• 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 realization

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

Give up the habit of Culture

October 3, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Guns and Perps are not the cause of mass shootings. But the Gun Cult does politicize the violence of guns, using gun violence as a reason to buy more guns. How ironic. But that is not the cause. A contributing cause, but not the cause. If we knew the cause there would be no mass shootings because when you find the cause you remove it, and with the removal of the cause, you remove the effects of the cause, which is the mass shooting.

But the fact that the Mass Shooting keeps coming back means that we have not seen the Cause. And as I pointed out in this talk, the Cause is Us. These shootings are the effect of the conditions we have created as our society, conditions which we all participate in unknowingly, but feed the cause we do.

Okay, what is that “habit” we’re giving up? WE live ritualized lives, doing the same emotional habits over and over. The habit starts in the mind, in the emotional currents that like rip tides flow beneath the surface of facts and things. There keep us swirling in a vortex, always eating our own tail.

The Mass Shooting are now a cultural habit, a ritual sacrifice of the innocents that comes back at least every month. A cultural Pain Body, the shootings rise each month to feed. The ritual is the same. Surprise! I thought it was fire crackers. The the Horror, the Horror (all recored on video), then the recriminations. Who is the cause? Then the grief and the parade of innocents, all snatched by death before their time…for what? The shooter is always dead. It is revising Media, a story that dominates attention for days, going over and over the same scenes of screaming people..(thank god it wasn’t me). The ritual sacrifice is the tearing apart, and the death, and then the coming together, feeling great empathy for the victims and families, a great rush of compassion…and then the society settles back to its normal everyday violence until the next Communion with Death happens.

Our society is afraid of death. We control our life and society so that death cannot happen. If death happens we rush to find the cause and eliminate it, like we did with airplanes. This is a mechanical cause of death, which is a failure of the system. But life is not a machine, and you can’t find the single cause. We look on life as a machine, a numbers game, but now the numbers game is us. The body count keeps going up. Wow, the is the biggest mass shooting yet!

Body count was the measure of success in Vietnam. And we are still counting bodies, only now it is us.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time Tagged With: addiction, Awakening, body count, dependence, dharma, double-bind, enlightenment, fear of death, gun violence, habit of culture, Joseph Campbell, Las Vegas shooting, meditation, mindfulness, realization, Satori, transcendence, violence, Zen

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.

Filed Under: Ideas Can Create A New World Tagged With: Awakening, Basho, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhism, dharma, double-bind, Eckhart Tolle, enlightenment, jesus, Joseph Campbell, liberation, mindfulness, realization, Son of Man, Zen, Zorba the Greek

  • 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

  • God is Androgynous
  • The Zen of Jesus
  • Three weddings, one marriage
  • Pride and Joy

Subscribe to My Blog via Email

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

Join 66 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 © 2021 · Lifestyle Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in