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!

Monday, July 18, 2016

What Happened To Us?


Into every boy's (girl's) life the first pals come. Easy as pie are those days and nights when together they play. Unnoticed altogether is the drummer who beats out the rhythm of their lives together as one child. So long as we listen it goes and we know not what we have. The day will come when the uncomplicated simplicity of childhood will shatter and split into individual dreams as if the drummer abandoned them, but that is not the case. That being so, one can never buy back for any price what he had. He has it still.



Whatever happened to Winky, my buddy? It's been about...what? 20 
years! For me, perhaps others as well, the loss will be too much for us 
to bear even though we remain completely ignorant. What happened?  
What did we lose? 


Theories rise like hot cakes. A whole entire career system is built 
around a loss we did not lose and what to do about that. We turn to 
anything we find which blocks the pain. We begin to gossip and talk 
nonsense about other people and their habits, traits, odd mannerisms.  
Arrange, then constantly rearrange the camps of who we like and who 
we do not, and who we like most and least. Altogether classify, judge, 
and arrange a world in our heads that does not otherwise exist. In this 
world good people and bad people dwell. People who do right and 
people who do wrong are placed there. There live friends and enemies. It (our world) splits and divides and shatters until it is very complex. 



Now, there are priests, lawgivers, therapists, teachers, counselors, 
artists, entertainers, politicians, the police and judges and juries, 
firefighters, soldiers, guards, rebels, arsonists, terrorists, nutritionists, 
yoga teachers, real estate agents, accountants, entrepreneurs, and all 
the rest. Books galore are written! Always and throughout, there 
remains a ghost world, a reality, that becomes more strange to us as 
we work out the terms of our world, the one we created, and it 
becomes even threatening; so, we discover ways to shut it off. We 
label the ghost world to be fantasy, illusion, to be a pack of 
dangerous dream worlds, nonsense, evil, darkness, all to be avoided 
as populated by evil spirits, witches, fairies, wizards, outlaws, beasts, 
and such. It is in fact the real one. And it is what we lost when we 
gave it up for a handful of shiny, worthless beads.