The Apocalypse Now of Trump

August 17, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

I felt the call to watch it again recently, then I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness….Where is that place at the headwaters of the river in my life. Where did Kurtz go? The book and movie is a metaphorical map that is both factual in that it takes place in space/time, but it also takes place in that intermediate zone where our known and unknown meet..at the headwaters of our own mind, the mysterious place where our river of life is created…what is the wisdom hidden there?

I was watching an Anthony Bourdain adventure to the headwaters in the Congo to visit a remote tribe, and they had a feast where as guest he had to kill the pig. Oh…the terror, the terror of life eating life to life. Is life death? Is death life? Are they the same? One or two?

Did our hero have to kill Kurtz to live? Was Kurtz the sacrificial animal? Kurtz was the fisher king in the Romance of the Grail; he had the wound that would not heal. When Percival won the grail and healed the Fisher King, he did not take on the wound of the king. He because the king without the ground. Did our hero in the movie take on the wound of Kurtz when he went back into society? Did he have a boon? Had he won enlightenment like Indiana Jones at the headwaters of his mind. What was the act that healed the wound?

Watching this clip I thought I was watching the Sky People slaughter the Navi in Avatar with their flying machines. The American inaction of Vietnam was an America Myth or Story of itself being superimposed over a jungle. The Triumph of American Will. What was real to the Americans was their Story or Myth (the Stench of Lies) not the destruction of human life. Reality was bent by the myth of the Story.

The same thing is happening today with Trump and the GOP. The Myth of the American Savior Party, the Triumph of Will, is being superimposed over the real ground of America, so in order that the Myth to be true, America must be destroyed like Vietnam. When your story is about the Triumph of the Will, a savior complex, there has to be an enemy to fight. This is the Don Quixote syndrome. The dragons are really just windmills. You own people become your enemy so you can save them.

This morning I see Apocalypse Now in a new light, the NOW light. Life is always a contest between our story of life and real life, between the unreal and the real. We fear the Apocalypse, we welcome the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse is ambiguous, two faces of the same coin. Life is death; death is life. Ambiguous isn’t it…and that’s the Terror…the Terror of Kurtz.

Ah…another insight. Our hero is assigned the duty of killing Kurtz. How does he do that. He is Arjuna in the Gita, a warrior who has doubt about his role because the cause or the war is ambiguous; you kill you family as well as your enemy. So Arjuna quits and seeks wisdom at the headwaters of his being, Krishna.

In the end our hero rises out of the river reborn. He now kills Kurtz cleanly, without doubt and confusion; he does his duty and returns to the madness with wisdom, whole and human.

Apocalypse Now has many metaphorical layers; it’s a Realization Feast. But you can only go as deep as you are ready for, a depth that you will accept. You only get the teacher (teaching) you deserve. If you cup is full, you can’ pour anything else in it. This movie is meant to empty your cup. Can you go to the Terror, the Terror in. your own well? Can you go the center of the labyrinth of you mind where the Minotaur lives? Can you kill the Minotaur, Capt. Kurtz? Can you get out of the labyrinth alive, or do you wander in the maize for the rest of your life, many more lives, perhaps? Can you kill your own Pain Body, Capt. Kurtz the Minotaur within? So many insights to discover in this movie that is a metaphor not only for our collective mind now, but you who are also Now.

When madness becomes sane

November 16, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I still stew and perk,

letting its meaning come to me in little jerks

something pulling me to greater awareness

of the Stench of Lies

and how our hero escaped the Labyrinth.

If you recall the movie, the hero cut the cord

with a mad act where he rose out of the river,

a baptism if you will,

and killed Kurtz and then walked away.

The question is this, the answer is this, is it a mad act that frees you from the double-bind of the Stench of Lies where everything is a lie. If everything is a lie, where is truth. If every truth is a lie, what do you do, because everything you do is also a lie. In other words, if every choice is a lie, what do you choose? If you can’t choose anything, what do you do.

The point here is that only a mad act, an insane act will get you out of the fix. I take my cue from Avatar where Jake Sully was caught in a double-bind between the world idea of the Sky. People (the mind) and the Navi (the heart) or the objective and the subject, and he didn’t know which was the real. So he jumped on the Last Shadow…an insane act, he said because he didn’t know if the dragon would eat him or not.

And my other guru is Zorba the Greek who said: “A man needs a little madness or he will never cut the rope.” So when caught in the double-bind where everything is a stench of lies the only way to sanity is insanity. Now don’t get me wrong, because one might interpret this to give you permission to make the mad act of a mass shooter. Well, that is a mad act, isn’t it, but not a creative act, not an act that heals the wound. A mad act can just expand the wound or cauterize it. The wound is separate. And the separation we are talking about there is the separation or the division Truth into two opposite but mutually dependent halves, so no matter which one you choose, you can’t leave out the other side because it is a reflection of you. If you cut the other out, you cut yourself out, since you are a mirror reflection of each other. Truth is never divided. It division is always apparent.

So…and here’s the point (if there is one) when the world becomes mad…you only choice is madness, for then your mad act will actually be sane, since all other choices are insane. This is the choiceless choice or act.

As I explore the Idea in this talk, I am relieved from the horns of the dilemma that our everyday lives are most often caught up in. When caught in a double-bind where everything you do to get out just keeps you in, caught on the stick pad of ambiguity, it’s only the Mad Act that can set you free. And the Mad Act is going to be spontaneous, something. you have ever done before, never thought of doing, and probably were afraid of doing. The Horns of the dilemma, of the Bull Horns, is the ancient Auroboros. the self swelling dragon of our own self-reflective consciousness.

The self-reflecting consciousness makes us human. It is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it gives birth to the ecstasy of creativity and a curse because the same dilemma gives birth of violence and self destruction. Self-reflecting consciousness or a split mind that is subject and object, is driven to restore original unity. The two paths are either to destroy your reflection (the enemy) or leap beyond your polarity and create an entirely new Idea of You in the world. You create a new world Idea when you leap beyond the polarity of your mind caught in a war against itself, unable to choose either one half or you or the other.

Discover your Source upstream

September 28, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Movies, great movies a metaphorical maps to the internal search for Source, or Who am I? In our materialistic culture everything is an IT, an object, a thing with qualities; that’s why if you can’t measure something, if it has no time and place, it doesn’t exist. This assumption comes from our grammar that sees everything as a subject doing something to an object. The Subject is Me as an object doing something (a verb) to another thing. Noun, verb, noun.; everything is a thing doing something to other things.

But when I ask in my heart, Who am I? Being a thing defined by others or even myself does not satisfy that question. Either others define me—and that’s no good—or I define myself—and that’s no good. When I am defined, either by others or myself I have boundaries and I’m separate by definition from other defines things. This is a static world. This is a created world. This is a world that is not changing. As a thing I am the created. As a thing I am a victim of who or what that defines me. As the created….I cannot answer the question Who am I? because the answer is in the dictionary of Culture. There in the Book of Culture I am defines and my profile is listed. There is something inside that screams NO! I will not be pined to the wall like a butterfly in Culture’s Laboratory.

The Great Quest is then upstream of Culture, to find the source not only of Culture by of my self. There is only One Source. There can’t be two sources for Culture and for me. I am a part of culture. My ego is kept in place by culture. I am part of the grid. All my values have value in my culture or subculture. I am culture and culture is me. So there can be only one Source for culture and me. The Source is upstream of Culture and Me.

I have to swim again the current of culture. Like a salmon I have to swim upstream to return to the Source. This is not easy because you have to swim against the stream of What Will People Think?

Like in Apocalypse Now, Willard had a single minded intention to accomplish his mission, to get to the source. Though all the psychic dramas his single minded intention kept him going. And this is the only thing that will take us to our Source, a single minded intention that doesn’t waver or get sidetracked by culture, which is going to be hell bent to keep you from finding the source of Culture. Culture is a worldview that does not allow doubt. You can do anything you want as long as. you stay within culture and the choices if offers, but you cannot question the fundamental assumptions of Culture itself.

And this is not easy because to question the assumptions that hold Culture together you have to question the assumptions that hold you together.

Enter the Heart of Darkness

September 27, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Tiger, Tiger burning bright, William Blake’s poem, focuses my attention this morning as I connected the dots between the Tiger leaping out of the jungle in Apocalypse Now and out of my office window as the morning sun hit my stained glass tiger. And the end of the movie when Co. Kurtz (played by Brando) says you can kill me but don’t judge me. And earlier he said that it is “judgment that defeats us.” He described this Snap realization as a “diamond bullet” between the eyes.

Why does judgment defeat us? Judgment divides reality into the good and the bad, into the I and the IT. We went to Vietnam to judge the people as gooks and kill them, as all ITs look the same. Taking my lead from the Tiger I post his poem.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

___________

Let the video journal of Captain. Willard speak for us.

I am going crazy I Saigon. I need a mission. When I am home I wish I was here; when I am here I wish I was home. I am wounded. I need a mission. Everything is upside down.

I am given a mission. Kill a man who thinks he is god. Our little boat heads upstream through Dante’s Inferno of one mad scene after another. One of crew is killed by an primitive spear. In the primeval forest we meet the Tiger. We are getting closer. He was real close. I want to confront him.

As I go keeping into the jungle, the forests of the night, approaching the headwaters of my own being, is that a Buddha ahead? What is my mission? If I see the Buddha, do I kill him? Going up river no one is in charge any more. I must confront “him.”

We pass through some boats full of people who look like zombies, all white in death ash, they part and let us through. I pass a sign: MOTTO APOCALYPSE NOW.

I enter his cave. I meet him shaded in shadow like a god, his hands in a helmet of water like a baptismal, and his head a white skull. Have I met Death itself, the God of Death? There are no methods here at all. He looks at me and says “I’m just an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.” He is in a place far from civilization and the known world.

He knew more about me than I did. Then he said to make friends with horror, with Death. He talked about the. Stench of Lies. He put me in a bamboo cages and then appeared in the night, large and painted, and threw the head one of my crew in my lap. I lost it! I met the horror!

Then he let me out and some women fed me and gave me drink. I knew I could complete my mission now and kill this god. Out of the river I came, born again like a Baptist, single minded. I was where I belonged. As I killed him the tribal people were sacrificing a bull, and the colonel and the bull died together…whispering the Horror…the horror.

I emerged from his cave, Buddha faces rising in my mind, and his people dropped their weapons when I dropped my knife. They would have bowed and worshiped me, but I walked through them and went back down the river from whence I came.

I leave this story for you. Do not judge.

Continuing my journey upstream of culture and Ego (they dance together), I explore Apocalypse Now. What did Col Kurtz discover, what horror did he discover? This is the question that pulled Willard upstream on this single minded mission. The cannot help but see this forgotten Buddhist temple in Cambodia with his gigantic Buddha faces intermingled in the scenes as a clue to the spiritual journey that goes upstream to the headwaters of our own culture/ego insulated egg, a bubble through which we interact with the world, an I safely inside with the IT outside. And judgment is our shell.

Kurtz wants men who are moral but who kill without flinching, like a tiger. The great impersonal face of the Buddha looks down. Were the American there moral? They certainly killed without flinching. But were they moral? What does moral mean here? Is the Tiger moral? Does moral means being an integral part of the whole, both the part and the whole as the Good. Judgment divides the whole into separate parts that are good and bad. Judgment and morality then are not compatible, if morality is the integration of all parts with the whole, if morality does not divide. A moral act then transcends the relative morality created by judgment.

What the Americans are doing from their moral viewpoint is Good. What their enemy does is bad. But from the viewpoint of the movie this morality is in question. Vietnam in our history was when we began to question the morality of America and its government.

But everything can and must be reduced to my everyday mind. Even here there is the heart of darkness that divides what I do from what I think, and I think I’m doing good, but from a wider view, I’m doing bad. There is always a SNAP! when these two divergent views comes together into one Gestalt. We always avoid this SNAP, this Satori when we see the polarity Zen Koan all at once. Polarity ends with a SNAP!, not gradually, but with a body shacking SNAP…a waking up that is sudden, an expected, yet strangely suspected, surprise.

Only the wide angle lens can question the morality of the narrow focused lens. Apocalypse Now questions not only the morality of the Vietnam War, and not only war itself, but civilization, our civilization. What is morality but the search for the ultimate Good, the headwaters of consciousness itself. If our Source is Good, the we must go upstream to our source to find our true nature. If you Source is not the Good, then don’t bother. If our Source is not Good, then suicide is the only logical answer. Better the earth be rid of us. But…wait…is not my source the same source as the earth? if the earth is Good, then so am I.

But since we are killing the earth, maybe we don’t believe our Source the earth is good, and so we don’t see the good in each of us. What is this misperception…but our civilization, our Culture of division and self loathing. Each of us then must set out on our spiritual quest into the Heart of Darkness to find through that darkness the Source of our Goodness or Light.

I must read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness now (I may have read it years ago but there are dots to be connected). This journey into the Heart of Africa goes back to my boyhood when I was fascinated with the unknown and unexplored center of Africa that was a blank space on the National Geographic maps I had on my wall. I wanted to explore that heart.

Apocalypse Right Now

September 26, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

In conjunction with Ken Burn Vietnam I just watched Apocalypse Now, and it will take some time to digest it’s powerful metaphors. I felt like I was going into Dante’s Inferno, into the tiger itself. Who dares go there? The utter madness of the war with its juxtaposition of America culture against the native culture, and who when these two realities rubbed together it created the Horror…Not only of the war but of the horror within ourselves that we avoid, that we insulate ourselves from by our culture.

There was such a powerful moment when in the peaceful jungle at night that reminded me of a primeval garden this tiger leaped out. to devour them. The horror!

And all through the Rembrandt portraitures of shadows you have the interplay of Buddha statutes. Is Kurt a Buddha or not. Don’t judge me, he said…you can kill me but don’t judge me. And like the buffalo he willingly gave himself to the hacking sacrificial knife.

When Sheen rose out of the river painted like a primitive, he had returned to the roots mind of man that was prior to the Culture of Lies that Kurt had left.

What is it like to live outside of the shell of Culture, outside of the “stench of lies?” The movie is a slow agonizing trip to the headwaters of humanity, into the interior like David Livingston, the African explorer who left civilization and lived among the primitive tribes for years.

Livingston wrote that once when a lion attacked him and grabbed him by the neck and shoulder and began to shake him, he went into the transcendent state of consciousness that was beyond fear. As Kurt said, you have to make the horror your friend.

Many of the vets telling their story to Ken Burns reports of the elevated consciousness or being they experience in combat when they know they are going to die.

So what was Vietnam? On the historical objective level of time, it was a great mistake, a tragedy. Apocalypse Now, however, is not about the objective war but the Subjective inward journey through the madness of culture itself to the root of our humanity that is beyond good and evil and judgment.

Truth is subjectivity said S. Kierkegaard. Most of our great movies are about this truth, metaphors that point to history with one finger and with the other to the truth of our being.

I just saw the meaning of the chalk covered natives guarding the entrance to the Cave of Kurt. The walking dead, the Grateful Dead…a land beyond life and death…beyond the boundary of the known.

And remember the show for the troop with gun totting girls sent to drive the men mad.

But again, I suddenly see this as the journey of the hero who unable to live in society or at war. When home he wants to be there, when there he wants to be home. And so he takes a mission, he wants a mission. He is sent to assassinate an officer who had dropped out of the world insane sanity. What was real and what wasn’t….Our hero had to find out, he had to know. And so with single minded intention he sets out to…know. He had to perform a mad act. He had to enter into madness in order to find sanity, in order to transcend the “stench of lies.”

Having performed the sacrifice, having done the act that was not a lie, that was not ambiguous, the tribes put down their weapons and he passed through them.

We lost the Vietnam War because the American civilization/culture is a lie, hypocritical and narcissistic. Its enemy was not. Our mind was divided; their mind was not. For the enemy the war was simple: either win or die. Americans didn’t want to die, didn’t want to make friends with horror.

I mentioned Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. What Capt. Willard was doing was the classic quest of the Holy Grail or the secret of Life. Culture/civilization was the “stench of lies.” The Hero’s Journey is to find truth through action, truth through heroic action, not thought or theory. Avatar is about this quest. The Life of Pi is about this quest. All moves are about this Quest in some form or another. The Quest for wholeness and completion. The quest to be free from time and karma and Ground Hog Day.

Put in the context of the violent Vietnam War, we get confused and think the movie is about the war, a condemnation of war. But the movie is deeper than that, and you have to travel to its headwaters to have this deeper truth revealed to you in a SNAP. It’s as if the movie were written by a Zen Master and as a koan it is a puzzle you have to solve. Just as Capt. Willard had to solve a puzzle, the puzzle of his own life and his inability to live totally in this world without wishing he were somewhere else then where he was, and when he was somewhere else, he wished he was here. Apocalypse Now is about living Now. It’s about making a friend of Death.

And this is Buddhism. We have to make friends with our own morality, we have to make friends with impermanence if we are going to be able to ride the Tiger.