Rumors of my Death are Somewhat Exaggerated

In the midst of chaos

my quest continues.

If all things return to the One

to where does the One return?

?

?

?

Zero

Merely a Series of Unfortunate Coincidences? The Illusion of Synchronicity…Sorry for the Inconvenience…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

At approximately ten PM on July the 16^th, my brother was pronounced dead in an Emergency Room approximately one thousand miles from my current home. He was two years younger than I.

In less than six years he managed to turn a five-bedroom French Colonial mansion into a landfill, starting with the second floor, which he occupied while my parents were still alive.

Alcoholism and poor judgment based on bad legal advice has rendered the entire estate uninhabitable and facing a sea of legal encumbrances that would prevent me from even taking my parents’ wedding album or my own high school yearbooks from the premises.

In less than seven months’ time since my mother passed away, the kitchen, dining room and front parlor will now require a hazmat team to clean up the mess he left, which in some places was knee-deep.

Power and water services have been disconnected. There is two feet of standing water in the basement.

We were forced to stay at a local motel.

After waiting nearly a week, I was still unable to make arrangements to have his ashes scattered over the graves of my parents, and was forced to leave to return to work.

My parents’ Lutheran minister seems to (correctly) suspect that my wife and I are Pagans, and insisted on being present to say a few words and prayers over my brother’s remains, although he was busy at a conference in St. Louis at the time.

It is my understanding that he still is in possession of his ashes.

My father died two years ago, and my mother passed away on December 30^th of 2013. While we were there, I installed two solar powered carriage lamps to light their gravesite at night.

On the way home, I was struck by the question “Who will see the lights?”

It takes somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-nine hours to drive to my parents’ home…and the same amount of time to return.

The only resting or sleeping done in either direction consisted of short naps at designated rest areas or while Suki was driving and one meal not eaten in the vehicle enroute.

Several hours after my first day back at work, I was diagnosed at a local ER with a DVT, or Deep Vein Thrombosis in my left leg. It is potentially life-threatening.

A new miracle oral drug called Xarelto has allowed me to convalesce at home without the customary four-day hospital admittance with intravenous drug therapy and frequent blood tests.

My healthcare insurance provider does not cover this medication, which can cost as much as four hundred dollars per month on average. My employer is a prescription drug plan administrator.

The irony of the fact that many of the plans my employer administers for other providers are much more generous in terms of the coverage, or cost of co-payments and premiums than the policy provided to company employees is not lost in moments like these.

Fortunately, the manufacturer is providing it for free for the first month, and only five dollars per month for the next two months I will need to take it. It would also appear that my annual salary is low enough to qualify me for hardship benefits…really? Really?!?! …Yeah, really.

After a week of bed rest under the skillful care of both my wife Suki and the lovely and talented Anastasia, I am slowly returning to full health.

If you absolutely have to get sick, plan on doing it under the care of a nurse, or better still, two of them…(especially if they are close friends with each other)…the right nurses can make almost anything better, and these two could turn a disaster into a block party.

“Sic hoc ergo propter hoc” means literally “after this, therefore because of this”. It represents what is regarded in the scientific community as one of the commonest flaws of logic, which is to assume that mere juxtaposition somehow implies a relationship between two or more possibly unrelated events.

Synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Jung, who initially identified an “acausal relationship” between the simultaneous occurrence of two or more unrelated psycho-physic phenomena.

Jung and his associates later noted, however that our ability to perceive meaning, portent or omen in the simultaneity of the events allows us to “assimilate unconscious materials”, thereby encouraging us to experience a renewal and vitalization of our unilateral personality. In this way, our sentience enables us to construct order out of chaos.

This is a process well-known to both the Chinese (I Ching, Consulting the Oracle of Changes) and the aboriginal peoples of what is now called North America, whose shamanistic traditions divined meaning and direction from occurrences within the natural world.

As unfortunate and sad as the recent series of events are, they are hopefully merely a series of unfortunate coincidences. They were replete with enough foreshadowing and ominous portents to fill up any novel by Nathanial Hawthorne or Theodore Dreiser.

Were I so inclined, I could spend the rest of my life waiting for “the other shoe to drop” and in the process miss whatever joyous opportunities await, barring superstition and fear.

On the other hand, those of us who are inclined to believe in the in the interconnection between the finite physical world and the more elusive and occult ethereal worlds do have the opportunity to reflect, if you will, on the interconnection of all things, even in the midst of random chaos.

I have missed you all these past four weeks…although it would appear that nobody noticed I was gone….

As my heath returns, I will be doing my best to make up for lost time, despite the fact that the expression is in itself an oxymoron.

I have been told that some of my more charming attributes are my irreverence, glib facetiousness, and affectionate preoccupation with anarchy and the self-determinism of lawless disregard for other people’s rules, and this trip was no exception. It was in part a journey into the heartland of America (or the Heart of Darkness), as well as an opportunity to skylark in the midst of loss and sorrow.

Somewhere between the extremes, illumination awaits us.

You be the judge.

As soon as I consult my advisors as to how to tell the story without subjecting myself to incarceration for any number of possible felonies that might be construed as to having been committed, I will be sure to share it with you.

…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

 

 

 

 

Blogger’s Tour

I have been invited by Jayne of Diary Incarnate http://jayneayres.wordpress.com to participate in a Blog Tour. The purpose is to see more blogs and learn about the other writers.
I have been requested to answer four questions and then I shall invite other bloggers to do the same.
I wanted to address these questions right away so I wrote this immediately, because I felt that I needed to take stock of the answers.
I will be announcing my invitations shortly.

1. What am I working on at the moment?

My works of late are divided into three groups:
• Erotic Poetry
• Essays and poems regarding Polyamory, Love, Zen, Mysticism, Romance, Kink/Fet, and Anarchy and Rebelliousness against “The Tyranny of Evil Men and The Inequities of the Selfish… ”
• My real love, a novel entitled: The Home for Wayward Souls and The Talking Monkeys; is a tale of Corporate Greed, and Excess, attempting to subvert The Pursuit of Happiness specifically, and the Bill of Rights in general. There is Primate Romance, Inter-Species Erotica, Philosophical Sexuality, Metaphysical Action-Adventure, and Religious High-Jinx set within a framework of Enhanced and Fortified Non-Fiction involving Intrigue, Subversion, Euphoria, and General Rebelliousness conducted in the name of preserving and protecting The Indomitability of the Human Spirit.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

A Genre is a label which is usually coined by an outside observer after the fact. Most of my writings are so compulsive that I have never stopped to think about how they fit into a particular category, but then again, perhaps I should….
A dear friend from my past named Amy Rogers used to say: “In labeling me, you ‘thing’ me out of existence (by objectification).”

If anything, my works are perhaps a synthesis of what I once read Elene Sallinger refer to as “Literotica” (i.e. I would aspire to write Literature, but can’t seem to avoid the erotic aspects of what I write, and it is not my nature to spare the details), “Everyday Zen”, and an on-going process of deconstructionism of everything I see and experience.

Soooooo…If I were to try to identify a genre, it may well be best summarized as “Enhanced and Fortified Non-Fiction”, as most of it is either biographical or becomes biographical sometime after I write it.

My works center around Bardo Thodol, The Tao, and Zen Buddhism; the road of excess leading to higher consciousness (or the palace of wisdom, whichever comes first); Mysticism, the Occult, Shamanism, and the cunning knowledge of Wiccan/Pagan practices and the waxing and waning of the Moon; “the willing suspension of disbelief”; a layman’s armchair view of quantum mechanics and relativity as it pertains to the “ever-present/never-present present moment”; primate sexuality; the Ascent of Man; Learning, Perception and Behavior Modification; and “the movable feast” of Sex, and Drugs, and All Music (especially Rock and Roll), as well as the influences of Violence and Tragedy, having been an Emergency Medical Services Paramedic for over twenty years.

3. Why do I write what I do?

I write for the same reasons that an alcoholic drinks.

4. How does my writing process work?

As a male, I think it would be presumptuous of me to compare it to gestation, as that is a process I know only by my empathic experiences, but it was what first came to my mind…(considering I have delivered about two dozen babies in the back of an ambulance).

Perhaps it is more like the way a pearl is formed. Some of my best sources of inspiration come from irritation, or discomfort, which I try to make more palatable with layers of introspection, analysis, pleasure, excursions by way of out-of-body experiences and altered states of consciousness, alternating layers of sensory deprivation and sensory overload, meditation, and copious quantities of the universal lubricant of the Soul…Sex.

I frequently try to make sense of the world by identifying the nonsense of it all, and then I try to imagine what it would be like “In my Perfect World”…the adage “Be careful what you wish for” has special meaning to me…the process of “Conjuring” comes to mind…I have seen flights of fantasy come to roost in less than a week, and I was not always comfortable with the initial results, but I do not shirk from facing the truth as it is revealed to me, layer by layer.

But I would be seriously remiss if I did not take into account the role that simple gratitude plays in my life. Some days I wake up and notice wildflowers growing amongst the squalor and I am reminded how grateful I am to have eyes to see them.

Other days when Suki and I fight I suddenly realize that I am either sad or angry or disappointed that my marriage is not perfect, only to realize how fortunate I am in my provocation…after all, if you take away the ups, the downs and the twists and turns, you reduce the thrill and romance of a roller-coaster to a mere commuter train on a straight track bound for oblivion.

And on just the right nights, the distant sound of the highway, or the airport, the wind blowing through the trees, and maybe the sound of my refrigerator resonate in just the right way so as to create a symphony of broadband noise that somehow harmonizes itself with all the noise in my head and a wandering angel or two is inspired to pass by and sing or even harmonize to it thereby reminding me how blessed I am in my madness to possess the sentience to appreciate it.

Thank you, Jayne.
XO,
Chazz Vincent

Dharma for a Friend: お待ちください 忍耐、お願い

Dharma for a Friend:

、お待ちください忍耐、お願い

 

You seek the Ultimate Truth.

Instead you discover the

Ultimate Void.

Matte Kudasai.

、お待ちください

This is truth

but it is not the Ultimate Truth.

Form is Form,

Emptiness is Emptiness.

Form is Emptiness,

Emptiness is Form.

No Form,

No Emptiness.

Only

The Void.

What comes next?

Madness and Magic.

Trade back your Reason for Instinct.

Matte Kudasai.

、お待ちください

A dog howls at the moon.

The sound drowns out

All the voices of all the Buddhas.

Patience please.

忍耐、お願い

Your words speak volumes

of questions seeking answer.

The earth beneath your feet

bleeds with each step you take.

You feel the pain as I feel yours.

Everything is just like this.

See yourself

as the main character

in the novel of your life

as you have written it,

as you are

in all your unselfconsciousness.

See yourself outside your ego.

Stand naked before yourself

Protecting nothing.

Defending nothing.

Justifying nothing.

Ashamed of nothing.

Embarrassed by nothing.

Embrace your self-imagined imperfections,

just as you are.

Forgive yourself of everything.

You must stand outside yourself to do this.

As you do,

ask yourself

“Who am I now?”

“Who is asking this question?”

No words can describe your understanding.

Matte Kudasai.

、お待ちください

Patience Please.

忍耐、お願い

As you stand in Dreamland

you see the detonation.

You feel the blast

as everything you knew

is blown away

by the Crown of Destruction.

In the stillness

of the void

before the backrush

of Nothing Special,

suddenly you see

everything

is exactly

as it is.

I am doing the

Ghost Dance

for you

in Dreamland.

Life Returns

all by itself.

Baraka Bashad.

The Ballad of Charles and Suki

The Ballad of Charles and Suki

No more than a handful of people claimed to know much of anything about Charles and Suki. There were several good reasons for that. They tended to be the wildest, and most generally bizarre, as well as the most private couple associated with either the Sanctuary, or The Home for Wayward Souls. They came to South Florida about eight years ago, but other details were pretty sketchy. No one was especially sure of how old they were, or what they did before they came into the congregation.

Charles’ parents were from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia originally, but came to the United States in the Nineteen Sixties after defecting from the Soviet Union and Communism. In the USSR, Charles’ father was officially recognized as one of the top paranormal researchers in the employ of the KGB…officially…but Charles had also alluded to the fact that Vladimir Vliynczykovitch was also reputedly the most powerful warlock in all of Europe. Charles’ mother did cutting-edge research in the early development of lasers for the government.

When they came to the US, they changed their family name to Vincent, and tried to assimilate into the culture and generally maintain a low profile. Of course, Vladimir was immediately debriefed and inducted into a laboratory facility that unofficially did research for the CIA. Charles’ mother, Svetlana retired from research to bring lasers and holography to the world of art, and became quite self-sufficient doing so.

Their home was filled with people from the world of the Paranormal, Espionage and Intelligence as well as every manner of Artist. The central theme of Eastern European Witchcraft was also always present, (if you knew what you were hearing and understood its true meaning) like an underground stream running through their home.

Suki’s father, Omar was a Yugoslav electronics engineer who worked as a graduate assistant and later as an intern responsible for technical support in Vladimir’s laboratory in the USSR. They became friends over the years, and although Vlad was older, they socialized a great deal outside work. They had defected together, escaping first to Japan during a scientific expedition, where Omar met Umai-ko-shi Shindo, the chief archeologist supervising the dig at a site that had interested Vlad because of spirits that were said to inhabit the area. Umai-ko-shi traveled to the United States with Omar and Vlad once they secured asylum.

Omar and Vlad had been practicing sorcery together for several years in the USSR. Omar became Vlad’s understudy, so the fact that Umai-ko-shi was a Tsukimono-suji, or White Witch brought together a series of forces and influences that culminated in the birth of her daughter Suki. Although Charles was sixteen years old when Suki was born, the four parents agreed that their children would wed one day. Arranged marriages were a throwback to their ancestors, and most of the children in the US rebelled against it, nevertheless….

They had grown up together in the USA, and the decidedly unorthodox lives of their parents had the effect of producing a bond between them, like cousins, and Charles was very protective of Suki as she grew up, although she was quite independent and very capable of defending herself. She nonetheless adored Charles as a hero of sorts, and although they went their own separate ways for a few years while attending college, they reunited at a family holiday and fell deeply and passionately in love with each other, and eventually married.

Suki, who had become a nurse-practitioner often called herself “Nāsu Witchi”, (“nurse-witch”) amongst her friends. She embodied the mystery and passions of both cultures freely. She was sometimes regarded as aggressive, or confrontational, which was partly due to her economy of words and sparse context and partly because she made absolutely no concessions to fear or guilt, and embodied a sort of Shamelessness in her pursuit of the “delicious delinquency of neoteny in (the) seduction of all things conventional, comfortable, or chaste”.

The fact that almost no one ever understood what she meant by that (partly owing to her rich arabesque of accents and nuances), also meant she tended to respond very strongly to anyone who did understand even a part of it, sufficient to provoke an intense tutorial of Tantric to those who deserved it.

She had about a half-dozen phrases she used as a litmus test for the uninitiated, but she had formulated that phrase shortly after she first became aware of her crush for Charles, who understood it so implicitly, that she affectionately called him her “(She-)Devil(’s) Advocate”.

It also meant that Charles understood that no matter how great her love for him, that she was her own woman, and no amount of devotion and dedication to her mate would prevent her from pursuing all of her interests.

Another favorite of hers was “(Perhaps, If) You(‘d) like, maybe we (can) make (some) crazy sex-fuck time together, OK?”

…And the door swung both ways. And it was good….

Because Charles always tried to encourage Suki to believe in her heart, that no matter what she did, he would always love and support her pursuit of any indulgence within their means unconditionally, and unequivocally and joyously.

For a very long while….

People usually say “…but over the years…things have a way of happening.” or words to that effect, but in truth, “things have a lot more ways of not happening…”

Years of childrearing, careers, and generalized ambition have a way of pushing Romance into the background. Unresolved resentments, bouts of poor health, surgeries, disappointments, fatigue and depression had produced the effect of alienation of affections.

If you spend years finding and receiving pleasure from one person, it is easy to understand why it is that when things go badly, that we also attach them to an unspoken resentment for the calamity of events that seem to well up around us, forever asking the question “What’s to keep them from doing it?”

They became isolated, and bitter like two old car batteries left unused on the floor of their garage, dissipated, no difference of potential left…no charge, no current flow…sulfurous, and caustic. Their comings and goings were of little consequence to each other, and they both generally despaired of life.

Charles had a nervous breakdown that lasted about four years. His work and his income suffered, but he kept his job and endured for no good reason in particular. He took high doses of four different anti-depressants that were having catastrophic effects on him physically and mentally. Suki rarely got out of bed, spent most of the night in a reclining chair watching TV, snoring and falling asleep while smoking, setting herself on fire, and stating that she was always tired and never got any rest. They both got fat. This is hell.

It is said that a true Buddhist would go straight into Hell to rescue a friend, but Charles and Suki were in two different versions of the same hell, unable to reach each other or rescue themselves…nonetheless…if you find yourself at the beach on the Lake of Fire…and say, several of you decide to go to a rave there…you might be amazed at the people you might meet.

There are, no doubt, any number of Buddhists who were meant to go to Hell for one reason or another, because of some Kharma that they couldn’t escape, because it was part of their program, a glitch, a flaw, a paradox…a ghost in the machine…a date to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight…a character flaw, perhaps, but if we are not so quick to judge others harshly for their faults, instead recognizing them and non-judgmentally encouraging them to face everything fearlessly and shamelessly, we can learn to recognize our own mistakes and errors of judgment or action which we can neither escape nor deny without grievous consequences.

And Charles was very lucky because despite it all, he had paid ahead a great deal of good and positive Kharma over the years, such that it just so happened that one of the other Lost Souls standing there at that rave on the Lake of Fire would help him lead himself out of the flames, and maybe even save herself in the process…at least eventually.