Watching the convention media reporters sniff out resentful Hillary supporters like foxhounds really illustrates how the media reflects our own mind. You can learn a lot about how your mind works by watching the news. Media hounds won’t let a scent die once they are on the trail of their story. Basically, media is attention: what it looks at we see. So if the media looks at a PUMA (die hard Hillary supporter), the PUMA exists for us, and if the PUMA exists for us, the observer, then the PUMA also feels it exists. The TV that we are looking into works  under the convention that the object exists as a thing in itself, when if fact what we are looking at is the media/object. The camera and its subject are not separate. The observer creates what is observed and pretends it didn’t. Everything is conditioned by the lens of the perceiver.

The media and its object, the observer and the observed are really one. Just as in theater and movies we have to suspend our disbelief and pretend for a while that the movie is real, the same with television news. We pretend that it is real and objectively true. But you can’t take the media out of the medium.

And the same convention works in our own mind. There is the thinker or “me” that observes thoughts, feelings, states, attitude, resentments, anger, greed, pleasure and pain like a camera. The illusion is that this thinker is separate from the thought, that the observer is separate from the observed—and then the thinker doesn’t approve of the observed and wants to fix it. “I shouldn’t think this or feel this way. What can I do, who can I pray to, and what can I take to change it?” This is like the camera trying to fix what it is photographing.

It’s very difficult to drop our conventional ways of seeing reality. We like pretending that the media is an objective witness. We hold onto our resentments, our PUMAs because they give us a sense of who we are, and the more separate we are from reality the stronger our sense of self is. When the media hound selects its subject, that subject feels its own objectivity and secretly enjoys it. “Wow, I’m somebody now because the media has given me some attention.”

When resentment and anger gets our attention through the media’s focus, we can see how someone’s pain becomes his or her pleasure and how that pleasure then becomes our pain. And yet, we must enjoy this suffering or we wouldn’t watch it, would we? I think we are fascinated, even hypnotized with TV because it reflects our own mind and its illusions, and deep down beneath the screen our soul wants to pierce the veil and break out of the trap.

When you look at the people in the Democratic convention, you see earth tones, all shades of earth from deep black through the shades of brown to light skin. And when listening to Michelle Obama’s speech this morning (I didn’t stay up last night), I felt grounded in the earth of family and the common life of working people. That’s seems to be the undercurrent of this election: who is the most grounded candidate, who is in touch with the people, the country, the times, and himself?

And each candidate tries to frame the other as out of touch, ungrounded, and elitist. Bush beat Kerry because Kerry was defined as being an elitist—which has now become as nasty a word as liberal in the Republican lexicon.

If color is any guide, black and brown represent earth and the body while white represents sky and the mind. Emotion is pitted against reason in this dichotomy where in our culture mind is all to often at war with the body and its urges and values security most. So if you peel back the layers in this political drama we are playing out, you can see the play of colors where the controlling mind fears the earthy body and the riot of its undisciplined emotions.

This division between body and mind plays out in the political parties that divide the collective psyche of our nation. Republicans like to represent rational control; Democrats represent the clamoring of freedom’s desire. It’s rational male vs. emotional female, head vs. body, control vs. discord, white vs. black, and sky vs. earth. I know this is simplistic but the color scheme carries out.

But in truth this division is totally irrational and illusionary, and anyone who invests their identity in either side is betting on a hand that holds no cards. A mind that is at war with its own body is insane. A life that is at war with itself is unreal. Michelle Obama was very real.

Now this passage from Chogyam Trungpa really helps this morning as I contemplate the yoga class I’m teaching Wednesday at the Southside Virginia Community College near Alberta.

“The nature of transcendental knowledge starts with bewilderment. It is as if we were entering a school to study a certain discipline with great, wise, learned people. The first self-conscious awareness we would have is a sense of our own ignorance, how we would feel extraordinarily stupid, clumsy, and dumb. At the same time we begin to get wind of the knowledge: otherwise we would have no reference point to experience ourselves being dumb…Knowing one’s own stupidity is, indeed, the first glimpse of transcendental knowledge.”

Well, this is encouraging. in other words, the dumber I feel, the smarter I am. While Trungpa didn’t mention this, what is also important is to accept not knowing anything. To experience anything we need the reference point of its opposite. I can’t experience black unless I know white. I can’t experience hot unless I already know cold. I can’t experience unhappiness unless I have happiness as a reference point. So while we believe we are this or that, stupid or smart, we are also the opposite of what we experience, or else we couldn’t experience it. We need the opposite of everything we experience. In order to be good you need the bad, otherwise you couldn’t experience being good.

Consicousness is funny that way. We believe—and therefor we think—we are limited, but in reality we are full and empty at the same time. Everything is its own opposite. You can’t pin anything down. You can’t hold onto anything. The trick is being comfortable with this. When you are ok with not knowing, if you need to know, you just know. When you are ok with being stupid, you don’t resist the “wind of the knowledge” when it blows.

This has not been a good summer for my relationship to insects. After some early summer flea bites a tick came along and  it me(it still itches), and then while watering my deck fern I angered a nest of yellow jackets and they added a layer of itch to my back before I could get into the house, and darn if I didn’t get three tick or chigger bits while going through the bushes at the lotus pond at Yogaville. Throw in some ant and mosquito bites and and you have one itching summer. Well, nothing profound here. I just itch and scratch.

Chogyam Trungpa quote:

“In the practice of meditation, mindfulness of the body is the sense of being right there on your meditation cushion, which is partly influenced by bodily sensation and partly influenced by audiovisual sensations and consciousness. At this point, it is not so much meditating on anything particular at all, but just being with one’s body fully and completely. As much as we can, we are right there, sitting there. And that kind of sense of being there is also a very penetrating experience. That sense of being transcends the ordinary level of self-consciousness even. You might occasionally experience that you feel that you are being there, you are watching yourself being there, and the watcher watches itself. But that is another little phase, another little project that wears out quickly, and then comes back into the experience of being.”

Just some early morning thoughts from the front porch. Another blue but dry day dawns as crows call and carry on around the house signaling the coming cooler days of fall. Today I plant another fig tree, the second of a pair of small trees given to us to plant at Peace House. Yesterday for lunch before my afternoon wedding I ate some ten figs from the parents of these “children,” and I was surprised to find that they kept my energy up through the afternoon. The trees ancestors came from Sparta, and you know how much energy the Spartans had. Anyway, I digress.

What I’m contemplating this morning is simply being who you are. It seems all of our suffering comes from avoiding the simplicity of this truth. Being who you are is just being present without any embellishments. But somehow for some reason, that never seems to be enough. We need reassurance. We crave applause. We seek credentials. In other words we just don’t believe we are real. I don’t know how we humans got caught in this mess.

Maybe the purpose of being unreal is to discover the joy of being real. Being real is just being who you are. Being real is being okay with yourself. Being okay with yourself is being okay with the world because you make no demands on it. You don’t need it for approval. When you don’t need the world for approval or justification, you are able to enjoy the simple reality of life as it is.

You have the ability to just be here with whatever is happening. The simple truth is that we are what is happening. I am writing to you this moment and that is all there is. Of course the mind comes in and tries to make something of it—you can watch you mind spin every moment like a political pundant on CNN—but when we learn the avoidance game of our thinker we don’t have to take our search for self so seriously.

I love this passage from Chogyam Trunpa in this morning’s reading on letting go: “For the (yogi or meditator) rather than getting away (a vacation) from the constraints of ordinary life, letting go is going further into your life. You understand that your life, as it is, contains the means to unconditionally cheer you up.”

This idea is really important for those people in small towns like Blackstone who long for a richer environments to grow their life. Back in the 80s when I first moved here I felt that this soil was not suitable for my nature, and I spent several years throwing darts of hopeless and dissatisfaction, but I didn’t hit the bulls eye until I reversed my perspective. Virginia, Southside, Blackstone, this street, my house, my family, my body, and my mind with all its history all contain the means to “undonditionally cheer (me) up.”  In other words, where can I go that I am not? If I can’t be unconditionally cheerful with what is given, then can I be unconditionally happy anywhere? Letting go is just accepting yourself as you are, unconditionally.

The key word here is “unconditionally.” This means being cheerful without conditions having to be favorable. Unconditional means being free, and the intrinsic quality of freedom is cheerfulness.

“These fig trees were planted by my Greek mother-in-law in the sixties,” our friend said. “There were imported from the Greek island of Sparta.” And she then gave us two young trees to plant in our yard. Imagine, fig trees from Greece. My mind loves to play with bottomless images like this.

Why these trees could be direct descendants of the trees that fed the Spartans that held off the Persian army. I think the Persians were Iranians. I’ll have to check. But anyway, I do have a bit of Greek history in my yard now.

In our rush to judge everything as a thing in itself we fail to understand—never mind see—that nothing stands alone. Everything is only a temporary noun. In reality everything is a verb, a process and part of an interactive web of events. I just ate a banana that was probably grown in Costa Rica. That banana was the sun, the soil, and the rain of the earth, a pattern of events we call a banana. It was also part of the man who picked in, the packers who packed it, the transporters who transported it, and all of the families that supported and gave birth to them back through time. The whole universe can be found in that banana.

And then I threw the banana peel beneath my azalea bush by the front porch where it will become part of the soil and then the bush and then the flowers of next spring. We are apart of everything. So it is not a large leap to eat the figs that fed the Spartans the defeated the Persians that saved the Greek and Western civilization. You may think I’m kidding, but I’m not.

Yesterday I spent four hours driving through Southside collecting pictures of the courthouses from Brunswick, Mecklenburg, Charlotte and Lunenburg counties. I thought the court house in Charlotte was the best historically preserved group of buildings as the town itself looked as if it was still shaking from the northern calvary that passed through there. If I were to say one word that summed up this area it would be “woods.” When this area was first settled, it was man and his ax against the forest, and not much has changed.

Except in the towns people are still holding back the gathering forest in little patches of clear space, only now they also have kudzu to contend with. And now with tight times in the economy—which has always been the case in this region—there seemed to be an extraordinary number of cars and even boats for sale on the road side.

I didn’t see much tobacco growing; the biggest fields were outside Blackstone. Lumber and beef looked like the two best commodities to invest in here. But everything was drought dry and I was reminded of siesta time in Mexico, as there weren’t many people to be seen.

In four hours of travel I only saw two Obama signs, and one was on my house. But I didn’t see any McCain signs. So from that one could say Obama beats McCain two to zero in this area.

(Letter to the Courier-Record)

In response to Mr. Pyle’s support of the recent editorial attack on Obama for his gun control views, I did a little research and found that the threat he poses to our safety here in Southside is wildly exaggerated and comes mainly from his being on the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based foundation that used its assets to “fuel a dialogue about how to address public policy issues like reducing gun violence,” said Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman.

Obama, who joined the board as a 32-year-old lawyer before he got into politics, reviewed over 1500 individual grant requests, and some of them were to study aggressive gun control policies, some of which were mentioned in Pyle’s letter. But the letter misleads us into thinking that these were Obama’s votes in the legislature.

“Not every [grant] got discussed,” said Carin Clauss, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who served on the board with Obama. “Some were just: ‘Yeah, we don’t have any problem with that.’ The primary function of the board was to identify the public policy issues that were going to be the subject of grants.”

So are we not looking at an irrational fear that Obama or anyone for that matter is coming to take away our guns and leave us at the mercy of the barbarians waiting at the gate. Fear always exaggerates the danger because fear impairs our vision.

“The other areas in which the foundation issues grants include reducing the influence of money in politics and boosting high culture in Chicago. Of the $219 million in grants approved from 1997 through 2002 — the years of Obama’s tenure for which the foundation has posted its annual reports online — the environment received $57 million, followed by education ($56 million), employment ($41 million), gun violence ($21 million), money and politics ($17 million) and culture ($6.5 million).”

So there you have it. Because of a few grants approved by a foundation board Obama was on, you are unlocking your gun cabinets and standing by the window. While the planet melts and China is set to overtake our economy and Russia is rattling its sabers, rural gun owners are afraid Obama is going to come and get their guns.

If this isn’t a false fear issue, I don’t know what is. Aren’t we better than this? Isn’t it time we wake up and stop repeating propaganda?