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

In a recent conversation with a Biblical man, I was reminded of the clash of myths going on in our culture today, even in the election with the candidacy of Huckabee, who stands on the Bible as his platform. We cannot avoid this cosmic battle, but we can transcend it through understanding of the roots of myth. Reading Joseph Campbell again is like having one’s computer defragmented.

Campbell goes to the three beginnings of all cosmic myths: The primitive pre-civilization myths that affirm life as both life and death (visit the Mayan culture); life negating myths (visit Jainism and the ascetic withdrawal from life); and the middle east compromise that began in the ancient city states of Mesopotamia (visit the Bible). This third way is what’s interesting because it is us.

This is the worldview that says I’ll affirm creation when it gets in line with my needs. In other words, reality is seen as a progression towards perfection. Completion and salvation is always coming tomorrow. Both science and the three Middle East religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, are shaped by this worldview (another name for myth). Science say utopia  will come when we get enough knowledge; religion says utopia will come when we get in the right relationship with God. But both views are within the constraints of time. Not now but tomorrow they say because the world of this present moment is fallen and can’t get up. But don’t despair, one says man can fix it, the other says God can fix it.

Opposed to this worldview, and coming up through its cracks in our modern psyche like geysers at Yellowstone is the Eastern worldview that raises the possibility of transcending time and affirming life as it is in the present moment. Instead of tomorrow, there is only now, so be here this view says.

Hence, today there is a terrible confusion in our society as to the nature of reality. Man has never been so confused, except maybe when the Middle Ages collapsed. But out of its death sprang the Renaissance and a new flower of consciousness.

I think man will look back on this age when mythos collapsed and a new transcendent consciousness of man was born, a consciousness that was awakened by Gautama Buddha first and then Jesus.

Posted under current events

“This is pretty deep stuff,” the checkout clerk said at Costco as he beeped my three books by Joseph Campbell. This was the second time I had found “deep stuff” at Costco since Christmas, the first being a book by Osho on Zen and Tantra that reawakened my interest in that writer. But Campbell, now there is an influence on my life that just keeps on giving. I had no comeback to the clerk since I never considered Campbell’s historic study on mythology as waters with a warning sign Too Deep, but on second thought I should have.

If you are interested in why Republican candidates are quick to carry the spear and shield of the warrior, read Campbell. If you are curious about the root of the Biblical world-view and its god Yahweh then go back to Zoroastrianism in ancient Persia with Campbell. And why is the feminine principle such a problem in our society? Ask Campbell. In fact, behind every current in society one can find a mythological source if you follow Campbell’s map.

We are standing at the edge of the abyss of the unknown in our modern era, says Campbell, and we have striped away all our protective mythologies, those protective psychic wombs that have kept man sane through its evolution from the cave. What does that mean? Well, just look at the turmoil in the mind and society of modern man. The modern world has become an insane asylum full of individual illusion and small groups of mythologies fighting one another for the rights to reality. We are now free to go crazy.

But we are also free to break out of the mythological womb and touch the transcendent consciousness the saints and sages have experienced and point us to. Man is not done with his evolution; it just looks that way when you are close up.

So if you want to dive into the mythological layers that still shape the modern mind, then follow Campbell. He went there, came back, and shares with us what he saw. Taking a swim with Campbell is like scuba diving in your own mind. You just won’t believe the treasures you will find there. Oh, and there are a few sharks too.

Posted under reviews

“Did you follow your TomTom to Costco?” asked my son, who has been having a good time with my description of my trial run with the new GPS navigator.

“Well, I’m not ready to give up all my memory to TomTom yet,” I replied. “Hallory,” that’s what I call the female voice in the device, “knows her stuff, But I think I’m going to see if I can mess with her head,” I added, laughing at the thought.

“If I keep making wrong turns despite her best efforts to control me there may come a point where she loses it and starts cussing me out.” Even though I’d be totally lost, I would win.

Posted under General Observations

“We are all tightwads,” I told Julie at the breakfast table, “until we see something we want.” This topic came to the surface because I’m about to validate Costco’s brilliant psychology.

Here’s the formula some genius in their planning division put into action: First, you establish that big ticket luxury items will only stay in the store until a limited supply is gone, and that you may never see that item again. Second, you display the black leather easy chair that swivels and leans back in just the right way to get Ed Conley to say that he has to get that chair—because when it comes to getting what you want, the time is always now, not tomorrow when you have the money. That’s the Costco way.

“Well, Julie’s not a tightwad,” my wife chirped in with Julie hiding her head. “She can’t resist a sale sign. She’d buy rusty nails if they were on sale.” Julie’s head went deeper into her arms.

“Why, you are like Freedom (that’s my daughters cat),” I said, jumping into the fray now that the chair was out of the hot seat. “If Freedom is out, he wants to come in. If he is in, he wants to be out. Freedom doesn’t care which one, he just likes the going and coming. You don’t care what it is, you just like the buying.”

“Yeah,” said Julie. “That’s me. Now lets talk about that chair you can’t afford.”

Posted under General Observations

When my wife proofed the piece about labeling and came to the end where I used the word “nigger,” she said, “I hate that word,” and I could see her emotional rejection. Now I don’t use the word, nor do I condone its use, but I don’t hate the word to the point that it awakens revulsion, and anger even at those who use it.

And here in Southside Virginia many people still throw the word around in their conversation, as one would wave a flag to raise pride in your side of the battlefield.

Then I thought of a child who wants and needs attention, and who will get that attention anyway he or she could. If the child can’t get attention with positive behavior, then negative behavior will do, especially if the child is competing with a sibling who has cornered the good behavior market. Whether the prize is a piece of candy or a scolding, it’s the attention that matters.And so with our words.

A word like “nigger” gets it power in the collective mind by the attention we give it. I imagine a word in our cultural mind that has emotional content like that child; it needs attention in order to maintain its ability to get a reaction. If a word can’t get a reaction, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t really exist except as a few lines in the dictionary, which is like being buried in a government warehouse.I suppose this is why black people defanged the word by repeating it so much that it becomes meaningless—as long as you are black, that is.

White people still have a way to go.

Posted under General Observations

I have been throwing darts since 1984 when I was locked in my room in Blackstone with no job or recognition. And now I have a dartboard in my office where I play with a friend. For years he has beaten me handily, then I got better, and the last time we played I beat him two out of three, a first. I have the score pinned to the wall next to the board.

You should only play darts with good friends. Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to play with another friend, but not the darts with a board and steel tipped barbs. Relationships can be a dart game, too. And the game begins when a friend throws a dart at you that you feel in the gut. “Oh, he hurt me.”

Now, here’s where the game gets interesting. One has a choice when hit by a dart: What is the source of the pain? Who is responsible? What is the cause? Did I say something I shouldn’t have? Am I guilty or innocent? Who is guilty? Whoever is guilty gets the next dart. These thoughts are always our first level of choice.

But there is another level beneath that is seldom noticed. One must ask on a very deep level what the target is. Is the target of the game to win or is it to expand beyond the self you were before you began the game? I’m sure you have noticed that a dark board is like a pond with a red pebble dropped in. The circles keep expanding. Do they keep going beyond the board? They do if you choose them to.

So if you choose the deeper level of the game, then you shift the responsibility for the pain to another source. I say, “I am responsible for my thoughts and feelings, therefore, I am the cause of the pain, not the guy throwing the dart.” The focus of attention is now on looking at your inner being and not at throwing the dart back. Now there is no target because there is no cause. You can’t find who threw the dart.

Wow! That is an awakening. That is a bull’s eye. If I am responsible, then I have just seen my ego-I that is wall of defenses I’ve built around myself. I have just been exposed. There is the castle in which I’ve lived. There is my prison.

The truth is that in order to see one’s ego-castle you have to be standing on a hilltop outside the castle. Now, the question becomes: “Who is that person on the hill?” Of course, you can’t see that person, but you know he or she is there. And that person is free of pain, free of darts, and innocent. The discovery of that person on the hill fills you with joy that has no external source. You have stumbled into your own center, and the pain of the dart is way out there in the castle. And as you look at the castle it begins to shimmer like a mirage, and then it vanishes.

I look for the blessing of the dart because it allows me to live on the hill overlooking my suffering.

Posted under General Observations

One is never too old for a label. This came to light this weekend when visiting some friends. My 97 year-old mother and some others were having a happy conversation in the living room when one of the hosts came in and said sweetly to my mother, learning close so she could hear, “Today hasn’t been too much for you, has it?”

“No, we’re going shopping next,” she said. The next day she remembered that moment and described it this way. “I was having such a grand time until he came in. I didn’t feel old until he said that.” But she laughed and said it didn’t bother her, but she did remember it.

Labels are such a subtle thing. There are large labels and small labels; some are called good labels and some bad labels. I wonder if the mind can work without them. Is the human mind just a labeling machine? Is there something beyond the labels? Is there a creator of labels, a soul (if you have to use a label) hidden from the labeling mind because it can’t be labeled? If the mind can only see labels, then the mind couldn’t see the label maker, could it?

There is something inside us that hates labels, but there is also something that loves them too.

Posted under meditation help

A friend of mine, a strong Christian conservative, and I are having a “debate” via e-mail, and I ran into something that also came up in an angry forum response to one of my letters to the editor. It has to do with labels and their power, not only to restrict one’s freedom of thought but also as a weapon.

After one e-mail exchange I was caught short, grabbed by the shirt, and stamped with this defining statement: “What you really are is a typical liberal.” And then the letter went on to read the litany of qualities that are printed on the “liberal box.”

And the same with the forum letter, which added after pulling away the sheet I was hiding behind, “So, why don’t you admit it?” And the follow up is always, “I admit who I am, so why can’t you come clean with who you are?”

I noticed,—and felt for the first time—that the offenses of the “liberal” were not errors that can be corrected, but were sins that are eternally damned. In other words, to be labeled a liberal is to be classified as something subhuman, something outside the pale of existence, and there is no escape. This label has super glue. No matter what you do, what name you use, you are still a liberal. No exit. No forgiveness. Only by confessing that you are okay with being defined as subhuman can you find relief. Only by admitting that you are not free can you be released from the torture rack. Only by submitting to the dominion of the other will you be allowed a small space to live. Only by taking responsibility for the other’s definition of who you are will you be accepted. The ultimate double-bind.

It made me appreciate on a feeling level the labeling process African Americans have been suffering under for hundreds of years, and all other minorities that have been labeled and tossed into the trash pile.

If Barack Obama is elected president, and I hope he is, I can imagine the bigot smile, getting as close as the secret service will let him, and release—quietly so only he and Obama can hear—his ultimate gotcha, “Underneath all that president stuff, what you really are is just a nigger, aren’t you? Now, com’on, be honest, admit it.”

Posted under General Observations

When I saw a GPS TomTom before Christmas, I knew that was what I was going to get my wife, who is my navigator on trips. I drive, she directs; that’s our division of labor. But being navigator also means that I don’t have to be responsible for making mistakes. Either she didn’t give me a clear direction, or she didn’t read the map quick enough—like when we’re driving in rush hour in New York City—or she happened to be reading; whatever the reason for our getting lost, the navigator takes the heat. That’s my side of the story. (Please don’t ask her, though)

So she got the TomTom for Christmas. No gift could be more liberating. Yesterday, we gave it a test run going to Norfolk. I knew how to get there, of course, but getting to our friend’s house in Virginia Beach was fraught with the possibility for errors. TomTom, do you stuff. I was amazed. The woman in the TomTom was flawless—l called her Hallory (Remember Hal in 2001, Space Odyssey?). I was her perfect instrument, and she never took a nap, gazed out the window, read a book, or threw the map at me. I was ecstatic. Not only did she tell me where to go, but she knew how long it would take to get there, and always with a calm and respectful voice. If I was slow to get in the right lane, Hallory never, never got agitated.

And I tested her just to see how she’d react. Going home, just one last test for Hallory; I purposely made the wrong turn, just to see if she would get mad. And that same calm voice told me how to get back on course, as if I had never made a mistake. When she brought me to our front door, and said you are home, I kissed her.

Tonight, we’re going out to dinner.

Posted under General Observations

After reading the blogs ad infinitum about Hillary and Obama struggling to define themselves, I can’t help but think that they are dramatizing on the national stage what race and gender mean in our society—which is to say in our minds and the way we think.

Obama struggles with defining for himself what it means to be black, if anything. And Hillary goes through the same process as she defines herself as woman and wife. Each struggles with past stereotypes and cultural conditioning that weighs like cement shoes, and we can watch them break free and then get pulled back, only to break free once again. We want them to walk free, because we are in that straight jacket too.

If nothing else, this political race is about how we define ourselves. Do we each create ourselves or are we created by others? It seems that the choice is ours. Hillary and Obama are just showing us how to exercise it.

Posted under current events