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?

The Holy Turkey; a national communion

November 24, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

This was a fun Thanksgiving talk where I make the connection between the Eucharist and Thanksgiving….One is giving thanks for….the Resurrection. What is the Resurrection? Healing, Unity, the restoration of our Original wholeness and perfection. Oh, this Thanksgiving was perfect! We need to understand deep inside so that we see it everywhere that life is a dying and living, destruction and creation, dismemberment and healing. it’s all about that. But we suffering because we don’t see that the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, the wounding and the healing, the tearing apart and the putting together is happening at the same time. But it’s like a coin with two sides: we see either heads or tails. But the coin is One. But we see two and we are conditioned to believe that these two sides are separated by….time. How long before this medicine heals me? How long before the yoga will kick in. How much meditation do I have to do in order to become enlighten (whole).Buddha says that our suffering lies in the gap between the heads and the tails, or the wound (the Pain) and the healing (pleasure).

Just watch yourself desire a doughnut. I feel this tension when I see the doughnut, a little wound in the body/mind. I want the doughnut because when I get it I’ll be healed of this wound created by the desire for unity. My suffering is measured by how long it takes me to get that doughnut. When I get the doughnut..AH…but the pleasure and the relief is not in the doughnut but in the release from the pain of the desire for the doughnut. Have you ever noticed that?

So this talk was about the Healing of the Holy Turkey, our national secular Eucharist where a sacrifice, the Turkey, gives up his life to heal us for the pain of our dismember family, who have moved all over the nation like the Jews in diaspora. The sacrificial turkey brings our family home.

And you have to eat the whole turkey, even if it takes days. You cannot leave any leftovers in a sacrifice to god. The Catholic priest eats all that’s left of the wine and bread. God gets mad if you don’t clean your plate.

Right now we have the Turkey bones boiling in a soup bowl. The only thing we didn’t eat was the gobble.

I also talked about myths or psychic stories that need ritual to activate. If you get a new credit card, you have a story that you have potential money, but you have to activate the card in order to activate the potential. You don’t get the power unless you activate the card (the story). Rituals of any kind activate our stories fo who we are. Rituals are (now listen up) unconscious. We just do them for reasons that never make sense, but we must do them. Smoking is a ritual. Anything that we repeat over and over is a ritual. A Ground Hog Day. It’s called Karma in the East. It is suffering. Why? Because it is unconscious. When I am unconscious of why I do things, I create suffering for myself. But I can’t stop? Why? A ritual becomes a compulsion. You can’t stop a compulsion. Why? Because its takes power to stop a compulsion, not will power. Forget that. No, you need the power of Consciousness. Consciousness is power. But when I am half conscious, because I doing things, rituals unconsciously, by habit, then I’m not fully conscious, and how can my half consciousness defeat the other half of my consciousness, the half that is unconscious? Answer that?

Rituals then activate our unconscious mind, which is our ritual behavior, and restore balance or Zero, or whole consciousness. I will be whole. Let there be One…says the Cosmos. We have to obey this commandment. We do so by rituals that activate my power that has been separated from my consciousness. However, because the ritual activates the unconscious or dark side, it creates karma, and more rituals. The unconscious ritual never makes consciousness whole. Only whole consciousness, that SNAP of Satori or Eureka! When I SEE…that is whole consciousness, and the ritual ends right there. Oh, it might have some inertia that keeps it winding down, but you know it’s outgoing mail.

But lets not stop here. Lets go deeper into the games you play with friends and family and strangers. A game is a ritual. why do we play it? How do we know we are playing a game? We know when we. since we are repeating relationship with this person. Different settings and time, but same emotional wringer. Same outcomes no matter how hard we try to make a different outcome. Best intentions are of no avail. That is a compulsive ritual which are the games we play.

Remember these two principles: games are unconscious; games make feel whole, but the feeling doesn’t last. So we have to repeat the game, hoping for a lasting outcome. It like football. The game is that there will be at the end of the game year, the Number One team that ends the game. But then we can’t wait until the game starts the next year. All games offer the hope of finally unity when the games can finally end, because there is hidden pain in the games.

The Mystical Body of Arrowheads

October 27, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I don’t know where this talk came from because today has been a low energy day, the funeral and all. On the surface nothing was moving, but when I stepped up to the live mike, something very interesting popped up, as if I had Found the One. When we speak the One our soul is healed, or our Soul is the One.

The thrust of this talk is that your passion, whatever it is for, is the Force of the One (of God if you want). The One is a Force that drives creation itself, seeking itself, knowing itself as the One, ongoing, ongoing unfolding of the One. Worlds without end, the One without end.

Others may think our passions to collect the One is crazy. A matchbook collector sees the Beloved One in every new matchbook. What we collect, what our passion yearns for, is a metaphor for the One in form, in our life. We give God form. We make the universal concrete.

The idea here is that the Many, which is all the arrowheads or martini glasses we have collected, is the the One when we find a new piece. There is a flip in consciousness, a shift in perspective when we have collected the many and they sit on our shelves, but we still are on the lookout for a new piece. John Wells could not have enough arrowheads, even though to the uneducated eye they all look the same. See on, see them all, one would say.

But to the passionate eye the new find is THE ONE! But then the One shifts back to the many, and the New One becomes an old many, catalogued and put away. But the yearning is still there for the ONE. So the ONE is a yearning, not an object. The ONE is a verb not a noun. The new pieces find find are emissaries of the ONE. So our passion for collecting, for integrating, for bringing the lost children home, is our Passion for God as the ONE. And our form of collecting is a metaphor for the Passion of Christ, which is the yearning of God for Himself, the yearning of God to Know Himself as the One in the many. This is all very mystical so I hope you can stay with me here…and just let go of our obsession on seeing just the many without seeing the One as the Many.

Whenever we feel the power of integration, the force that drives us to unity, to completion, to resolution, and to home and peace, that is the Power of the One. Now the ONE is a fill in the blank word because. you can write any noun you want there: God, Allah, Buddha, Christ, the Self, the Cosmos, Nature, Goddess..whatever…But these are all nouns, and the ONE is a Verb. The One has no name because if you give it a name it is not the One; then the One is one of Many names, many sounds, many things. So the ONE can have no name. But we can feel the One. But our map of many hames has no place of a Verb. You can’t but a Verb on a map. Only things, only nouns can go on a map. So we are lost without a map when it comes to the One.

We are looking for God, or the ONE is the wrong places. In a materialistic culture or world view, all we see are things, and things are many, so where can the ONE that holds all things be? The ONE must be there somewhere or else what holds all this stuff together. What keeps it from exploding like a Big Bang. The ONE is there but we can’t find it—and yet we must find it because it is our Source—because all we see are things. All our maps are useless. Maps only map things.. Who is it that is reading the map? The ONE is reading the map. You never count the ONE because the ONE is never on the map. YOU are the ONE. That’s why you can’t find the ONE (Thou Art That) on the map. You never count yourself. You can’t count yourself, because if you counted yourself then you would be something, a thing counted, and that’s not the ONE who is never counted.

Whatever level we are living on, we are still collecting the ONE. On the base level we may be collecting sexual conquests, to possess the One. On the power level, we may be collecting power. On the moral level we may be collecting converts, on the intellectual level we may be collect ideas to find the Theory that explains everything, or the ONE. On the mystical level, we may be collecting dots that connect the Soul, that realizes the Soul as the ONE. Whatever level, we are all the ONE yearning for the ONE.

But the dividing line is between collecting the ONE in order to possess the ONE, and the yearning to BE the ONE. To BE the ONE you have to let go of trying to possess the ONE…in form. The ONE is formless. In order to BE the One you have to be formless too. One must let go of the desire to possess the One, to possess God…and that is not easy. Why should I give up my desire for God, to have God? How can I give up my desire for God? Ah….here is the mystery…the nut even squirrels can’t crack.

Je Suis Hamilton

June 14, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Reflecting on this now. I listening to it on a road trip that lasted from Outer Banks to Virginia, and just remembering that brings it all back. But what stands out is the through the rap and perspective the play is alchemy in that it takes the historical story (the objective story) and through the magic of the rap as 1st person, also make the play subjective, so that you feel you are Hamilton. The metaphor is I am Hamilton; I am not Hamilton. By holding these to contradiction together as One art, the play becomes an energy generating power play that is transformative. This is the true healing of the wound of separation…through art as metaphor.

Metaphor in art creates a transcending unity that includes both 3rd person (IT) and first person (I am). This is why Joseph Campbell kept saying religion and myth are metaphor. When Jesus is seen as metaphor the 3rd person (Jesus is a historical IT) and the 1st person I am are held together as a tension that is energy generative and creative….this energy is available for the break through or realization, the energy a rocket ship needs to break free of earth gravity.

The gravity of earth (metaphor) is that everything comes in pairs of opposites and through our survival logic we have to choose from one of the two. But healing of the wound of separation of the two that can’t be One comes through the alchemical power of Metaphor that holds two contradictory but mutually dependent reality or view together. The two incompatible views or realties are 1st person and 3rd person. I am that I am is first person. Everything is an IT is third person. The metaphor transcends duality and creates a mediator the unites the two opposing points of view. So the metaphor is Hamilton is: I am Hamilton (I feel the life of Hamilton as my own life) and I am not Hamilton because he existed in another time and place. The metaphor is ambiguous;; the two that is One. You are the ONE that is both first and third person…that is both I AM as the creator of the universe, and I as an IT that is created by the universe. I am creator/created….and that is liberation from the gravity of earth.

Pride and Joy

March 29, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

What is metaphor. Why is it Alchemy. What does MacGyver have to do with it. How do you transmute base useless stuff into gold? We are all looking for the Philosophers Stone, and the metaphor, the living metaphor is it. What is the difference between a dead metaphor and a living one? Tune in to find out.