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The Terrible Accusation of Sin

October 5, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

The Culture Egg is a hologram of space/time where future holds the meaning of life. The illusion is that in future you can break out of the Culture Egg and be ffee. But Future is the creation of the Egg. Catch 22.

The Idea of Sin is a hook that does not pull us into God’s boat but into the Vicious Circle of Culture, karma and Sorrow.

My life story (since I’m 80 and have a bit of a story) is written in a decade after decade struggle to solve this question of sin. I was fortunate that my parents, namely my father, planted a strong seed of Unworthiness in me, a Sin Seed I had to get out. Like a deep weed, we spend our efforts pulling on the leaves, then the stem, but always the root seed remains to sprout again and again.

We never get to the root seed because that is the Source of Sin…and it is me. My very idea of me is this Idea of Sin that has been planted in me…but my parents who were the gardens of the culture that planted the seed in them. So I do not blame my parents, but I thank them….for if it had not been for the Seed of Sin I would not be free. Oh…Happy Fault.

We’re exploring the heavy weight of Sin (or the floating feeling of anxiety, that something is wrong with me and/or the world. As long as we are inside the Culture Egg we cannot find the cause and remove it. As Culture, as a microcosm of the macrocosm, I can’t find the cause external to me, for as Culture I am the Seed…but it has been planted in me. What is my face before my parents were born? But the blame is not on my parents because they two were just transplanting the Sin Seed in my innocent soil.

Any one who has a heartfelt longing to find this seed and pull it out, we discover the Crack in their Cosmic Egg. It will come as an Idea of Light, a revelation, a single Idea that drops into the dark cave of the mind that illuminates the whole landscape all at once. This Idea of Light can be small or large, a candle or a searchlight. The Enculturated Mind jerks to attention as if it had been confronted by death. And Light Seed has the power of death because it is death to one’s darkness in the Culture Egg that is lit by artificial light.

Once your Light Seed is planted,—if you nourish, palm it with your hands so the wind of darkness will not blow it out—more Light Seeds will come from outside the Culture Egg. The Light Seeds meld themselves together, creating a brighter light in the heart. Like a GPS Navigator you learn to follow its directions instead of the flat map in the Culture Mind.

The Light Seed directs you upstream and against the Sin Seed’s light, in the opposite direction given by the Culture Egg’s map. You are brave enough to travel alone.

Just as Theseus in the Labyrinth, you follow the thread of light out of the maize of Culture, leaving behind. your own idea of your self, the self conditioned by the Sin Seed. One goes, not so much against the river of Culture, but against the more powerful rive your own own conditioned inclinations. You begin to replace the First Responder of Culture with the First Responder of your own heart.

And this is why I ended up in Buddha Dharma. Here in this tradition I found my focus to be on my own Enculturated Mind instead of external causes. Mindfulness is the practice of making one’s subjective Idea of self objective. Awareness opens up a vast space in which the Culture Mind thinks and emotes, so you can just become aware of what you internalized Culture Egg is doing. Only in mindfulness are you free from the judgment and sin of Culture. If you can see without judgment your thoughts of being unworthy, you are not those thoughts…You are freedom itself…and in Mindfulness the Seed of Light blooms into a Lotus.

It is not easy to change our First Responder from mind/brain to heart/brain. The Culture Egg holds our mind hostage, conditioning it from birth, and it is the Knee Jerk First Responder to experience, registering everything as either something to eat or something that is gong to eat us. This is the Old Testament Judgmental God of Jehovah who punishes his disobedient children.

So it is not easy to change this first responder to Jesus or Heart as First Responder. One has to go against the Law of Culture. When free of Culture, we discover that the Law and the Heart are the same Father. “I and the Father are One,” said the Son of Man.

But in the Culture Egg it is a sin to say I and the Father are One. (Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ?) In the Culture Egg you and God are ontologically different, separated by a chasm only a god can leap. All. you can to is try your best to love God with all your heart….

Oh, wait….that is a double-binding commandment. Love is spontaneous, You can’t try to love, to be spontaneous. The only way to live in the Culture Egg is as a hypocrite.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, dharma, Eckhart Tolle, enlightenment, insight, Joseph Campbell, liberation, meditation, mindfulness, realization, transcendence, Zorba the Greek

Breaking Out is hard to do

October 4, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I find that the more I crack into this subject of breaking out, the more energy comes to my talk and they take me where I cannot predict. That is what it’s like to be outside the Culture Egg: you can’t predict the future. You have no control over the future. When you are outside the Culture Egg Life does you. Inside the Egg you do life, but who is you? The You that is inside the Egg is a mini-Egg, a mini Culture Egg. Like your smart phone (it is the internet and the internet is it) , you are the culture and the culture is you. Breaking out is hard to do.

What keeps us in the Culture Egg but Shame and Guilt that begins when we are toddlers exploring the world. We have just broken out of the Womb Egg and now we are exploring our new world womb. But Culture smacks our hand then we follow our drive to explore. DON’T TOUCH THAT! We begin to feel guilty for exploring. And most of all we fear being abandoned by the Mother if we explore and attract her anger. Shame and guilt are instilled in us, and we always feel something is missing….An emptiness that must be filled, we become consumers and buy that which is promised to fulfill us. But it never does.

We break out of the Culture Egg when extraordinary events call us out. Just heard a story from a local mother of an Uber driver in LV who answered the Call of the Wild and blew past the cops to pick up the wounded and ferry them to hospitals, calling in other Uber drivers—like the small boats in England who rescued the stranded troops from Dunkirk—to become ambulances, since the city didn’t have enough. We are all greater than we think we are, but we don’t know it until we DO our greatness, when the Culture Egg breaks open and we are called upon by the emergency of the moment.

What takes over in those moments? We don’t know. The moment does us. In the Culture Egg we are conditioned to believe we are individual doers, that we have to strive on personal will, but that will always is blunted by the Will of the Culture Egg, which is like the Las Vega casino; The House always wins.

Culture keeps our eyes on just the facts, and facts seen from inside the eggs always create a logical tape loop. The inside of the Egg has no logical end. Everything goes in a circle inside like a Dragon eating its tale. We all lose in the end as long as we stay within the Culture Egg.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: Breaking Out, Buddhism, Christ, dharma, enlightenment, insight, Joseph Campbell, liberation, Mad Men, meditation, mindfulness, Pain-body, realization, Satori, transcendence, Zen, Zorba the Greek

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.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Breaking Out, Buddhism, Call of Wild, dharma, double-bind, enlightenment, insight, jesus, Joseph Campbell, liberation, meditation, mindfulness, Pain-body, realization, Satori, transcendence, Zen, Zorba the Greek

The American Violence Delivery System

October 2, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Well, I got the most initial views on this topic than any I’ve given before. Despair is on out minds this morning as we despair over America and our insane violence. Insane random violence creates terror and dread because we can’t make it fit out map of what violence is and how we contain it. Normal violence as a motive. Most violence is family violence, or robbery violence, or justified violence, but these mass shooting are something different. They don’t fit out map. We need a bigger boat to understand Jaws.

We are looking at what a Delivery System is, and we can understand a Nicotine Delivery system, a sugar delivery system, a drug delivery system, all of which are now institutionalized in our. society. An institutions is just a bottle that attempts to capture the lightening bug of profit so that it can reproduce itself and predict the future, control the future.

But when we look at our Media, a 24/7 media, both entertainment and news, it is a delivery system whose profit is Attention. Viewers is profit. Viewers are the fuel that runs the engine. What gets attention? Emotion, emotions that appeal to an trigger the reptilian brain of survival. Media also activates the higher brain of altruism and enlightenment, but what drives the news is the Reptilian Brain of fight or flight response. That gets a revised attention, and the media gets viewers. Each channel strives to be the Number One Delivery System. So they compete in new ways to delivery their product….

Now the media is not the cause of the mass shooters, or the Terrorists (one is outside and one is inside but they are the same effect). What we are looking at is that we have created an emotional delivery system that has never existed before and it is changing us in unexpected ways, as all new inventions do. We create the system and then the system creates us.

Media violence which media reports on as if it is a bystander, is an interrelation between the camera and the event, and viewers also feed into this growing field like batteries connecting to a electromagnetic field. Every act of media violence—which includes opinion wars on Facebook—feeds the field. And like a saturated cloud of electromagnetic force, it needs to ground itself and release the pressure. At some point there is going to be a lightening strike, and the cloud feels the better for it. So the Field of Violence always feels the better when there is a mass shooting because it has let off some of its negative steam Fields of energy are not moral. They are as impersonal as a thunder cloud. It will strike anything standing up.

So could it be that we are seeing Mass Shooting as lightening strikes from the negative field of frustrated energy built up by the division in our culture? Everything that happens in the Media Field is immediately divided into a pair of opposites. Division not unity is being delivered to us on a emotional platter.

And yet there is great creativity and love and empathy when there is a violent eruption. When the lightening strikes the innocent, everyone is a first responder with prayers of compassion and help. The Field restores balance. The mass shooting renders the social fabric, a wound bleeding all over the media streets, and immediately, and proportionally, love and compassion come pouring in to heal the would. Violence and love seem to dance together.

Why do violence and creativity go hand and hand? The. 60s was the most creative and violent decade in our history, unless you go back to the Civil War. So the 60s was a kind of civil war eruption where two earth plates splits and pull apart, rubbing and jerking with the release of tension. The One is split, it tries to hold (the conservative movement), but it can’t keep control, and violence erupts, and the opposite plate also tries to restore balance. The the One splits, neither of its halves can restore unity, because each tries to do by dominating or removing its mirror reflection. The Old and the New during this transition fight to the death, but since they are mutually dependent (being the One that has no second) they cannot resolve the painful disunity through conflict. Peace comes through understanding and reconciliation, not through blame and vengeance. The One is not restore by the dragon eating its own tail.

So what can we do? We have to disconnect from and stop supporting the Negative Energy Field that deliver pain under the guise of delivering pleasure. In Buddhism pleasure always comes with hidden pain. Pleasure/pain are a single unity, but culture separates them so that we seek one while we think we are avoiding the other. But they always come together on their delivery platter. Seeing the Delivery System is seeing the illusion that pleasure and pain are separate and that we can have a world filled with only pleasure.

As long as we remain ambiguous over violence, violence will remain. The NRA uses violence to arm itself; the victims of violence use violence to disarm the NRA. Again the dragon eating its own tail. Whatever gets polarized feeds the Dragon. Hopefully, we are coming to a Turning Point where there is a Shift in the consciousness of our species/society, where enough is enough, and SNAP…a shift happened, not incrementally, but all at once, like when a person decides to become a mass shooter. SNAP! When a person chooses death over life. There must be that same SNAP when a person chooses life over death. As a society we must choose life over death…and death is division and endless conflict of a divided collective.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: American violence, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, cause of violence, cultural divide, dharma, double-bind, enlightenment, insight, Las Vegas shooting, liberation, medium is message, mindfulness, Pain-body, transcendence, Wheel of Samsara, Zen

Is Trump the New Nixon?

September 26, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

After watching Ken Burns Vietnam and the Democratic Convention chaos and the arrival or the Great Savior Nixon who would end the war and restore Law and Order I connected the dots and saw Trump. The base of both is Fear. The Cultural Egg cracked and poured out liberated souls who were experiencing reality outside the Egg for the first time. It was exhilarating. Potential was liberated. The Cultural God was dead; all things were possible…even violence as the Egg cracked down on those who would crack it.

We have to understand this conflict in American Culture between Exploration of the Unknown and the Security of the Known. These two drives are categorical imperatives. We humans have the DNA to explore the unknown, to leave the egg and make new omelettes, new recipes for living never known before. But at the same time we have to have a secure base from which to venture out. Every child must have this secure home, secure mother from which he can explore his expanding universe. And when the adolescent is ready to explore the cultural/social world, he needs a secure base in an understanding father, one who encourages his need to discover who he is as a unique individual and not just a clone of culture.

So Security is the base for new Exploration. However, When this gets turned. upside down, then Security trumps exploration; security repairs the egg from the cracks of exploration; Security punishes the chick how pecks at the egg from the inside. Fear of Exploration is fear of risk…and it is fear of freedom

The great Cultural Lie is the those who peck at the egg from the inside are against freedom. We know this is a lie because we feel it is a lie. Truth’s measure is what we feel in our hearts to be true, and the feeling of Truth is the drive to explore the Truth, to discover the Truth and not retreat and regress back into the safe and secure egg…the chick who is afraid to crack the egg. Truth has no friend in security.

Connecting 1968 crack in the Culture Egg to my own evolution, I literally dropped out of Culture’s Egg one morning/night in April of 1968. The outside world was reflected by my inside world. I went to sleep listening to J. Krishnamurti and when I woke in the morning, I had dropped out of the personality I was before I went to sleep. I looked in the mirror and broke out laughing. I recognized my true nature looking back at me. There was no image. There was no Image. Like Don Draper, I had dropped my false image of myself as a separate thing whose identity was founded in a lie, in a deception. The question Who am I was not asked.

I was in the astonishing state where I was prior to thinking and either/or choice. Like Bruce Lee I was faster than fast and fearless. One might say I was in a Samadhi state for a few weeks. All I knew was that I was Awake!

But the Egg closed back up and remained the hole. Nixon came in and restored Ego Order. Ed Conley came back but with a divine hunger to find that hole once again…but the effort to find that hole from which I had escaped my old fearful self could not be found because—and it took me decades to see this—the effort to escape the egg created the egg. I was hatching and laying the egg simultaneously.

It takes a solitary journey, alone, to discover that the Cultural Egg and your Ego (just the difference of a single letter) is a mirror reflection of each other. The fear of breaking out of Culture is the same fear of breaking out of your own Ego (of the Known). Just as there is a gravitational pull against leaving the earth, there is the same force pulling against your leaving the Culture/Ego egg. You cannot break out as a group, in a herd, in a religion, cult, ideology, or whatever group you created for security. The crack in the egg is only big enough for you alone. One is born alone….

Old Pond

Frog jumps

Plop!

We all find cracks in our Egg, maybe in a craft, a sport, sex, in some pursuit where we feel that we are fearless, where we con’t feel the constraint of judgment and objectification, where we feel no one is watching us. Culture is an implanted EYE that is always watching us from inside whispering in our eye when we peck at the egg from the inside: What Will People Think?

This Culture Eye inside always makes us check ourselves to see if we measure up, are doing it right, might make a mistake, or are not certain. The Culture Eye makes us hesitate. Who do you trust, the Culture Eye asks: ME or yourself. God or your sinful flesh. Let MY WILL be One, the Eye says. Remember, Religion, God and Culture are now One in our society.

We are deceived when we believe we are dropping out of the evil humanistic secular culture by taking refuge in religion. Religion today is a rebellious sub-culture, a rebellious son of culture who defines itself by not being culture, in the same way the GOP defined itself by not being Obama.

We can see the absurdity today when Trump attacks the NFL players for being against the Flag/God and Country. The flag of America Culture has been torn in two, with one have calming to be the whole flag. This is an obvious and self evident divisions of the Collective Mind into a good versus bad son. Trump is president of the Good Son, and he defines himself by not being the Bad Son. We will build an egg to keep the bad sons of God out.

Thank you Mr. Trump for helping us see what madness is. When you see madness, you don’t choose to be insane. When you don’t see it, you are insane.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: Buddhism, dharma, freedom, insight, Ken Burns Vietnam, liberation, Mad Men, meditation, mindfulness, Nixon, transcendence, trump, Zen, Zorba the Greek

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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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