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You are here: Home / Archives for Joseph Campbell

Avatar and Titanic Creative Mythology

August 9, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

If you love Avatar and Titanic, these to movies by James Cameron (JC) are creative mythology as described by Joseph Campbell (JC). These are golden threads by Ariadne (the Goddess) that can lead us out of the womb or labyrinth of the modern I-IT world to our true Center that is both within and without. 

VIEW TALK HERE
That’s why we can’t find out center because it is neither IN or Without. In our I-IT mind, our center has to be IN or OUT because IT has to be an IT somewhere. But our Center is not an IT, so it has no location is space/time. It is the Center of Space/Time. It has no name. It is your face before your parents (I-IT) were born. To find it one has to be able to read the mythic maps, which are our movies now, since we have erased with our rational empirical mind all traces of the ancient myths that used to lead man out of the labyrinth of the world. 

The Philosopher’s Stone is Metaphor. Metaphor is the coded language of the treasure map. Indiana Jones knows how to read this map. The ITS of the world are metaphors that point to you as the Center where you and the world are ONE, the two that is ONE. You as an IT and the world as ITS are the ONE that has no second IT. YOU ARE IT!

Why can’t we see metaphor today? Why is everything an IT? Our logic fails us, the Classical logic of Aristotle, the Law of Identity that is the foundation of science. A cannot be A and B both at the same time. The I-IT consciousness is fundamentally a dual Operating System. Everything comes in two like on Noah’s Ark. (See the metaphor there?) Noah’s ark is the modern world where everything comes in pairs-of-opposits. Yahweh created it because he himself is an I-IT mind, a god separated from his creation as ITS. We are made in that image and we suffer because we have lost out True Center. In order to find our True Center, the center of our world, we have to let go of the idea or belief that we are created, that we are just ITS, things that are created, by either Yahweh or the Big Bang, Either way you are still a created thing, an IT without a true home at the center. 

We can read metaphors as a finger points to our true center because we read them with the I-IT mind. We are not on the map we are reading. We are the Reader of the Map looking for ourself as the Reader on the Map we are reading. No wonder we can’t find out who we are. We are not on the map!

Filed Under: Buddhas in your Landfill Tagged With: Avatar, James Cameron, Joseph Campbell, Paradise Lost, Search for Center, Titantic

The Las Vegas Shooting as Field Effect

October 6, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

This was an interesting talk because we are stepping beyond with media news concludes is the cause or absence of cause in the Las Vegas Shooting. Since there in no obvious cause to the shooters action, we need a bigger boat. The media is frustrated because they can’t fit him into the usual suspects, i.e. ISIS, father hatred, work frustration, racism, Trump, Obama, etc, so like the obelisk in Space Odyssey: 2001, this “obelisk” has no reference to the known world.

We also noted that the Obelisk in Space Odyssey was a metaphor or symbol in the movie for that trigger the activates the evolution of human consciousness. When we encounter an unknown, something that has no reference to the known, we either discount it, ignore it, miss perceive it, or we make the leap in consciousness to a greater reality map, one that includes the “obelisk.” Is the Las Vegas Shooter the Obelisk in our Space Odyssey?

Do we need a bigger boat to understand this Jaws rising up from the depths of the American Psyche as Death itself, as this horrible monster that is us. This is not a human problem, referencing the evil nature of man, so that Original Sin explains everything. This is an American problem that is unique to America. Just referencing to the idea of Evil does not expand consciousness.

We are all the Las Vegas Shooter, since we all participate in and create the American Culture of Violence in which the Shooter is the effect. Anger and its child violence grows in our frustration to find the cause of the violence. As always, when we can’t find the Usual Suspect, we look for the wrong suspects, blaming everyone and anything that comes into view. We even make political systems out of blame the wrong suspect, which perpetuate the anger at not being able to find the Real Suspect….because it is us.

Violence begins at home, right here on Facebook, if you want to look. Not in the other post but in our own, when we dig in out position and mount our machine guns at the other’s position. Right there in our Opinion Wars we have the root cause of the Las Vegas Shooter. We are participating in the America Field of Violence. Like an artist who creates the art and is then created by his art, we created the field and then the field creates us in an interactive dance of the creator and the created.

Lets keep kicking this can. The fundamental assumption that creates the Violence Field in our everyday lives and collective life is that culturally implanted Idea that we are the Created and that some external force causes us to move, whether that cause is in the external world or in our past traumas makes no difference. We believe we are the Determined. Mecahnistic science from Newton on believes that for anything to move an external force is necessary. So what is the external force that caused the Las Vegas Shooter? What created him? What caused him?

The Bigger Boat understanding and knowledge—the knowledge of Knowing not believing—is that we are each the creator/created, a player in a dynamic Unity. We simultaneously create and are being created by the world. Steve Jobs created the Apple World, and we participate in its creation while it creates us in unsuspected ways. Creativity is always a surprise because it is not completely caused by the known. Creativity is a mix of the known and the unknown, a discovery cocktail. Creativity is revelation.

Is the Las Vegas shooting creative? Or is it violence. It is creative violence. The shooter created the shooting as the biggest one yet, with the biggest body count, and without reference to the known narratives that explain through known categories the cause of the shooting. This LV Shooter leaped beyond the pale, beyond the known. We need a bigger boat to understand this Jaws rising up out of the American Unconscious.

The Las Vegan Shooting was a Field Effect. The tension of anger, outrage, and violent confrontation in the American Collective when reaching a saturation point but realize its pent up energy through the lightening strike of random violence. When a lighting bolt hits an object it appears to be random, but there is a build up of energy on the ground that attracts the build up in the field. BAM! The lightening bolt strikes to reales the energy on both sides.

But the Strike itself creates division and violence in the field as it struggle to align separate meanings to the Strike from the existing maps of reality. In our effort to find meaning, we lose meaning. We need a bigger boat. America, each one of us has to create out way out of the double-bind, this lose/lose pattern that keeps repeating itself, with each repetition getting more violent.

We are chasing our own tail. And caught in this feed back loop of a Collective Mind chasing itself, the energy increases like a hurricane over warmer waters. What are the warm waters? Perhaps it is the Media itself, for if you want to understand what the new conditions are in American Culture that has never existed before, it’s 24/7 commenting news, which is itself divided into two competing narrative. Everything the Media as a force field touches is divided. Just as everything Trump touches divided into two conflicting halves, into the dragon eating its own tail.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: American violence, Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Culture War, double-bind, evolution of consciousness, field effect, gun violence, Joseph Campbell, Las Vegas shooting, liberation, meditation, Space Odyssey: 2001, the unknown, transcendence, Zen

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.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, Christ, dharma, double-bind, enlightenment, jesus, Joseph Campbell, transcendence, Zen

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

The Toxicity of American Culture

October 5, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

The point of this talk is that we all contribute to the toxicity of the American Culture in which we swim. Each of us can’t change the bowl and the water, but we can change the toxicity in us. Each of us is Culture and Culture is us. If we each see and remove the toxicity in us, then eventually the water of the American Culture will clear. There has to be a shift in the consciousness of America as a collective, at least a shift in enough to shift the direction we are going.


American Culture is like a Cruise Ship. You can’t change the course of the Titanic on a dime. Course change is slow, but if the majority on board want an immediate course change, the American Culture can shift directions abruptly. We are the ship and the ship is us. There is no one steering the ship but us. But it is our collective intention or blindness that is steering the ship. When we have enough pain, when we have enough of pain, then a shift occurs. That’s what having enough means.

Our individual lives and our collective live is the same. Using the analogy of the smart phone, each of us is America (internet) and America is us (the individual smart phone). We are an interactive relationship, a dynamic unity. When enough of us shift, the whole internet shifts.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: American culture, Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, double-bind, Joseph Campbell, Ken Burns Vietnam, liberation, Mad Men, transcendence, 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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