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, December 19, 2016

Truth contains space, space does not contain truth.  Truth contains time.  Time does not contain truth. In our striving way we make this mistake and search for truth in what is contained by truth.  It reminded me of the ancient story of four blind people who discover an elephant for the first time.  One has the tail, another holds the trunk.  The third has a leg .  The fourth has a tusk.  From their separate points of view (touch) they describe an elephant. All are incorrect, incomplete. The science we have been taught to worship is blind in the same way. Continually, it describes truth by studying its tail or its ear or its leg, etc. It struck me with a bang that an ancient man long ago knew what fools us today and his warnings ignored. But they have not disappeared altogether. In silent surrender is found truth and that is all that is found there and the only place it will be found. We are so fortunate it cannot be spoken nor written of.  Last night I was reading Moby-Dick and enjoying it as much as before.  Fascinated.  Here is one thing Ishmael said to me-

Yes-there is death in this business of whaling-a speechless quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?  Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.



Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. page 66

glass art by shannon smith, costa rica
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