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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 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

Mona Lisa Smile with Julia Roberts

October 1, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Okay, a good talk because it asks questions that go right to the heart of our everyday lives. If. question doesn’t go there, it is not worth asking. But most people don’t ask questions that go there because it creates disturbance in the field. We pull back into conformity and don’t agitate our heart, we don’t disturb our soul. We don’t want to know who I am.

And so we sleep, content to fight superficial cultural wars. We shy away from heartfelt questions. The questions Who am I is a direct route to Virtue.Virtue is integrity, wholeness, authenticity, true nature….yes, our true nature is Good and virtuous. But in order to be truly human we have to discover that virtue, we have to uncover it, we have to dig for it. Virtue is not given.

Virtue has to be won. Virtue is born of the double-bind between this and that, between this commandment and that commandment. Virtue is born from the conflict between the outside of the cup and the inside of the cup. The outside of the cup is shaped by culture, the inside of the cup is our heart. Virtue is when we make the inside and the outside the same cup. That is the Holy Grail the heals the wound that separates the mind from the heart, the wound that won’t heal.

I hope you listened to the talk. Virtue is being morally good. The movie I use as a metaphor Mona Lisa Smile is about the virtue of young women in the 50s who moral duty was to become wives and abandon any desires to have a career. The question of our time is whether being morally good is a creative act or an obedient act, and if it is an obedient act then who do we obey? Our church which is now politicized? Do I hate gays because it is morally right? Big problems here, as you point out.

The next question is whether Virtue is integrity or division. Can one be virtuous and be conflicted? This is where sex comes in. If I must be chaste in order to be virtuous, but I’m in love and want sex…what is virtuous? Celebrate priests get into great trouble here.

Okay, we have arrived at the understanding that Virtue is not given but must be created. And virtue is created out of a conflict between mind (culture) and heart, or thinking and feeling. Our thinking mind thinks culture. When culture is divided like it is now, our mind is divided. We can’t find the station of the heart through the static of the mind’s thinking. Culture gives conflicting commandments. Its messages are duplicitous. The Stench of Lies is everywhere.(Apocalypse Now)

When culture is divided, who do we turn to? Virtue is not out there. Virtue is inside the heart. Virtue and faith are not separate. Culture is truth believed in: Faith is leaping beyond belief. Faith is being born again…born from the womb of culture and religion because religion is culture’s partner. Religions and science are the two wings of culture, but they flap in opposite directions so culture goes in a circle. But Virtue bypasses the dysfunction. You go it alone. You go straight.

Filed Under: It's Martini Time, The Zen of Movies, Uncategorized Tagged With: America divided, Awakening, Bhagavad Gita, Cultural War, dharma, Eckhart Tolle, enlightenment, Joseph Campbell, Mad Men, meditation, mindfulness, Mona Lisa Smile movie, transcendence, virtue, Zen

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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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