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, June 10, 2021

 The So-Called Scientist


Let us reason together in order to see what is happening to us. I am not going to teach you anything. Listening to me is like talking to yourself. Together we learn.


The so-called scientist looks through her microscope. What she sees depends upon what she is looking for but she is unaware of the effect of that upon her work. She thinks what she sees is the way things are. She knows not that the observer is the observed. She knows not that what she sees is colored by her memory of what she has seen in the past. She believes she can cross the same river again today which she crossed yesterday. That the river is always flowing is not important to her because that would keep her from being a scientist in search of fixed knowledge which she is convinced brings control to life and destiny. She believes herself to be dedicated to bringing to all a better world. She is this way only because she thinks of herself as an intelligent scientist with a reputation for intelligence among others who think the same way. It is mere group think. She is concerned with her career. Blind to how her fixation is in the past she is arrogant. She will tell other colleagues the meaning of what she has found in a paper she will author and publish. It is folly to do that in a world in motion. Yesterday’s knowledge is dead. But she has been busy gathering a following of fools. In this manner she will be nominated to receive coveted awards and the false prestige they bring. This she believes to be practical and secure though it be nothing but illusion made by abstract thinking. A translator who is not there is busy telling her what the thing she sees means. Words. Then, the translator tells her, she can tell others what to do about it. Meanwhile, everybody alive knows everything is getting worse.


The lawyer is bound to the past in the same way as the scientist as is the physician and the psychiatrist and the minister and the businessman and the journalist and the artist and the writer and the guru and all the rest. They belong to schools of thought and are proud of it. Each school has its private language others do not understand. They argue among themselves and teach in their schools that this will lead to progress which is thought to bring excellence but which is merely cosmetic. The word”excellence” is not the thing. Trends, latest fashions, and celebrity abound in a society of idiots. And the emperor of it all is naked. Humanity is riding a train traveling faster and faster and deeper into a purgatory-like condition of its own making and none of it is real. All is illusion. Should we all laugh? At whom? It might be fun if the price were not so high in terms of violence against all who have stood in the way of self-made, arrogant, judgmental pretenders over the ages. It is a very complex and convoluted  history. They kill each other. They kill children, women, the elderly, the helpless, and the best. They are constantly sending children to school where they can be forced to learn the game and assimilate.  Two Riders approach.


The game we have been playing is unfortunately very attractive to us. Or maybe it is not unfortunate at all. Maybe there is a plan to actually get us hopelessly lost and before we find our way back home we have to admit we are lost completely and mean it. That happened to me and some others. How many will it happen to before we are too far gone already?


Thinking, as we are taught to do it, divides us. It divides us 

abstractly into a thousand nations, a thousand religions, a thousand philosophies all engaged in one form of war or another. Wars among named groups are inevitable. As individuals, it divides us from within in wars against ourselves. This is done by observing what is named to be a flaw and then creating an illusion of an ideal human being without that flaw. Then one now creates with thought a method to become that perfect human without the flaw. All the world as we know it now is caught madly in this way of living. Look around. 


There is quite another,  largely ignored, possibility. It is possible to look only at the flaw in ourselves or others without a judgment that it is a flaw or a virtue. Observe the condition as it is without words. Be practical for a change! The result astounds! It works! The flaw is not. It disintegrates. It never was. It was being created by the blind scientist who is ignorant of reality. On the outside the pure observation works the same miracle. We see suddenly the other as another human who actually wants the same thing I do when we observe them with a still mind, anchored in reality, even for a short while. That is all it takes. It happens. There is no going back to resentment and fear and hatred now. And we heal. Healed and made whole by the loving winds of reality. Mediation as practiced by aboriginal peoples all around the Earth for thousands of years taught me this. I trust it without a doubt.


All people, and that means all, want to work together with pride and joy. Excellence comes from one place and one place only…it comes from the soft, yielding hearts of human beings regardless of their present condition. There is a way home. Each one who turns to the heart assumes the attitude of humility heart when trusted brings and will have to produce excellence and excellence alone. Such a train, bound for glory, will inherit the Earth. I did not say accumulate money and property.  I said inherit the Earth. 


Welcome home.

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