weekend in quebec

I was sure I would never see her or the likes of this place again.  I have been coming

here to this little bed and breakfast for forty years and the place mats have not changed.

The towels are frayed and at least as thread bare as the rugs.  The morning breakfast, consist

of a delicious flaky pastry and a glass of Tang.  And coffee almost as bad as I have had anywhere.

You know the kind, it is labeled coffee but pours from the pot the color of a light tea.

But, alas, that is not why I come.  I come because this wonderful, little old lady looks and sounds like

some old aunt, some sister of my grandmother, an ancient distant cousin.  The little candies she places out in the hall

are wrapped and minty and smell like my grandmother’s draw, and Matante Corrine’s kitchen.

And the ancestors trying to get out well–that’s really me.  That is my nostalgia acting up again.   I said

this year I would try to maintain a better presence, but Quebec, and the French and the maple syrup;

its too much to contain.  For a short weekend just nine hours north to a magnificent country

covered in snow, and smelling of ancient relatives, I have returned home…

Quebec is a lovely provincial city in the French Provence of Quebec.  It is situated atop of a cliff on the east shore of the St. Lawrence River north of the 45 parallel and in the foot hills of the Laurentian Mountains.  It has been there for as long as any city colonized by Europe has been on the continent.  The old city is a walled city, a fortress against intruders with outstanding arched architecture and welcoming gates to the old city within.

The architecture and the ambiance is like many old cities in Europe, but unlike any on this continent.  The snow covered qutntrangle that is characteristic of many corners of the city is so sweet a spot to just hang out and drink coffee and wander in and out of the shops.  It is clearly a family oriented square and despite the very cold, cold temperatures it seems like folks have just adapted and walking on snow seems just as natural as we might find walking across a grass

lawn.

to wag or to NOT wag your tail

When we use the phrase “getting vibes”  what are we saying?  what does the experience of getting or sending out a vibe feel like?  I think that for the most part we are all fairly convinced that what ever it is that we mean by the word “vibration” we do, each in our own way, have an idea of what it means.

I can walk into a room and hear my ego saying, “yikees, i can’t stand the vibes in this room.” I know what that means for me.  It is at the very least a sensation that I feel, not think, that I am uncomfortable–there is something about the experience of myself in the room that I do not like. Is the experience of the vibration a sensation that is pulsating in the room that my senses  are picking up, or is it my own vibration experiencing the room that I am sending to my brain.  Another words is the feeling coming from an objective or subjective source.

Putting the problem aside for a moment of source, let’s look at a more definitivequestion?  Do I put out vibes?  Do I take the experience of my inner world, at any given moment, and do I send those vibrations out into the atmosphere around me. Or to word the question in another way, does my mood, good or bad, find a way of projecting itself out around me so that someone close by might register what that mood is without my having to speak about the mood?

I think that we do.  i am convinced that when I step up to a cashier at a market that in a matter of seconds, if I am paying attention to my inner world, I will be able to “pick-up” the vibes and determine if the cashier is in a good or bad mood…that is pretty obvious.  From that example we can all probably extrapolate to an event in our own lives where we emitted or received the exact nature of a mood.  Essentially, the mood without the use of words communicated itself to another sensate being something about the internal landscape.  And, no words were used.

I had a very sensitive dog, named Oreo, she was the most loving creature.  She wandered in her world looking only for an opportunity to wag her tail.  If I was to come home in a bad mood, some horrible pot hole just swallowed another tire, or it took me an extra hour to get home, because some jerk forget to put up the detour sign….Oreo would come running up to me, “smell” my mood and if it was anger she would lower her tail between her legs and skulk away–dejected.

We do spread our moods into the world, and given enough time we spread or moods, our vibrations into the room, into our mates, into our children and our families and friends and indeed, into the universe.

Having established, at least subjectively, that moods and vibrations do exist and they can have an impact on the universe around us.  I will stop here and collect my thoughts for the next essay.  What impact can a mood or vibration have on how the universe ’experiences” me.

Willie’s experience of the universe when Bernie is not home…………….

just plain feels-good

David McCullough tells a story about the portrait artist, John Singer Sargent when he was at the White House trying to get an audience with Theodore Roosevelt.  Sargent had been wanting to paint the president, but Mr. Roosevelt was a hard guy to pin down.  One morning when Sargent was waiting for an opportunity he saw the President coming dow the stairs from the upper chambers of the White House.  Sargent took the opportunity to ask the President when it might be a good time for him to paint his portrait.  Mr. Roosevelt answered, “right now would be fine.”  And john Singer Sargent painted him right there with his hand on the newel post and it became on of the finest capturings of a president in a casual pose.

What was important about that for both Sargent and Roosevelt was the immediacy of the moment, the actual capturing of a moment in time, seizing the day, and in that instant memorializing it for posterity. Although we may not in our own individual lives aspire to the level of authority that either of those men possessed in their respective occupations; nonetheless, we each in our individual way can aspire to our own excellence

There is a world of difference between aspiring to excellence and pursuing perfection.  The former is possible and noble, the later is arrogant and not attainable.   Furthermore, from one perspective we are allowing the experience of life to be channeled through us and in the second example we are suffocated by a mandate.

When I set out to write an article or an essay, or if I set out to study some subject matter in water color or pen and ink, I am not at the moment of beginning the pursuit at all concerned with the outcome of the project.  Outcome is not even on the radar.  The pursuit is the process.  The desire that I have to study or to compose is pure desire.  The pursuit is pleasure not results.  I certainly can become happy, delighted and even enthusiastic about the outcome, but it was not about that while the process was occurring.

I found myself, recently explaining to some one that listening to our desire, our deep libidinal wishes and drives was actually what was meant in theological terms as doing the will of God.  As an organism planted on this planet with many other species around us, it is necessary as the means of avoiding the most amount of suffering possible, to stay connected with the physical realities of paying attention to what we wanted to do with our lives.

How else does God speak to us?  His “words’ are not voices that we hear, and if we do hear voices they are probably commands from egoic and super egoic locations in the mind-field.  We can readily adopt the notion that if God speaks to us at all, it will probably be through the most primitive access and that would not be language, but rather from the theater of the body, as one French Psychoanalyst put it.

In the very first place, the experience of pleasure and desire are derived not from an egoic construction, or from a compilation of knowledge  data.  In the very first place, the experience of pleasure and desire is organized as a physical sensation.  Sex and food are probably the two original pleasures that are conducted through the body.  They are experienced as satisfied urges.  A build up of frustration is experienced as an energy lack and the satisfaction of that lack admits a physical condition akin to “feels-good.”

Desire is the wanting to experience more of the sensation of well-being, or feels-good.  It is a directionality that conducts the human being toward heat, away from cold, toward satiation and away from hunger, toward well-being and away from negative thoughts and emotions.

The obvious duality of the human mind is the simplest way that we have to go beyond, or cut through our reason to a more intuitive path of awakening or enlightenment.   Quite simply if we are encountering a negative thought or a negative feeling from within, from deep into the subjective arena of the human situation, we can be certain that we are on the wrong path.  We are being “wrong-minded,” we are being induces with a sensation from within the body alerting us to the fact that something has gone astray .

Conversely, when we are in a state of joy and gratitude or simply in a state of being at one and feeling the universality of cellular life; when our actions have led us to a place where our work and our mental status are in unison and we get the idea that all is right with the world…that we know is theologically having heard and followed the will of God. Psychoanalytically, we are well analyzed and our thought, ideas and reasonings do not interfere with our goals for ourselves and for our fellow creatures. Who we are and what we are wanting is not in conflict with the laws of the universe, when we place our state of desire at the center of how we arrive at what the next “right-action” ought to be for us to be maintaining our homeostasis (well-being).

Homeostasis is a term from physics and well-being is a term from relatively new age philosophy or theology.  One is thought of as having a fixed scientific assessment while the other is arrived at through spiritual and subjective awakenings.  But from the perspective of what it “feels” like we are talking about the same human condition.

intuitive psychoanalysis: cracks in the shadow of the object

The dynamics of intuition are guided by the acquisition of knowledge without the intervention of reason.  Actually, I have had experiences where the intuitive knowledge was actually hampered by the introduction of reason.  The egoic mind with its wrapper of defense frequently will get in the way of finding our freedom to act, believe, perceive or otherwise become aware.

In discussing intuition, I would like to divorce the concept from its often intuited meaning of divining a spiritual awareness.  In other words, for sake of this discussion I am not interested in making a leap that what is intuited is necessarily channeled from an other realm.  I am interested in the manner in which intuition by passes reason, but does not transport us to a realm away from our own individual consciousness.

The examination of an analysands conceptualizations through the exclusive use of reason would render a weak analysis.  If the analyst and patient stay connected only in the world of knowledge and the world of objective reality there will exist little chance for the patient to access through the analysis the inner freedom that he needs in order to have a through examination of ones internal landscape.

The value of objectivity is greatly limited when it is an internal landscape that is being pursued.  Objectivity has its place in the development of a narrative.  Clearly, were a patient actively engaging in lies about events the analyst would not benefit from have an objective appraisal.  But, again it is not an objective appraisal that we are after.  Were I to be lied to, consistently, I still would through the transference of emotional knowledge have an experience of the person that I was witnessing.

Over time it is not the object that renders the nuggets of gold in an analysis, it is the subjective relationship that is arrived at by the two people participating in an exchange of emotional data that fills the quality of the psychoanalytic experience, and gives to both parties a “feeling” of either connectivity, or one of perhaps neglect or dismissiveness. Over time the transference is experienced as either positive or negative and is seldom, if ever experienced differently in the patient and the analyst.  The most usual outcome is that  what ever is experienced is experienced.  For instance, it would be highly unusual for the patient to love the analyst and the analyst to simply be indifferent to the patient.  The induction of feelings is conducted in the dynamics of the relationship and what ever is transpiring in the relationship is a combination of the emotions flowing in each direction–form the patient to the analyst and from the analyst to the patient.

Intuition, not reason, conducts these experiences in both patient and analyst.  However, it is important for the analyst to be well honed in on his or her practice of being awakened to subjective experiences, because it is in the initial stages of the analysis particularly important for the analyst to remain open to the fact that the dialogue on the surface of the relationship may actually be very different from the intuited feelings at the more deeply structured aspects of consciousness.

Of course the classic experience comes to mind that is nearly mythologized by now.  A patient will present with an air of sweetness conducting business, as if, the feelings were positive.  The patient may go out of his or her way to comment on some inconsequential aspect of the room, for example. ” Oh, Dr. your taste in wall art is really stunning, does your wife do your decorating for you?”

The induction here is probably understood by the analyst, but layered over in the consciousness of the patient.  The Analyst will “”know” he has been insulted, but the patient will not know that he/she has let slip out a photograph of layered over hostility.  This kind of knowledge is intuitive knowledge and has no connection to spiritual concepts or concepts that are declaring that the knowledge comes from another source…it simply is more readily available to the trained professional, to the person who has an awakened perception that utilizes data other that that produced by reason alone.

There are concepts of spiritual and creative intuition that I want to discuss, but for the moment, I simply wanted to establish a basis for intuition that describes knowledge arrived at by pulling together from a variety of experiences that are essentially subjective in nature.

Intuition in modern psychoanalysis may well be the center-piece of its theoretical contribution to the field.  It is studied under the definition of counter-transference, but the experience of the counter-transference can only be arrived at subjectively and has therefore always cast our science in a less than scientific light.  Much of the research work of the last few decades have attempted to grapple with this notion and present it in such a way that it can be viewed as objective data.

It seems to me to be a long road to take to arrive at something that is clearly and uniquely an aspect of the human condition. We are born with a capacity to look inward in the same manner that we are born with a linguistic ability.  We have a capacity for language at birth, but the location of our birth decides the specific form that the language will take and a baby born in France will “naturally” grow up speaking french, a baby born in China will “naturally” grow up speaking chinese.

The study of intuition and the study of the subjective, the interconnection of humans at a sub-linguistic level is as important for our science as is the objective theories and theories of technique that we build in order to work inter-subjectively with another human being.

for leonard

a pleasure washes over me,

a night fire warms my socks &

the moon is full and casting a light

on the ice night lake across the way

and down the indian path to where

the canoe sleeps beneath the bramble bushes

covered in a light snow that fell

earlier in the day.

i wish that god had found me sooner.

i wish that  more of my days had

been less dazed by the fog-like haze

that covered my brain like the

light snow that covers my canoe

by the lake near the indian path.

I am not sure how big a difference

it would have made.

It took a long cold winter night to

finally get me to light a fire in the

rusty cast-iron stove that burns the

wood and ignites my desire to write

to you now, by a dim light, a candle or two,

and tea that comes all the way from china.

It has always been about you, you know.

Though I pretended well, and made much hay

of it, while the sun shined on the younger

part day.

Eclipsed by a fast moving cloud, the moon lite

night faded dim and the shadows left no

sign of where the light had fallen.  Light

leave no trace when it fades, no foot print

to follow, no track to smell my way back

from where I came.  Traces, we do not

leave them when we finally leave for good.

The scent is gone, the moss is covered,

an oak leaf hangs from a branch fluttering

in the wind, blowing as the gust of cold harness

shards of ice and brakes them into a thousand

kisses deep, sharp against the flesh of my face.

Leonard, it was always you that gave me pause

and made it right.

my monastery by night.

POETRY:

Author, poet, life coach, spiritual teacher, Larry Krupt, has agreed to post one of his pieces from his “yet-to-be” published book here on this web-log.  Larry performs his work in various South County Rhode Island setting as well as in Providence and New York City.  He is a regular contributor at the local Artist Way meeting.

His work  reflects a deep and profoundly felt spiritual experience.  Interweaving images from the sea and the heavens as well as metaphors from mythology to current event, his work always requires a second, slower, more deliberate reading.

I am so eager to hear his words that I frequently find myself reading fast to get the landscape, then I relax, take a deep breath and re read while his poetry washes over me like the sound of a tibetan chime or an improvisational cello.

I am grateful to Larry for agreeing to let himself be introduced here to my regular readers.  My only regret is that I am unable to render his voice.  The last time I felt so enthralled by a poet reading his own work, I was mesmerized by Dylan Thomas.

Introducing, Mr. Larry Krupt:

Language: There is a way out & it will find me…

“…profound to me that the only two things that aren’t divisible are silence and God.

This comment was posted in respond to a recent essay.  I simply love the idea that our ideas, as cooperative ventures, can always be improved upon.  At least I seem to find that to be true of anything that I do with language.  I suspect I would feel very different if some one were to arbitrarily pick up a paint brush and begin to swat at my paintings with colors and line of their choosing.

Have you ever had the experience of sitting with someone over dinner and suddenly you are moved to a feeling of dread as you watch that person, slowly and deliberately, reach across the table with their folk pointed at your place. In horror you watch as the folk descends right for that luscious  hunk of  roasted zucchini in the corner of your plate.  That is what it would feel like to me if someone pointed a paint brush at one of my paintings.

But with language when someone adds something to what i have said it feels like I have been increased, my thought has been expanded and like the ever expanding universe, i believe that my thoughts take on a life of her own, and I love to see them become their own thing in the literary universe….

Language has to be one of the most beautiful and versatile gifts from the universe to the human condition.  Language holds all of our dreams, it speaks to us of love, it renders itself as a message from our own body and it registers itself in our minds. Language is a human competence that is born into us as is our ability.  It is an organ of the human body that works as a system of symbols.  It is the connecting tissue of the human race.  Nearly all that we do for ourselves and for each other is constructed with language, or in the very least is reported in language.

The ego goes through many seasons of reason, and some reasons we do not understand–it is profoundly true that the heart has its reasons that the reason can not know.  But as we clamor for conscious understanding, we do so with the cognitive capacity of language.  In our spiritual understandings we say that, “god has spoken to me,” or “god speaks to man in mysterious ways.”

We speak of our computers having a language, we watch as people talk to each other on a stage, creating word by word a stage production that is essentially a new grouping of words that build the events of a person’s life into sound and fury. Stephanie Brown, just days after having spent six days on the roof of her house in New Orleans during the Great Flood, sings the words, “here’s to life,” an anthem of poetic justice and poetic beauty..

In the beginning there was THE WORD.  The majuscules giving the written word their authority in the realm of truth.  T.S. Eliot, “in the room, women come and go, speaking of  Michaelangelo.”  Robinson Jeffers criers out against, “man’s inhumanity to man.”  A pope gives a dictum and millions of souls are condemned to the fires of hell for eating meat on Friday.  A supreme court justice hands down a majority argument that gives a corporation all of the rights that a person has, turning a democracy of the  people by the people &  for the people into business proposition where he who owns the most toys wins the controlling shares.

Language for good or for bad is the vehicle that we have to bring our specie to a heightened consciousness.  What we do with that consciousness supports life or promotes death.  It is that big a deal that we have linguistic capacity, that born into the organism condition of the egoic mind that not only allows for communication, but in fact demands and promotes it in the very fiber of our D N A.

Language and images seem to dominate my creative life.  I feel blessed by the voices that I hear that provide the chatter for these blogs and I am grateful to pen & inking and watercolors that allow me to concentrate, indeed, meditate on a singular aspect of my world.  As I focus, as I intentionally eliminate much stimuli and demand of myself to be with one small aspect of the world, I can identify with that wonderful Little Prince given to us by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  He is excited to revisit “his” little rose, because it is not that there are billions of roses in the universe, the importance to him is that one of them he has a special relationship to.

I am grateful to my special relationship with language.  I am honored that the universe has chosen me to give dictation to at this time in my life.  As I ponder the gifts that have come my way, I realize that I have so many wisdom-givers to give thanks to. I am grateful that I have found the value of gratitude & that that too is a sensation that readily transforms itself through language.

Finally, I want to say just one last thing in this essay about language.  Language provides a way out of the maze that chaos often spins us into.  I find there to be a substantial difference between the language that I hear as the perpetual voice that runs in the back of my mind and the language that emerges out of the stillness that is discovered just outside the purview of the ego.

Exactly what that difference is is still a mystery to me.  I am perplexed because in characteristics like sound and cadence and word order, it is clearly the same english speaking language.  The difference lies in the fact that nothing ever spoken to me out of the stillness ever employs a sense of urgency.  Perhaps the answer to the question, “does my mindfulness use the same language as does my ego,”  might lie in the simplicity that emerges when urgency is not present.  But, I am not finished with that question & I see that its cause might be taken up under the larger question about the distinction between the entire mind field and its differences from the egoic mind.

Thanks, again & more to come.  Please feel free to add comments or even a separate thread in the comment section, it often jolts a dialogue…..

extinguishing the flame & pursuing the passion

My first passion, what I use to call my constant factor was the sea……

Passions, the the sinews of human strength, the connecting tissue and tendons not only of the human organism, but macrocosmically the very web of inter-being, interconnectedness — the fabric of human civilization.  Passion, or, if you like its more common name desire, is The Source of our spiritual dynamics.

I would like to talk this morning about how I experience my passions and how I see human resistances play themselves out in limiting our reach and limiting our capacity for contentment with life.  This is a gift to my readers in that I promise not to spin-off into some political rant.  I promise to leave the other greater motivator of action out of this morning’s essay.  Well, perhaps I should at least name the other passion.  I will not be writing about: AGGERSSION.

O.k., I have introduced this morning topic: Passions.  It is interesting to recommend the word “passion” to a patient in analysis.  It is frequently met with dubious caution.  I find it curious that passions are often equated to shame.  It is mind-boggling how many people feel that their own passions should not see the light of day.  I mean people often feel that they have no right to what is their private and personal desire.

It is not alright for me to want something that my mother does not want me to want.  I am not unconsciously free to want something that the majority of society does not want me to want.  Desires are often hidden from the self’s ego as vehemently as they are hidden from friends and colleagues.  To the  extent  that desires are equated, rightfully, with the template of sexual urges, and to the extent to which an individuals’ urges are understood as metaphors of our biology, people are afraid to parade themselves naked in the world.

I understand–believe me, I get it.  It is very difficult to parade an erection.  It is just too, too clear.   Their is seemingly an inherent shame in parading my desires in public.  But, there is a very huge danger in turning our own backs on our own desires.  The universe needs to hear from us clearly.  Because, it is evident that we are always getting what we want, and if we are stuck in our own ambivalence, we will be receiving from the universe the very ambivalence that we are shinning.

I am forever reconciling the “laws of attraction” with the “laws of psychoanalysis”.  I do this because I find myself unwilling to abandon science in order to embrace my Dynamic Spirituality.  The other side is equally true, I am no longer willing to feel shame over my desire to embrace my spiritual nature.  In order to maintain the reconciliation that I want, I have to keep moderating my divided mind.

In Dynamic Spirituality, I take into consideration my experiential perceptions.  I take into consideration what I see and what I feel.  In the dynamics of psychoanalytic thinking, I take into consideration a host of visions, a multitude of data and look at this string of events that might point to a pattern to be noticed.  Both forms of registering data are requiring my natural powers of observation but one is attached to observing events outside of me, while the other is attached to observing events inside of me.

I do not blame you, dear reader, for being frustrated with my pace.  I am five-hundred words into this essay and I have not coalesced on what I mean to say.  Stay with me, please,  because I do think that this essay needs to stand on its own so some review of concepts are necessary.  SEX & AGGRESSION are the corner stone of analytic motivation. Psychoanalysis, in need of much isolation  from psychotherapy, utilizes the biological template for survival of the specie and self preservation as the evolutionary underpinnings for the use of emotions as the compass of human behavior.

Along with this law of analysis, comes a need to be able to register emotions both from our selves and from others.  That means that the accurate “reading” of emotions is necessary for us to engage with the universe in a self-preserving manner. To a large extent right-action, a term from eastern philosophy, is dependent on right-perception.  And right perception is experiences subjectively by us as a bodily sensation.  Perception is registered with the senses, but “right-perception” is an internal judgement that we move towards in life as our wisdom becomes more of an instinct and our egoic impulses become experienced less urgently.

In a very general and generic kind of way, emotions can be boldly made to fit into one of only two camps.  An emotion is registered as either feeling good or feeling bad.  When I am in neutral I am not at that moment experiencing a feeling. However, as I move my hand closer and closer to the flame of a fire, I begin to experience a sensation that my body is registering as negative.  That negative sensation, in this case, we recognize as pain.  And, although we do not like the phenomenological experience of pain–a negative feeling, we can also witness that pain, in this example, as a cue or a warning that we must change the direction that our hand is moving in.  Essentially it is a physical anxiety in the form of an urgent request from the body to the mind to remove the hand from its proximity to the flame.

That is how emotions work for the body.  A negative sensation is a cue or a clue that we are not aiming in the right direction.  In the case of the hand and the fire it is pretty clear what and why the feeling is sending that sensation to the brain.  Were we to ignore or for some other reason be unable to ignore the body’s request to be removed from the flame it would be very shortly consumed in a massive amount of pain and eventually the body would be consumed and death of the organism would occur.

The negative emotions are engaged to help the body to survive against an onslaught of conditions that could harm it.  In like manner positive emotions, thought seldom experienced with the same urgency as pain, are also a signal to the organism.  Positive emotions alert the body to the idea that it is experiencing a sense of well-being.  When we are doing something that we like the body feels content.  This sensation of contentment can be either experienced passively or actively.  In Spiritual Dynamics, I would argue that the extent to which we are willing and able to consciously feel the well being is the extent to which we are able to experience gratitude and the commensurate desire for “more” positive sensations fulfills the requirements of the “law of attraction” that good feeling thoughts tend to attach themselves to new good feeling thoughts.

As we move away from the flame and learn to stay away from conditions that cause negativity, we become ever more adept at wanting the feeling of well-being to characterize our lives.  In my language of Spiritual Dynamics I would call this wisdom,  As we approach knowing for ourselves what the truth about our passions are and our willingness grows in the direction of wanting more good-feeling thoughts, we begin to understand that a truth and a wisdom does exist that we can experientially tap into.

In both psychoanalysis and in spiritual dynamics the aim is for the organism, the body, is to be in a state of grace.  By grace I mean a state in which one does not feel at odds with nature.  I am wanting for myself, and that want is in cooperation with both the aims of civilization and the aims of my personal passions.  The alignment  and the oneness of my desire is attuned with both the laws of nature and the laws of personal attraction.

In another essay, I will explore in greater detail what the resistances are to being in, and remaining in, a state of grace. That is a state of well being in which one’s mental health is clearly understood.  A well analyzed person understands not only what he or she wants, but exactly how at the same time one may be destroying the wishes, killing the dreams that are not sufficiently grounded in passion.

I have a passion for writing……….

beauty contest or senate race

I really am delighted that we elected a handsome playboy centerfold man to the Senate.  Actually, had it been a bathing suit contest, I may well have voted for him myself.  Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with handsome men, I think we have too few of them, if anything.  And the idea that he could become the new “face” of the republican tea-bag party is really stimulating in many ways.

If you pair him up with the other beauty queen, Sarah Palin, you could come out with a very beautiful baby.  And it would be the first time in a long time that politics would have labored to produce such a bundle of joy.  The last gift that the senate attempted to put under our christmas trees was a glittering health insurance mandate that felt more like a tax that a present. So let’s see what politicians can do when we begin to elect them on the basis of looks.

Maybe the Huffington Post could run a beauty contest and the state that produces the most beautiful man or woman might win a fat check to improve education,  Or in another contest we might have them dancing to the stars and the couple that most reflected down home values might win a transportation grant to repair bridges.

OH, the possibilities are endless when you begin to mix sex with politics.  Just remember back to Franklin and Eleanor, what a handsome couple they made.  And, how can we forget the triangle Bill, Monica and Hilary created for our national consciousness..

But, I am missing my point.  I wanted to talk about just how wonderful I thought it was that the arrogant, passive democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s seat to a cute young  republican whippersnapper.  I am delighted for this one reason in particular.  What if this national embarrassment were to act as a wake up call.  What if by taking a hard long look at the meaning of this win we were to discover that democrats are sick of the meek orator without lions’ teeth.

I wish I had voted for Hilary.

When I saw the Health Insurance Bill watered down to something that the Insurance companies loved, I could not believe that we had squandered away our 60 member majority kowtowing and catering to the republican right that would not do anything except hope that it would fail–that way the President would fail and they would have a chance to be elected in 2112.

Underhanded propaganda, lies about death panels looking to kill your grandmother and scare tactic warning of the government in the medical exam room, all swayed voters.  I can understand how that would sway a voter to the far right, but it is not the far right that won the “Ted Kennedy” seat.  It is the democrats who lost it.  Unlike the republicans who vote as a block of ice, the democrats will fight amongst themselves when they have run out of republicans to fight with.

The Obama Administration in its sickeningly sweet approach to compromise gave away the whole thing one inch at a time. And they did not only do that with Health Care, Tim & Larry did it with wall street.

The republican win in Massachusetts is a good thing, because it could, I said could, wake up the party and the administration to the fact that 2010 elections will be a disaster unless democrats grow teeth and grow them very rapidly. Bush the Second, used reconciliation to push through the biggest tax cuts to the super rich that this country has ever seen. He  shamelessly use 9/11 to promote a war that he went gunning after.  He  looked silly at best dressed in flight gear floating onto a battleship declaring Mission Accomplished.  He could have been Mary Poppins for all I care.  He boldly and arrogantly pushed through his agenda until the very last day of his office.  He did not care that the left hated him.  He got his job done for his base.

No so for Obama…he crashed and burned with the economy, as we sat and watched the middle class get robbed of its entire equity.  This period will go down in history as the biggest middle class give away to the global aristocracy.  We have dug a hole that we can not fill.  And if we continue to compromise away our values, the financial give away will pale in comparison to the desperation that will set in when we begin to notice that we have given away our dignity and our integrity as well.

We are witnessing wall street becoming the seat of the government.  Corporate take over in the shape of “too-big-too-fail” will sound like this:  The Senator from the great state of Enron yields to the Senator from the great state of Blackwater. While health care and wall street continue to rob the average american of cash & dignity, we are at this very moment funding the largest military mercenary army in history.  Hired guns know more about intelligence secrets than even the senate foreign relations committee.

Folks, do not take it from me–all my sources are second hand at best.  Go and read for yourself, dig, google and bing your way to the truth.  Look at what is happening.  Our passive glances are dangerous to our way of life.  Corporations are a way of life to America.  The birth of the corporation and the subsequent standing that  corporations have in our legal system perpetuates a delusion.  Because it is impossible to “birth” a corporation.  A corporation is a thing, a man made thing that has no real body and no real soul.  What is is a contract.  But it is a contract that has been given the status of a person with all the legal rights of a person.

consumerism and capitalism: are they the same

There are days and times in our lives when we feel so misunderstood that we would like to remove ourselves from the human race and go back to swimming with the alligators.  Those were the days, back early in evolution when the only thing that you needed to worry about was moving the fragile alligator egg from being too exposed in the sun to a nice shallow spot in the water from where it could hatch and swim away going about its business.

No on-going worries, no strife about did I do it right, did I make sure the egg was properly buried?  Or, oh, my god, what if I did not love this egg enough…..on and on and on ad infinitum.

I bore myself with the question of am I enough. Today, no spiritual dynamics–

So, in that light, periodically I turn my attention to politics because there, I am convinced that there are plenty of opportunities to be as angered as I want about the plight of our United States.  For example, dear Mr Limbaugh..wow, now that is a specimen of a fine human being…He has no trouble telling it like it is, like he sees it…He hopes that this country fails and falls flat on it’s red and blue faces so that the democrats who currently have the white house can be blamed for the fiascos of the last thirty years.  I like that telling it like it is.  In regards to helping the people hit by the earthquake he stood right up for all Americans…”We’ve already donated to Haiti,” Limbaugh told the caller on his radio show. “It’s called the U.S. income tax.” Good for you Rush–we will send the money to you so that you can take another vacation at a drug rehab center…Well, with talk show hosts like that who needs politicians to be angered by.

But it does bring up to my mind the loss of American Values.  I think, my view is that values have been hijacked by the titans of Wall Street and the Lords of Pennsylvania Avenue.  In both case we have a host of corrupt valueless people for who public service is just another word for “grab as much as you can and the heck with the other guy” mentality.

It is not really a particular political party that has us held up.  One party may be somewhat more cleaver than the other–you can decide for yourself which one that is, but regardless of the party of current power, the morality is about getting a job and hanging on to it.  Truth is of rare consequence in politics.  Power is the motivational key.

Who hijacked the American Value?  Who among us failed to fight for the right to up-hold the American Truth.Where is Superman?  Where is this fellow or gal that can leap tall buildings and stand for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Frankly, I could care less if he is a democrat or a republican, but what I do care about is that he or she is not cowardly in the face of corporate lobbying politics.

When I hear people say that they do not want government between them and their doctor, my response is always, but is it o.k. to have corporate giants between you and your doctor?  Is a gatekeeping health maintenance organization a better option?  Do you want to hear about unfair?  I  seem to be both simultaneously angry & passive about the condition of our democracy.

A government that i trusted to protect me gave all my money away to help big banks not to fail.  Then when it came time for those big banks to help the economy, they were entirely too greedy–kept all the profits, gave billions in bonuses and left us all to deal with upside down mortgages, trillions in deficit, & gave the health insurances a sweetheart deal as a Christmas Present.  Wow that inspires about as much confidence as “hedge -betting” funds.  I heard a congressman recently asking a banker about hedge funds and he had this to say.  Hedge funds are about as smart as an auto mechanic selling a car with bad brakes to a customer then taking out an insurance policy on the customer so he can collect when the car fails to break.

That was very un-fair of them…unfair not as a democrat might have thought that a republicanthat was un-fair.  But rather un-fair in the way that one might consider morality rather than legality as the bench mark for how we operate as a society and a government.  When we speak of banks and insurance giants as too big to fail we are talking about goliath — a spider big enough to eat a bird.

When this economic crisis is over and the dow-jones has returned the billions to the billionaires, 30% of the population will have lost their homes, retirements, health insurances and cars as well as their retirements and their dignity. Right now many are homeless and even more are unemployed in an economy that is said to be returning to normal, despite the fact that the high unemployment rate will not change for decades, if ever..

While the democrats had the watch, and two houses of congress were run by the democratic majority, we none the less, we the middle class, got thrown under the bus.  What are now the American Values that will save at the very least our dignity? I think we are left to our own devices and as a result of that we will be seeing many, many Tea Pots and Tea Parties.  We will be seeing, as one conservative put it on the air recently, soap boxes and bullet boxes…When questioned about what he meant he responded by proudly saying that the sale of arms in this country was way up and that a revolution may well be on its way…

This same conservative spoke of replacing the American flag with an old American Revolutionary Flag with the number “2″ sewn in to indicate the 2nd great american revolution. Where are we as a nation..?

We are not a group of socialist fighting a group of capitalist…we are a middle class being swallowed up in total valueless greed, swallowed up by selfishness….and undisciplined regulations that at best appear to place some restrictions, while in the long run-giving more that free reign to the drivers of our economic bus…

The economic crisis is a spiritual crisis at every level of our economy…from the deep cynicism and skepticism of the very hopeless poor, to the new disenfranchised middle class who have lost their life earnings….and are sadly, rapidly loosing any hope of returning to the American Dream.  Consumerism has failed capitalism.  It has tricked the capitalist into believing that we could go from a nation that manufactured most of the worlds goods to a nation who bought.

In the process as a society we bought into the idea that capitalism was the same as consumerism.  It is not and we are the proof.  Where we are in the world today–not where the fat-cats of wall street are, but where we are the residents of main street–we are the proof that consumerism and capitalism are not the same thing…