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Make friends with your death

November 2, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I should title this Make Friends with Death (of impermanence). My wife is having a stint put in her heart, and I’m contemplating our mortality…with you, here live. Death is the one thing we all have in common. We are all in the Club Death. We should make friends with this friend. Why do we treat death as the arch enemy? That’s like treating our humanity as the enemy. Death makes us human. We know we are going to die. Death is the Black Hole around which our consciousness forms, our human consciousness. I want to know how that consciousness operates. Who is it that wants to know? If life and death are One, then life/death wants to know how this consciousness operates that forms around the black hole of death, both attracted to it and afraid of it, both drawn into it and repelled by it. What is the Black Hole? Can one go through it?

What is as common as death, especially when you get older, is having your life partner in the hospital, that body shop created to keep death away. When the petal fall from the rose, we take the flower to the hospital to put the bloom back together.

We like to believe our roses in the vase will live forever. Why do we give flowers that are going to die? My wife got some real roses, and some real nice silk flowers. How often we treat our loved ones as silk flowers instead of impermanent flowers. We think they will last forever, so we let them sit on the shelf gathering dust…why not…they will never fade or wilt. We assume everything is forever.

I suddenly remember the Graduate, and the investment of the future to the graduate: Plastics. We invest is a self, in a body, in a world that will not fade, that is made of plastic. But it has no value, no meaning….for only death and impermanence gives us meaning and love. Only death makes life worthwhile.

Relationship, marriage can flip back and forth between plastic and living flowers. It is so easy for the relationship to become plastic, or silk flowers. They look great but there are not living, not vulnerable, not feeling. The silk flower has no aroma. No matter how fine the silk, it doesn’t have the touch and petal softness of life. The silk flower is just perfect. No bug can eat them. No petal can wilt. You feel secure with a silk flowers because you and the silk flower stay the same. You don’t have to be vulnerable. You don’t have to feel. You don’t have to wilt and feel time. You have shelf live. Your marriage is just perfect because it is not impermanent.

Marriage, relationship is either living or plastic, depending on our view. Everyone wants to know how they can make their marriage fresh again, to bring the roses back to life. There is no magic formula. There is no path to life. Just reach out and touch the plastic flower with tenderness, and it will come to life..and so will you.

Feel the impermanence as you. Feel the death in you. And then you will feel it in everything. For everything is impermanent. Everything is dying. Feeling that makes everything living.

 

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Awakening, Buddism, four messengers, impermanence

The Zen of Miss Marple

October 23, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Miss Marple of the Agatha Christy novels is a metaphor for the awakened mind that does not rest on any form, or the wisdom mind of Zen, and other non-dual traditions. She withholds judgment until the whole or gestalt kicks in. Satori in Zen is when the gestalt kicks in and you solve the koan the master has given you. But you can’t solve the koan or the mystery with intellect, as Miss Marple demonstrates. The other deceives have intellect, but she has insight-intelligence. She withholds the judgment of intellect until Insight kicks in.

What drives her awakening of Insight is curiosity and intention. Intelligence tells her that All is One. But until satori, she doesn’t know what the One is, so she is patience, curious, and single minded, because she must give birth to the One that solves the mystery.

The Buddha was driven by this same curious intention; he could not rest until he had given birth to the Buddha who was the Awakened One that has no second. Miss Marple is a metaphor for that Buddha principle.

We are all metaphors of the Life principle, that Self realization of the One in our own personal lives. We are the One; we are the many. But we believe we are just the many. So we don’t hold judgment until Insight of the One awakens. We judge prematurely and settle for less.

Everyday mind is enlightenment, said the Zen Master. Well, my everyday mind is going to Walmart and watching British mysteries and, of course, sharing my insights on Facebook. That’s about it. Oh, I go to Costco every two weeks. I have to work with what’s given. That’s the rule. Work with what’s given, because what’s given is the only reality. What’s given is the One that has no second. If you create a second to the One, you are creating time and an alternate fake reality. We can imaging a better reality, and then live in it instead of the one that is given because we believe what’s given is crap. What’s given, however, is IT!

If enlightenment is going to be anywhere its going to be in the given, in your own backyard, in your own everyday mind. You need not go anywhere.

And this is the way Miss Marple works. She always stays with the given, with the bare facts. She refrains from creating imaginary scenarios. She is OK with not knowing. She has no pressure to know, to have certainty, to close the case and escape the tension of not knowing. All the minor deceives want to close the case to escape the tension of not know, of lacking certainty, and ambiguity. They hate ambiguity.

But the master detective loves ambiguity, for, as in the case of Miss Marple, she feels most alive in ambiguity. Her mind is sharp, awake and aware, fully attentive. Nothing escapes her awareness. Ambiguity is the water she loves to swim in. Not so with the Modern Mind. For it truth is clear and distinct ideas (thank you Descartes). Ambiguity is a quicksand one must get out of as quickly as possible…through premature judgment. You grab hold of anything.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Agatha Christy, Awakening, Miss Marple

Practical Magic

October 8, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Practical Magic is a 20 year-old movie with N. Kidman and S. Bullock about witches in New England. that for me is a metaphor for getting you mojo back. When you are in a slump, when down and you feel what’s the use, take refuge in your Practical Magic.

Magic means a surprise that doesn’t fit our cause and effect map of reality. Practical means it is useful in our everyday life. You need to create a Practical Magic space of play in your life where the means and the end are One. Something you love doing that has no purpose. When you think there is a purpose, you are going to eventually become exhausted and depleted of energy, and you say what’s the use? I’m not getting anything out of this.

Practical Magin, referring to the movie as metaphor, was that the witches could not deny their nature. Their nature called them and they had to return to. use their magic to get out of a fix. The witches were like witch McGyvers. They used magic potions to get out of a fix.

The other dimension of the movie as I look into it, is the the “witches” were women who could operate of the material world—regardless of what people thought. The “witches” played with reality. Play is practical magic.

And you can play with your reality too. I used today’s talk to model Play real time as my talk. My talks are play. For me there are Practical Magic because I say things that inform me, that surprise me, like a rabbit out of a hat. Wow…where did that come from?

I love movies because they are Practical Magic. I find surprises in them, rabbits pulled out of a hat. Magic for magic is just entertainment that has no use. But Magic that is Practical has an undiscovered use as a side-effect. The Use of Practical Magic is like the unexpected side-effect of drugs, except in a positive way. Practical Magic has unintended side-effects. Life is the unintended side-effect of Practical Magic. Life is the unintended side-effect of play.

If life is the intended side-effect of play….you are not playing. The magic is not practical.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time, The Zen of Movies Tagged With: alchemy, Awakening, dharma, enlightenment, liberation, mindfulness, Practical Magic movie, transcendence, witches, Zen, Zorba the Greek

The Las Vegas Shooting as Field Effect

October 6, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

This was an interesting talk because we are stepping beyond with media news concludes is the cause or absence of cause in the Las Vegas Shooting. Since there in no obvious cause to the shooters action, we need a bigger boat. The media is frustrated because they can’t fit him into the usual suspects, i.e. ISIS, father hatred, work frustration, racism, Trump, Obama, etc, so like the obelisk in Space Odyssey: 2001, this “obelisk” has no reference to the known world.

We also noted that the Obelisk in Space Odyssey was a metaphor or symbol in the movie for that trigger the activates the evolution of human consciousness. When we encounter an unknown, something that has no reference to the known, we either discount it, ignore it, miss perceive it, or we make the leap in consciousness to a greater reality map, one that includes the “obelisk.” Is the Las Vegas Shooter the Obelisk in our Space Odyssey?

Do we need a bigger boat to understand this Jaws rising up from the depths of the American Psyche as Death itself, as this horrible monster that is us. This is not a human problem, referencing the evil nature of man, so that Original Sin explains everything. This is an American problem that is unique to America. Just referencing to the idea of Evil does not expand consciousness.

We are all the Las Vegas Shooter, since we all participate in and create the American Culture of Violence in which the Shooter is the effect. Anger and its child violence grows in our frustration to find the cause of the violence. As always, when we can’t find the Usual Suspect, we look for the wrong suspects, blaming everyone and anything that comes into view. We even make political systems out of blame the wrong suspect, which perpetuate the anger at not being able to find the Real Suspect….because it is us.

Violence begins at home, right here on Facebook, if you want to look. Not in the other post but in our own, when we dig in out position and mount our machine guns at the other’s position. Right there in our Opinion Wars we have the root cause of the Las Vegas Shooter. We are participating in the America Field of Violence. Like an artist who creates the art and is then created by his art, we created the field and then the field creates us in an interactive dance of the creator and the created.

Lets keep kicking this can. The fundamental assumption that creates the Violence Field in our everyday lives and collective life is that culturally implanted Idea that we are the Created and that some external force causes us to move, whether that cause is in the external world or in our past traumas makes no difference. We believe we are the Determined. Mecahnistic science from Newton on believes that for anything to move an external force is necessary. So what is the external force that caused the Las Vegas Shooter? What created him? What caused him?

The Bigger Boat understanding and knowledge—the knowledge of Knowing not believing—is that we are each the creator/created, a player in a dynamic Unity. We simultaneously create and are being created by the world. Steve Jobs created the Apple World, and we participate in its creation while it creates us in unsuspected ways. Creativity is always a surprise because it is not completely caused by the known. Creativity is a mix of the known and the unknown, a discovery cocktail. Creativity is revelation.

Is the Las Vegas shooting creative? Or is it violence. It is creative violence. The shooter created the shooting as the biggest one yet, with the biggest body count, and without reference to the known narratives that explain through known categories the cause of the shooting. This LV Shooter leaped beyond the pale, beyond the known. We need a bigger boat to understand this Jaws rising up out of the American Unconscious.

The Las Vegan Shooting was a Field Effect. The tension of anger, outrage, and violent confrontation in the American Collective when reaching a saturation point but realize its pent up energy through the lightening strike of random violence. When a lighting bolt hits an object it appears to be random, but there is a build up of energy on the ground that attracts the build up in the field. BAM! The lightening bolt strikes to reales the energy on both sides.

But the Strike itself creates division and violence in the field as it struggle to align separate meanings to the Strike from the existing maps of reality. In our effort to find meaning, we lose meaning. We need a bigger boat. America, each one of us has to create out way out of the double-bind, this lose/lose pattern that keeps repeating itself, with each repetition getting more violent.

We are chasing our own tail. And caught in this feed back loop of a Collective Mind chasing itself, the energy increases like a hurricane over warmer waters. What are the warm waters? Perhaps it is the Media itself, for if you want to understand what the new conditions are in American Culture that has never existed before, it’s 24/7 commenting news, which is itself divided into two competing narrative. Everything the Media as a force field touches is divided. Just as everything Trump touches divided into two conflicting halves, into the dragon eating its own tail.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: American violence, Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Culture War, double-bind, evolution of consciousness, field effect, gun violence, Joseph Campbell, Las Vegas shooting, liberation, meditation, Space Odyssey: 2001, the unknown, transcendence, Zen

The Heart of Jesus versus the Law of Culture

October 6, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I didn’t get around to talking about Jesus and the Law directly, but the idea is there. I’m working on it. What we are talking about is how big the Culture Egg is, and how all encompassing it is. Each of us has an enculturated mind. We can’t escape it. Passed on by our parents, the direct emissary of Culture, we cannot escape it. Our parents have no control over it. They are Culture’s personification for the child, who by design imprint their world view. This is natures plan.

But Nature didn’t plan for Culture to be dissociated from Nature, from Being. Culture is a semantic language system that is an abstraction of the direct reality of Being, that is beyond language, beyond concept, beyond the filter or mediator of Culture. This is what make us human.

Culture stores the accumulated knowledge of humanity so we don’t have to start over in a cave when we are born. However, Culture takes on a life of its own. The further Culture gets from the ground of Being, the greater the suffering created by Culture. The Sound of Being is the Heart’s Intelligence that taps into the heart and intelligence of the Cosmos itself. Human culture demands that we are obedient it it as God. Culture becomes out God.

But now we are in conflict. Our heart connected to Divine Intelligence is in conflict with the intellect of Culture. Heart and mind are in conflict. We can see it everywhere, especially in religion. Don’t obey the flesh, obey God, religion says. Flesh is sinful. Be obedient to God who is outside of you.

But the Heart is who I am. The Heat is Intelligent, but we are commanded by Culture to obey its Laws. And here is where Jesus comes in as a model on how to drop out of Culture/Religion. You have to go against the grain; you have to go upstream of the river of culture. But you have to go alone. If you join a sub-culture, then you just got into another boat in Culture and you are not going anywhere.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Christ, dharma, double-bind, enlightenment, jesus, Joseph Campbell, transcendence, Zen

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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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