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!

Friday, September 16, 2016

The Title Of This Piece is For You A Secret

Jeanette Winterson writes about the ego as “that hollow, screaming cadaver that has no spirit within it”. Sexing the Cherry, at 105. That is the best I've come across. She wonders if that is what people who describe the search for God as a way to be rid of oneself are referring to, the ego. She writes that ego is the ideal self run mad. She likens it to searching for one thing and quite surprisingly finding another “in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain”. She points out for me that it is easy to lose oneself, and, boy, do I know that! So it is, I think, the ego we are better off without since that spells a sane self. She goes on to say that if the ideal self, the secret self, the other life, could be found and brought home a person could live in peace and have no need for God who has no need for us, being complete. That last statement may surprise with its tender, loving message left behind for all seekers to feel no matter how they conceive of a God. A relationship with the complete goes far deeper than need nearest to effortless culmination. I now call that love, or true love. My love waves and I wave back. I recommend the writings of Jeanette Winterson to all human beings who read.

So, I am left, myself, now, with the sense that it has all been a search for who I am, a discovery I have been driven insane left to live as a hollow cadaver with no soul, and finding a way to restore sanity to my true, secret self. I, of course, have no way to know how you, in secret, feel. Your life is your own. I feel a need to reach out to others and tell what I know. Recovery is possible. But, there is no formula for it. It is more undoing than doing, more unlearning than learning. So, I say look for writers and teachers who irritate you to undo you to unlearn. The one who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy. One who pulls you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.


In secret I find mercy and forgiveness enough to light the way.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

a true friend is someone who will stab you in the front. The kidd