PLEASE & THANK YOU (weekly harangue #116)

Layman Pascal's 
Spirit'd Mini-Books

PLEASE & THANK YOU



Please.  

Thank you.  

These small & simple phrases, used everyday all over planet Earth, do not receive their due dosage of our respect.  We use them to train children, but they are not merely childish devices.  We use them vainly & superficially but they are also the voice of our depths.  We spout them absentmindedly, tersely, even bitchy (sic), but even then... we sense a great power of potential lurking within them.

No matter how poorly employed, these ancient words continue to be among the most popular, reliable tools that we have for mutually instructing each other in the invocation of goodness and in the sublime art of creating higher organic-spiritual moods.  When we repeat these "decorative utterances", whether aloud or internally, we are already beginning to make a bio-emotional & existential gesture of the most extraordinary profundity.  To repeat these “casual spells”  until we feel them sincerely, whole-bodily, until they stir something authentic in our core...?  This can be a worthy alternative to any of our world’s religions.  

The Saints of History are depicted turning their attention & heart upwards toward that hovering place "above" where we feel ourselves concentrated in the sincere pleading gesture to whatever Higher Power we can realistically conceive.  This is no gesture of self-debasement, no slave's gesture demonstrating a lack of control & competence, but only a natural movement which is common in the lives of the holiest, wisest & most powerful human beings.  It is an act of uniting the heart, body and mind into a single aspirational force-of-opening.  It is a deep purifying request which connects us to the Higher Intelligence of the Life-Power.  And this sacred act of embodied longing is only the full, natural extension of the word: PLEASE!

Similarly, today's experts on neuro-psychological self-cultivation & holistic human health are surprisingly uniform in advising us to intentionally select and amplify the feeling-frequency of Gratitude.  This is practical advice, they say.  It obtains an improved mind-body resonance, greater sanity & resilience, and improved social relationships.  It is the vibratory and chemical mode of functioning that is associated with an existential gesture of opening-to-receive-energy & confirming-the-nourishment-of-intrinsic-goodness which is found in all of this World or any part thereof.  This gesture is the apotheosis of: THANK YOU!

So whenever we sense the falseness & superficiality of the conventional human use of these sacred word-feelings, whenever we feel doubtful or cynical or oppressed by popular and manipulative trivialization, we should remember that we are comparing this to our sense of the potential in these phrases.  Our doubt are only a confession that we can already feel a more genuine, more useful & altogether more profound application of these bio-psychological gestures.  In truth, we were extremely lucky to have been indoctrinated with such terminology.  It is a very benevolent piece of living cultural machinery.  What a gift to give any child! 

Our social graces are not merely sociable -- they are also graceful.  

Please & Thank You can be a Whole Prayer... a True Prayer... the quintessence of Prayer.

Layman Pascal

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