What’s a Fleabag?

September 26, 2019 by admin 1 Comment

I was watching Flea Bag last night, the Amazon Prime series that got an Emmy, and the main character keeps looking out of the movie at Me, the viewer, making eye contact and making comments about what her character is saying in the movie, a little secret aside just between her and me.

This breaks the convention of the movie and shocks us into awareness that I am separate from the movie….I See You, she says, like in Avatar.

Flea Bag is my new movie metaphor that I must work with. What is the truth here? Oh…that outfit she is wearing is the outfit of a French Mime…Is Flea Bag a mime of a sound mime?

Now that I open the bag, instead of fleas insights are jumping out. Our comic character is a tragic figure, isn’t she? She makes us laugh through her pain. She is constantly caught in the double-bind of consciousness trying to fit into relationship. She reminds me of the silent movie Charlie Chapman and Harold Loydes who made us laugh at their suffering.

The character keeps looking at me, pulling me into her life. What’s with that? I”m the audience. I don’t exist in her world. I don’t’ exist in my world, for that matter, when I lost in the show. I don’t exist, the suffering me, the complaining worried me that exists when the show ends. Heck, that’s why I watch TV and movies, to escape my suffering, to have a mini-vacation from me?

But she doesn’t obey that convention of the absent me. She looks at me. I SEE YOU, she says. What…Is this Avatar? When she looks at me, she and I are sharing a secret, a joke, a private aside that no one else sees. What is that secret?

The Zen of Raymond

July 14, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

This talk is about the double-bind as a formula in Everybody Loves Raymond and how to get out of the Perfect Trap. A double-bind is a situation where no matter what you do or say is lose/lose. If you can catch another person in a double-bind you can control them…but watch out. There are only two ways out of a double-bind: violence of creativity. Destruction or love. The news us full of violence created by a lose/lose situation. Even suicide is a way out of the double-bind. But humor is the best way. In this talk I look at how humor is created by the double-bind. So watch it.

Women intuitively know how to create double-binds. Men get caught in them every time. The basic formula is Nature versus Law or Order. Obey your own nature or obey the Law created by the other. In the double-bind, no matter what you do, you feel guilty: guilty for disobeying your own nature or guilty for disobeying your duty to the law. Heck, this goes all the way back to Jesus.

The Cosmic Soccer Game

July 12, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

The idea bloomed in my morning meditation as I’ve been metaphorical fascinated with Soccer during the finals. That picture of the soccer field as the cosmic field of duality and time where the One is divided and its two equal sides compete to restore the original unity as time. The Ego as the soccer ball runs with it for a moment in time, with all the attention on it, giving it energy. But all is played out in the Oval of the Goddess. She stays the same while the sperming players come and go.

Watching the soccer finals my metaphorical mind is running with the ball. Just look at this image that begins the game. You have a circle, the One (non-dual) without a second, then you divide the One into Two (duality), and then you created the center is the Point. You place the ball on that point (the ego) which invests the Cosmic Circle into the now portable Point that represents the undivided One (God), and each have of the One struggles to restore the Whole, or the divided God.

When you divide God or the One, its like dividing a magnet and tremendous energy is created to restore the One, and the longer the struggle goes on, the greater the fury, the greater the energy because the two poles becomes a feed back loop that is like a runaway nuclear reactor.

Each Goal is a release of the tension. For a moment there is the restoration of God (Center), but as there is still time (history) the rapture is temporary and the game continues as if nothing had happened. If the game is tied, the Oval Womb (Goddess) in which the Cosmic game takes places becomes energized by thousands of minds in the oval and across the globe focuses on that one moving Point. The energy being generated is felt in every cell of your body.

The two teams of the divided Whole (One God becomes two gods) also divided into team players, but which even player has the Ball, they are the whole team, the focus of the One mind on that moving point like a cat watching a laser point. The players with the ball for that moment is a god and is invested with the power of the whole as all eyes are on him. He performs with super human skills.

Then by mistake by one and skill by the other, the Still Point is transferred to the other god, and the Point is advanced towards the Goal and restoration of Unity and release of the building tension. When the game time (history) runs out, there will be a final goal and a tremendous release of tension. However, the Original Unity has not been restored because history has not ended and the god that lost yearns for its chance to restore paradise and become the God that has no second.

This is the Cosmic Game of duality and time. We are all born as Original Unity, then enter historical society that is divided, and our Ego is not the soccer ball which we much run with throughout our life achieving goal after goal—a new car, a new marriage, career, fame—that temporarily relieves the tension of the divided One. When time runs out, we look back on all our goals achieved and goals lost, perhaps never realizing it was all just a game.

You can see the Cosmic Soccer right here on Facebook. When our opinions are invested with the power of the center, our Ego we kick it back and forth trying for a goal. Our opinions want to be the Opinion that has no second. Ego can never see that it is playing a game. Ego takes the game seriously because it believes it is the soccer ball and that the game clock is real.

The Compassion of Quan Yin

December 2, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

I’m talking about Quan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Bodhi Sattva means Satchitananda in yoga. Bodhi (chit) means mind. Sat means being or Just This. When knowing (Bodhis) IS Sat or being, BAM! knowing is being; being is knowing. You are the Cosmos knowing itself as Just This. I say the Cosmos because if I say God, I freak people out. The Cosmos knows itself through you and me. We are the Cosmos knowing itself. It’s quite simple.

We think we are outside of the cosmos, or Being, knowing being from across the street. But we ARE Being. Yet we separate ourselves from Being and call it IT, and this separation is what Buddha says in his Four Noble Truths is the cause of our suffering and discontent with life. We are separated from our own being by our mind that is a duality operating system. To know something as that something means you have to give up your position outside of something as the knower of something.

AH…here is the mystery and paradox of Zen. You ARE IT and you are not it. That is compassion. That is Quan Yin, the goddess of compassion. She evolved in time from the 10,000 year old Shiva to the Bodhisattva of Compassion in Buddhism to Quan Yin in China. Gods evolve as human evolve, you know. But as I describe in this talk, she is not external but your own heart. But this is not logical and neither is compassion.

In Zen, in the Heart Sutra (read it and listen to the chant), Quan Yin arouses the mind that does not rest on form. What does that mean? When you mind does not rest or is invested in form or thought, it is free to create. It becomes an integrating mind that connects dots creatively, not investing in any dots you see. Like Sherlock, this mind just connects dots by withholding judgment. Don’t formulate the picture until all the dots are connected, all the clues are included. Don’t prematurely shoot off your gun.

The Heart Sutra, a Zen chant that is ritually chanted in Zen monasteries (But I’m not a Zen Buddhist) is spiritual irony. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form it says. That’s not logical, but the sutra is a metaphor that invites you to make the mad leap of Jake Sully in Avatar on the Last Shadow or the mad leap of Zorba the Greek, my two favorite movie metaphors.

The Heart Sutra of Zen is a Koan that cannot be solved by the intellect. The Englishman in Zorba could not solve or understand the Koan of Zorba. All he could do in the end when his best intentions crashed around him was…dance.

So dance we must on the ashes of our destruction, on the funeral pyre of our own death. Be the Grateful Dead. It’s all around us metaphorically, folks. Dance on death…That’s Halloween. Dance on sorrow. That’s compassion.

This is a discussion on compassion and what it means. We think it means feeling the pain of others but I think it’s deeper than that. Compassion drives selfless service, a compulsion, if you will, to help remove the pain and suffering of others. Compassion takes many forms, as many forms as there are humans. Compassion is life itself. Compassion restores unity. The Cross of Jesus is a metaphor for Compassion. Compassion wants to heal the wound that won’t heal. Compassion knows that there is no end to suffering. Compassion knows that there is no end to suffering beings, yet compassion cannot help but serve the healing, but do what it can to elevate the pain of life.

Life is Suffering, says the Buddha, even though he is condemned for being pessimistic. Life is death, but death is life. If we look closely—the horror, the horror—life lives on the death of life. We all end up food for the worms. So how do we play in this game where death conquers all? Is is possible to not participate in the suffering of life? We cannot avoid relationship because life is relationship. So how do we play in this lose/lose game. That is the question.

Buddha also says suffering is caused by separation, the divines of the One life into two, which our mind does. I experience this and that, good and bad, is a divisions of the observer from the observed. Compassion unites the two. In compassion the observer IS the observe. That is the end of suffering says the Buddha and anyone who has known compassion. Compassion turn from avoiding pain to embracing pain as oneself. I don’t fell the others pain as a separate being; I am the others pain. This compassion is express in infinite way, but it is always the same.

Rosemary’s Baby is Reborn Again

November 17, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Patriotism is a secular religion now, one that fits perfectly with Christian religion, so in this marriage you get secularism and religion to sleep in the same bed. While most see these two worlds, secular and religious, as opposites which you both can’t obey at the same time, in the GOP Right you can simultaneously obey both commandments— obey God, obey Caesar—at the same time. Two sides of one GOP Coin.

Roy Moore is like the Zen white hot iron ball that is stuck in your throat because you can’t swallow it and you can’t throw it up. Roy and his like is the child of two incompatible languages of the mind and soul. Secular society (liberal civilization I might add) is a rational society, prose society that deals exclusive with the objective world just as science does. Religious life deals with the subjective dimension of us, our values and meaning, personal meaning, I might add, not objective meaning like what is the meaning of life. NO…what is MY meaning.

My thesis her is that the Republican Party got in bed with the Religious Evangelicals( these of the Christians most concerned with personal meaning, and if you can’t feel meaning it doesn’t really exist) back with Nixon and then Reagan. And when they got in bed together them mixed their languages. Imagine if you needed a rational manual to fix your car, and you got poetry. And the poem used metaphors that made the car your Soul, so you don’t know if you are fixing your car or your soul. This, BTW, is Alchemy, the science of the Middle Ages, where the sciences was subjectively involved with his experiments, trying to find the Philosopher’s Stone that would end suffering through chemistry. The Enlightenment and the Scientific Method ended that nonsense.

But here we are again, Middle Ages recycled. Again we can’t tell the difference between instruction of the salvation of our soul and the salvation of the nation through new policies. the Bible and the Constitution are shuffled together.

So for the believers, Roy Moore is a Moses who is going to take his people to the promised land by smiting the Pharaohs. And so is Trump, who like my martinis is a mix of gin and Vermont and you can’t separate them. So you get a little high on Trump or you get a hangover.

The Print Age ended in the 50s, and with the computer age the paradigm changes. News is hot instead of cool. Newspapers were instruments of reflection, TV is the instrument of action. In print everything moves in horizontal lines, in TV/internet everything comes as wholes. In print what happens in another state is distant; in TV/cable what happens in far away also happens on my street. The objective world is now the subjective world, both at the same time. Prose and poetry are mixed. We can’t tell them apart.

What’s a Fleabag?

The Zen of Raymond

The Cosmic Soccer Game

The Compassion of Quan Yin

Rosemary’s Baby is Reborn Again

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The Minotaur Myth