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, July 19, 2019

What Nobody Knows

Some person has a problem. At the beginning he may well be excited at the struggle ahead of him and imagine how a victory will feel when he is done. He commits to the struggle. Unexpected help arises from many quarters. “We will win!” they shout. Something is watching all of this unfold from the outset and is aware of every detail as it happens. The person with the problem is unaware of the quiet, still observer but the observer is aware of the person with the problem and is that without which the person would not even exist to accept a challenge at all. The person who has a problem to solve feels a mandate to solve it and thereby bring about a change for the good. But he fails. 

Misery sets in. It feels such a familiar misery. How many times?

Alone, he realizes the mandate was actually to fail to solve a problem, and, by experiencing failure deeply, find that peace that is always with him; a peace without which one must endlessly strive for what cannot be attained for we have it already. The person who had a problem disappears. Nothing of it remains.  Life opens like a flower whose anonymity is its strength. Life is not being lived by a person. Any swan knows this. 

The human being shouts,

“Goodness does not need man. Man needs goodness. It is not to be that man will save the planet. All arises from what man calls blackness and back to it shall return bringing no persons with it.”
What in us that is not a person knows this? Pay attention.
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