THE STORY OF JOHNNY WHOOPER SWAN We go to school trusting our parents. We meet a teacher there who stands up front with a big desk, and a pointer. She or he trains us in an authoritative manner. We attach mentally to a life long need for authority in order to live lives successfully. Right so far? In my case, at the age of 25 I was ready to enter the practice of law where I hoped for success and a happy life finally. Very shortly, very shortly, I became anxious. There was a foreboding. I was made more uncomfortable with each experience. Law work is nothing like what I was told it would be. The system is corrupt. But I still cling to my expectation that career success is necessary to my happiness as a man. Each day my grasp of what the fuck success amounts to after all becomes more clouded, murkier. I hear songs on the airwaves and at concerts which describe my life as the life of a fool. What am I becoming? I want to rip off my business suit to run naked in the street with my hair on fire! But I am too afraid. In strange, weird (weird comes from a word meaning wise), fragmented steps I go about a journey of my own believing myself to be the first man to have failed in such a total way which journey works so as to break up my career, end a marriage, and start an entirely new way of relating with my two children whom I love deeply. Almost magically I meet a woman who is a career counselor who asserts a beautiful message that I am made to be joyful in my work everyday and at all levels. This understanding sets me on a completely new course. It is no longer a world of systems to me but an undivided one of unlimited beauty. It reminds me of a painting. A true masterpiece. I am drawn from within to learn the truth about my identity and nobody else can teach me that. From this point onward I will use thinking capacity for mastering mechanical processes and follow my heart, which includes my whole nature, which includes your whole nature and that of every human being for all the rest. I’ll go by the name Johnny Whooper Swan who does not explain itself to anyone. By my fruits shall I be known. Watch me soar!

Sunday, September 4, 2016

So, when you consider that a person who loves never considers himself to be a lover you gotta wonder what have we been doing the last few thousand years? We have been honing away at ourselves, alone and in groups, to become what cannot be achieved. What must inevitably happen to people who do that? Right. Suffering.

Somebody has twisted your mind in a knot. Life is not an obstacle course of challenges. It happens. It happens like your birthday...which comes to you wherever you are every time the Earth completes another cycle around the Sun. I am reading a story about a novice hiker on a trek through wilderness to find something she cannot name. Man, she encounters so many difficulties, each of which she reports leads her to the same conclusion...keep walking. I met her only on the pages of her book but I love her.

They told me, If you don't know where you are going, any road will do. (and laughed) I say, If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there. (and sigh) I am so aware just now of one thing: when I am open and empty of any motive without a clue where I want to go I am at my best and I cannot fail.

I say, we are drawn to walk, or sometimes kicked in the ass, and we walk on a journey without purpose to discover we have never fucked up. That's peace, Man. But those who walk with purpose, to save themselves from some imagined suffering, remain in limbo even though dressed in robes of salvation chanting psalms and prayers and proverbs.

Okay, someone who feels guilty may choose to whip herself continuously until she finally frees herself from the guilt only to discover she never did fuck up since the conduct she abhorred in herself led her to beat the shit out of herself which has led her to peace which is why she chose the self administered whippings. It's all good does not mean, whip Hell out of yourself, or drink yourself sick, or have sex with everybody you meet; it means whip Hell out of yourself if you want to.


p.s. You only want to when you want to. And nobody is going to change because I tell them to, real change will come when the person who changes wants it to be so.



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