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, August 19, 2021

 WHEN WILL IT END?


I want to share a simple story. It is an early story from the Bible concerning one young man killing his brother.  In the story, Cain and Able, the two brothers, are the offspring of the first man and woman on Earth, Adam and Eve. And Cain murdered Able.That is a big problem. In the first family it is told one of the sons kills the other. Terrible start. Omen for the future. We cannot forget what happened. What will happen next? 


What, may we ask, was going on? We may presume the two were close. That they observed each other through early childhood into manhood.They communicated. They were thinking. Observing, communicating, thinking: those three. We all can relate to that much because we are still doing them all the time. They shape our lives and our lives are not getting better. We have many such problems and they multiply.


I have a sister. We grew up very close in a small family of four. Our ages are just two years apart. Yet, many times did I hear my sister tell of a past event we both experienced and was shocked that she remembered it the way she did which was vastly different from my memory of the same event. And she told me a similar thing about my memories. So, even close relatives living together will have entirely different banks of memory stored in the brains. So it probably was for Cain and Able. Consider with me that our future, as we think about it, is shaped by projecting our memories of a past, limited as those memories are. So, we think backward and forward. Our computers can do it now. Humans are taught that the ability to think is going to save them. From what? Thinking and all the problems it causes is all. Notice it is the thinking that teaches us it is our most important ally. Is life but a joke?


Let us take a careful look at what was going on with Cain and Able that might have practical application for us today. Imagine some talk between the two. When they separate they each think about what the other has revealed by sounds and drawings and body language and gestures. They make judgments based on such. As do we today. They watch each other often. Notice similarities and differences. Make more judgments by thinking and form opinions about each other. In this manner did one brother reach the conclusion the other brother must be killed and he was the man to do it. 


Now is it time to notice the weight Cain placed upon his ability to think in order to follow through with his plan. It was so heavy in his brain that thinking was in fact who Cain was and to Cain his image of him put together  by thought  was Able. Simply put, Cain’s thinking killed the image he held in his brain through thinking of Able. Nothing has changed since the beginning. We still live the same way. We  make images, hate images, and kill them. We are taught in the schools of greatest influence all over the Earth that that is all we can do and we have to live with that and make up theories about an after life where we will be different to help us endure such a horrible world. Meanwhile, we go on improving weapons designed for the sole purpose of killing people and there is a huge, huge market for them, increasing.


It has been suggested ever since the time of the story of Cain and Able that there is another way to live…here…now. Up to now, it is largely ignored. People agree or disagree with it but go on killing and preparing to kill. Is it really easier than changing? 


Is thinking the best and only way to utilize the brain? Maybe thinking, being so undeniably limited, is only useful for tasks like matching socks or tying a tie properly, or remembering where the bathroom is. Perhaps the very worst way to use thinking is thinking about ourselves and others since we know how big the cosmos is and how limited is thinking. Could that be the actual problem? Should we and can we free our brains of problems to solve them. I mean absolutely end them. Yes. It has been done. Die to the memories of the past totally and enter the dimension called now and with a free, still brain see the whole picture at once. That is done by courageously deciding to do it. The courage arises the moment a person sees it must be done. What do you see, Brother? Sister?


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