The Zen of Raymond

July 14, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

This talk is about the double-bind as a formula in Everybody Loves Raymond and how to get out of the Perfect Trap. A double-bind is a situation where no matter what you do or say is lose/lose. If you can catch another person in a double-bind you can control them…but watch out. There are only two ways out of a double-bind: violence of creativity. Destruction or love. The news us full of violence created by a lose/lose situation. Even suicide is a way out of the double-bind. But humor is the best way. In this talk I look at how humor is created by the double-bind. So watch it.

Women intuitively know how to create double-binds. Men get caught in them every time. The basic formula is Nature versus Law or Order. Obey your own nature or obey the Law created by the other. In the double-bind, no matter what you do, you feel guilty: guilty for disobeying your own nature or guilty for disobeying your duty to the law. Heck, this goes all the way back to Jesus.

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.

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.

The Toxicity of American Culture

October 5, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

The point of this talk is that we all contribute to the toxicity of the American Culture in which we swim. Each of us can’t change the bowl and the water, but we can change the toxicity in us. Each of us is Culture and Culture is us. If we each see and remove the toxicity in us, then eventually the water of the American Culture will clear. There has to be a shift in the consciousness of America as a collective, at least a shift in enough to shift the direction we are going.

American Culture is like a Cruise Ship. You can’t change the course of the Titanic on a dime. Course change is slow, but if the majority on board want an immediate course change, the American Culture can shift directions abruptly. We are the ship and the ship is us. There is no one steering the ship but us. But it is our collective intention or blindness that is steering the ship. When we have enough pain, when we have enough of pain, then a shift occurs. That’s what having enough means.

Our individual lives and our collective live is the same. Using the analogy of the smart phone, each of us is America (internet) and America is us (the individual smart phone). We are an interactive relationship, a dynamic unity. When enough of us shift, the whole internet shifts.

The Call of the Wild

October 4, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

We’re talking about The Call of Wild, the call from beyond culture’s egg. The chick hears the call and begins pecking from the inside, not knowing what’s on the outside. The caterpillar enters the cocoon not knowing the call of the butterfly. Movies and art is the call of the will, whispering to our heart of the reality that is on the outside of or through the Egg of Culture. Joseph Campbell says not fight the egg, and don’t try to crack it. You make the egg transparent. It doesn’t really exist.

And I give these talks like Jake Sully on his video journal before he dropped out of Culture, out of the known world. Culture is the known world. The outside of culture is the unknown. From the inside of culture, the outside of culture is death. We don’t want to go there. The gravity of culture keeps us inside. Culture is our own mind like the smart phone is the whole internet. Our individual minds are tiny culture mind, all of us interacting and supporting the Big Egg. We can even have anti-culture sub eggs within the Big Egg, and the Big Egg doesn’t mind because you are sill inside the egg. But if you dar question the Big Egg itself, you are going to go against the stream of culture itself, alone. Culture is like Russian Nesting Dolls. You think you are leaving culture by getting inside another doll.

Culture instills us with the subliminal belief that we are outside of culture able to judge culture itself. But that is the magic trick of culture. You are still inside culture believing you are outside of culture. That viewpoint is a fiction. That viewpoint is a creation of culture itself. This is not to judge culture, but to just describe it. To SEE it. That’s all. Just SEE it…in one grasp, on one Gestalt. That’s all. That SEEING is outside of culture. When you can see the whole catastrophe, you are free, and the catastrophe disappears.