sacred, so like Bourdain we are cursed to wander the earth looking for it. 

Our profane mind, our worldly mind separates death from life, even assigning God with creation and the Devil with destruction. In the East God is both creator and destroyer at the same time, at the same time. So life is ambiguous. Everything is dying, everything is being born. Death gives life, life brings death. Life is the One that is two.

Seeing that is the Zen Satori. The Koan of life is cracked. God is no longer divided and dismembered. It is through SEEING that we are made whole. The Now becomes sacred. 

Compare the Communion in a main stream church and the communion with a Master Chef. Both have the same ingredients: fragmented ingredients, the death of a sacrificial life, the fire of transubstantiation (the funeral pyre) turns death into life and joy. But you can see the difference between the dead ritual meal, and the living meal, the dead Eucharist and the living Eucharist. The Church holds the sacred hostage, and just serves it out in wafers on Sunday. But in real life,  you too can become a Master Chef. You too can become a priest. You too can turn death into life. You too can discover the sacred in the profane, the One in the many, the whole in the parts. 

Filed Under: Buddhas in your Landfill Tagged With: Anthony Bourdain, Master chef as priest

The Mystical Body of Anthony Bourdain

August 13, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

The mystical Body of Bourdain is the mystical body of cooking itself, which is a Eucharist we all participate in everyday to some extent. But Bourdain by making a show if it, creates a ritual that to me is a metaphor of the Catholic Mass, which itself is a metaphor of the Dying and Resurrection of Life the eats life to live. Life must die so life can be born. Life gives itself unto death so that new live can be created. Whether we like that or not, that’s the truth. Most of us in the squeamish West can’t handle that truth. We don’t like to see animals killed for our meal in the village market. We like it all packaged and renamed. We avoid this truth of life that is death. Life and death are ONE. You can’t separate them, but we try. 

VIEW TALK HERE

The mystical Body of Bourdain is the alchemy of the chef who through his magic transmutes the fragmented animal and vegetable parts into a meal that brings unity to the family of man, a communion if you will. Through eating together we find unity together. Our fragmentation is healed through the unity of the Mystical Meal. The master chef is the Sacrificial Priest. His ingredients are what’s given in his region, and through his personal unity of body/mind (his art) he restores unity in his guests or family. Great cooking is magic. 

Great food is great taste and great taste is a blend of opposite flavors and textures. Our taste buds instinctively know what is whole and what is not, what is complete and what needs something else. 

Bourdain’s mystical adventure is visiting parts unknown in a quest for completion through the experience of taste. He metaphorically captures our own quest for completion and satisfaction in experience. Perhaps when he realized that he could not find completion or peace in his life through new tastes, he decided to really go to parts unknown. (Who knows).

Every moment is the crucible where the old become the new, where the known dies into the unknown and rises as the known. Every moment of the Now is where clear and distinct ideas become ambiguous, and a new Idea is born (or not). In mystical language every moment is the breaking of the body (crucifixion of Christ) and the Resurrection of the Body, both simultaneously. When we know the spontaneous union of opposites, that is the Christ Consciousness (Awareness) that transcends the fragmentation of consciousness in names and forms. 

Mystical means transcendent of experience. Experience is fragmented; Transcendence unifies this broken bread into a Single Idea that contains all the fragments. This Single Idea is the Parts Unknown. It is the unknown known.

The modern world is crying out for unity, for its lost center. Scientific materialism makes stuff, but it doesn’t restore our center because it’s flat and we see ourselves as just so many ants crawling on the earth like as if it were a ripe fig. Each ant wants to get as must sweetness before it dies. This is a Wasteland, a Flatland that has been wiped clean like a white board of all the ancient myths that once made us aware of the Tree instead of just the figs. We find our unifying myths in movies and Romances of the Quest for unity, which I see Parts Unknown as metaphorically. 

Like Percival of the Arthurian Round Table, Bourdain is questing for the Holy Grail, that meal, that food that will give final satisfaction and end his need to keep searching parts unknown. The Holy Grail (metaphor alert) is the completion of the Quest and the search for meaning. Bourdain’s quest for satisfaction or completion in food is a metaphor for our quest for meaning in the material world. Can we find satisfaction, completion, and the end of the pain of seeking in material form, in the next best thing? Can we find it in time, in parts unknown?

Filed Under: Buddhas in your Landfill Tagged With: Anthony Bourdain, Eucharist, Mystical body of Christ

Ed is a Zen Writer and story teller who finds insights in the truth of his life in everyday mind and events. Learn more

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