120801 22:11 election

"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."
- Abraham Lincoln

One might feel safe in the assumption that I am political. But I am so only in the Quaker sense: "Speak Truth to Power" I find myself increasingly concerned with indications obvious to me the psychological manipulation of the electorate.

I am a registered voter and, as indicated, when I get around to it, I will become once more an Independent. Since I feel it will make those who seek power work harder to manipulate me into giving into their addictions.

Without equivocation greed is the most obscene and grotesque aspect of humanity. In a profound sense it is exercised as economic terrorism by the few against the many.

And as I write this I have in mind not simply  Niccolo Machiavelli  (1469-1527) “Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied. .” indicative of addiction; the operative word is "satisfied" or "never enough." When earnestly asked of those who purport to serve us how much power they want -- inevitably the answer is "MORE!"

When required to define their posture the reply is "more jobs for Americans" yet it is these very people who have moved our industrial genius to other nations in order to glean more profit ignoring the problem of what money is for: a medium of exchange for goods and services in order to drive the economy forward.

My sense is quite grim since I well know that hospice will be, in the very near future, a Growth Industry dealing with the already epidemic levels of dementia & Alzheimer's essentially induced by chemical substances inimical to human consumption increasing profits across the board.

Both Democrats and Republicans want to control the news media while saying on one hand that deregulation is indicated to increase jobs and on the other some other bull roar about censorship of the Internet.

I had not intended to attempt a definitive essay on elections or the economy. This is a selection of afterthoughts from a conversation with a fellow volunteer at hospice and his concerns about 'them' meaning the obvious  destruction of freedom and life livable . . . a person unwilling to live and die for something will stand anything to avoid the issues plaguing our nation and the world.

Collectively we are near checkmate upon a chess board covered with would be Kings. This is no game people, you, me, all of us, are dying because of avarice a Cardinal Sin.

Avarice n extreme greed for riches, immoderate desire for wealth; cupidity
syn avariciousness, greed, rapacity, covetousness
related deadly sin, mortal sin - an unpardonable sin entailing a total loss of grace; "theologians list seven mortal sins" greed - excessive desire to acquire or possess more (especially more material wealth) than one needs or deserves
Quotations
"The love of money is the root of all evil" Bible: I Timothy
"avarice, the spur of industry" [David Hume Essays: Moral and Political]

©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

120801 02:34 Judas Iscariot

I have arisen from a dream which defines me in ways difficult to accept as Judas Iscariot. Inherent in the dream's message was the role of avenger for the deaths of God' Children of which, of course, we all are. Yet some seem called to devour in greed everything in sight.

There are certain aspects of my personality that I am not comfortable with since it implies, at least to me and with my powers of discernment, that I am less benign than my ideal of man god or Jesus.

Baptized Methodist, an occasional Congregationalist, then for a long period of time attendance to no church. Then briefly Baptist and finally my last sincere attendance: The Episcopal Church of America. What I call and sense The Anglican Communion profoundly based upon the absence of a Pope. Or simply: Pro - test - tant.

Without artifice or conceit or intent to promote or advance any specific theology save the significance of Free Will for all, which at the moment, seems the left hand of love, mercy, compassion, empathy, kindness and sacrifice. There is virtually no part of me indifferent to anything.

"God helps those who help themselves"?!

As man and child I have been victim and helpless to stave off the deaths of anything or anyone yet in prayer have I plead to be the one to die in their stead. Simultaneously aware that my sense of death was then simply what it implies: dead and buried, this body to rot -- end of story. Add to which my sense of Jesus or any of the characters within the narrative of The Bible -- Both Books -- The Old and New Testament from beginning to end there is zero sentimentality. What I have come to perceive as idolatrous idolatry of ideas used to sell a belief system and not promote faith. . . .And in faith I would be for God anything God, in His infinite will for me for all mankind decided. . . .Even Judas Iscariot.

Spiritually and intellectually I've wandered far afield of "Christianity" without censure of Our Father. If anything, encouragement to know the divinity inherent in all Prophets who define God differently than I was formerly comfortable with. Yet each stripped of their costumes, difficult to understand languages and customs I discovered a common thread. A will to know, love and submit in life, worship and death "God."

Through, possibly, inappropriate confession, through the agency, or venue, of these pages I have proven my imperfection and ordinary humanity fully conscious of my intention to enable others to know themselves divine of origin. Instead of all the lies explicit to me at least in the various brands of human experience and thought -- the what we are willing to live by and die for in real flesh and blood terms -- I would suggest that you must decide not in belief but faith a choice.

You, though I know you not specifically, are worth my life to teach you the value God given within you.

Chortling here at my temptation to quote the wisdom of another, a Buddhist Master, since it seems now that I must write it myself incomprehensible or not.

What you love incarnates what you will become. I have a cat named Annie but I in loving her will no more be a cat than her love for me makes her human . . . I should have said I have a companion a cat named Annie and in our love for each other incarnate God's love for all life.

"When we love properly, we expand our love for a few to compassion for all. This love can help all beings to live with happiness and freedom, and it is anything but small and powerless–it is the reason for our existence!" --Buddhist Master

04:42 Pause

Typical of my practice I seek affirmation in quotes, and there were several that seemed indicative of what I sought, yet simultaneously I discerned a need to close with my own:

Read the runes and ruins of your heart carefully since the reckoning is soon for all of us.

©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_Iscariot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Judas

If the rich could hire other people to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living.
- Jewish proverb

PTSD IS:
I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people… To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about. -- As quoted at "Baba Ram Dass in the realm of Visionary Artist Martina Hoffmann: in the end there’s only one spirit and one humanness" at Elephant Journal (9 October 2010)

120731 0459 death

Upon entry into volunteer service at hospice--I feel disinclined to name 'mine' since it is a universal choice of many. None more noble than those they serve or lower in the sense of Mother Teresa and Sr. McAuley or any Religious Sisters/Brothers at all. Their devotion to the poor. 

I had a dream the night before our first class, it astonished me as most of my dreams do. Visions too. 

It dealt with the funeral of a friend and I a 'civilian' was recruited from the congregation to give the homily unprepared. 

Pre Performance I strode the narthex shabbily dressed in street clothes disheveled stewing the various things I could say: He was near the end of his life an agent of the CIA in Cambodia had fathering a gaggle of red haired children with Cambodian faces. And I remembered him from elementary school, my second faze there having stayed back in the fourth grade, brilliant, a bit odd in appearance somewhat cartoonish like Howdy Doody but tall and lanky sans Uncle Bob. 

He collected his semen in a one gallon jug filled with wood grain alcohol proudly displayed amongst his young male friends -- always wondered -- did his mother know? His sister or our mutual Doris friend next door with the psychiatrist dad who I later sold a Martin Guitar to at list price. He seemed to enjoy my flimflam sales pitch perhaps it was worth paying 100% more than on 48th Street Manhattan.

He played the piano well and we'd formed a group of shorts, can't remember what I played then conversant with so many instruments--probably cornet. In order to better render our nascent talent we patronized a jazz club smokey dark and filled with adults -- how could we get away with our drink orders? I requested scotch like mom drank and another one or two asked for beer and Win. Well. He. Asked. For. Milk!? 

With aplomb or indifference we were served.

What's my point? Oh. Yes. Periodicity of my faith and death and all of that. Starting from now and going backwards: I think hospice should charge a tuition for the experience -- priceless -- since the congress of baboons & goats has decided to cut our budget another 10% while guaranteeing themselves congratulatory raises for killing the world's economy and extending their medial insurance to cover Happy Endings to tax payer sponsored elegant lunches with lobbyist. Especially The United States Catholic Conference of Bishops who sponsor the birth of children produced by rape and incest -- you  know I've addressed this subject before -- oh well I'm a shit head and redundant as hell.

Well. Hell. What do you expect me to say? That's 30% in three years! We are near shutting down the lights and heat at night using candles and matchbooks. The staff is finding more remunerative work flipping hamburgers while the professional whore politicians are covered until death that's when I get them.

Oh sweet Jesus on a moped with and iPhone talking not paying attention direction of travel; do I love to role play. Sometimes I'm Mary getting pregnant sans foreplay or penetration no fun at all. Other times I'm Judas, sometimes Job, but my favorite role is as Osiris who greets the dead upon their departure from life . . . and sometimes Isis or God depending upon my mood: who Judges whom and with what mercy? 

Or none!

At the first class my image, the experience of death, was no death at all, merely buried alive looking at the coffin top three inches from my nose in the dark forever. I never did deliver the homily covered in a fine film of sweat disheveled but awoke then wrote up my dream -- maybe someday I'll go back and read it -- this is from memory.

Well Jesus! Look at me now riding the Milky Way on my tricycle no handed! Ginning at, to beat the band of goats in hell below me.

©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

detritus sins & virtues

Are 
we are 
we not the 
waste of God's 
dream of us the super-
fluous driving the event 
horizon forward or backward?
God remains the engine of the Universe 
and we the fuel or exhaust?! Virga fallen from 
a cloud like dream never inseminating life again or
are we merely like all the galaxies just one of trillions life vernacular forms a virus Ebola?


120731 0123 detritus sins & virtues
©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

Grief sucks & then you die

PTSD is grief the genius of which is it must be dealt with
regardless of talent which does what it can 
and of indifference; it is merely ignorance and arrogance. 


To that end I lend you my current notes gathered across religion and science in faith received from the same source:

GRIEF:

A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it. --Alexandre Dumas ?


All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law, as of all benign laws, is fear. --Elizabeth Goudge


Anyone who limits her vision to memories of yesterday is already dead. --Lillie Langtry


Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject. --Hannah Arendt


Do not surrender your grief so quickly
Let it cut more deeply
Let it ferment and season you
As few human or divine ingredients can. --Hafiz of Persia


Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. --Dr. Seuss Theodor Seuss Geisel


Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not. --Xenophon


Finding a new normal . . .Kept it moving . . . to keep living . . . I win --Marvin Sapp


Grief and constant anxiety kill nearly as many women as men die on the battlefield. --Mary Bokin Chesnut


Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. --Mark Twain


Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it. --Daphne Du Maurier


Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind --Daphne Du Maurier


In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism. --Hannah Arendt


It isn't for the moment you are stuck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security. --Anne Morrow Lindbergh


It was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. --Mary Shelley


Love comes unseen; we only see it go. --Austin Dobson


Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday. --Thornton Wilder


Mourning is not forgetting. ... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust. --Margery Allingham


One does not ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: You suffer, that is enough for me.” --Louis Pasteur


Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.


Out of difficulties grow miracles. --Jean de la Bruyere


Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated. --Alphonse de Lamartine


Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. 
--The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) --Thornton Wilder


Suffering raises up those souls that are truly great; it is only small souls that are made mean-spirited by it. --Alexandra David-Neel


The cure for grief is motion. --Elbert Hubbard


The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired. --Robert Southey


The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.. 
--William Wordsworth


The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound. --Maureen Duffy


There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. --Alexandre Dumas or --Hafiz of Persia ?


There is something pleasurable in calm remembrance of a past sorrow. --Cicero 


To love deeply in one direction makes us more loving in all others. --Anne Sophie Swetchine


We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest... might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had before. --Daphne Du Maurier


What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us. --Emmerson & Thoreau


When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when 
we loved not enough. --Maurice Maeterlinck {Belgian Philosopher, 1862-1949}


When you're feeling your worst, that's when you get to know yourself the best. --Leslie Grossman


You need not cry very loud; he is nearer to us than we think. --Brother Lawrence


©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved  120730 0643 genius of grief

--Felicite Robert de Lamennais
“Conscience is a sacred sanctuary where God alone may enter as judge.”


120730 00:22 U&I
 1+1 = 1 since you are a mask & a self -- never really "what you see is what you get"
Leave mom, dad, Jane, Spot the dog, Amadeus the cat, the Church & The State outside they don't matter to your self--soul or consciousness inside 


God never minds about masturbation or imaginary lovers or how broke or broken you are since God is the best friend you'll ever know so long as you meet inside He will help vanquish the dragons there and in the end you will be endless just like your friend God


be still child and know your friend all along within you


amen


PS if you want a quick peek seek Rumi he knew best and remains generally better than most or simply more better it takes a long time to give virgin birth to your soul no quick fix pills or liquor but simple silence and respect for all who never though they have one a
soul


©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved