The Avatar and the Voyage to Pandora

Good morning. What will we discover in Avatar this morning? I'm suddenly getting views, so that inspires me to write more. There are so many way to interpret Avatar layered story. What is science fiction? It is both science and fiction. Buth true and not true. It both IS and it is NOT. This is the contradiction in our very logic that we inheretided from Aristotle: the Law of Ideniity. Out civilization is built on this logic. Everything is what it is.

A flamingo is a flamigo, and a corquet mallet is a mallet. (Alice in Wonderland.) But in Wonderland (Pandora?), the flamingo is the mallet, and the mallet is the flamingo. WAIT...that is not logical. That cannot be. It IS or it is NOT....that's it.

You are either the Sky People or you are the Navi. But Jake Sully found himself being both and neither. What am I?When asleep, Jake was awake, when he was awake, he was asleep. And then reverse that?

Do you get that? He finally reached a crisis where he admitted in deep despair that he didn't know which way of knowing, or identity was a dream and which was real. There is no logical way out of this double-bind. or Twist.. No matter what Jake chooses to be, he is trapped. When he is the human, he is not the Navi. When he is the Navi, he is not human. Back and forth he goes, oscillating between the real and unreal, the dream and waking...between IS and is NOT.

How does he break out? You have to feel the despair of Jake Sully. You have to find situations in your life where no matter what you do, you are fu**ed. Like a pendulum, the logical mind swings between This and That.....

To arouse the meaning of Avatar, you have to inhabit Avatar...You have to arouse the Jake Sully in your..the Hero in you, the hero with a thousand faces.

Je Suis Jake Sully....

How Avarat changed my life.

I was a Sky Person, and with a wound that could not be healed. By accident, I signed up for a journey to Pandoar, on the promise that I would be made whole again. I kept a journal of my adventure.

I have been writing on for 19 years, and I'm still getting views and insights. https://www.facebook.com/the.voyage.to.pandora

I always call my wife. Avatar and Hurt Locker were about not being able to choose. What do you do now?

When Hurt Locker won best picture, I was shocked. Surely Avatar was the best picture of the year. But after watching Hurt Locker twice, I find both movies are about the same crisis: The crisis of Choice. What do both heroes do when there is no choice.

Jake Sully could not choose between the human world and the Navi world because he couldn't not tell which was real. He was in a No Man's land, so what did he do? He just leaped...a mad leap. A Hail May pass if you will.

And is there a choice of. which wire to cut when deconstructing a bomb? Is there a choice when you are either alive or dead? Is there a wrong choice? You won't know you made a wrong choice. So is there a wrong choice if you will never know it?

Right and wrong depends upon having a future where you can say, OH, Sh*t...I shouldn't have chosen that.

The choice is ambiguous, therefore, there is no choice. So what do out hero's do when there is no choice?

In the cereal scene, what did the Choose do where all the cereals were the same. Do you remember that scene? He just grabbed any cereal and walked on.

I often find myself in that situation when trying to fill my wife's shopping list, and there is one item that is ambiguous, not noted in a clear and distinct idea. It could be this or that. I don't know. Usually I will call to find out what to choose. But if I choose without calling, there is the fear of making the wrong choice. But what if I never knew I had made the wrong choice?

Both movies are a meditation on choice and the discriminating mind, which in Avatar is the mind of the humans. To them everything is an IT, and you have right and wrong ITs from which to choose.

To the Navi, there is no IT world because everything is Thou. You are everything. Pandors is a way of knowing that transcends choosing good or bad, right or wrong. To our modern minds, this is the Lost World or Lost Paradise, where everything is a choice and a value.

When I cannot choose, I call my wife.

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot
_________
Avatar is many things, and one is what it feels like to suddenly be in the Beginners Mind. When Jake Sully wakes up from his induced sleep on Pandora in his new body, he is Beginner's Mind....
Suddenly, you are ALIVE for the first time...You are Adam freshly created in a new earth. So Jake in the movie oscillates between Old mind (the Humans I-IT way of knowing, and the Navi, or I-Thou way of knowing where you are One with all yet separate at the same time. With the Human consciousness, you are always separate searching,
_________

Turn on the overhead light��

Thanks to Albert Low, I have a new metaphor to work with, two ways of knowing: The flashlight and the overhead light. The flashlight is our cognitive way of knowing one thing at a time. There is no ambiguity in the flashlight way of knowing. Everything is one object. Every object is clearly and distinctively from other objects; that is what allows us to be selective and choose what is good or bad,

The Third Eye is the overhead light, that is always on. This is Awareness AS, and it's impersonal because everything is known as a whole with no distinction. We need the flashlight mind to have a personal consciousness. A satori is when the flashlight mind blinks, and the Overhead light bursts through and illuminates everything at once. Then the flashlight or Sense of separate self returns, and we know here we are without a map.

When the flashlight mind encounters ambiguity and it cannot choose, that is the moment that arouses the Overhead Light to flash on, and we can transcend the ambiguity not by seeing but my Knowing the One that is two. I am That.��We need both Flashlight mind and Overhead mind to navigate the world. When we can blink the flashlight at will, we will always know where we are. ��Coming and going you never leave home. (Hakuin)

In Avatar the Flashlight mind is the way the Sky People know reality where everything is an IT. The Way of the Navi is Awareness AS not Of.

If you want to wake up, shop in the Gap

The Gap of Deja Vu From a Zen viewpoint �

The Gap of Deja Vu
Is a clue you are dead��

From my perch that sense of Deja Vu is a sense that what I'm seeing is the past. When we look at the stars, we see yesterday's stars and today's. When I perceive reality or the world, it is yesterday’s world.

Existence is impermanence or a flowing reality. The brain is a video camera that is cognizant of the situation memory, as yesterday’s stars, are believed to be happening Now.

NOW cannot be perceived and caught by the snapshots of the brain because we perceive and believe NOW has already happened. This is the way consciousness functions. We live in the hologram of personal consciousness believed to be Now, but it is a split-instant past. The Gap between the Memory of Now and the Now can break through as Deja vu...the sense this has happened before and it has.

The movie The Sixth Sense was about this sense that what I'm seeing is not real because it isn't. We see is a Memory of the Real, for the Real or Now is has always moved on. It cannot be fixed or known.

Zen is the tradition that arouses the Sixth Sense and arouses the mind that does not rest on the Gap or the known that is dead or past.

The Avatar and the Voyage to Pandora is also about this Gap of Deja Vu. Pandora is a metaphor for the mind that sees reality as Wonder, fresh and for the first time. The Sky People or Humans see reality through language and the gap, so for them everything is just an IT or a dead thing. For the humans reality is dead, earth is dead and has lost its wonder. They live in the sense of Deja Vu where one is haunted by the nagging feeling that I've been here before...and you have. What we believe is real is a recording of the brain. In this way, we know where we are and are always in a known world....We have been here before AS reality, as the Real....

But (and this happens at the speed of light, we could say) I'm just watching my brain recording reality. The Knower of reality IS reality, but it is only by creating a Gap that we know that I am something separate from the Real.

Deja Vu is a clue that I'm asleep. I'm living in a dream, believing it is happening for the first time, but I am asleep in the Dream of the. world.

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot

That is Pandora, Jake Sully....wake up....wake up. We already always on Pandora.




Sully's Moment of Zen

When Jake Sully couldn't tell which was the dream, the reality of the Humans or the Navi, he described his situation as a No Ma's Land, the dead zone between the trenches in WWI. This was Sully's Moment of Zen, and your moment, when you arouse the mind that does not rest on either viewpoint, or Way of Knowing.

This is the Moment of Zen or Awakenng where you cannot go back to being a human and earth, nor can you go forward to being a Navi and living on Pandora. What do you do when you cannot do anything?

You make the MAD leap. In Avatar, Sully leaps on the Last Shadow, a metaphor for death and the unknowable. You die, and that death, or leap, is your resurrection. In the Mad Act, that is. your moment of Zen where you suddenly KNOW what to do, who to choose, where to do, how to fix the machine, and Who you Are. There are many substacks of the Moment of Zen from opening a new package to finally being Home in your own nature.

The Moment of Zen or No Man's Land is the same. The formula is the same. In Zen, that moment of Zen is MU! Let's pull MU parts. What is it? What was the Zen situation that arouses MU.

A monk asks Joshu if a dog has Buddha Nature or not. Joshu says MU, or NO. For If Johsu he says Yes, a dog has Buddha Nature he is wrong. That is not the monk's real question. He could have Googled that.

If Joshu says No, a dog doesn't have Buddha nature, he is refuting the basic truth of Buddhism that all beings have Buddha Nature.

The real question the monk was asking Joshu was to give his mind peace from this nagging feeling that won't let him go. If a dog has Buddha Nature, then why don't I have peace? Why do I suffer? Surely, I'm better than a dog. I have been meditating for 25 years, and still, I have no inner peace.

Joshu doesn't just say MU...MU rises spontaneously from his gut. MU is leaping on the Last Shadow. But not just for Joshu but for the Monk as well. In MU, the monk and Joshu are the same NO...But does NO mean NO...

When Joshu has the moment of Zen, NO means YES. MU is an ironic NO. MU leaps beyond the polarity of the two ways of knowing, being human and being Navi.

In the human way of knowing, or dream Jake Sully, everything is an IT. Nothing is sacred. Noothing is whole. Everything is for profit. Everything has a use.

In the Navi dream, all is one and wondrous. You are always seeing your world as if for the first time. We flip back and forth between these two ways of knowing or being. One moment, life is dead, a Groundhog Day of boring sameness,. In the next moment, everything can change, and you are alife and full of energy again. You know...

But wait, lets get back to MU as the Last Shadow, and your Moment of Zen when you do do something you never thought of, where you become Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, doing the miraculous action when you plans and expectations fail.

MU is the NO that is YES....YES....I am ALIVE...You cannot do or say MU....in your despair, in your wandering in No Man's Land, in your Dark Night...the Light of MU will burst forth like a Fourth of July rocket.....The Triumphant YES....the Madness that is beyond Madness of No Man's Land where everything is it's own opposite and you cannot wake up from the dream.

In your Moment of Zen, you step out on faith over the abyss without a hope or a prayer to rest on. You DIE and are Reborn.

You have aroused the mind without resting it on Yes or No, for both are dreams.

From my perch, Avatar and. Star Wars are the get epics on our age. Joseph Campbell said that movies are our myth makers now since the modern age (mind) threw myth, metaphor, and mysticism out with the bathwater of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, which was the dream of Europe for a thousand years.

The Sky People (humans) in Avatar are a metaphor for the modern mind, that analyzing objective mind that is the dominant way of knowing since Bacon and Descartes "I think, therefore I am."

The scientific method was in the saddle of the new age, and Faith was given to Sunday School and an hour on Sunday. But for the rest of the week, we gradually became in a material world where everything was IT. The I was missing, a ghost in this vast machine.

Jake Sully is the mythic hero that Joseph Campbell defined in his epic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Watch Avatar again, this time with fresh eyes. This is your inner journey. Don't watch the movie as an IT. Inhabit the movie as your dream, you quest to wake up from the sleep of Modernit where everything is just IT, over there, and you feel a victim in this machine world, the world of the Sky People.

And read the Hero's Journey. It's time to wake up Jake Sully.

I notice that we are getting viewers here on Pandora..

Nirvana is openly shown to our eyes. �This earth where we stand is the pure lotus land! �And this very body, the body of Buddha. (Hakui)(

Avatar is a metaphorical blueprint for awakening to Buddha Nature, or your True Self that is no self.

Inhabit the movie, become Jake Sully. Do what he does in your everyday life. Watch the movie over and over until you ARE Jake Sully and Not Jake Sully at the same time.

I took my 100 year-old mother to see Avatar in 3D..How did you like it I asked.

I liked it, she said, but where did they get all those tall blue actors from?

The problem with Ego is our language and objective consciousness, where for anything to exist, it must be a thing over there. The Ego is a word, an idea of something. All the while, the Ego is patting itself on the back for naming and catching the Ego in a new set of words. The Ego is believing words are things. See the Trap of Words, and what happens?
See the trap of your situation where you don't know what to do, or what the truth is, or where you are. See the trap of our personality, the belief that I am a body and mind with a personal history, a thing in time separate from the universe. The Ego is Lost in Space. The best way out of the Trap is to watch Avatar three times.

Nirvana is openly shown to our eyes. �This earth where we stand is the pure lotus land! �And this very body, the body of Buddha. (Hakuin)
___________

This is from a Zen Master. James Camaron's movie Avatar is a blueprint for awakening to the truth that we are always already in the Kingdom of Heaven....or Pandora.

The Pandora is our Wonder in the eyes of Jake Sully, which is our own true nature. Reality is the nature of wonder, through the eyes of a little child, who Jesus said could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

When we watch Avatar for the first time, there is Wonder...The movie evokes Wonder..Avatar is a metaphor for our own awakening when we see our home town, our family, our neighbor as if for the first time.

That is what awakening is all about. Seeing your every world for the first time....OMG....

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot

Avatar arouses wonder that does not rest on the known...

With movies, this wonder is evoked only when you see the movie fresh. When you see it again, the wonder is dead.

But when you awaken, the wonder never dies.... your life is always fresh and creative. Wonder never dies.

The Great Mother comes to restore wonder.

The Diamond Sutra of Avatar

Avatar is a diamond with infinite facets. I keep seeing new meaning in Avatar, the original, so I return to my journal like Jake Sully with another report to keep you informed about my exploration.

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot�
__________

Avartar is a blueprint for arousing the integrating mind, the Vision mind, if you will. To know Avatar for the first time even though you have seen it many times, is to arouse the Vision Mind that is always integrating the content of a changing world in a new way, which is seeing it for the first time.

When Jake Sully wakes up in the end of the movie, is he a character in the movie, or is Jake Sully You?

I am Jake Sully, Jake Sully is me.

Who are you?

Je Suis Jake Sully��

We hear the Call to Transcendence or Adventure in many ways. One of my favorites is by way of a great movie. But you have to inhabit the movie and be the Hero who hears the Call to Transcendence. Avatar is my favorite. Jake Sully journey through the contradiction of two ways of knowing, the objective way of the human and the subjective way of the Navi created a crisis in. his being. I don't know which world is the dream and w which is real, he said when he was caught in no man's land between the two worlds.

What did he do? He jumped on the Last Shadow, a metaphor for death or the unknowable. But that wasn't the last act for he was still in the body of the human and the body of the Navi....

What was the alchemy of Jake Sully where he transmuted the ambiguity or contradiction between two ways of knowing, objective or subjective?

JS sits up in the end looking at YOU in the audience.

I SEE YOU....

What does that mean? Does he see you as someone, or is he seeing you AS You.

Are you not Jake Sully hearing the call to transcend who you think you are?

Avatar as the formula for creativity.

Creativity (or violence) arises when a single situation or idea is perceived in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference. Arthur Koestle

This formula for creativity (and violence) rings in every situation I when I'm caught in a Catch-22 situation. Catch-22 (the movie as metaphor) is where Yes is No and No is Yes, and nothing you do is any good.

Jake Sully is caught in the vise or noman's land as he called it when he did not know which was the dream and which world was real. The incompatible frames of reference, each standing alone as the truth, but only one could be obeyed.

The single situation is the movie. Avatar is an extended Zen Koan where there are two viewpoints of reality, the monk and the master, and there is a yearning in the heart to be born. I AM is the ONE that is born from the ambiguity of Two.

Avatar is creative alchemy. Avatar is a move Koan, a womb for a new way of knowing the world. Avatar is the awakening of non-duality, the I AM that transcends the split mind of This or That..which is real, the human world or the Navi world?

If you inhabit Avatar like I have, still writing from its ambiguity, Avata is a living well-spring of creativity.

THE TEACHING OF SUCHNESS

Avatar is the Zen teaching of Muchness. Reality is just what it is, no filter, no lens, no. added qualities, beliefs, opinions, and definitions, langurage. Suchness is intimate..before and beyond words..In this way, Suchness is the suspension of the Separate Sense of Self....

Suchness is wonder. Amazement...reality is so very familiar, and yet so marvelous at the same time.
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot

Suchness is seeing your old town, your old family, and your old self for the very first time.
Oh...what an awakening.

The earth is Pandora...Earth is not an IT but a Thou. �

�Nirvana is openly shown to our eyes. �This earth where we stand is the pure lotus land! �And this very body, the body of Buddha. (Hakuin)

THE ZEN OF AVATAR

Avatar is an art form we call a movie that generates a creative tension in the hero—and in you, if you can sit in Zazen with the tension and allow it to gnaw away in your guts.

Just as a Zen Kown is a creative tension between a Monk and Master that can explode in your a Kensho or awakening, Avatar is a movie nuclear reacto...That ends with the hero Awakening as........I SEE YOU....

Avatar is a blueprint for your awakening to your transcendent true self that leaps ;beyond the dulaity of everyday consciousness where we are always being rubbed the wrong way.

Avatar rubs you the right say. Zazen is the practice of sitting without reaction to the rubs of the world, a allowing that gives the creative tenion space and permission to explode into

I AM.....