• Home
  • About
  • The Minotaur Myth

  • Zen Fits
  • It’s Martini Time
  • Reflections on Eckhart Tolle
  • Buddhas in your Landfill
You are here: Home / Archives for holy grail

Discover your Source upstream

September 28, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Movies, great movies a metaphorical maps to the internal search for Source, or Who am I? In our materialistic culture everything is an IT, an object, a thing with qualities; that’s why if you can’t measure something, if it has no time and place, it doesn’t exist. This assumption comes from our grammar that sees everything as a subject doing something to an object. The Subject is Me as an object doing something (a verb) to another thing. Noun, verb, noun.; everything is a thing doing something to other things.

But when I ask in my heart, Who am I? Being a thing defined by others or even myself does not satisfy that question. Either others define me—and that’s no good—or I define myself—and that’s no good. When I am defined, either by others or myself I have boundaries and I’m separate by definition from other defines things. This is a static world. This is a created world. This is a world that is not changing. As a thing I am the created. As a thing I am a victim of who or what that defines me. As the created….I cannot answer the question Who am I? because the answer is in the dictionary of Culture. There in the Book of Culture I am defines and my profile is listed. There is something inside that screams NO! I will not be pined to the wall like a butterfly in Culture’s Laboratory.

The Great Quest is then upstream of Culture, to find the source not only of Culture by of my self. There is only One Source. There can’t be two sources for Culture and for me. I am a part of culture. My ego is kept in place by culture. I am part of the grid. All my values have value in my culture or subculture. I am culture and culture is me. So there can be only one Source for culture and me. The Source is upstream of Culture and Me.

I have to swim again the current of culture. Like a salmon I have to swim upstream to return to the Source. This is not easy because you have to swim against the stream of What Will People Think?

Like in Apocalypse Now, Willard had a single minded intention to accomplish his mission, to get to the source. Though all the psychic dramas his single minded intention kept him going. And this is the only thing that will take us to our Source, a single minded intention that doesn’t waver or get sidetracked by culture, which is going to be hell bent to keep you from finding the source of Culture. Culture is a worldview that does not allow doubt. You can do anything you want as long as. you stay within culture and the choices if offers, but you cannot question the fundamental assumptions of Culture itself.

And this is not easy because to question the assumptions that hold Culture together you have to question the assumptions that hold you together.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Apocalypse Now, Buddhism, dharma, enlightenment, holy grail, Joseph Campbell, Mad Men, mindfulness, realization, transcendence, Zen

Enter the Heart of Darkness

September 27, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Tiger, Tiger burning bright, William Blake’s poem, focuses my attention this morning as I connected the dots between the Tiger leaping out of the jungle in Apocalypse Now and out of my office window as the morning sun hit my stained glass tiger. And the end of the movie when Co. Kurtz (played by Brando) says you can kill me but don’t judge me. And earlier he said that it is “judgment that defeats us.” He described this Snap realization as a “diamond bullet” between the eyes.

Why does judgment defeat us? Judgment divides reality into the good and the bad, into the I and the IT. We went to Vietnam to judge the people as gooks and kill them, as all ITs look the same. Taking my lead from the Tiger I post his poem.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

___________

Let the video journal of Captain. Willard speak for us.

I am going crazy I Saigon. I need a mission. When I am home I wish I was here; when I am here I wish I was home. I am wounded. I need a mission. Everything is upside down.

I am given a mission. Kill a man who thinks he is god. Our little boat heads upstream through Dante’s Inferno of one mad scene after another. One of crew is killed by an primitive spear. In the primeval forest we meet the Tiger. We are getting closer. He was real close. I want to confront him.

As I go keeping into the jungle, the forests of the night, approaching the headwaters of my own being, is that a Buddha ahead? What is my mission? If I see the Buddha, do I kill him? Going up river no one is in charge any more. I must confront “him.”

We pass through some boats full of people who look like zombies, all white in death ash, they part and let us through. I pass a sign: MOTTO APOCALYPSE NOW.

I enter his cave. I meet him shaded in shadow like a god, his hands in a helmet of water like a baptismal, and his head a white skull. Have I met Death itself, the God of Death? There are no methods here at all. He looks at me and says “I’m just an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.” He is in a place far from civilization and the known world.

He knew more about me than I did. Then he said to make friends with horror, with Death. He talked about the. Stench of Lies. He put me in a bamboo cages and then appeared in the night, large and painted, and threw the head one of my crew in my lap. I lost it! I met the horror!

Then he let me out and some women fed me and gave me drink. I knew I could complete my mission now and kill this god. Out of the river I came, born again like a Baptist, single minded. I was where I belonged. As I killed him the tribal people were sacrificing a bull, and the colonel and the bull died together…whispering the Horror…the horror.

I emerged from his cave, Buddha faces rising in my mind, and his people dropped their weapons when I dropped my knife. They would have bowed and worshiped me, but I walked through them and went back down the river from whence I came.

I leave this story for you. Do not judge.

Continuing my journey upstream of culture and Ego (they dance together), I explore Apocalypse Now. What did Col Kurtz discover, what horror did he discover? This is the question that pulled Willard upstream on this single minded mission. The cannot help but see this forgotten Buddhist temple in Cambodia with his gigantic Buddha faces intermingled in the scenes as a clue to the spiritual journey that goes upstream to the headwaters of our own culture/ego insulated egg, a bubble through which we interact with the world, an I safely inside with the IT outside. And judgment is our shell.

Kurtz wants men who are moral but who kill without flinching, like a tiger. The great impersonal face of the Buddha looks down. Were the American there moral? They certainly killed without flinching. But were they moral? What does moral mean here? Is the Tiger moral? Does moral means being an integral part of the whole, both the part and the whole as the Good. Judgment divides the whole into separate parts that are good and bad. Judgment and morality then are not compatible, if morality is the integration of all parts with the whole, if morality does not divide. A moral act then transcends the relative morality created by judgment.

What the Americans are doing from their moral viewpoint is Good. What their enemy does is bad. But from the viewpoint of the movie this morality is in question. Vietnam in our history was when we began to question the morality of America and its government.

But everything can and must be reduced to my everyday mind. Even here there is the heart of darkness that divides what I do from what I think, and I think I’m doing good, but from a wider view, I’m doing bad. There is always a SNAP! when these two divergent views comes together into one Gestalt. We always avoid this SNAP, this Satori when we see the polarity Zen Koan all at once. Polarity ends with a SNAP!, not gradually, but with a body shacking SNAP…a waking up that is sudden, an expected, yet strangely suspected, surprise.

Only the wide angle lens can question the morality of the narrow focused lens. Apocalypse Now questions not only the morality of the Vietnam War, and not only war itself, but civilization, our civilization. What is morality but the search for the ultimate Good, the headwaters of consciousness itself. If our Source is Good, the we must go upstream to our source to find our true nature. If you Source is not the Good, then don’t bother. If our Source is not Good, then suicide is the only logical answer. Better the earth be rid of us. But…wait…is not my source the same source as the earth? if the earth is Good, then so am I.

But since we are killing the earth, maybe we don’t believe our Source the earth is good, and so we don’t see the good in each of us. What is this misperception…but our civilization, our Culture of division and self loathing. Each of us then must set out on our spiritual quest into the Heart of Darkness to find through that darkness the Source of our Goodness or Light.

I must read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness now (I may have read it years ago but there are dots to be connected). This journey into the Heart of Africa goes back to my boyhood when I was fascinated with the unknown and unexplored center of Africa that was a blank space on the National Geographic maps I had on my wall. I wanted to explore that heart.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: Apocalypse Now, Awakening, Buddhism, enlightenment, Heart of Darkness, holy grail, Joseph Campbell, journey of the hero, Ken Burns Vietnam, liberation, spiritual quest, transcendence

It’s Time to Wake up Now!

September 25, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Well, I didn’t talk about movies, but I did talk about waking up to the conditioning of Culture. And movie are wake up stories, but I forgot to talk about that. What I did talk about was awaking curiosity as to why we are divided and dissatisfied, and why we are not in synchronicity with the external world. When synchronicity happens, we think it is a miracle. No, that is the way life is supposed to be; you are supposed to be in harmony with nature and the world, other people and your own experience. Division does not exist in nature. It exists only in Culture as an overlay that we mistake for reality. We believe the menu is the meal, the map is the terrain.

So this talk was intended to arouse your curiosity. Am I dreaming the dream of Culture, mesmerized by TV and internet, entranced by the dancing forms of culture on media that defines the reality I’m to believe in and then live in, my belief actually creating the reality I perceive. We should be curious about that.

But to say something about movies which my intention before my tongue took me in a different direction. Movies are Art, and Art has the purpose of waking us up to a wider experience of ourselves in the world. Art is Metaphor. Art has two. fingers; one points to the form of the art, the other finger points to your heart, hoping to get past your defense mechanism built by current culture. Culture doesn’t want you to wake up and leave it. Culture is like a doctor who won’t cure. you because he wants you to be his patient, or a spiritual teachers who promises to take you to the other shore, but never lets you off the boat.

The Game of Culture is to keep you as one of its cells. If the cells revolt against the body the body dies. But the great illusion of culture is that your revolt against culture is still within culture. Nothing changes. Culture doesn’t care if you obey or revolt, if you vote for security or change; either way you are still in culture. We need a bigger boat.

Culture is about shaking the Snow Globe to make the mind clear. Spiritual practice, Buddhism, is about discovering that you don’t need to shake the mind/culture in order to restore clarity.

Waking up begins at home. Waking up doesn’t begin in the big issues, deciding who is wrong and who is right, taking sides, creating a position, joining a movement. All this is fine, but it has nothing to do with waking up. Waking up is like the snow globe become clear when you stop shaking it to wake up.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Buddhism, dharma, Eckhart Tolle, Ground Hog Day, holy grail, jesus, Joseph Campbell, liberation, meditation, mindfulness, realization, Satori, wake up, Zorba the Greek

The Great Wound of 1968

September 25, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I hope you follow the trail of our break or wound in American Culture or Collective as we use Ken Burns Vietnam as our breadcrumbs. If we want to find out where America’s blood is coming from, we have find the wound and go into it. Only by looking at the wound directly without a sheet over it can we cauterize the wound. But the wound is not just in Culture, just in the past in 1968, but it is in each of us right now. This is a living breathing wound.

And the drops of blood are all over our Culture Media which is our collective body now. Media is the reality field where we all live now, the greater world were we are all connected. No longer do we live in isolated small towns. No longer do we live in a passive print world and passive TV were we just consume commandments through advertising and the information given by culture passively, spoon feed by the parent culture. Now we the people have grown up and we interact with the parent culture, and we are discovering that we can change its course by the chorus of our voices on social media.

1968 was a cataclysmic revolt of the children against the Parent children, as least half the children. The War is not right, you lied said half the children; the war is right and its your duty to die, said the other half. Our fathers sacrificed themselves in WWII and now its your turn to die for culture…No..no..I don’t want to go. It doesn’t feel right.

Since when did FEELINGS trump duty? Since when did FEELINGS trumps authority? Since when did FEELINGS trump what’s right and wrong according to the Parent Culture?

But FEELINGS are uniquely ME! If it doesn’t feel right and I’m forced to do it, I get split into two conflicting halves. And so the head (culture) was split from the Heart (my unique Me). The whole and the parts were at war. The good of the individual was in conflict with the good of the whole. Two goods were now at war, and both were right.

The parents (father culture and mother body) of the Culture Child were getting a divorce.

So Wonder Woman was called up from the unconscious and sent into action to restore balance between Mommy and Daddy. All Daddy and his sons did was create and fight wars. All over Facebook the opinions shoot at each other. Sacrifice gave them purpose and got Daddy’s approval.

Mommy kept screaming: why does my son have to die? Can’t we all get along?

So why did mommy and daddy get a divorce, the Cultural Child asked in bewilderment. When I lived with Mommy in the House Culture it was a friendly world. But when I left Mommy and went to live with Daddy in the Big World, it was a hostile world that wanted to kill me. Why can’t the inner and outer worlds get along the way they are supposed to be, the way they are promised to be by nature itself. It hurst so bad when Mommy and Daddy get divorced.

The Republicans began to represent and speak for Daddy and Big Culture, while the Democrats spokes for the fragmented children of culture, all the pieces that didn’t fit Daddy’s world. You were patriotic and a good son if you obeyed Daddy, and you were a rebellious son if you obeyed Mommy. Father knows best, and mommy’s a mess.

But the division in Culture got politicized into a movement, Movement Conservatism they called it. As long as you don’t work with the other side, in fact you can even demonize them, you can define yourself as the righteous side, and as the Sons of Light you can keep the Sons of Darkness out. People will vote for light. Conservative means Father and Masculine and strength; Liberal means Mother, feminines and weak. You want to vote for strength, don’t you. After 1968 Nixon was the First Responder with Law and Order and a promise to bring order to the obvious chaos created by these Mommy sons.

Republicans stood for one thing; Democrats stood for many things…too confusion. Law and Order trumps exploration. Obedience trumps freedom to question.

For the few that want to find the real Holy Grail that heals this wound that won’t heal, they have to go into Culture as themselves, to trace it so the root, to follow it to the ends of the known earth, to chase it down in everyday mind, in the trivial and mundane, for the roots to this Great Wound are in the insignificant, the superficial that we pass over on the hunt for bigger things. We must come to the terrible realization: I am the wound and the wound is me. There is no exit. To be human is to be wounded. And yet, it is through this cross that we are resurrected….not in time, not tomorrow or after death but right now.

If you notice in this picture, the wound is the feminine principle. It is through this wound that we are reborn.

1968 is the Great Wound and it is through this wound opened up by Ken Burns that we must go in order to recreate America, to give birth to a new America. The Cultural Womb in which we now live is divided against itself. Everything we touch comes divided into war against itself. We cannot heal ourselves while inside the womb of division, because everything we see and do comes divided.

We have to see our Cultural Womb from the outside, outsides our selves even because we believe our self is outside the womb while it is inside the womb. That is the great deception of Culture of Division, to believe that you are outside what. you are inside, to believe you are innocent of the guilt of the wound. The glue of culture is the guilt from creating and believing in Culture as the ultimate reality. Culture is an abstract world, a mirror world of reality, the the way we experience reality is through the filter of culture and guilt.

While Ken Burns Vietnam is documentary history, it is also metaphor in that while it points to history, the other finger points to each of us, the microcosm of the macrocosm. So without, so within. Culture is as collective body or organism where each cell, you and me, contains the whole DNA of the greater body. Water any one of us and the whole culture will blossom like a flower. The way to explore Culture is through our own everyday mind. It is only here that we can make the subjective implant of culture objective.

The operating system of culture is through the grammar of Subject (noun), verb (action) and Object (noun). Everything comes divided into this formula. The subject is the object and the object is the subject in the field of culture. This grammar logos is culture. But we are decided to believe that our subject is outside of the object (culture). Our mind (culture) is both subject having a conversation with objects. Both are the same mental process.

How do I explore the culture within? Through my fingers, through my body because my mind is secondary, that train behind the engine, so to speak. The engine, which is upstream of mind or consciousness, leads me along the track of my writing. Who am I to tell my fingers what to say. I let my heart/body lead the way.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Christ, dharma, Eckhart Tolle, holy grail, Joseph Campbell, Ken Burns Vietnam, meditation, mindfulness, Swami Muktananda, transcendence, Zen

The Generator that won’t run out of gas

September 17, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I changed the name of this talk as I began and ended with my Honda generator running in back to burn up all the old gas. How long will it run. And that reminded me of the Seinfeld skit where Kramer tries to run a dealer car on empty. The Quest of Eternal Youth or the Inexhaustible Source of Energy begins even in Genesis when God blocks the True of Life from man with the Cherubim. There is always a dragon guarding the cave where the gold is hidden. And even gold is a symbol of the Sun, the inexhaustible source of energy and life. So where is it?

Our Western Culture has been very successful in creating alternative sources of energy, but they have side effects, as we are discovering now. Every proxy source of this Fountain has negative side-effect. We are always looking for the Source in the wrong place.

If we say the Source is God, we are still looking in the wrong place because now we are looking ini the Idea of God. When an IDEA become the source of your energy, then you have to keep feeding this Idea with your energy. You are the source of energy for the Idea that gives you energy, and eventually you are going to run out of gas. There is a sacrifice here when we invest in an Idea or anything for that matter as our Source of Energy. We are looking for the Source out there…in form..in the world…in things.

The Source of your energy is not out there. You are the Source of You. But in order to find that Source you have to give yourself away. How long can you run with the gas needle on Empty? What keeps the gas tank filling up as you empty it. The Conservative will never know.

What keeps your well filling up as you continue to pump it dry? How can you find out? Is there an experiment of manual for this? Try this to see if it works. You see what’s missing with this question: Will this work? I want some guarantee. I want some insurance because I am not totally ready to give it all up. I’ve got to keep something in reserve, some left over on the plate. What is that trace I hold back? It’s the thought of Me.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: fountain of youth, holy grail, inexhaustible energy, Seinfeld out of gas, Tree of Life

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »

Ed is a Zen Writer and story teller who finds insights in the truth of his life in everyday mind and events. Learn more

Live without future

Search

Connect to my Facebook Pages

Archives

Top Posts & Pages

  • The Minotaur Myth
  • Pride and Joy
  • Scratches on the Wall
  • The Silent Scream of FB Jail
  • The Search for Noah
  • The Scent of Baba Muktananda
  • God is Androgynous

Subscribe to My Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 68 other subscribers

Awaken Insight Meditation

AIM is a website where I share my Dharma Insights in my everyday mind. My daily experiences are metaphors that point to the Truth that is One. Paths are many, but the Dharma is One. I invite you to walk with me on my journey. I also invite you to enter into creative dialogue with the post, for then we push it forward and get some traction in our life.

The Minotaur Myth

Copyright © 2022 · Lifestyle Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in