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 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.

The Son of Man has no place to rest his head

October 1, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

The Son of Man has no place to rest his head….which I tie to Zen Prajna, the aroused mind that does not rest on form. Which ties back to Irony, which is the realization that the form of the known you are resting on is going in a tape loop. HAH! The Zen Koan is broken. That’s freedom.

If we cannot see irony, we can’t see, period. . Irony is the portal to greater understanding that comes from the unknown or Field of Potential Knowledge. For the ancient Hebrews. God is ironic. That’s why Jews make great comics. Comedy is irony. irony is the double-bind where you ultimately become trapped in a lose/lose feed-back-loop. It is through SEEING the irony in our life—through seeing our incessant attempts to break out of our closed mind and always failing— that we Break Out.

This breaking out if Freedom; it is the Christ function or the Zen function. “The Son of Man has no place to rest his head” is an ironic statement. Whenever you think you have it (when you can rest your mind) you doIf we cannot see irony, we can’t see, period. . Irony is the portal to greater understanding that comes from the unknown or Field of Potential Knowledge. For the ancient Hebrews. God is ironic. That’s why Jews make great comics. Comedy is irony. irony is the double-bind where you ultimately become trapped in a lose/lose feed-back-loop. It is through SEEING the irony in our life—through seeing our incessant attempts to break out of our closed mind and always failing— that we Break Out. This breaking out is the Christ function or the Zen function. “The Son of Man has no place to rest his head” is an ironic statement. Whenever you think you have it (when you can rest your mind) you do.

Free Will then is the freedom of the Cosmos itself it create itself out of itself. When we identify with form and personal will, we close our system and it turns back upon itself in irony. Seeing is a function of freedom. Seeing is a dynamic interplay and unity between the created (cause and effect me as form) and the creator or universal that is an empt field of potential.

We are trapped in the unseen irony where we perceive ourselves as the created and some other force, God or the world or Satan or the Government or Obama creating us and taking away out freedom or giving it to us. Either way, we are the passive victim, the created. But in truth we are the creator/created. We interact with the Cosmos or God to create the world we live in, either as a dynamic coherent world of wonder and adventure or a dismal closed world that continually disappoints us. Either way, we are creating the universe we live in. So, I say, why not enjoy it!

We’re looking (or at least I’m looking) at Jesus as not only a form in time/space but as a function, an entry into our potential, and potential is something that has no existed before, so when it comes to activating one’s potential there is no reference to your past or the known, or to history and cause and effect. Jesus as Son of Man is then not a form that is known, but a verb that creates new form. Jesus is a Breaking Out from the known, from your history, into a bravo new way of being that cannot be known before you jump into it. Therefore, faith is the only way to leap from the diving board of the known—and faith means there is no certainty there is any water in the pool. The pool into which you leap is the unknown, and that’s what our potential is, the Unknown.

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.

Ride the Bike of Life

June 12, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Today’s Eckhart Tolle quote for our meditation: “Not all unhappiness is of the pain-body. Some of it is new unhappiness, created. whenever you are out of alignment with the present moment, when the Now is denied in one way of another.”

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Okay, leaving the “pain-body” aside for another day, lets talk about alignment with the Now. Zen calls the Now Dharma, of you could say the Tao, or if a Star Wars fan, the Force. All religions has their own word for it. Obeying God’s Word is close for me if I understand the Word as this Creative Present Moment. The Cosmos or God is speaking me as the Word. And when I’m in alignment with the Now, Dharma, the Tao, or God (in this sense) the Now is speaking me.

You are in alignment with something when you ARE that something, In order to understand Tolle and non-dual wisdom we have to get past the idea that everything is dual…we have to transcend the dual in order to Speak the One, to be the Word.

We know our bike is out of alignment when there is a wobble. We get the wobble fixed. I know I’m out of alignment with the Present Moment or Now when I have a negative rub. The pain of a wobble is my clue that I’m out of alignment with Life. I must be curious about that rub, like I’m curious when the wheel of my bike or car has a wobble. When my car has a wobble I don’t blame the car in front of me. I don’t blame the people on the street. And if I’m on a flat road, I don’t blame the road. And if the wobble just appears, I don’t blame the car maker, unless I find that he intentionally built the wobble into the car. Nature does not build wobbles into the cosmos. When a wobble appears in nature, nature restores balance or unity. Alignment and Unity are the same.

So Jesus says I and the Father are One. No wobbles. Now is the Father. some old guy in the sky, or is the Father a metaphor for the Now, the Dharma or the Word. If the Father is God immanent as the Present Moment, then why do I have wobbles? Ah…here’s the real rub.

We cannot be conscious of the Present Moment as form, but we think we are. Therefore, the forms or the Now that we get in alignment with has already passed. By the trick of our consciousness we are always trying to balance or. get in unity with (which is balance) the objects of our consciousness. Now this is the key. All is change. All is I permanent, says the Buddha, which is the same thing. There are no things that change. Things ARE change.

As in quantum mechanics, electrons, sub-atomic particles are waves as well as particles (things). Waves are not things. A wave is a field of energy. How can you get in alignment with a wave? A surfer knows. A mountain biker knows. And we know if we look in a different way.

When we learn how to balance on a bike, we do not balance on what we are conscious of because when you are moving, if you balance on the moment of form that is what we are conscious of, that moment is moving under us. The trial and error of learning to balance is to balance on the moment that is upstream of Now, that is transcendent of Now. The Now, the Word is transcendent of experience because conscious experience has already passed when we experience it. The Now is not going to stand still.

Balance is a surrender. One surrenders to balance. One lets go of clinging to form that is conscious in order to balance. This is Zen. This is mysticism. This is creativity. The Creative Act is an aspect of balance that restores unity through transcendence, or the creation of a new single Idea or form that restores balance and removes the wobble.