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.