DAY NINE

For the Jews ask for a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Greeks foolishness. But to them, the called-out ones, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. 1st Corinthians 1:22-24

Ever felt like Alice when she firsts falls into Wonderland and sees that incredibly wonderful garden but she just can’t get there because she’s either too big to fit through the door or too small to reach the key on the table? To me that’s symbolic of the repetitive circle most of mankind is bound to: swallowing their own tail in a vain attempt to reincarnate themselves from their own ashes.


Only one man has actually been dead (stone cold, no memory dead – not a ghost, not an out of body experience but really, truly dead) and now lives again never to die. He is the one and only door keeper and the only way out of this freak show for the rest of is to find out where He is and go there. And with all due respect to Aldous and Jim (Huxley and Morrison), some of us actually DO get out here alive. Because this door that I’m talking about is not just a mental or ‘spiritual’ door of perception but an actual ticket to a new reality and place.

But I certainly have had the common experience of angst, doubt and existential terror that all who seek to understand and escape this world find. Neither mescaline (cactus), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), cocaine hydrochloride (coke), psilocybin (mushroom) nor tetrahydrocannabinol (THC in Hemp), all of which I smoked, snorted or ingested during a particularly volatile time in my young life, opened any doors that provided escape from the reality of death. In fact if they did anything at all, rather than finding portals of escape, this dead end pursuit by me may have actually allowed unsavory and unwanted fiends entry into the portals of my mind and body. Nasty little devils that took a much bigger and stronger man than myself to evict once they had gotten used to the food and the furniture.

What I didn’t have when I was going through this pointless time in my life was the very uncommon experience, even among poets, scholars and sages, the very unworldly experience of coming face to face with the One. No I have not come face to face with God the Creator of the universe or I wouldn’t be writing this to you. No one can look at the true God directly and live. Instead I met the one who was dead and now lives: the alpha and omega of our salvation and this has made all the difference.

The innocent chosen one, who suffered as an outcast and criminal, was nailed alive to a wooden stake and hung up on a desolate hillside called “The Skull” in public shame so that the entire city could see and mock his situation. He who was abandoned by most of his family and friends to die alone in obscurity and whose body was wrapped in a sheet and placed in a shallow, unmarked grave. He is the answer to every question about the what, why and wherefore of life. He is the door that if a man or woman can find it, although it is always within the grasp of anyone, he or she will go in and out and find pasture for their soul. He is the WAY OUT, of which no groovy hippy in their wildest psychedelic trip could ever have dreamed.

My Lord Jesus Christ, (your Lord too if you want to him be) was raised from the dead, taken up to the right hand of God in the heavens, is currently directing an unseen kingdom that operates completely outside the duality of this tired and limited earthly realm where mankind bounces like a pinball between vanity and depravity seeking wisdom or signs but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth using microscopes, telescopes or psychotropes.

But his new kingdom will not remain hidden forever. Although we are pilgrims and strangers on this earth wandering and waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God, it will not always be so. Stick around and I’ll tell you why the so called “New Age” is nothing at all like the pseudo-messengers of light (i.e. false apostles) are currently peddling in the marketplace of ideas. When the true water bearer comes back, it will be the dawning of The Age (yes it will be new) that we have always longed for in our hearts. It will be a time that will finally bring to pass and super exceed the tainted and limited visions of world peace, social justice and human potential than can be found in the fetid pools of pop psychology and utilitarian ideologies that surround us.

Are you ready and willing to take your place and be counted among the foolish for Christ’s sake? Be sure because if you take the red pill, you can never really go back to your blissfully ignorant state again. But then again, if you’re really one of us, you’d never want to.

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr

DAY EIGHT

What is it about passion and fervor for anything or anyone that can lead so many otherwise intelligent people astray? I am a passionate individual. And mixed with a modest portion of intelligence covered in a creamy arrogance sauce with a yummy side dish of selfishness, I have encountered any number of dead ends on my way to the fulfillment of my desires. But then, I’m an idealistic jester whose very satirical nature side tracks any serious attempt at influencing life and culture.

But why is it that even those stoic souls who worship at the altar of rationality and fervently believe in the power of the mind to trump the emotions at each and every turn, the phlegmatic Mr. Spocks, if you will, in cold contrast to the sanguine Dr. McCoys, still fall prey to mystical associations and conjurings of the most fantastic kind?

You think not? Show me the logic of concluding from the DNA record and the organic complexity of living creatures that homo sapiens derived from completely random, undirected processes taking place over exceedingly long lengths of time. I’m not sure that a high priest of any ancient pagan religion ever had to make a greater leap of faith in order to promote the local deity du jour than is made by the modern scientist in his fervent attempt to deny the possibility that intelligence of any kind may have played a role in our genesis as a species.

And as if this uncontested road of scientific certainty isn’t enough to open a case for doubt, there is always the extreme opposite end of the intellectual spectrum, if you will, namely the loosely defined movement known only as the New Age. Occultism, Neopaganism, Astrology, Human Potentiality and Universal Truth, recycled ideas, warmed over and spiced up to be fed as fresh meat to an uneducated clientele looking for new experiences to scratch their itching ears.

Of course, one might easily assume that a healthy balance would be to position oneself somewhere in the middle of this line between “pure” rationality and “mystic” spirituality and, it may be that most of the human race finds itself somewhere along that line. But there are a good number of us, who seeing the weaknesses inherent in each of these two opposing ideas as well as, and this is more important, the potency that there is more to nature of reality than this limiting duality, have fallen, headlong as it were, onto another possibility.

For the most part, the allegedly unlimited human mind appears trapped in a dualistic world, a kind of cruel, philosophical dialectic, if you will. We speak of good versus evil, Yin and Yang, Occident versus Orient, male and female, slave and master, up and down, right and left, mind and body, hot and cold, right and wrong, black and white, capitalism versus socialism, liberal versus conservative, anarchy versus totalitarianism, ad infinitum.

And this conundrum concerning opposites is not solved by mental gymnastics like trying to explain false dilemmas (Morton’s Fork as an example) or emotional appeals that we look for the shades of ‘grey’ between the black and white or the a hybrid version of opposing ideas like ‘bi-sexual’ or the proverbial ‘middle of the road’. While these may be correct within the confines of their own usage, they just reinforce the notion that our reality seems rooted (or stuck might be a better word) in the duality of opposites.

But there is another dimension to this seeming limitation that cannot be found out by rational inquiry or mystical musings but is nonetheless as real and plain as the nose on my face.

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr

DAY SEVEN

Ah the seventh day. God rested on the 7th day of Creation.

Where do we find peace in this world?

Is it to be found within ourselves…this same self that cannot even accomplish the good that we will to do…sometimes even doing evil that we don’t even want to do?  Although that certainly doesn't stop a lot of very convincing writers from exhorting us to look within ourselves to find the answers.  I guess they think that thanks to that unintelligent, unmonitored, freestyle event called evolution, every person who is born has universal truth encoded on their DNA. Tried looking within myself for answers - came up empty and miserable.

Do we find peace in a supplement? Ginkgo, Noni, Aloe, Algae, Acai, Alfalfa, Chlorophyll, Cranberry, Maqui, Royal Jelly, Spirulina, Greens, Reds, Proteins, and on and on and on…

Do we find rest for our souls in meditation? Yoga, Tai Chi, posture, focus, concentration, contemplation, bells, drums, chants, incense, candles, sounds, smells, music, atmosphere, the great outdoors, and on and on and on…

Is it in the heart? Is it in the solar plexus or the spleen? Is it between our ears or between our legs or sitting upright on top of our heads? Is it first sight, second sight or the third eye? Can you enervate peace? Breath it into being or capture it in a dreamcatcher on the wind?

Thirty two years ago I reached beyond this world and asked for help from the only source of help in this universe and without reservation or hesitation I was given a peace that I have never understood nor can I describe except to say that it abides with me and lives in me.

I have friends who have struggled to find the Secret to peace, happiness and prosperity seeking it among the stagnant pools of tradition or the poisoned wells of self aggrandizement. In their zeal to know and understand, they have swallowed the first lie believing that they themselves have the power within themselves to control the universe and draw good unto themselves. At best they are a bit foolish. At worst they become ensnared by a deceitful lie that masquerades as the truth; false light leading the unwary off the path and into the tangled wood.

Who would want to drink from the muddy waters of man’s philosophies and vain deceit when we are offered living water from the author of life? Not me and hopefully, not you.

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr

DAY SIX

What is it about us human beings that makes us have to relive some of the same mistakes generation after generation? Wouldn’t you think that if something bad happened to my father and he told me about it or warned me about it, that I would avoid that trap.

It sounds logical but for some strange reason life doesn’t work that way.
I mean how many of you have children or younger brothers and sisters or grand children or somebody younger than you that are just doomed to repeat the same failures in marriage, love, sex, drugs and rock & roll that many of us went through?

What is it about youth that makes it impossible to believe that churning milk long enough turns it into butter whether you want it to or not.  Same thing with poor lifestyle choices: they get you into places you don't like being. 

How many times do we hear young people, or how many times when we were young people, did we say or believe: “Oh that won’t happen to me!”

“Oh yes, Betty is an alcoholic but that will never happen to me...bartender one more round!”

“Tommy was a drug addict but I can shoot up that heroin or take a little meth and nothing will happen to me…hand me the bag…”

Yeah and we’re all going to live forever and we can live any lifestyle we choose and we’ll always stay perpetually young. Now this would be an instance where a fairy tale rather than bringing clarity to reality would actually cloud good judgment.

Of course nobody actually believes this but try to find the one young person in a thousand that actually does something about it without being forced by some circumstance to change?

I was NOT that young person…at least not before I turned 21 anyway. I could do anything to my body and mind and nothing was going to happen to me.

And I know why it was that way for me. I knew that things I did were wrong and I knew what the right things were to do but I just didn’t want to change. I mean my younger self was more than willing to ruin things for my older self if it meant I could have a little more fun.

What’s really intriguing is to realize that this is actually not just a condition of youth but it’s a systemic problem for everyone their entire lives. Listen to how this man describes the condition:

For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I…For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

His name was Saul of Tarsus and he is one of the writers of the Bible, specifically The New Testament.

If we’re all subject to like passions and our natural course is to be contradictory and self destructive then how can any of us escape?

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr

DAY FIVE

Even in my first life…that one that ended all those years ago on that porch…even back then I was always intrigued by fantasy. Myth, science fiction and fairy stories all provided a vehicle to describe the indescribable parts of life.

It was Clyde that once told me that “we do not retreat from reality, we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves... By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly."

Certainly for some, fantasy is an escape and God knows we all need to escape sometimes from the stifling reality of the sweatbox we call the daily grind. But much more than just mere escape or a child’s daydreams, well thought out fantasy allows you to pass through a wardrobe or a picture or travel in a rocket ship into another world and by interacting in that strange or bizarre environment see and understand our own world that much more clearly.

But even beyond that, fantasy gives voice to the reality which lingers just beyond our vision…the reality that we all knew as children that the world was much bigger and more awesome, in the true sense of the word, then most of us are able to recall when we get older. In that sense, fantasy has the power to awaken within us, if only for brief time, the sense of wonder that sometimes finds itself buried beneath the burdens of adulthood.

“My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.” (Patricia to Joe aboard the TweedleDee in Joe Versus the Volcano)

`Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, `if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.'

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr

DAY FOUR

What is a Ragamuffin anyway?

Webster says it’s a ragged, oafish person…a ragged disreputable person, poorly clothed, often a child.

That’s me…well at least it is me when I try to wrap myself up in all the glorious works my hands have created for myself. And I’ve always felt that my figs leaves were a lot nicer than a whole bunch of other fig leaves I had seen.

But come to find out…there ain’t nothing new under the sun…the thing that has been will be again…and all that piss and vinegar pride I wore as my youthful crown was nothing more than a bunch of leaves and grass that withered and dried up…not even enough kindling to make a good fire…and it left me cold and naked.

And then I got invited to this most wonderful feast I’d ever been to and this incredibly kind groom gave me a beautiful suit of clothes to wear to his wedding…and I haven’t been cold or naked since…except…well…let’s say that I’m still a ragamuffin at heart but I’ve got a good benefactor who despite my shortcomings, covers for me when I’m wandering a little by the side of the road.

Now not all that wander are lost you know. I’ve met a few good friends on the side of that road…one is a former priest and struggling alcoholic and another is a beautiful soul who no longer sings on this earth…and meeting them both has made my life fuller.

Rich was a stranger in this land and on this road to righteousness, although we falter in our steps, he always knew we were never out of reach of aid. And I remember what Susan said: How love is found in the things we’ve given up more than in the things that we have kept. And when home is just another place where you’re a stranger and far away is just somewhere you’ve never been, I hope that I remember, he was my friend.

And Brennan, God love him, Brennan showed me the valley of desolation far away from the Hallelujahs of piety. And introduced me to a gospel made for the weak and sinful with hereditary faults and feet of clay. He wrote and spoke for the smart among us that know we are stupid and the honest among us who admit that we are scalawags and ragamuffins and misfits.

And as the Caterpillar said to Alice: Who are YOU?

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr

DAY THREE

God how I hate religion! Man is so damn pious and holier than thou with his sacraments and vestments and testaments and regiments…God how I hate religion.

What a small world it would be if all we were living for was to join some church or some synagogue or some temple or some mosque and subject our bodies and minds to the discipline au jour…Lord, Lord, I hardly knew you…

Ha! I tried that one too. I think it was right after about 20 days of Orange sunshine and window pane acid…wasn’t that what we called those little orange pills and that stuff on a blotter that we kept in the freezer? Oh you missed that trip? Good for you…

Yeah hair cuts and right living…less drugs and no drinking…buckle down and read the paper…go to church and do my homework…Dear Lord I was a good boy at 19. I was a good, good boy for a little while. My house was clean and my clothes were washed…and the roaches all went upstairs to my neighbors for food…Yes Lord, life was good. Mmmmm…It was good. And I was good. And everything was good…until the fall.

I was a good Pharisee…I was a righteous man in my own eyes…I was a well painted mausoleum…looking good and being white…washed that is…and I was asking Jesus what should I do to escape the wrath to come…mmmmm…

Then I watched my dumb ass self fall from heaven, at least from the pedestal I had constructed for myself somewhere in the clouds…and I fell back to earth…oh and great was that fall brothers and sisters…Mmmmm…give me a hallelujah…amen.

Thankfully somebody with a little more common sense woke me up and showed me the way more perfectly…and it was a thrilling and humbling experience…

That’s when I became a misfit. Are any of you misfits? Or maybe you’re a Ragamuffin?

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr

DAY TWO

Hello again.

Sometimes I marvel how quickly I burned through my first life…

When it ended I felt like a middle aged character from a Dickens novel. The big difference being that I was barely 20 years old.

As good as I was at weaving my complicated persona to cover up the fear and weakness inside me, the threads weren’t strong enough to hold it all together. And then it happened.

As the clock struck midnight on the last day of 1977 and a group of young people stumbled blindly into the New Year as I had done the past three years myself, I turned my back on the party and stepped out onto a small stoop on the corner of a main street in my hometown, less than half a mile from the hospital where my first child would be born someday and breathed the fresh air of a new day.

I often feel badly for people whose only experience of the dramatic comes in a bottle or a pipe or a needle or a pill. I lived that drama till I was naked and wounded with nowhere to hide.

And I know so many people who live vicariously through books or songs or movies or cartoons as if they really know what it feels like to be free. And I love those people but I can’t lie to them.

Until you’ve stood on the precipice of extinction and looked fully into the abyss of your own failures, you’re still living a cliché founded on a lie. I wish I could take away your pain but some paths you’ve got to walk on your own.

I have a friend that lost a finger one day but it saved his soul. I lost a friend one time but it saved my life. Too many have lost so much more for so little.

My road has sorrow but it always ends in joy. Sometimes there’s even joy without the sorrow but there’s never sorrow without the joy. If you’re not on this road, isn’t it time you took the red pill?

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr

DAY ONE

Hello my friends. Welcome to the first of the twelve days.

When I was a child I dreamed incredible dreams and I had incredible fears. Sometimes my fears mixed with my dreams. Maybe you know what I mean. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re still having those fretful dreams. Wherever you are and whatever you’re experiencing, I love you…and that has nothing to do with how you feel about me.

But back then I didn’t love you. I feared you…but not just you…I feared life. I feared death. I feared myself. So I said and did many things to protect myself from the fear. Maybe you did too.

How did you cope with childhood? How did you cope with friendships, school, relationships, family, growing up, becoming you? Do you remember? Do the memories hurt? Do you have shame mixed with joy? Happiness mixed with disappointment? What went right? What didn’t?

I was born in 1957, the beloved son of two wonderfully young foolish people trying on the garment of parenthood. In 1977 I died…but my body lived on. And those two wonderful parents of mine, as oblivious to me as I was to them, never knew I had passed on.

In 1978 I was born again. If you know what that means then I don’t need to say any more to you. If you don’t know what that means, then you’ll just have to find out. Stick around…who knows what might happen. Then there’s a few of you who think you know what it means but you don’t and because you think you do, you’ll never know what it really means and that’s sad…for you.

Death is an interesting phenomenon. I’m sure I don’t understand it. I hate it and I’m fascinated by it. And I hate it. And I’m drawn to it daily. But living death was much worse.

If you’ve ever done time on this earth as a shade, a wraith walking in the crack between the world that is and the world that isn’t then you know what happened to me. If you’re still living there…I don’t know what to tell you except there are two ways out and they’re both final…but they’re not both equal.

How many of our friends, our families, our brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors, school chums and children (dear God we’re all just children) have moved beyond our reach forever? You may think you’re too far gone but if you’re a living dog then you’re much better than a dead lion. Think about it.

I like... no that’s not true...I LOVE the scene in The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the Red pill. Have you seen the movie? Did you like it? Did you hate it? Have you asked yourself why?

If you haven’t seen it, the hero is a seeker named Neo who is looking to find out what’s really going on in his world and what is this thing that he knows only as The Matrix. Morpheus, a person claiming to know what The Matrix really is, offers Neo two pills: one red and one blue.

The red pill is an opportunity to see ‘beyond the world that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth’ and as Morpheus says “to see how deep the rabbit hole really goes”. The blue pill is the fall back position: If Neo chooses the blue pill, he can go back to sleep and forget that any of this had ever happened.

How many times have you (and I) taken the blue pill and gone back to sleep pretending all this never happened?

I’ll see you tomorrow…or I won’t…

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr