1 Thing That Explains Everything … July 13th, 2020

Jonathots Daily Blog

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Justice

Although we are glib—chattering on about liberty and justice for all—we discover quickly that one of these offerings is fairly simple and the other, painful.

Granting liberty is not difficult whatsoever.

You can give people liberty without ever having to interact with them or put up with their behavior. There can even be liberty in the midst of segregation and bigotry, as long as they express their freedom on the other side of the tracks.

It’s justice that clogs the drain.

The idea of equal reaction and equal respect being given to all is brutal—because many believe that happiness and the true expression of liberty is in bettering all and besting most.

What would it be like to sacrifice an inheritance of privilege and favoritism so that the fellow down the road in the rickety house can be treated even-steven?

How can we ever have people who are automatically determined to be criminal—just by their demeanor, color, clothing and address—if justice interferes and she blindly overlooks all these considerations?

If you get justice, I will have less.

No doubt about it.

There isn’t an unlimited supply of justice—it is doled out in tiny capfuls, like medicine, and must be carefully regulated. Otherwise there is the danger of giving too much to one, too little to another and leaving a final soul untreated.

Yet unquestionably and righteously, until justice rides into town and is perceived and possessed by all, nothing is truly achieved, leaving everything addled.

Fearfully and Wonderfully… April 4, 2012

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The Psalmist declared that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”–fearfully in the sense that the same energy that can empower us can also blow up in our faces, scattering our dreams into oblivion; and wonderfully made because even though we continue to gain great insight on the human condition, we still remain the final frontier for discovery.

Over the past several days I have presented human life in six twelve-year packages. Let’s take this morning to sum it all up and also conclude what might be better choices in applying these precious dispensations of time.

From birth to twelve we have the chilled-hood–a time when boys and girls are so similar that it is often difficult to tell them apart–both visually and certainly in ability. But it’s also a dangerous time, when the prejudice can be planted in the young, fertile soil, promoting a lifetime of  begrudging appreciation. For understand this–prejudice is not an idea. It is a disease. And once you allow children to be infected by this germ by alienating members of the opposite sex, then the disease of bigotry continues in their lives and they will find it difficult not to apply the same principle to people of color and people who vary in size. What’s the best thing you can do for your children? Teach your boys to rejoice over being equal with girls and your girls to enjoy equality with boys–AND that this could be the norm for our species, not the temporary. Yes, the message of chilled-hood is that we don’t require antagonism between boys and girls, which can lead in the future to the disease of prejudice, turning us into bigots. Let me be bold–there is no one who thinks that men and women are different who does not also have the inkling that black people and white people are from separate worlds and that the size of a human being determines their value and intelligence.

And when thirteen years of age comes along, in that phase I dubbed addled essence, an introduction of the drugs of testosterone and estrogen permeating the bloodstreams of emerging adults, it is a great occasion to draw a line in the sand and insist that these “addled essence” individuals tolerate tolerance. I love that phrase. What do teenagers hate to do? Enjoy things they didn’t come up with. So the greatest thing we can do for those between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four is place them in situations where they need to tolerate tolerance. In other words, they need to understand that their future primal relationship will be with someone different from themselves, and the more they learn to understand, the greater the compatibility will be. To the addled essence, we require that you tolerate tolerance.

And when twenty-five years of age rolls around and the human being moves into the phase of “you’re kidding,” where procreation seems more important than being creative, we should remember that birthing your own life, and THEN another, is the key to being an excellent parent. Nobody can help anybody else be happy if they are discontented. So before you bring another human being onto the face of the earth, make sure of your own joy about being here yourself.

We move on to years of  thirty-seven to forty-eight. I dubbed this Re-Spend-Ability. The solution here is really quite simple. Love and money don’t mix. Do you want to talk about your love, your romance and your relationship? Terrific. But no signs of the dollar should ever come into the discussion or you will taint the beauty and sanctity of love. And honestly, when it’s time to talk about money, a pencil, paper and a calculator is sufficient rather than memories of your honeymoon and misgivings about whether you are appreciated and heard. The best way to sustain a long, living love affair is to make sure that love and money are never in the same room together.

Just around the age of forty-nine, estrogen in a woman and testosterone in a man begin to wane, hinting towards a loss of the feminine mystique and the macho persona. People get scared so they start picking at each other and blaming each other for their condition–dissing in action. What is the goal? To get older but not old–because even though as a man you are losing some of the ability to run races and lift boxes, and as a woman you are not going to be giving birth to children anymore, what you have gained is experience and wisdom, which enables you to keep a cool head in times of crisis. Can I repeat the by-line for this group? “Get older, not old.” And the best way to stay young is to be current and funny.

Which leads us to our last twelve-year period, which for many people extends even into their nineties. Eco-quality–where nature and human creation were meant to come into peaceful unity, returning us back to our chilled-hood spirit of cooperation. It has a simple and delightful slogan: learn and play. Unfortunately, most people who find themselves in the post-retirement era become grumpy and unwilling to learn, and think playfulness is immature. But if you can escape the urge to be cranky, you can realize there is still much to learn because a whole world of possibility is being invented right in front of you. And there is more time to play because you aren’t lifting boxes and don’t have to wipe the runny noses of your offspring.

There you have it. Now let’s put all the by-lines together and see what we come up with:

We don’t need the seed of prejudice but instead should learn to tolerate tolerance, birthing our own life to joy before we welcome another into our fold. Separating love from money while getting older but never old, we finally arrive at the true wisdom of the human journey, which is to learn and play.

It is a great system that first removes the antagonism that exists between the sexes, which relieves the pressure to be superior and frees us to live a life of true spirituality, which is:  “NoOne is better than anyone else.”

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Below is the first chapter of Jonathan Richard Cring’s stunning novel entitled Preparing a Place for Myself—the story of a journey after death. It is a delicious blend of theology and science fiction that will inspire and entertain. I thought you might enjoy reading it. After you do, if you would like to read the book in its entirety, please click on the link below and go to our tour store. The book is being offered at the special price of $4.99 plus $3.99 shipping–a total of $8.98. Enjoy.

http://www.janethan.com/tour_store.htm

Sitting One

 I died today. 

I didn’t expect it to happen.  Then again, I did—well, not really.

No, I certainly didn’t expect it.

I’ve had moments of clarity in my life.  Amazingly enough, many of them were in the midst of a dream. For a brief second I would know the meaning of life or the missing treatment to cure cancer.  And then as quickly as it popped into my mind it was gone. I really don’t recollect dying.  Just this unbelievable sense of clear headedness—like walking into a room newly painted and knowing by the odor and brightness that the color on the wall is so splattering new that you should be careful not to touch it for fear of smearing the design. The greatest revelation of all? 

Twenty-five miles in the sky time ceases to exist.

The planet Pluto takes two hundred and forty-eight years to circle the sun. It doesn’t give a damn. 

The day of my death was the day I became free of the only burden I really ever had.  TIME.

Useless.

Time is fussy.  Time is worry. 

Time is fear.  Time is the culprit causing human-types to recoil from pending generosity. 

There just was never enough time. 

Time would not allow it.  Remember—“if time permits …”

Why if time permits?  Why not if I permit?  Why not if I dream?  Why not if I want?  Why does time get to dictate to me my passage? 

It was time that robbed me of my soulful nature.    It was time that convinced me that my selfishness was needed. 

I didn’t die. The clock in me died, leaving spirit to tick on.  

So why don’t we see the farce of time?  Why do we allow ourselves to fall under the power of the cruel despot?  Yes, time is a relentless master—very little wage for much demand.

I died today. 

Actually … a piece of time named after me was cast away.

Addled Essence… March 29, 2012

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All teenagers are drug addicts, induced into a life of dependency by their very own mother. Yes—Mother Nature comes along and takes these boys and girls who are enjoying the equality of chilled-hood and injects them with drugs to completely change their environment. The girls get estrogen and the boys get testosterone–and the human race gets really screwed up. So for the boys it becomes a hair-raising experience and the girls scurry along, trying to keep abreast of the situation.

Seriously, we refer to this as “adolescence,” but in my opinion, it’s more addled essence. The essence of oneness the boys and girls had is suddenly addled, shaken to the foundations by the introduction of puberty minus explanation. Yes, there seems to be a dearth of information. What we tend to do is hand the young ladies a tampon and a Midol and the young men a sports drink and a football–and hope they find a way to work it out.

Unfortunately, they don’t.  It begins an adversarial relationship which is never quite overcome, even as adulthood sets in and the later years of graying are achieved.

Boys are taught to be macho. “I want what you have.” Girls are permitted to be prissy. “I have what you want.”

So rather than being a playground–a joint experience of discovery or a class project resulting in understanding–we have a free-for-all of misinterpretation and domination. Society does little to relieve it, promoting the idea of the war between the sexes in its entertainment and its news articles. Politics continues to promote a glass ceiling, where women are supposedly encouraged to rise in business, but are greatly praised for remaining homebound. And religion—well, religion teaches abstinence without any sense of those who are abstaining understanding the depth, beauty and complications of their appetites.

So of the three choices available for these burgeoning, blooming, bountiful beings—those being abstinence, promiscuity and masturbation—we tend, in the religious community, to blatantly favor abstinence while secretly acknowledging that our children “might not follow the letter of the law.” In the secular community, we quietly allow for promiscuity, while insisting that we have instructed in abstinence.

God gave testosterone and estrogen for a reason. They are inside every one of us to teach us our individual importance and our corporate responsibility. So we end up with an addled essence in our teenagers, which causes the average parent to throw his hands up in the air in desperation, hoping that his precious offspring will outgrow the stupor. They don’t. They carry the adversarial attitude into adulthood unless someone stops them from being so brain-dead from the experience that they can see the necessary coalition between men and women.

We have to decide what we’re going to do. These young humans, who are under the influence of testosterone and estrogen, must be monitored for their better health. We cannot leave it to chance and hope that a few Bible scriptures will inspire them to abstain, or a couple of well-written teen comedies will cause them to wait until they “fall in love” to become sexually active. I think there are four steps to help us deal with the addled essence phase of humanity, to keep it from spilling over into the adult life and making us all believe that men and women were never meant to get along:

1. Talk. I know what you’re thinking. “Tennagers don’t want to talk.” Exactly. I also don’t want to lose weight. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m fat. Create environments, possibilities, interludes, dynamics and opportunities for conversation. Talk about sex. Talk about the opposite sex. Talk about their bodies. Don’t criticize them for pursuing masturbation out of curiosity when the alternatives you offer them are cold showers and the Gospel of John. Talk.

I raised six boys. We talked about sex more than anything else. Why? Because testosterone dictated the subject matter. Talk. Don’t be rebuffed; don’t lose the faith. Find a closet, tell them you’re going to clean it out, shut the door, lock it, turn on the light—and talk.

2. Remove the dominance of the physical. For the love of God, can we stop teaching that men are the aggressors and women are the prize? Anyone who knows anything about sex is fully aware that if a woman is not in touch with her own sexuality and able to have an orgasm, that the sexual act settles into an action of futility. Stop acting like “sex is for men and having babies is for women.” We are not all fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. If women do not enjoy sex as much as men do, the process breaks down. Remove all indications that physical domination has anything to do with romance.

3. Establish commonality. Every high school male should have to go through six weeks of home economics and every female should have to spend an equal amount of time understanding weight lifting and being involved in some form of team sport. We fail in our society by misunderstanding the cultures around us–including the culture of gender. Because I have spent time in a kitchen, I no longer believe that cooking is a female task. Because the women in my life know how to lift a box, sweat a little bit and carry their own load, they no longer contend that men are beasts of burden. Commonality produces cross-reference, which leads us to understanding and culminates in compatibility. Separating boys and girls to make sure they don’t do nasty things just makes them more ingenious on finding better locations for nastiness.

4. And finally, we should use the addled essence—from age thirteen through twenty-four—to inform these discoverers that the trio in our life is essential to make us a quartet. What I mean is when we’re emotionally clean and able to be honest with ourselves and others—even of the opposite sex—it allows for spiritual awareness instead of trying to follow rules line by line. And when we are spiritually aware, we have a great thirst for knowledge which makes us mentally informed. Then our physical–our bodies–are prepared to be honest, aware and informed in making choices. Without this process at work, human sexuality becomes a “shame and blame game” instead of a “same and tame” one. We try to shame people into being pure and then blame the ones who fail, instead of teaching that even though estrogen and testosterone have created different urges in us, we are still 98%  the same. And the more we understand our similarities, the greater our ability to tame our appetites–to more fruitful delights.

We must learn how to deal with our addled essence population. We hide our heads in the sand, hoping they will work it out on their own, when they are under the influence of drugs beyond their control. So you can worry about marijuana, cocaine and meth if you want. These are dangerous. But until we address the difficulties brought on by estrogen and testosterone, we will thrust our chilled-hood  into addled essence, and therefore cripple them for the adult walk–limping instead of sprinting.

Because unfortunately, if you have gone through the twelve years of addled essence, you arrive at age twenty-five feeling the responsibility to pay your bills and get married, which leads to the next condition, which I, tongue-in-cheek, have named … You’re Kidding.

 

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Listen to Jonathan sing his gospel/blues anthem, Spent This Time, accompanied by Janet Clazzy on the WX-5 Wind Machine

 

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Below is the first chapter of Jonathan Richard Cring’s stunning novel entitled Preparing a Place for Myself—the story of a journey after death. It is a delicious blend of theology and science fiction that will inspire and entertain. I thought you might enjoy reading it. After you do, if you would like to read the book in its entirety, please click on the link below and go to our tour store. The book is being offered at the special price of $4.99 plus $3.99 shipping–a total of $8.98. Enjoy.

http://www.janethan.com/tour_store.htm

Sitting One

 I died today. 

I didn’t expect it to happen.  Then again, I did—well, not really.

No, I certainly didn’t expect it.

I’ve had moments of clarity in my life.  Amazingly enough, many of them were in the midst of a dream. For a brief second I would know the meaning of life or the missing treatment to cure cancer.  And then as quickly as it popped into my mind it was gone. I really don’t recollect dying.  Just this unbelievable sense of clear headedness—like walking into a room newly painted and knowing by the odor and brightness that the color on the wall is so splattering new that you should be careful not to touch it for fear of smearing the design. The greatest revelation of all? 

Twenty-five miles in the sky time ceases to exist.

The planet Pluto takes two hundred and forty-eight years to circle the sun. It doesn’t give a damn. 

The day of my death was the day I became free of the only burden I really ever had.  TIME.

Useless.

Time is fussy.  Time is worry. 

Time is fear.  Time is the culprit causing human-types to recoil from pending generosity. 

There just was never enough time. 

Time would not allow it.  Remember—“if time permits …”

Why if time permits?  Why not if I permit?  Why not if I dream?  Why not if I want?  Why does time get to dictate to me my passage? 

It was time that robbed me of my soulful nature.    It was time that convinced me that my selfishness was needed. 

I didn’t die. The clock in me died, leaving spirit to tick on.  

So why don’t we see the farce of time?  Why do we allow ourselves to fall under the power of the cruel despot?  Yes, time is a relentless master—very little wage for much demand.

I died today. 

Actually … a piece of time named after me was cast away.