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.

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 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.

Th Healing Wound of Vietnam

September 30, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Well, we got down to the wound, didn’t we. The Wound that doesn’t heal is what Eckhart Tolle called the Pain Body. It rises when hungry, when conditions are fight to feed on…us…then, sated, it returns beneath the surface of consciousness, and we wonder what just happened. We all know this experience. We’re at the dinner table enjoying our dinner, and something is triggers, someone steps on a land mind, and the table explodes in anger. What was that? Even when we walk gingerly through conversations, we can still step on a Pain Body Mine. We all have friends and family where we have to walk carefully. That is the wound that has not healed.

And so in a wide angle lens Ken Burns Vietnam is a healing of the Collective Pain Body that is Vietnam. We see both sides objectively and subjectively. There is no judgment in the presentation. There is no presumption of guilt. Both sides are guilty and both sides are innocent. We create the wound when we separate innocence from guilt: I’m innocent and you are guilty! Healing comes when we realize in our tears, in our human heart felt tears, that we are all innocent/guilty. That’s what it means to be human.

It is in this realization through suffering that gives us our humanity and our transcendence of our humanity, Through compassion, which is the healing of the separation, we transcend culture. Okay, get ready for a leap now.

Culture is a semantic language reality that intervenes between our heart and the ground of reality, and we are obliged to identity with it. Culture is human society maintained by our collective memory. It is vital. Otherwise every one of us would have to start from scratch in a cave with the discovery of fire.

So Culture isn’t bad. We can’t live without it. We are culture and culture is us. Our Ego is a microcosm of the macrocosm. We think we are a separate individual consciousness that is outside of culture able to judge it, attack it, or obey it (hence the. split in Patriotism ). America splits into the Good Son versus the Bad Son (but each son is good/bad.)

Healing restores unity. Healing restores unity between the mind (that sees everything as two) and the heart that sees only One.

The Phantom of the Opera is you

July 15, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Oh, Wow…last night Friday movie was Phantom of the Opera, and the “music of the night” has replaced the Night and Day of Cole Porter. The movie. reminded me of the Life of Pi. Now, how did I make that connection? Remember the monkey that began and ended the Phantom, the animated monkey that clasped two cymbals together, that was retrieved at an auction of the Opera. I thought that was significant because you have to put opposites together in order to get a sound of meaning out of this art.

As metaphor the Opera has as many levels of meaning you care to peel. I won’t attempt to cover them all, even if I knew them. So what I’m focusing on is the juxtaposition of the flat and the vertical. The movie begins and ends in the everyday real flatland. But the interior of the movie, when it breaks into living color is vertical. Instead of running on a horizontal time line, it drops us into the timeless subjective interior of our own psyche. The black and white flat line is in time, the Opera is in a timeless zone. Here we encounter through the medium of the Opera our own heart felt longings and fears. Here we encounter our own buried Pain Body and self loathing, and here we hear the enhancing Music of the Night.

The black and white exterior is visual; the interior is a felt reality. Here the Phantom and I are One. The two antagonists, the lover and the Phantom are two aspects of my own personality. And the “princess” is my Soul. But why did it remind of of the Life of Pi?

Life of Pi is about a horizontal and vertical reality—the Cross if you want to leap—and the boy and the cook is the black and white horizontal external reality while the boy and the Tiger is the deep dream interior, like the interior of Alice and Wonderland. The interior is felt and looks like a dream. The exterior is rational, logical and collective. We all see the same reality here, or at least we agree to see the same reality.

But the interior is always unexplored, and the only guide is art and metaphor. The law here is ambiguity. Logic is no guide in the interior. We have to connect the dots, put the two symbols together to strike a note of realization. The interior is a tale told by a monkey. In the dream or interior, you play all the characters at the same time: the One that is many.

And this is the law of the flatland…here too we are playing all the characters, the One as the many but we believe we are just a one among many and everything is separated and alone…a place where being alone is self loathing, and we wear a mask to hide out pain in the labyrinth beneath the Opera.

The paradigm shift, the transubstantiation, the Alchemy of the movies happens when you make the shift from Third Person (the movie is an IT) to First Person. I am this movie, all of the characters are me. Je Suis Phantom. I see my self-loathing and it is me…for in the seeing I am whole and no longer loaded. It is only in the refusal to see myself that I loathe to see myself.

But am I good or bad, ugly or beautiful? No…I am ambiguous. That is the message of the Opera. You are Night and Day..You are the One….you see you are above and below, night and day, joy and sorrow, innocent and guilty….all in One. THAT is what we cannot in our logical day mind accept. Everyday mind is a choosing mind. You have to choose one or the other. You can’t have your cake and eat it too….so you are either beautiful or ugly…but you can’t be beautiful/ugly.

But that is the message of the Phantom of the Opera. You must put your inconsistencies of the lower nature together with your higher (everyday) nature as One. One rose both thorns and petals. “Night and Day, you are the One”..(oh, Cole Porter songs are fighting with the music of the night.

But here we are: Beautiful and ugly, you are the One. But this is not a third person IT realization. No…this is a First Person realization. I am the One.

I am not good or bad, ugly or beautiful. I am good/bad; ugly/beautiful. I transcend these pairs of opposites, but in my transcendence I don’t leave them behind, I includes them in my new identity which is not an identity. I am free from identity of being either good or bad. I transcend Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden…In myself I unify the whole world. Night and Day..I am the One.

You see..this is a paradigm shift from time to timeless, from horizontal to vertical…In the cross the horizontal and the vertical are One.

Breaking Out is hard to do

The Call of the Wild

The American Violence Delivery System

Th Healing Wound of Vietnam

The Phantom of the Opera is you

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