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!

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

                          Why Is Humanity So Stupid?


Why is humanity so stupid? Yes. We all know it to be so. We are stupid. And yet, there is afoot some sly trickster who keeps away any real change. I speak of the change on behalf of which Bob Dylan sang so well 60 years ago! Times, the kid sang, are changing. To AA many have come who are desperate for change. Desperate as anyone can be. And many find a way to change. There lives improve. Within a short time they are complaining again about the rotten state of humanity. The trickster has worked on them and so even one who was desperate and changed some behavior is made to overlook the fact and return to his former state as God’s chief critic.  In that way, he does not see the greatness of what has happened in his life and does not feel a passionate need to spread the gospel that all suffering can be ended by anybody alive and in the simple way it came to him. So, he spends the remainder of his time fighting against drink. Amazingly, it escaped his notice that he was given the keys to a Kingdom of Joy. The trickster in him has by a slight of mind prevented the reformed drunkard from being filled with the power in the fact he was separated from drink by this truth- that his problem never was alcohol, but himself! Not about other people, but about himself! He was not taught by anyone else how to stop drinking. He stopped himself! Such power can free a person. But, sadly, not him. Why not him? The trickster.


That is why humanity is so stupid and unable to change. The reformed man becomes active politically, active in some organized religion, strives to cultivate virtue in himself and the people around him and they long for him to take a drink again for he has become a raving idiot. He is still drunk. As the reformed person sees it, the real problem is, once again, the unacceptable sins of others. No real change ever happens among that bunch. Trickster wins. Its concepts remain in the driver’s seat of the living creature. 


A human is conceived. The human conceives an idea. The idea conceives another idea. The idea supplants the man. What a trickster!


All swans weep

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