Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

Silver Thread Dialogues (STD)
(0r) A  Spiritually Transmitted Disorder

Silver Thread Dialogues are Facebook based dialogues designed to help you get free of  your personal labyrinth. We are all in a labyrinth being devoured by our Minotaurs but it is not too late to find the silver thread given by Ariadne, who has compassion for you. The little play on the meaning of STD is not by accident, but by irony. The situation is that in our society today we think the labyrinth is normal. Our struggle to fix ourselves and the world, over and over, without success is the labyrinth— the world says just keep trying, you get it right soon enough. But that was ten thousand years ago and nothing has changed except our world gets worse.

Obviously, the Minotaur is getting satisfied, and we are growing desperate as the  earth is being destroyed, our jobs are going, and our personal lives are devoid of meaning, hope, and nothing seems to work. We need a Silver Thread. But we don’t need someone to tell us how to get out of the labyrinth because each of us has a personal and unique labyrinth. One map or set of instructions will not fit all. This is where the ST Dialogue can come in as a radical and revolutionary approach to freedom. I will walk with you in your labyrinth and together we can discover the right turns to take.

Lets take a moment to look at why the labyrinth is confusing. We are trapped by the  Catch 22, which is an impasse between two right but contradictory messages. We turn this way, and are guilty for not going the other way; we go the other way and are guilty for not choosing the first way. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. This is the labyrinth of the mind. If you notice, this is a conflict between mind and heart, thought and feeling, objective and subjective. The labyrinth is us!

The reason we are lost and can’t make a decision  free from doubt is that these two messages have different frames of references; they are like two fingers that don’t meet when you close one eye.  Subject vs objective is a lose/lose choice because they are of different dimensions or views. One see the world as in me (subjective or what I feel) the other sees me in the world (objective or what I should do). These two views create a puzzle out of which the intellect cannot get. The labyrinth is not logical! Thinking will not help you here. And that is what we are conditioned to do, think our way out of a fix. STD is not a new belief or method or technique or even a teaching: it is a discovery that you can make with a guide.

The dialogue of discovery can bring you out of your labyrinth. You have to create yourself with a new vision of who you are  to escape the labyrinth. The Minotaur is you. Are you the brave heroic Theseus? Is your mind as pure as Ariadne?  Do you want to make your world a friendly place for you and your family, where you are in harmony with others and circumstance? This is possible. This is your birthright.

Getting back to STD and the Labyrinth: if we are conditioned to believe the labyrinth is normal and that our disorder is order, then what is abnormal or totally different from what we think we should do would be the normal and the real order. To walk with STD is to give up what you know and open yourself to what you don’t know.

We need to make the labyrinth your home; we need to transmute disorder into order. We can transcend the conflicting message through discovering how to bring them together into a greater vision of who we are, a vision that includes yet transcends the pairs of opposites in which we are stuck. Message me if you are interested.

Posted under Facebook Dialogues, General Observations

Some Christians argue that Halloween is not Christian but a pagan myth and should not be celebrated. Well, lets agree that it is a myth that is practiced as a ritual. And people like to practice it because it is fun. Kids like it. Parents like it. Adults like it. The ritual has legs.

But what does it mean? Everyone gets something from this bag of treats. For the candy companies, Halloween is their Christmas. For the costume makers, it keeps them alive. For the parents its a great night out that they remember as kids and want to pass on to theirs. For the kids…well it gives them a chance to get to grab and eat all the candy they can, something that might be forbidden during the year. Kids get to legitimately  break the rules. Adults who go to costume parties get to pretend they are someone else and take off their persona or worldly mask they must wear every day. Adults get to break the rules and act like kids.

But what about the spiritual person, or the person who is suffering from the demons of their own unconscious. (they are the same really). What can Halloween mean for that person?

Okay, lets look at the ritual where one opens the door and welcomes demons, death, and all that is foul and evil, and then gives this ghoulish population candy. Where do these demons come from? From the night, from the unseen, from beneath the earth, from hell, from anywhere but the daylight world where we like to keep everything in order and safe from these demons that can only bring death and chaos to our world.

A myth (according to Joseph Campbell) has the function of putting us in accord with reality so that we can affirm life and fulfill our potentials. How can the myth of Halloween put us in accord with our own True Nature? We have to really enter into the ritual and play all sides to find out— as if it were a dream and we are all he characters. In the dream of Halloween, you are you and you are the demons also. These scary creatures are your own fears coming up from your own unconscious where you have buried them, hoping they would stop haunting you. You must suspend disbelief here, as if you were watching a movie or play or a book and really got lost in it.

So Halloween is like a play in which you are playing all the characters. Okay, that’s the first step. The second step is to have the intention of letting your demons come up for air, so you can see them face to face. So you ask them to come up. You welcome them as you welcome the kids at your door. THESE ARE YOUR DEMONS.  You can feel this. You can see yourself in these masks. These are your masks…these are your children.

Now the next step is when you give each of your demons a piece of candy, you are giving them your kindness. Your demons are your own fragmented and buried childhood, your lost innocence that you have forsaken and buried alive in the grave of your own mind—so you could wear the mask of your adult persona. They are the unborn crying for deliverance from the living grave you put them in.

See that. Accept that. Tell you them you are sorry. Tell them that you love them. Love your enemies…for they are you. Mentally and in your heart with each piece of candy you give to these children, ask them for forgiveness and tell them they are free now. You no longer fear them. You no longer bury them. Let them go in peace. And you will be at peace.

Have a blessed Halloween. Thank you for walking with me in this valley.

Posted under General Observations

What, it’s the end of daylight saving time next week. Thanks for telling me. I would have missed the whole thing and been an hour out of sync.  But hey, that’s the way everyone lives anyway isn’t it. Life is catch up. One never has enough time, or one has too much time. But never the right time…unless one is in the right place at the right time…but that is a rare occasion and always by accident.

So I thank you for reminding me to stay in sync with the clock and the social wheel of time so I won’t miss my TV shows or be late to work.

But I must say, now that I’m on time, that there is a time beneath our clock time of the mind. If it were not for this Natural Time we would not know that we were out of time or late or early or just chasing time. We know this because beneath the time of our mind we are time. That’s it! We are time. But we think we are out of time. (Oh, that’s what we think death is, a time when we are out of time). But that is not what death is because we can’t be out of time….we are time. So how can we be out of our self?

This is all nonsense, of course…or is it? You are time, but you think you are separate from time, and because you are separate from it, outside of it, you chase it or fear it. If you caught it, what  would you do with it? You would  stop chasing it. Stop moving after it. That’s what you would do if you caught time. Like the fish chasing water, if you caught the water you would stop trying to get it.

I hope you liked this little rime……it all goes with time.

Posted under General Observations

Today while talking to a friend about my photography business I realized that I outed myself in 2005 and now six years later I’m still putting the pieces of myself back together. But first, before you get all excited, “outing” is a metaphor for coming to your true nature. And what is my true nature? I don’t know. But I had to out myself in order to find out.

I have a residential photography studio, which in from 1987 to 2005 was a running faucet of business. I was content drinking the best scotch, eating the biggest steaks, and watching the biggest TV I had ever had, and work my business. Life was good.

One day in July I went to Yogaville and something kicked inside like a fetus. My old spiritual path I had put down in 1987 came back, and so did meditation, yoga, and vegetarianism. I couldn’t help it. The scotch and steaks left like unwanted relatives. I still did photography, to be sure, since I had bills to pay, but my passion was to teach yoga and meditation. Oh, and my writing came back as a blog, which morphed into Facebook. Something was alive in me that would not let be go.

Now my business is just a drip. I can blame the recession, but I think my outing had something to do with it. In 2005 I hung a Blackstone Yoga Center on my front porch and changed the pictures in my house, put in a shag rug my my light studio for yoga classes, and began to collect little statues of Buddhas, and Indian deities. I thought my Yoga Center was Yogaville East, an outpost of spiritual power. When customer arrived I would drop the background over an altar with Yoga paraphernalia and joked about the schizophrenic nature of the room. But being in a conservative community, it may not have been a joke. But looking back I was my own joke. When you cast off an old ego, the new being always comes in a new unrecognizable ego. But, fortunately, this shell has not hardened that much and it cracks and falls off occasionally, when the fetus kicks real hard inside.

But, I did it and I’m glad. My inner nature had grown to the point where it had to come out and make the inside and the outside world one world. The initial phase of this shift in world systems was chaos. I introduced chaos into my life by shaking things up. A part of me was dying, a new me was being born. The transition between worlds is always turbulent. But I persisted. I could not put myself back in the box.

Since 2005 my business had grown tremendously—oh, not the photography business but the business of being my true nature (whatever that is). You see, we don’t know what our true nature is because truth is a discovery. One must continually discover his/her true nature, and in order to do that one must be willing to discard your old nature. Death of the old you, birth of the new you, that’s the formula of Christ and the Cross.

Always be new.  Hang  you new nature on your front door. Out yourself. Make your world One instead two. Make your inside and your outside the same world. You must invite chaos into your life: but here a tip. When the old system is broken up, a new and great vision of you will be born.

If you don’t believe me put a bowl of cat food on the porch. Watch the ants organize a system of movement around it. Take the bowl and knock the ants off. Watch the chaos. But in a few minutes the ants will reorganize a new system that fits their changed environment. Between the old and the new system there is chaos. Now….Are you not as great as the ants?

Posted under General Observations

Where does it say Jesus laughed from the Cross. No where. But this is the WAY. Now I’ve been harping on this metaphor thing for some time, as everyone here knows. And this is a good place to harp again…it’s morning after meditation and the first cup of coffee is rushing through my nerves with a little jingle….The Cross and Christ on it is a metaphor. And it is fact to. It is both at the same time. Christ on the Cross obviously happened in time as a historical even. An insignificant Jewish Rabbi was outspoken and got himself executed. Happens all the time. No big deal in the larger picture of human history.

But what makes it special? What gives this event transformative power? What makes the world turn on this event? Not the facts. The facts are past, the facts are long buried, and all the details will never be known. Look at facts that happen today. We never know the whole story, and even if you did know all the facts, there would still be new books coming out with a different slant. You just can’t know all the facts. But that’s not the point. The facts mean what you make of them. So facts in themselves mean nothing. The meaning of Jesus is not in the facts. Facts are a blank screen upon which you write.

So Christ and the Cross must point to something else. That’s what a metaphor is: a pointer. But does the metaphor point to another fact? That’s what has happened in religion today. People get together an agree upon what facts the metaphor of Christ and The Cross will point to. They call it our doctrine, and you better believe it is the right doctrine or we will crucify you.

This is the Fallacy of the Fact. Okay, so how does one get out of this fallacy? Keep the metaphor open. The metaphor points to what you must discover. Yes, that’s it! The spiritual metaphor points to THAT which you have to discover on your own by yourself after you have spend a lifetime trying to avoid this discovery. You have to discover YOURSELF. You have to choose yourself as whole, complete, and perfect and unable to do one damn thing to make you better than you already are. You must discover that you are powerless to fix yourself or the world or make it better than it is. This is an affirmation of LIFE.

Life is a paradox, a mixture of oil and water, good and bad, now and the ideal of perfection…..The absurd is the realization that life is a paradox,ambiguity, a mystery that cannot be known, a puzzle that can’t be solved….BAM. The only movement when this simple realization occurs is laughter. IT IS SO SIMPLE! It all comes together in that one laugh. the Laugh of Job. The laugh of Christ on the Cross. That laugh of Christ on the Cross is YOU.

How do you know if Christ laughed on the cross? You laugh on the cross of the paradox, on the cross of this absurdity of being on the cross of your own choosing. THIS IS THE WAY. …..time for another cup of coffee. Thanks for walking with me though this inquiry.

Posted under General Observations

I find this an overpowering image….Strange Fruit…and I remember a song by Nina Simone…and I allow my mind to leap from this picture in metaphor….apples hanging from the Tree….in the Garden of the Fall where Adam did eat and divided man into good and evil….but don’t think this tree is gone for we just exchange the fruit….gays, Muslims, Liberal, Conservatives, immigrants, my neighbor all….all hang from this tree in our Garden.

This is the Garden of Good and Evil. What difference what fruit hangs from this tree? Hitler had his favorite fruit. We all have our favorite fruit. We’re not talking apples and oranges here, but fruit as a metaphor for that which is labeled Evil by the Good labeler. The duality here is the belief that I am good and you are evil. But there is only one son of man. There is only one apple, but it has many colors. One Man with many colors. Labeling absolutely cuts the apple into parts with one slice being good and one slice being bad. When we lose sight of the Oneness, we have to hang our bad apples from the tree—it’s the only way to get rid of them.

If we lose sight of is the Tree we focus on the fruit not the Source. To the people who hung the fruit in this picture, this tree was like their Christmas Tree. They felt safer under it. The order of their society was protected by it. Once we divide the world into absolute Good and Evil, one feels commissioned by God to remove the Evil parts. Is there any real difference here between this Southern scene and one where the Israelites were commanded to destroy a city because its inhabitants worship the Goddess instead of Yahweh? They had their tree too.

And the Cross is a Tree, and Jesus is the fruit, hung there to make the world Good. Oh, the paradox. What a great metaphor this picture is.

I equate the Tree with the Word. The Tree/Word is the source of the fruit.To the tree all fruit is just fruit. Like a Mother it does not distinguish between its children. But the Father does (the male god who has no female counterpart); for him there are good sons and bad sons, and the bad ones better straighten up. The Mother embraces both good and bad sons. So one can see why God the Father created the Garden and Good and Evil, and also why He wanted to get rid of all those Mother religions in the land. And Now we can see why Eve (Goddess)  was associated with the Tree.

But getting back to the Word/Tree as Source of good and evil. In this context good and evil are relevant while the Source/Tree is transcendent and beyond “words”. Words, the many words of the mind, thought, are the fruit of the Word. If we get hung up in the words and in our conceptual thinking, and lose sight of the Word, we end up handing words from the tree as Evil words…..but there are only words. Stay in touch with the Tree/Word and the meaning of the relevant words shift. The world turns, so to speak.

I’m playing around here with the idea of a switch labeled Good and Evil. According to the dictates of your conditioning, you flip on Evil or Good. So to those who condemned Jesus they flipped the switch that labeled Jesus Evil and were justified in hanging him from the Tree. That meant they were Good. The idea is that in order for you to be Good you have to flip the switch and label somebody Evil. That’s the way the switch works. Its a circuit, just like a light switch. This is the Operating system of the thinking mind. In order to be Light you have to flip the switch. You turn on the light/Good by turning off the dark/Evil. You see? But this two poles of the switch are a pair of opposites; you can’t have one without the other.

Okay, lets look at this as a switch that flips us from Subjectivity to Objectivity. Good or evil is a Subjective evaluation. Subjectively I AM…. Subjectively I am the center of the universe. Objects in the world are ITs that we divide into good and bad. Do you see what’s going on here? (thanks for walking through this with me on our inquiry). Duality we between the separation of Subjective view from Objective view. The objective view is the dominant view of the Western world; it is the view of materialism. The world is made of stuff…ITS. Third person in grammar. Subjective is inside, First person I. Subjective is value and meaning. There is no value in an IT. There is value only when I identify with an IT and enclose it in my value circle of ME.

This Garden of Good and Evil is a separation of the Subjective from the Objective view. The Inside and the Outside are divided into two contradictory frames of reference. This is the formula for the suffering of man. A named group (religion, party, family, tribe, church) is a Subjective inside group that sees the world from its subjective perspective. Anyone who does not see the world of ITS from inside this group is a threat, an objective threat.

This is like when two lovers who are lost in each other’s subjectivity as one subjectivity, is intruded upon by an objective outsider. They feel threatened, objectified, sucked out of the private and sacred interior and made into an IT. Or when you are in a subjective state of grief and a news reporter shoves a camera in your face. Or the primitive doesn’t want his picture taken because he feels it will steel his soul. To be objectified is to be judged and taken out of your Subjectivity and your meaning and value.

Subjectivity is Unity Consciousness. The world is viewed as being in you, or your group. Objectivity is a view where you are in the world, another object among ITS. To be made objective is to  threaten and destroy our unity of subjectivity. The group says I AM GOOD and the Truth. The group says to the outsider either enter our subjective space and see the world as we do….or we’ll hang you from our tree. Your looking at me threatens me and my sacred interior. I can’t tolerate you. You are the death of me.

Okay, we have covered too much ground but if we can see this it’s ground breaking. Here’s how Christ transcends the switch. Christ is the principle or formula that combines both subjective and objective views, the inside and the outside are One view that is both two and one at the same time, kind of like 3D in the movies. I and the Father are One. This means I (Subjectivity) and the Father (Objective IT) are One.

Then he says Love your enemies. Love your ITs. Be one with your ITS. Make the objective subjective! This is what empathy means. I see you from inside you and inside me at the same time. I am you and you are me. That is the act of compassion. Compassion is the act of transcending the duality of subjective/objective and creating a new vision that includes both pairs

of opposites. Christ is a creative dynamic vision, a verb…not a noun. Christ is both First and Third Person, and the Holy Spirit is the dynamic union of the two.

When this vision occurs, this unity consciousness, one is again in the Gardena and the fruit, frozen by the labels of good and evil are allowed to grow and reach their full potential. This act of Christ restores life to the Garden, for this life is beyond good and evil. (Pandora is a metaphor of this Garden of Harmony)

Posted under General Observations

Let me share what I experience all the time now to see if it throws some light on the subject of free will vs determinism. I have a photography studio and I often will forget to check my computer calendar or even write down an appointment, and what ever I choose to do, go to town for a few hours or what not, when I return to the house (my studio is in my house) my customer is coming in the front door, apologizing for being late. This is the norm now, not the abnormal. If I’m getting ready to go somewhere and I have a customer coming with prints or whatnot, they will show up just before I have to leave.

It seems I have a secretary arranging connections regardless of what I choose. So I quit worrying about it. I don’t intentionally forget to test the secretary. But whatever I do I stay connected and the world is my friend. We are buddies, in sync buddies, me and the world.

So how does one fit choice and free will into that context? I choose to go here or there, but whatever I choose it is okay, no problem. So there is both choice and no choice, both free will and determinism at the same time. A paradox, yes? This creates a great freedom and allows me to be spontaneous and free from worry. I am okay no matter what I do. My secretary looks after me. She’s the boss.

Posted under General Observations

Whenever we are in conflict, perhaps irritated, perhaps angry, with an opposing views, I find myself looking at it from two directions at the same time. From one direction I say their opinions have nothing to do with me. But from the other direction their opinions have everything to do with me. They are true and not true at the same time. How can that be?

I like to watch ants. Each ant is an individual trying to find its way around a pebble or under a twig. Yet each ant is also a species organism. They all move like Italian taxi cab drivers, rushing back and forth over their little trails, but there is no traffic cop. They intuitively know where and what to do.

If I have a plate of cat food on the porch, the ants will make quick work of what the cat leaves. There are so organized, like little Egyptians building a pyramid. I take the plate and knock in on the floor, throwing chaos into the ant organism. All the cells run around like crazy. Then, suddenly, as if a whistle was blown, the ants reorganize and get on with their business.

Okay, let me see if I can find out what I’m talking about here….focus…focus…Oh, so when opinions rain on us and make no sense, we are perceiving them from the view of the single ant, my special perspective; but they make sense when we view them from the whole which includes my singular perspective and all opposing perspectives. This  new whole perspective (or non perspective) is a mystery, an unknown. I don’t know what it is. And I can’t choose to see it. It must be revealed to me. But how?

All the mystic report of the acceptance of Unknowing, of surrender to the mystery of God or Truth or….the Whole vision. That moment of surrender is feared because it looks like chaos, the plate dumping the ants and all their organized reality into mass confusion. Armageddon. But…..as we watch the ants, they suddenly and mysteriously reorganize into a system that fits perfectly with the new reality or field of reality.

Are  we different from the ants? Suddenly, the mind can reorganize itself and grasp a larger vision then it had as a single perception….(Oh,..this is not easy to communicate….But I think I’m on to something.)

Okay, we think we have the world all figured out (that’s the ants getting the cat food). Then comes chaos (that’s me tapping the plate on the floor and knocking them crazy). This chaos is existential. We have our existential moments when the intellect is confronted with contradictory frames of references, or what we would say are two equally valid rights or truths that cannot be integrated into one truth. I call this Catch 22 or a double-bind. The movies call it a Sting. This is Chaos. The plate is tapped and all our ideas of what’s real run around like crazy looking for its lost order and logic.

This chaos either comes without asking as a personal crisis, or intentionally (going before a spiritual master or teaching that slaps the shit out of your mind). But  what happens after chaos is that the system (the ants) and our intelligence reorganize on a higher level. This is called vision logic, or transcendentalism, or awakening, or rebirth or resurrection….oh, there are a lot of names for this unnameable discovery.

Our intelligence, when its conditioned way of thinking is broken up, reorganizes on a higher level, a vision that includes the previous systems and its contradictory opposites.

Two  things can happen: we can either have a nervous breakdown and regress into bygone system that no longer works (fundamentalism, if you will)  or awaken to a new and higher vision of who we are.

There you have it. I woke this this seed of an idea this morning, and thank you for walking with me through this revelation. Was it good for you? It was for me.

Posted under General Observations

This caught my interest this morning while reading Bill Moyers Interview with Joseph Campbell: here’s what JC said about marriage to kick off the interview: “What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It’s the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. It’s different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. It’s another mythological plane of experience. When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we’ll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.(And how does one choose the right person?BM)…. Your heart tells you.”

Campbell continues: Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. The Chinese image of the Tao, with the dark and light interacting—that’s the relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that’s what you have become when you have married. You’re no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.”

Campbell describes marriage has having two stages: “There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically in order to produce children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family and the couple is left.

It’s not simply one’s own thing, you see. It is, in a sense doing one’s own thing, but the one isn’t just you, it’s the two together as one. And that’s a purely mythological image signifying the sacrifice of the visible entity for the transcendent good. This is something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, what I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. If f they are still living as they were in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when their children leave.”

Posted under General Observations

At the age of 75 I am distinctly aware of my personal myth that has shaped my life. I feel it as a shifting trade wind shapes the path of a sailing ship crossing the ocean: the ship goes this way and that tacking with the wind but maintains a specific course although at no one time is the ship pointing in the true direction of that course. This morning I decided to share my discovery of my personal myth with you because you also have a personal myth that shapes your life, but it is often unknown while in the course of it, and this unknowing can often make you feel that you have no myth and no meaning in your life. “What am I doing? What is my purpose? Who am I?” This is the call for our myth to appear.

Your myth is what pulls you, gives you your passion, and makes you do what others thinks is crazy. Your myth can drive you mad and it can support you when the world becomes mad—and it often is. You can fight your myth or you can give into it. Your myth calls you out of yourself. She or he can come to you in the personifications of relationship and in circumstance—even God will appear to you dressed in the clothes of your myth. Following Joseph Campbell’s outline of the Call to Adventure in his seminal work Hero with a Thousand Faces, the mythic path in our life has a universal outline that can be found in all the  religions, myths, tales, and personal biographies of man from the first Shaman of the Neolithic hunting tribes of primeval man. Campbell calls it the monomyth, the archetypal story that springs from the collective unconscious. I write this to help you become sensitive to this story, your own story of you.

Campbell says it best: “The basic story of the hero journey involves giving  up where you are,  going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.” The first stage is leaving your “home town” (environment) because it is too repressive or maybe a call to adventure, an alluring temptation draws you out. Or the call may come when something has been taken away and  you go in quest of it into some realm of adventure. I’m reminded of a young person I knew looking for her missing birth  father. But always the realm of adventure is of unknown forces and unknown powers that are hidden or trapped in the unconscious. The heroic field is littered with demons, monsters, and great battles, but in modern life, it might be the boss who abruptly fires you. Campbell drives this point home again and again: all our old myths and symbols are dead, so we have to discover them anew in our own personal history. We must awaken our creative imagination to hear the ancient call of the wild.

Campbell also says that one may refuse the call, where the summons is heard but for some reason or another not heeded. When this happens your life looses its energy, its passion, and you feel that you are is just going through the motions of life, living out some  role assigned by others. I have felt this hollowness and it has been the will to escape this suffering that has evoked my myth. In Buddhist philosophy, this is the Wheel of Samsara or life as birth and death, a life without taste, a wasteland, as T.S. Elliott wrote.

The title of these series is Be Still, Dive Deep from my three years on an old diesel submarine from 1958-61, the USS Cubera. Here is a picture of us doing a battle surface (by accident). Like a frog, a submarine is at home above the surface and also below the surface of the water. My  tour of duty in this undersea craft has been a great metaphor for my life’s myth. There I am right behind that sonar dome you see protruding like a tumor from beneath the bow. My job was to listen through sonar gear to find our targets and avoid the sub hunters who roamed like wolves in search of their prey.

Posted under General Observations