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!

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

 NAKED 



As a child I was taken to Sunday school to learn about Jesus. His Daddy is God. Well, I was struck completely by surprise when we read the story of Daniel and the lion’s den. Daniel was in trouble with the King where he was and was arrested and sentenced to be thrown into a den of starving lions to be eaten alive. It scared me to imagine that! Of course, I wondered could that happen to me? In the story, though, Daniel and the lions got along fine. The lions did not even try to eat him. I was relieved but had to wonder how that could happen for Daniel. The story said that Daniel was a person who arose every morning and went into a closet and spent an hour with God. And, in the evening he did that again everyday of his life and that was why God’s creatures treated Daniel so kindly. I wanted that! All the adults I knew seemed just as amazed by the story, did not doubt it, they said, but none of them offered any advice as to how someone like me could spend an hour alone with God in a closet. My parents never tried to my knowledge. I was left to wonder how adults who go to church could read that story and do nothing to acquire the knowledge of how Daniel done it. It was as if they all decided it was not worth it to try. Not worth it? That’s beyond crazy!


Everybody I met since is scared to die and yet does nothing to follow Daniel’s way. Many years later, when I was an adult of 40, I met a man who told me he had been shown how to be with God and that he believed if a man or woman would go into a quiet space for an hour in the morning and again in the evening he would know God. But he confided in me, “Still, I will not do it!" That was real important to me because it made me realize I was just like that man. I had believed since childhood the story of Daniel’s escape from  hungry lions by meditation and had done nothing myself to find out what it means to meditate and and how it is done. What does the name “God” mean? Who is it? Actually.


Today, I can tell that for me “God” is the truth of who we are as naked beings. By naked is meant someone free of all concepts. Such a one has a free brain that is completely active and aware of all there is. Rattlesnakes and lions are of no concern to that one.


There are billions who practice some “method” to meet with God and  find it so shallow they soon get bored with it and stop the practice. They are unwilling to spend up to two hours a day with a result so petty that it leaves them feeling like they just cannot measure up to a saint so they choose to “believe” some saint. It is quicker. Leaves more time for shopping. 


If you are like that, as I was, then I want to suggest to you that you already know that nobody rightly named ”God” would make puppets who need to find some human authority to teach them a method which the human tells them will put them in touch with “God”. That game is patently absurd.  Simply turn to knowledge you were born with that “God” is the name of a state in which one is free of all human concepts standing naked before it all. Birth, in another word. Check in. Check in twice a day. Swans be here all day long. By writing this post, I recall as a four year old being alone in a field near my home talking with something unseen but very real to me I knew back then to be naked me. I was telling what I was finding on my visit here living with big people. So, closer than the veins in my neck is that which is forever young and I love my time with that!

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