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.

Dilemma is the mother of creativity

August 9, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

Again if use The Avatar and the Voyage to Pandora as my movie metaphor to pull this cotton ball apart. How can I create myself anew? How can I transcend suffering? How can I be master of my domain? Where is my Center, my home? All these question rise from the dilemma of ambiguity, or a situation where we can’t choose the One that has no second, and that One is ME.

How can I choose ME that is not conflicted by Shoulds: you should do this; you should think this; you should not do that; you should..should…should…Where is the ME that is free from Shoulds? That is my Center, the place where there are no should.

We are conditioned, trained, brainwashed to try and arrive at Center by removing the Should, the Other that be believe is causing the dilemma. If I could just get a new job I would oolong by under the tyranny of the Should, or the wife or the husband or whatever our Should comes from. Even our home town, or our religion is the source of the Should. What will people think…if you do or say that? You shouldn’t do that.

So Center of our True Home withins (not without) is where we are free from the Should or the Law. This was the quest and resolution of Jesus Christ who came not to obey or submit to the Should, but to fulfill it. What does that mean in your everyday life?

The conflict between you inner nature and the outer Should is the dilemma of human consciousness. The only way out of this conflict— that only leads to violence and destruction if we don’t find it—is creativity. That mad leap into the unknown You, the You that has never acted or thought of this before. A dilemma is a conflict between two Knowns, both of which are mutually exclusive and dependent at the same time. The only way out is a leap into the Unknown.

Avatar and Titanic Creative Mythology

August 9, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

If you love Avatar and Titanic, these to movies by James Cameron (JC) are creative mythology as described by Joseph Campbell (JC). These are golden threads by Ariadne (the Goddess) that can lead us out of the womb or labyrinth of the modern I-IT world to our true Center that is both within and without.

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That’s why we can’t find out center because it is neither IN or Without. In our I-IT mind, our center has to be IN or OUT because IT has to be an IT somewhere. But our Center is not an IT, so it has no location is space/time. It is the Center of Space/Time. It has no name. It is your face before your parents (I-IT) were born. To find it one has to be able to read the mythic maps, which are our movies now, since we have erased with our rational empirical mind all traces of the ancient myths that used to lead man out of the labyrinth of the world.

The Philosopher’s Stone is Metaphor. Metaphor is the coded language of the treasure map. Indiana Jones knows how to read this map. The ITS of the world are metaphors that point to you as the Center where you and the world are ONE, the two that is ONE. You as an IT and the world as ITS are the ONE that has no second IT. YOU ARE IT!

Why can’t we see metaphor today? Why is everything an IT? Our logic fails us, the Classical logic of Aristotle, the Law of Identity that is the foundation of science. A cannot be A and B both at the same time. The I-IT consciousness is fundamentally a dual Operating System. Everything comes in two like on Noah’s Ark. (See the metaphor there?) Noah’s ark is the modern world where everything comes in pairs-of-opposits. Yahweh created it because he himself is an I-IT mind, a god separated from his creation as ITS. We are made in that image and we suffer because we have lost out True Center. In order to find our True Center, the center of our world, we have to let go of the idea or belief that we are created, that we are just ITS, things that are created, by either Yahweh or the Big Bang, Either way you are still a created thing, an IT without a true home at the center.

We can read metaphors as a finger points to our true center because we read them with the I-IT mind. We are not on the map we are reading. We are the Reader of the Map looking for ourself as the Reader on the Map we are reading. No wonder we can’t find out who we are. We are not on the map!

Activate God in you as You

December 17, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Today we are talking about finding the Universal in teh particular, the eternal in the temporal, the whole in the part, the oak tree in the acorn, and God in you. The universal that contains everything cannot be known because the container can’t know the container. You are the Universal as the Particular expression of the universal, but in our Sky Mind civilization we only see and recognized the parts. This is a fragmented world and every parts wants to be the universal by getting rid of the other parts. It’s not that we don’t know the Universal exists, it’s just we look for it in the wrong place or wrong way.

When Jake Sully in The Avatar and the Voyage to Pandora wakes up as the AVATAR, of the Buddha in the end he has awakened as the Universal that contains both the sky mind and the earth mind. That the climax of the movie, the end of the journey…to wake up to this truth that you are the universal and the universal is you, and yet we still have our parts to play out—but not looking for the universal but by knowing that the Universal is a creative urge, never to rest in the universal but to activate the universal in time, in the present moment…Ah…and this is Zen satori…that activation of SEEING, the knower of the universal.

My old guru Swami Muktananda always said God dwells within you as you. If you think God is something, you are wrong. The universal (God) is not something because something can’t contain all things. The universal is like space, but even that is something, it the. universal contains space too, emptiness and form.

So if the Universal isn’t something then what is it, because we know its exists. The ancient Hebrews got it right. The universal is the Creative WORD…not a noun but a verb, a creative impulse, the Word that contains all words and sounds like OM. This WORD is a germ, a seed, a spark, an urge: What shall I be? Quantum calls it the Implicit Order our of which the explicit order, us particulars break forth. God then dwells within you as this Urge to restore the Universal or Unity….which is what we call love. It all seems to come full circle.

This talk is going to get a lot of views as it is climbing rapidly. I feel my energy when I talk about the God that dwells within as You….This is a Zen Koan.

If God dwells within me am Me, then why don’t I experience it? Well….here’s the Koan: If you say God dwells within me as me, you are wrong; if you say God doesn’t not dwell within me as me, you are wrong. Now which is it. Choose of God will punish you. You see? The Perfect Trap.

The Satori is the you can’t experiment the container of you because you are the container of you. Everything, inside and out, is You. Where can you go that you are not? All experience of the world is your experience. Not mine. My experience is my experience and you can’t have it.

Avatar: Buddha blueprint

December 14, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I’m giving a seminar Sunday in Richmond at the Richmond VA Heartfulness on Zen and the Art of Movies, and The Avatar and the Voyage to Pandora will be my first movie subject. Buddhism is a continua from division to unity; from suffering to the cessation of suffering; from sorrow to joy. Avatar is a blueprint for that. But the Zen of Movies is to see movies as an extended metaphor. A metaphor is like a street sign that points to two opposite meanings on the same street. Movies as metaphor point to the plot with one finger and to you with the other finger, but not the objective you, but the Subjective You.

You know how your are surprised when someone is talking and you think it’s to the objective you, someone standing in a group anonymously, then suddenly you realize the person is talking not about you but to you. Feel that sudden shift. That is the finger of metaphor. You think the movie is talking about the content of the movie, but its talking to YOU.

And the metaphorical view of a movie is (1) objective things (2) a dream that is you who plays all the parts. You are Jake Sully, the Sky People, the Col., the Navi and the Home Tree. YOU plays all the parts just like in a dream.

The Metaphor has a SNAP to it. There are living and dead metaphors. A dead metaphor is about something. A living metaphor is not about you, it is you. When you see the metaphor pointing at you, you are a Buddha. You wake up to a greater insight of who you are. You become the Avatar.

There is a crucial transitional “dark night of the soul” in Avatar when Jake Sully didn’t know which world was real, Sky world (mind) or Navi world (body). He couldn’t live in either one. So he made an insane act; he jump on Death. Through this insane act, he united to division of self and became mind/body. …which is itself a metaphor that contains yet transcends the contradictory opposites of sky and earth. His mad act unites and restores the original oneness. This is zen. Seeing (satori) is the action that restores the soul. There is no will power involved here because Seeing is not an act of will.

When you are shown a puzzle as asked to see the old hag or. young woman, no effort will see. The interesting things about Avatar is that it leaves you with you. When Jake Sully merges mind (sky people) with body (Navi) and just sits up looking at you. Who is he? Is he you? Je Suis Jake Sully!

Slowly, slowly, the movie walks you to this SNAP where the objective movie and YOU come together. That is the real Wonder of Avatar, not the mountains or the jungle.

Movie as metaphor is movie as myth. All our ancient myths are erased from our collective consciousness, and, as Joseph Campbell says, modern man is in free fall. We have lost our center. (watch Mad Men).

Movies restore center. Movies are our modern myth makes. They get the message of Transcendence through the ego defensives through metaphor. The ego thinks it’s just a movie, but the unconscious Soul drinks it in. And for a moment after the movie you feel light and at peace, but then the tide of the cruel world comes rushing back in.