A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 01/18/20

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 18, 2020

IN A PLACE OF COMPLETE INSECURITY

ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN

There are days when one prays and all seems very clear and what God wants from us is exactly understood to be good for us and we feel close to our maker and glad, we are actually secure in our faith, we might say. But perhaps that is when our prayers, our listening, are at their most distant from God. For it is then we are talking with, talking to, and listening with our own minds and not connected with such as God at all. We have sealed the truth off from us by walls of thought and time which cannot bind love and so no love will ever be found in such an illusory environment as that. And it is also the case that when we are fully in touch with the Great One we are aware that we are in a state of alert and must watch our step or fall into a trap that we are easily convinced God has abandoned us and for no apparent reason. It is this way because we want something we can hold as “my own” when there is no such thing in existence. Creation, however, is total destruction of all that is of time and thought, as that was yesterday’s wine. Nothing new can arise in the presence of time and thought. Utter stillness of mind must be for creation to be possible. I am saying only a quiet mind is open to build a bridge that spans all walls. That is creation.

One bit more, please. There is something that but for which all the words above written would be but an unlit candle and it is this: In this place of Creation where anyone’s mind finds complete stillness, there will be found your God, the only God, and God only. Waiting for you. Is it not the best news to be reminded God is not some image so petty it can be brought into our messes to sort them out? That is forgiveness. That is mercy. That is love.

When anyone is to blame, everyone is to blame.