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

When society reaches a place where it divides itself into two factions—a cultural war, if you will—with each side claiming to have the correct map of reality, then it is obvious that we need a new map. We come to this conclusion because we instinctively know that society and reality are a whole greater than its parts, and if the parts are at war with each other, well, we call that a cancer and the body is diseased.

Therefore, reason and faith tell us that we need a new map, but one that includes both the partial maps of the warring factions. Put the two maps together, taking the best from both, and you have a map that will take us to the other side, to the new world. You can’t transcend by eliminating half your world; you transcend by included the opposites of the old world and creating a larger, more perfect new reality. That new whole is greater than the pair of opposites that were its parts. This is the way nature and man evolves.

We are looking for that leader who has that “vision thing.”

Posted under General Observations

On the Internet this morning was this piece about the opening of the $27 million Creation Museum in Kentucky, and below are a few quotes that caught my attention.

Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum explained why dinosaurs and man are displayed in the same time frame: “ They all had to exist at the same time because they were all made on the same day. There may not be any fossil evidence showing dinosaurs and people in the same place at the same time. But it is clearly written that they were alive at the same time.”

In Ham’s view, the great flood explains not only where scientists find fossils today but also the topography of the modern world. The Grand Canyon was made in a matter of days or weeks as the waters of the flood rushed away and the land was reclaimed.

Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world’s problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief “is at the root of modern evil.”

A visiting senior said, “It’s not how old it is that matters to me. What matters is being right with God. Darwin’s theory has no God. It can’t be right. I don’t know if this story is truer than Darwin’s theory, but I do know it’s better.”

To me this is a very clear picture of our age in transition. On the one hand you have a map of reality as drawn by the rational worldview born in the enlightenment that sees man as the objective observer outside of the phenomena he is observing. The universe this worldview created is a flat world made of things that bounce around obeying the commandments of natural law. The scientist is the priest who describes this world to us and saves our poor butts from the hell of not having AC through the communion of technology. This world has no depth.

On the other hand you have the map of reality created by a God who is an objective observer of things that bounce around according to the Ten Commandments or His whims. This is also a flat world in time that has a beginning and an end, as all good stories do, and man really has no say but to blindly conform to this world view as the priests of the Bible dictate. This world also has no depth.

But with both maps you have one thing in common: you and I are puppets, empty cups that must be filled at the altar of either the rational scientist who demeans faith, or the irrational priest who proudly substitutes reason with faith so that what he says is the only means to salvation and the way out of this imperfect and sinful world both worlds have created.

We need a new map. We need a map that puts God in our existence as the source of who we are, a God that can be experienced as who we are, and God that loves us as we are. We need a map that puts faith and reason together as partners in the same human being. We are really very tired of a God who only loves us if we are good—and being good for this God is a double-bind trap where we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. We need a map that doesn’t pit our natural urges against our spiritual longing, which create a civil war within and a war against nature without.

We need a new map that will lead us from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, and from fear to the knowledge of immortality. This map is out there, but you won’t find it in a science book or a church. And that is because this map has to be discovered by each of us, not given in a book.

Grace comes as the Holy Spirit to those who have faith in themselves and in the small voice within that says, “You need a new map.” When you throw out all the outdated maps with the contradictions and dead-ends, you must be willing to stand on the edge of the unknown with the known world behind you, without fear and in perfect trust in God.

Here is the real “cutting edge” where reason and faith hold hands. Our reason tells us the we are the mapmakers, and that all conceptual maps are of only limited value for a short time; our faith tells us the God has created a beautiful friendly place for us to live, right now and not in the future. Reason can show us what is unreal, but only faith in the unknown can lead us to the real. When we discover the real, it is very, very reasonable because everything fits.

Posted under General Observations

Today was my 96 year-old mother’s yearly heart check up—each year her heart doctor says to come back in 12 months—and her three month pace maker check rolled up into one appointment, which has always been at 11 a.m. But this time the receptionist said the appointment was for 1:30; and even though I suggested that Mom tell them that her battery had stopped, they still wouldn’t let her in early. But they did laugh a lot, almost falling off their chairs.

So we went to lunch and afterwards Mom and my wife decided to walk to the Ukrops while I got the car. As I was passing them, very slowly, Mom turned and headed for the car and climbed in. “I start out feeling 36,” she said, closing the door, “and in five minutes I’m 96.” We both laughed, and I knew I had to write that down.

My wife got some bagels for the receptionists, and when we returned at exactly 1:30, I thanked them for giving us the opportunity for a wonderful lunch, and when Tilly gave them the bagels, one receptionist came out and hugged her.

I guess they don’t get many laughs or bagels at the heart clinic. Oh, and the doctor told my mother to come back in 12 months.

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(A letter to my friend in China who is coming home in a month)

People here pride themselves on their Brunswick stew, which is basically a big pot of everything that one finds lying around including any road kill that was fresh (just kidding). But the thought occurs to me that this is how we are—a big pot of whatever is lying around thrown in, then cooked until it all blends together. It is usually delicious. However, while some find it, most of us are always looking for the perfect stew. We all want to be delicious.

So how can you be delicious? Some of the thoughts you are throwing in to your pot doesn’t seem to be cooking too well. Thoughts like “hard word rebuilding my life.” And “I have to uproot my life once more.” And, just for seasoning, “I’m not sure I have the energy for it.” Obviously, these thoughts won’t blend in with the other ingredients because they are not real. They are from the past looking through the present into the future, an old recipe.

Are you feeling that you are returning to the “old world?” Now that you realize that what you are looking for doesn’t exist, in time that is, are you seeing your homeland as a wasteland where you will have to hoe the barren land to grow some meager and meaningless existence? You have harnessed yourself to the plough and hardened the ground with negatives, then created your self as a Chinese coolie who must through will power break the ground up and grow a life. How exhausting. No wonder you don’t dance with excitement on coming back.

You are at the place in your life where you can recognize the old recipes that you have been making your stew by, and the reason it never tasted so good was because of the negatives, fear, doubts that you threw in. Only positives blend when cooked in the fire of the present.

“Find what I’m looking for.” This is a big piece of road kill that you had to fight the buzzards off to capture for your stew. While it is good to be a searcher because that yearning pulls us to far away places like China, it is also a double bind that makes life a straight jacket. The more we search or struggle, the more bound we get. After cooking our stew for years and years, getting rid of the negatives that ruin it, we come to the last piece of uncooked meat floating on the surface. “What’s this,” we wonder, never having noticed it before. When we examine “find what I’m looking for” closely we will notice that the stew no longer has anything floating in it. This was the last piece to be removed. And it is the hardest one to find in the stew, and that is why it is usually the last one to be removed.

If you can remove the thought that “I have to search,” you have removed time from your mind. Remove time and you will discover your stew will taste good without having to add anything. Feeling that you “have to search” is also the thought that you are not okay as you are right now. So when you get to wherever your search takes you, you will still have the same bad tasting stew. And you wonder what’s next. Now you are at the point where “what’s next” doesn’t have the same old hope it once had. Oh, so much effort. So you know deep inside that this is not the recipe for you any more.

But, what recipe is there, if the old one is no good anymore? Well, Duh…there is no recipe. Think about that….No, don’t think about that because thinking is part of the old recipe. Just do your life. Whatever you are doing is your life. No effort there. Whatever you are doing is okay. Why do you have to compare what you are doing with what you think you should be doing? You are always holding up some old recipe that someone gave you and tasting what you are with the imagined taste of the recipe. One is dead, one is alive, but your living food always comes up short. That is the recipe you must finally throw out. It is the recipe that has driven you to the far ends of the earth. If your recipe says that your stew is bad, then obviously the fault is in the recipe, not the cook. Everything you think about yourself is part of this old recipe. Thoughts about yourself are just road kill, rotten bits of thought from the past. Sample one. Taste the decayed putrid flesh. Get sick. Throw up. And you won’t eat one of these pieces of dead meat again.

A pure mind is a thought free mind. Not that you don’t think, but what you think will be always fresh and creative and not self degrading and rotten. What you are looking for is your innocence. But you are already innocent and have always been so. You just let someone put some road kill in your stew. Take it out and you will be fine

Posted under General Observations

“See wherefrom the ego rises” said Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian sage who is recognized as the greatest realized being of the 20th century. While I don’t think he wrote anything, there are several excellent recorded dialogues in the 1930s of him with visitors to his ashram in India. They would come bringing their minds with its doubts and confusions as to how to realize the Self and freedom from suffering; and he would reply with essentially the same answer to each mind. “Who is it that asks the questions? Find that and you will know your true Self.”

Marharshi’s yoga or path we that of direct knowledge of the Self. This is the highway of negation where the mind keeps dropping obstacles to the Lord who dwells within until it reaches pure subjectivity without an object. “I am that I am,” is all the Self can say.

Marharshi is like the sun and our minds are like shadows that come to ask where the light is. And in this way our ego stands against our inner light of consciousness—as a shadow afraid to look.

I am sure at death the ego says as the body dies, “I’m going to die!” and it enters the light and dies—and we are still here.

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The labyrinth is a mythical maze that traps us like a spider’s net. There is always a secret way out, and those who are to succeed must get help from some underworld or above world power. This is the map the fairy tales and myths have laid out for us humans who are lost in the labyrinth of the world. And this is the beautiful and powerful theme of Pan’s Labyrinth, which we saw last night.

Just released on DVD, the movie has many levels, and in a way it is a labyrinth in itself. For those with innocent eyes all the layers can come together at once—the real and the unreal, the rational and the irrational, the movie and real life. Great art works on all levels at once, and the key is given to the soul that can hold these opposite together with one eye, so to speak, so the movie is not just this or that. When the layers are all grasped at once as a whole that is greater than its parts, the labyrinth suddenly opens and we are expanded.

The biggest obstacle to breaking the mystery of the labyrinth in which we are caught is the illusion that we are separate form the movie. This belief is created by the movie of the mind in which we experience ourselves watching the world as if it were a movie. We must go into a movie like a child, surrendering all doubt and disbelief, and let the movie be our guide into the mysteries of our own undiscovered and larger self.

We have to believe in fairies, as the little girl in the movie does. Fairies and these mythological forms are stand-ins for a belief in the magic of possibility. Instead of believing in this moment as a continuing of the past, which kills this moment, we must see this moment as an opening full of possibility. That is the way a child sees this moment—and there is only one moment and we are it.

See this movie and here is a key to it’s labyrinth. The movie is you and me, and there is liberating wisdom hidden in this mirror.

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“The world is flat,” said those who couldn’t compute the dream of Columbus, but he sailed anyway. This mythic tale of Columbus has even more meaning for us today when we have a “depth experience” of light or an awakening or angels or whatever doesn’t fit our “flat” map of expectations laid out for us by the world of empirical science and validation.

But for us to give these most real experiences any helpful meaning, we must find a context or a background in which we can correctly interpret them. If you see a brilliant inner light and go to an empirical scientist he may convince you it was a brain fart, because that is all he can measure with his instrument. “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t’ exist,” he believes. But that is just his map, only it is the one we have been conditioned to trust. He is not interested in interpreting your experience in a valid way; he is interested in controling your experience so his map of the universe will be as it should be.

We are all deep vertical experiences looking for meaning in a flat horizontal world. Why, it is enough to drive you crazy trying to fit a third dimension in a two dimensional world. “What shall I do with this square peg,” we ask our experts, and they give us a board with a round hole.

“Make it fit,” they say or they will declare you not real. Think what our imagination rich children are experiencing as they are dragged kicking and screaming into our flat world where nothing is permitted to exist that can’t be dissected and killed by the cold analytical mind. (I’m recalling ET right now.)

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The question of finding a “true” map of the world we live in, one that tells us what it is and what it means is being asked on many fronts, but the place where it becomes a matter of personal existence is the most important because that is where each of us lives. We exist at the place where we experience the world and ourselves, and today that place is like the Alaskan Eskimo village that is sinking in the melting permafrost. (Just read about that this morning)

Upon investigating the map with which we have been navigating the world and ourselves for that last 400 years, we discover that there is no true map of the world and me. Mapping me is like mapping a breeze or catching smoke. Just as we can’t map the external world with any accuracy, nor can we map our internal world with any satisfaction either. When our old maps fail, we have the feeling of falling into an abyss.

Each of us goes through large and small catastrophes all the time. Life is one damn catastrophe after another, most would say. And what is a catastrophe but a place where our map didn’t record and warn us of the reef. “It is not supposed to be this way,” we cry as our plans and all that we cling to sink beneath the waves.

We are all the mapmakers. To be human is to make maps. That is what mind is: a brain function that makes maps. But our error comes when we mistake the map for the real thing. We forget that it is just an approximate overlay that is the best we can do until a better map comes along. And the better map doesn’t come along until we have enough catastrophes to warrant a revision. A catastrophic time is a mapmaking time.

The second error comes in when we fail to include the mapmaker in the mapmaking. We assume that the one who makes the map is an external observer who through his senses and technology is seeing an objective reality out there or in there from which this observer is absolutely separated. This is the outdated map from the enlightenment that is the reason why all our trusted charts have become unreliable. Every map begins on an assumption that is not questioned, and now we are questioning those rock bottom assumptions about reality.

Here is the wonderful and magnificent question we are asking in this post modern age of transition: if the mapmaker and the map are bound together as the two sides of the same hand, then who am I? Is there a map that includes both the mapmaker and the map? Or is my life and the world I live in unknowable? Can I live without controlling my life and the world? Is there an order to the universe that is beneath the mind’s rational or mythical or Biblical map?

We are living in a world (if we choose to) where there is the possibility of living without mapmakers. Each is given the freedom to discover him or her self; and there is only one path that has been tested for thousands of years:

To find our essential being we must tear up all our maps, one by one. Our purpose is not to have knowledge of what life is, but to BE life as it is.

Posted under General Observations

We are all looking for a mapmaker: “Mapmaker, mapmaker, make me a map,” goes my altered version of the song from Fiddler on the Roof. From the first question we ask our mother as a two year-old pointing to a new object in our universe, to the silent questions we ask God in our heart, we want someone or something to give us a true and complete map of the external world that our senses record so we can make sense of it and navigate successfully through it.

Philosophy, theology, science, religion, all the self-help programs, politics, science, evolution, you name it, they are all just maps of the universe that the mind has unsuccessfully tried to capture and make us believe in. Our mapmaking history can be described as trying to map the ripples on a pond. Everything is always changing.

When the charts don’t show us where the reefs are or how to get to get to our destination, then the great fear of losing control creeps into the culture. And that is what’s happening to us now. Our sense of personal identity, which a world view or map creates, and our orderly world where everything is supposed to fit is falling apart. We are having a cultural nervous breakdown—and we are watching it on television as it happens.

Watching Flags of our Fathers the other night reminded me how different the world is now from those fathers who fought WWII. Since then we keep re-fighting that war, hoping to find again the victorious righteousness and the heroic sacrifice in what was a real war against evil to save the freedom of the world. Ever since then our wars have been fought on ideological maps where an imagined evil was superimposed on a non-threatening conflict in order to create our war against the “evil-doers.” Our map of the universe said there should be an evil threat out there, and we set out to find one.

When we found what we thought was evil, we launched an invasion to stomp it out. And after the dust and blood settled, we discover to our horror that there was only a scraggly tribal civil war that left alone would have faded away without one drop of American blood.

Now the maps are soaked in blood, Korea, Vietnam, Granada (remember that one), and Iraq. If all those who died for that map could speak, and they do, they would say one thing: Find a new map.

Posted under General Observations

The thought came to me this morning that meditation works because it works. Meditation works not because of anything that can be said about it, but because it works. That is like saying water will get you wet because it does. You just have to experience wetness to understand this. You just have to get in some water.

Meditation works, whether it is for 5 minutes or on hour, if you don’t try to make something out of it. Sitting down (one can stand or walk) for meditation means sitting down with your self just as you are. Whatever you think or feel is okay. No judgment is allowed in meditation.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were such a place where one could not be judged, where there was no sin or guilt, just innocence and no separation from God. Well, the good news is that you are already in that place. So just sit down and stop thinking about it.

Learning how to sit with your self is learning how to sit with God. If you just want to think about God or just believe in God (which is thinking about God), then meditation will not take you there. because if you sit down to meditate so you can think about God, then you are making meditation a means to an end. When there is a separation between the means (you) and what you want (your goal or end)—that is time. Meditation doesn’t have any time because it is always now.

Meditation begins to work, really work, when you sit down with no end or purpose. You just sit and observe without judgment or labeling what is going on inside and out. Watch the breeze moving a leaf, hear the bird calling to his mate, feel the arm or your chair supporting you, smell the fresh cut grass, notice the thoughts passing through the space of your mind like birds cutting across your lawn, be aware of a feeling rising into consciousness, and if you don’t hold it, watch it go.

Meditation works like liquid plumber. Pour it in and it is bound to clear your pipes. It doesn’t matter what you call it, or who you buy it from,  whether you can read the directions or not, or what you want to use the sink for—meditation works. Just pour some in and you will find out. But you have to pour it in—don’t think about it.

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