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!

Saturday, January 28, 2017


My Story Of Darkness

I am reading a good novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. I am only beginning it. But, it turned me to writing. There seems to be a common fear of death in the form of a fear of darkness, death as a darkness, in other words. The chief character of the novel so far, an old man in his eighties, tells that he fears death because of his fear he will not find God in that darkness. I remember my mother at that age telling me she was afraid. “Of what?” I asked her. She replied, “Of what everybody fears I suppose, death.”

In old age we begin to forget. We lose our learned skill of keeping up with life by treating everybody and everything we encounter in the way we treat a story as we read one. We begin to notice we are returning to a child like world we had forgotten. Now, my question is this: whether we comprehend by reading in accordance with the experiences we have had in life or is it the other way around? Does the practice of reading (and especially the experiences of being tested on the book) train us to live in a false way regarding the things of reality? To treat them by false ideals, I mean, by what we come to call by reading more and more, our good judgment? And, sound principles. What excites me here is really the notion we acquire our judgment falsely because it, reading, reveals a world we can seem to control. Therefore, we like it! So, could the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Bible actually be a metaphor for a book? Could a book held in one's hands be telling that a book is going to curse you soon in a terrible way and you will be cast out of paradise and left to earn your living by your wits? What a funny joke that would be! (All I know is there are two ways to read the scriptures and they are vastly different.)

What about this? I read a book to find out whether the author knows me rather than to read a book to find out whether the author can teach me what I do not know to help me understand how to control myself. In the first way, I am looking for a friend. In the second I am looking for a teacher who knows what is the matter with me who can straighten me out.

If I were a swan...I might ask why there is a darkness in the first place. And, why do I fear it? My friend urged me to meet the darkness now, while alive, and find out its nature. Asked me whether I thought it better to wait until death to find out. I was able then only to see: I want now to know! How about you?
(hmmm...notice the silent letter k is all that separates the words now from know.)

That leads me to suggest to you that you have encountered trouble when you have tried to meet the dark one, the one who does not speak your language, does not even think at all, never scolds and never asks questions; and that trouble has come from your trained mind which comes up with all manner of things for you to consider other than that. Correct? Why would you not want to meet the rest of you so much that you would interfere with an honest wish on your own part just to prevent it? You know, it takes a lot of attention and hard work to keep somebody from just sitting still for a little while. Must be a real threat, huh? A threat to what do you suppose? 

I met the dark void and knew it had been banished by my own decision to engage in selfish struggles to earn my living here by my wits; banished to a dungeon in the soul of me where it had remained until I found it and asked what it was doing there and would it like to be my friend. It had been waiting is what it made me to understand.
For what?

For you. What took you so long? 

That is my story of darkness.

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