We’re serving Peace Pie here at Peace House. Walk-ins are welcome. This pie has been cooking for many, many years, and there have been many poor pies, but the recipe was never just right. You know when the pie isn’t a full Peace Pie when it starts giving out, or when you have to make an effort to bake it. Making a Peace Pie takes no effort, first of all; and secondly, it never gives out, no matter how many slices you cut.

So how does one make a Peace Pie? Well, I hate to tell you this, but there is no recipe. Oh, there is a recipe, but you have to discover it yourself. No one can give you his or her recipe. But the good thing is that we all have an original recipe for a Peace Pie, and when you eat a slice of peace, no matter who made it, it always tastes the same. “Oh, that’s good. I feel so peaceful.”

Now, you can have a slice of my Peace Pie so you can get an idea what a piece of Peace Pie tastes like, then you will have an idea what to work for in your own kitchen. You keep making pies and check to see if they taste like a Peace Pie.

Peace Pies are made in the mind so you have use the ingredients that you find there. Some of the best ingredients are the spiciest. Anger is great, and then you can throw in a little depression for balance. It’s really quite easy. You get a little piece of peace from someone who has a Peace Pie, you let your mind eat it, then you keep that peace alive by throwing all these so called negative ingredients into it. Peace feeds on all the stuff you have lying around in your mind. Once you start mixing, you just can’t stop, it’s so much fun.

Peace has a way of transmuting whatever you mix with it into peace. Peace is magical that way. But you have to practice making peace in order to experience peace. You can’t have a Peace Pie and not give it away. Just give someone you know some peace, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

My daughter’s old cat, Freedom, is a messy eater, and because of that I kicked him out of the house—where he dragged smelly cat food all over the kitchen floor— and made him eat on the back porch. To keep him from turning the rear entrance to our house into a field of decayed food I boxed in his food place so he couldn’t drag the food backwards as was his habit. But then the ants started coming.

Now he doesn’t drag his food out, but every day his half empty plate and food is covered with more and more ants. Yesterday we clashed, the ants and me.

This good food source must have combined the ant colonies because now there was an inch wide column of ants running along my back deck into the porch and coving the plate with a mass of ants so thick I couldn’t even find a clear space on the plate to pick it up. I had had it!

I grabbed my bug spray and carpet-bombed the ants. Then I followed their supply train along the deck’s edge strafing them and laying waste to their population with my chemical weapon. The whole ant population was destroyed. Hah!

When as I realized what violence I was doing,  this great wave of remorse swept over me. And I scanned the deck and cat plate to see if there were any survivors. A few dazed stragglers wandered around in circles looking for their lost comrades. What had I done? Oh, this was bad, bad karma.

What could I do? I went to the garbage and got out a couple of old car food cans that still had fragments of food and put them at the place where I had stopped killing the ant column. I asked the ants for forgiveness and hoped they would take this offering as a sign of my sincere apology. I didn’t care about the bad karma, I was just sorry for the ants.

When I picked up Freedom’s plate this morning, there were no ants. And so far I have felt no ominous threats from the ant world. I just hope I’m not reborn as an ant.

Yesterday the idea of the MacGyver Principle came up at the dinner table, and this morning I read a review of the series that ran from 1985 to 1992. You remember the series don’t you, where this Middle American guy gets himself out of scrapes with his ingenious ability to use what he has on hand and in his pocket.

But you know me by now if you have read this blog for a while. Everything I have at hand becomes a metaphor that points to freedom from the bondage of the conditioned mind. The “scrapes” we find our self in are always caused by our own mind, and if we apply the MacGyver Principle to our situation, we might have a clue that will cut us free. So what is the MacGyver Principle?

Its simplicity makes it difficult to see. First, MacGyver never looks for a savior or the experts to rescue him from his entrapment; he absolute relies on himself and what is given. No matter how tightly he seems wrapped, the means for his escape are always given, either in the immediate environment or in the pocket junk he happens to be carrying. MacGyver has a deep trust that whatever he needs will be provided when he needs it, but not before. He never goes on a mission loaded with every conceivable piece of technology he might need. MacGyver travels light and with no insurance.

When you apply this principle to your mental double binds, it means that you use your negatives—the guilt, the doubt, the irritations, all of your suffering—as the means to extricate yourself from bondage. By turning your negatives into positives you make your life workable. As Secretary Rumsfield said, “You go to war with the army you’ve got.”

How does MaGyver do this? Nothing in McGyver’s life situation is glued into a label. Chocolate plugs a leaking tank of acid. Cigarette smoke reveals a laser beam. The binocular lens aims the laser of the security system at itself and disables it. You can’t do this if you only see a chocolate bar and a pair of binoculars as being only one thing. The conditioned mind only sees what’s in the dictionary. MacGyver sees reality prior to the mind’s labels. McGyver is in the present moment and he brings no labels from the past with him.

So if you look at, say, your “I’m not worthy of happiness” thought like MacGyver would, you don’t see a thought/feeling with a name like guilt, you see an energy pattern with no name that enters the consciousness like a crow looking for something to eat. It’s not personal and it’s not you. MacGyver accepts everything in his immediate situation. So to be free you have to accept everything in your mind without personal investment. Just as leaves are leaves and clouds are just clouds, thought is just thought and you let them pass through without grabbing them.

You allow yourself to be as you are without judgment, without trying to fix yourself, and without looking for an expert with a recipe. Accept yourself as you absolutely are and the trap will spring open. Only your fear keeps it shut.

We love new recipes, and it’s a funny thing, no matter how many we get, there is always room for more. But what is a recipe if we take away the immediate content, such as interesting food. A recipe is a promise and an expectation of completeness. Good food, or even bad food, will make us feel full, and what is being full but the absence of being hungry. Recipes are also an order that you can impose on your cooking, and if not your cooking, then upon your life. When we feel like we need something, when there is a hunger, we look for a new recipe. And recipes must come from some external expert or authority that sells us on the hope that his recipe will satisfy us. Can you see the endless nature of recipes? When you look at them as a formula before the content, they are as endless as the stars.

Is it possible to life without recipes? Lately I’ve been looking at the recipes in my life, and one of the biggest one is the recipe of yoga. I’m a yoga cook and here’s my recipe. Sit down at my table and learn how to cook your meal of life so that you will be satisfied. I even advertise this recipe on my house: Blackstone Yoga Center. There are many such recipes in town. You have a Methodist recipe, a Catholic, a Presbyterian, and Assembly of God, and so on, all advertising their recipes with signs and claiming there’s is the best. Even the Fitness Center is a recipe. And those who don’t use these popular recipes make their own, which are also mainstream but aren’t advertised as such so those that use them can belief they don’t need any recipes. I call this kind of recipe “practicing southside Virginia,” or whatever culture you are in. All this recipe asks you to do is watch TV, drink socially, have sex when you can, and lose yourself in your work, and this will bring you satisfaction promises the recipe.

The question I ask goes deeper than the recipe, since all recipes are belief systems, an order or system, if you will, that is imposed on one’s life from the outside. Even our minds impose, or try to impose, an order on our thoughts, but we are never successful in that, as we all know.

So now we notice that when you follow a recipe, there must be conflict. It’s like when you train a dog. The dog wants to go one way, you want to go another, so you impose your order on the dog’s order, and hopefully the dog learns to heel and sit and roll over. A recipe is like that. There must be some existing order that we find unsatisfactory, and then we choose some new order to make things come out better, to replace dissatisfaction with satisfaction. And have you noticed that all recipes are thought sturctures, the blueprints of the mind?

But after you try a recipe for a while the satisfaction usually gets watered down. Maybe you say the recipe wasn’t that good after all, and that there must be a better one around the corner? Some recipes use guilt to keep you following them. The dissatisfaction of the guilt you get from quitting the recipe is greater then the dissatisfaction of the recipe itself. You get caught between two dissatisfactions, and the greater one usually wins.

So I ask again, is it possible to live without following some recipe? You should really look into this. Your satisfaction depends upon it. But there is more. If there is the possibility of living without any foreign order (a recipe) imposed upon you, then there must be a basic and undiscovered order upon which you want to lay this recipe. Now is that basic order a basic goodness, a natural moral order, if you will, or is that basic order no order at all but a kind of chaos? And if we believe our basic self is chaos, the we must feat that chaos.  In otherwords, we fear our own natural order, whatever it is.

If we are going from one recipe to another looking for completeness, are we not doing that because we don’t believe we have a native order, our own natural completeness and basic goodness as our ground? Well, this digging is getting us deeper and deeper, so we’ll rest for awhile.

I had a profound thought as I was power washing my cars this afternoon. There is nothing more pleasurable than standing in the spray of a power washer on a hot July afternoon. Oh, here is the insight.

There is no sin when the son does not become what the father wants him to be. The sin is when the son becomes what the father want him to be and doesn’t become what he wants to be. This creates a existential guilt that fathers neurosis. The only cure for neurosis is to realize that you are not who you think you are, and in that realization you are free.

“Have you seen the RV keys,” I asked everyone at Peace House yesterday, trying not to sound pathetic.  “I had the keys in my hand, now I can’t find them. I think I left them in the shop.” But since I lose my keys with the regularity of a cuckoo clock, no one stopped their life to help me look for them. This morning when I put on my pants and reached in my pocket, there they were. I was so happy, not so much in finding the keys, but in realizing a truth that I keep forgetting with the regularity of a cuckoo.

“The keys are in your pocket, stupid.” Keys, of course, are the master metaphor that opens just about any door we want in life. When we come upon a locked door, some obstacle to our life’s purpose, we need to remember this note. In fact, we should tack this wisdom reminder right in the center of our mental theater. “The keys are in your pocket. You had them all the while.” And when you realize this truth once more, a little call will sound in the mind: “cuckoo, cuckoo.”

What if the whole world were my friend? Is this a strange thought, one that hadn’t appeared in the mind, a possibility that hadn’t been imagined? Now I don’t mean the whole world as an idea; it’s easy to have an idea as your friend. Ideas always have two sides. If I have the idea of a friendly world, then I also have the flip side sense that this gives me some credentials, even if it’s just a little secret grin that only my mind knows about. This idea would just pat me on the back a little as I admired myself for being a friend of the world and having the world be my friend.

Why bother with all those lists of friends on the Internet when you can just melt them into one big friend. “Ah, the universe is my friend. Let’s see you top that?”

But what does it mean to have the whole world as your friend, really? Everything that comes into the theater of my mind would then be my friend. The mosquito flying around this keyboard looking for a place to land is my friend, even when he bits me and I bit him back. The poison ivy that kissed my foot in the weeds yesterday is my friend, even though I sprayed it with Round Up. The clerk at WalMart who didn’t respond to my smile is my friend, and even now I remember her fondly.

What ever comes my way, both inside the mind and out—and there is really no difference—is my friend. With your friend you are just okay with what ever happens, whatever their mood, whatever they do, even if they get mad at your, there is this space of okayness around it, this friendship.

Having the whole world as your friend basically means being okay with the world as it is. The world doesn’t have to change to make you happy, not the slightest thing. Every irritation or uncomfortable situation, every upset or disaster is part of this uncompromising friendship.

So this idea of friendship is not an idea at all. It is real, as real as the old cat on my back porch that keeps pulling his food across the floor so I step in it and flies come like vultures for a feast. We can be irritated with our friends and help them find a way to be less irritating, but friends you remain, and with friends there are never any problems, only the joy of discovering solutions together. When the world is your friend, you work as a team.

We love belts, at least I do. I like a good leather belt and then I wear it until it wears out. Then I get another good belt, usually hand crafted by some craftsman. A belt holds you in and keeps your pants from falling down and setting you up for ridicule. A good belt is also a protection and helps you feel safe. One loses respect when your belt fails its purpose.

And I live in the Bible belt that hold up everyone’s religious pants. A belt sort of holds our conceptual pants up, the things we believe in that help us feel secure. Our pockets are full of convictions and values that we have picked up along the way, so we need a good, strong belt to hold them all up.

But we are all wearing belts of some kind or another. I’ve been wearing a Yoga belt for some time, and you can see all kinds of belts out there today, Buddhist belts, New Age belts. Atheism belts are becoming popular now. And history is full of discarded belts that no longer hold up our modern pants. But the bigger the religion the bigger the belt. We love to add holes to our belt, and we pat our over lapping belly affectionately like we had a baby inside. The bigger the belt the more secure and right with the world we feel.

We think if it weren’t for belts our minds would just spill their contents all over the floor, like guts going everywhere. We wouldn’t even know who we are, at least that’s what we fear would happen if we took off our belt. Our belts are our identity, and our belt buckle is like a badge or symbol of our club.

So I dare you. Lets take off our belts and see what happens. What is all this stuff we’re holding up? Can’t we live without that? A belt is also a bondage, a strap that hold us in, and you can even beat yourself with your belt, or punish others with it.

Lets burn our belts and be free.

Tommy, my 89 year-old uncle visiting from Tampa, told me his story this afternoon, and in just a few minutes he gave me a beautiful picture of how a photographer is born. He was in 8th grade when he dropped out of school. “All I did was draw pictures of the teacher,” Tommy said.

And my mother, his 97 year-old sister, added she remembered going down the street in Norfolk and seeing a crowd at a department store window. “And when I got closer, there was Tommy drawing pictures of the people on the side of a refrigerator to show how clean you could keep it.” Tommy may not have learned in school, but he was a master at learning from the environment.

He remembers the exact moment when the vision of his life was born. “I was looking at this photograph in the window. I had never seen a large one like this and I went inside to find out what it was and how to make one. The man showed me a camera that cost $69 dollars, which was a lot back then. I begged my mother to buy me that camera, and she did.

‘Then I went to the newspaper so they could show me how to work it. This was before flash bulbs, mind you. When a huge hurricane hit Norfolk that year—it was 1936—all the other news photographers kept low but I went out all night in waste deep water taking pictures. The next day the newspaper printed all my pictures. They were a sensation. When I saw my name, Tommy Eure, at the bottom of the page, I was made.”

We all need a map that shows us the bigger picture of where we are.