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!

Thursday, February 15, 2018


I'd Rather Sit this One Out


We are all fools who attempt to tell the meaning of things absent the slightest understanding of what it is we mean nor what could even be meant by someone or something. Very superficial are we.

I just did that. I cannot help doing it, it seems.

As humans is it our only pastime? Or is it just the source of everything we think, say, write and do?

We see tracks of a bear in the woods. We think, this means a bear has been here no longer ago than it has been since the last rain. We start to reason.

Someone asks my religion. I could name a few, but really, it is Texas Tech sports, with an emphasis on football.

I send everything through that filter first. We are a tough team who take on opponents manned by superior athletes who are much better funded, equipped, supported, recruited, and publicized. And we hope to overcome all that with a lot of stubborn grit. It began I believe in the minds of early pioneers to the High Plains of West Texas who settled in with not enough water, frequent winds, tornados, and dust who more or less willed a college from the treasury of the Texas Legislature to be built where none was more unlikely. Today there is a law school and a medical school on that campus.

Now we know my religion we can wonder whether it could be possible to escape it. The question is: can one live knowing a language without following it? Might we see the same animal tracks referred to above and without a name know instantly what is shown? Might it be we would actually know much more from sighting the tracks that way than by the reasoning process? Can one live a satisfying life with no attempt to derive meaning from it? Whatever that means? I am reminded the answer is, no.

Suppose one could see that meaning has no meaning? Even for a second see it? It was education that trained me to think that intelligence is meaning derived from a process, reasoning. That is not what great artists tell us, nor scientific geniuses nor is it what anyone else who is seen as superior has experienced on the way to greatness. All seem to tell it that reasoning has to be transcended to enter a zone where they do their thing. And my own somewhat limited experience bears that out. I never learned anything well by thinking it through. Trained to do it, I begin there each time, like a religious person will begin at the earliest teachings of his or her religion. Filters. Like Tech football. Such filters are not beneficial but actually blind us. To get to excellence in a field of endeavor one has to transcend limits of reason. Some have described it as looking with one's entire being. Reason has been a big handicap for mankind. And, it has caused much unnecessary suffering to all living things on Earth. Reason is equally grounded in good and bad, success and failure, good and evil, etc. So, it is just as likely to shit on you as to pull you out of shit. But there is a field out beyond right doing and wrong doing. We meet there in songs of rejoicing. There greatness bends rules. Ignores them. Plays with them. Fulfills them. If I cannot dance with you in that field, I'd rather sit this one out.

Ahhh. There you have it! It is in learning we can sit this one out we find freedom from language. Language should serve us, not the other way around. It feels like, live and let live.



No comments: