Sitting on the Front Porch getting insights, I decided why wait until Martini Time to speak with you. What good is an insight if you don’t share it? Why eat alone? Why travel alone? I want company. I want to walk along the path of life sharing what we see together. Life is Wow! So I called this talk Zen Live. 

To me, since I create my own world and meaning, Zen is the Wow of discovery. Zen is Seeing the whole of the moment instead of the conflicting parts of thought and concept. Seeing the world through the eyes of thought and concepts is living on the rim of the bowl instead of in the Center. The Spot we are all looking for in the center of the Bowl, but we are looking for the center on the rim of the bowl, searching for the unknown in the landfill of the known. 

Words and concepts when taken literally keep us pined to the rim of the bowl with the centrifugal force of culture and language. When everything becomes metaphor, then a bowl is a bowl, but a bowl is not a bowl, it is a metaphor that points to the center of the bowl where there are no concepts, the nameless center that is my own heart, the source of my existence…my self before I was born in words and language, and chained to the rim of the bowl for all eternity. Sheldon’s Spot is a metaphor for our center that has no circumference or rim, or no name.

We experience our Center all the time, but the experience doesn’t fit our reality map, which is all about living on the rim of consciousness in the Third Person of our grammar. Everything is a person, place or thing. Everything has a name. Everything is known. So the Rim is the known, and the known is the past, concepts held together and stored in our personal and collective memory. But the present moment, unnamed and unknown alludes us. Not able to live without our center, our Source, we seek it in the future. When we live on the rim, we create time as a mean to get off the rim in the future, but we never do.

So how do we get off the rim of our existence? Here’s the Zen of it. We have to SEE that everything has its own opposite, so there is no way we can find the Center that has no second when living in a thought based reality. Only the center of the bowl has no second, but as soon as we name it the center, we create the Not-Center, and we are off on the hamster wheel again, chasing the illusive center in time. 

We have to SEE that we cannot get off the rim by choice. Choice creates either/or. Choose this or that. But when we create this, we create that, and we create choice. So choice keeps us bound to the pairs of opposites, which in mythology is Maya, the illusion of appearances or names and form.

Culture conditioned us to believe that only through choice, our freedom of choice, can we get of the rim or tread mill of life, the experience of Ground Hog Day. But choice always creates TWO. When there is only One without a second, there is no choice. So the Center is found through the choiceness choice. This is the effortless effort, the inaction in action. A sudden discovery. BAM! and that’s Zen.