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, March 8, 2021

 UNTITLED


In my past were many times I threw parties drunk on a lot of booze and basically forced people to join in.  It always came from a deep need to get people to understand me and relate to me as caring beings should and love me and show me they loved me by joining my party and it never worked out. I kept trying, though. Trying to make something good of what was a mess o’ words. Words. Words. Words.


I went to church this morning at 6:00 a.m. and listened to marvelous chanting of words...words...words.  I am beginning to understand why I am drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian services.  First, I am drawn to the power of language.  Always have been.  But now I see how as people we demand that the Mystery come to us on our terms. The Biblical accounts of the Jews and God seem almost crazy to me. Like bickering children are they. Their God is a nasty adolescent. He rants. They rant back and on it goes. Whenever I listen too much to the words I begin an argument inside my head. If, however, I let the words go on by and just feel I touch that in me that longs to know.  From there I empathize with the Jews.  I pick up isolated phrases that illuminate the experience for me. Like this morning, out of nowhere, I heard some Rabbi quoted as saying thanks for "initiating us in the knowledge."  That is the precise language my own master used to describe what he could do for me.  And he did.  He initiated me into the knowledge. The rest has been up to me.  He showed me out of love how to turn inside myself and find what I had always been searching for outside myself. ..to find it inside. To experience it there. Jesus taught the mystery to his 12 and maybe a few others, like Mary Magdalene.  Everyone has need of this knowledge.

 

Basically, there are two distinct approaches of man to his God.  One is the popular one that has been established in World Orders of Religious History and Ritual and is practiced everywhere in Temples built by man.  Without noticing it, these people, with the best of intentions, virtually create a relationship with their God by words. They make promises and their God promises back…in their language and voices, incidentally. They tell stories....again in their language and voices...about God.  In this manner has a God been created by man.                                          


These people have named their God and named their Religion and built churches and synagogues and temples. These people, without questioning it, assume there is a God before they begin their search.  This is convenient and meant to keep things orderly,  from getting too nasty or frightening. And yet, so much of what these guys experience is nasty, scary, horrible terror. Always their kind are at war with another such group and the butchery is unbelievable in scope and  pure brutality.  Noticing not the inevitability that such outrages must come from following “OUR GOD”. More important, though, this practice has prevented discovery of the actual truth. To know in one's own heart that God is love and not the word "love" but the power itself inside us all.

 

There is a way to approach the knowledge. Some come to God by bending the knee of the heart in secret, alone and empty of desires, and are willing to accept whatever is to be shown, absolutely on the terms of that which is sought.  Even are we willing to be shown: there is no God at all.  That is a mouthful.


These ones want the truth more than they want anything else.  And they find something that does not speak to man in man's language but in the language known to every infant at birth...known to even a tiny butterfly... which language cannot be placed in a book of man to be kept from the uneducated ones or those who refuse after hearing of it to join the Church that is created by the hand of man. 


Let it be known, there is a church that was not created by the hand of man to which all who are born belong by an inalienable right granted in the Dimension of Heaven at the moment of conception. The rolls of this church cannot be altered and no money is sought or needed by this church for the walls of the church enclose the Heavens above where all stars and planets and moons are in attendance. Such a church only gives for its needs are none. It gives sunshine and the breath of life to all on equal terms. In this church is opportunity freely given. Take it or leave it. And there is a way to learn, at a deeper and deeper level throughout a lifetime of the relationship of one single human being to a breath. That is the meaning of religion, derived from the term relationship  which is how one thing is tied to another in affinity.

 

As I was leaving the church this morning, my gaze fell upon a set of photographs of men in robes with great chains around their necks to uphold heavy jewelry .  These guys are church celebrities. Their names are prominently displayed.  One is immediately struck by the falseness of it all.  Here are they publicly denying the truth of all those chants I heard this morning.  "Our religion is fake" they admit.  "There is only the glory of man to be sought finally" those photos shout. "There is no God save us!" they claim. Of the truth of the words of man's written scriptures these learned scholars do not even know.  Why not?  Because they come not  empty to find whatever there is to be found but presume to know. How do I know this? Those pictures tell it. 


Nobody keeps 10 commandments…Jesus said that… so just keep the one…the first one. Love. Simple. Done.


One can proclaim in God’s name:  “ I will smite the wicked in their tracks and give them boils and break their backs and visit on them plagues and cause creepy, crawly things to molest them and take away their pleasure drive and leave them in fear and terror and sorrow and cold and wet and hungry and lame and blind and deaf and wishing for the end….dissatisfied. 


Or, one may merely sing out that all a man complains about is of his own making from ignorance of what is carried inside him. The trouble with the former approach is how it blames God for the evil man has done and indicates God is somehow incapable of or unwilling to make a thoroughly good world.  


There must be actual observation of the present in place of observation from the past that has led only to “my conclusions” before anyone can see what actually is.  Absent judgment or condemnation, one simply watches it flower and disappear. Cells of your body change. The contents of those cells change. You become a light unto yourself. At the close of sorrow lies passion.


My reader, please now go to the address in cyberspace here given to hear a talk worth all the gold in the world to you.  Go now. 


 http//www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

Let Us Milk A Cow By The Hand Of Love And Share The Ice Cream.     Ran Smith Dairy



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