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, November 8, 2021

 Who Is A Pilgrim?


One can go on a pilgrimage of some sort, maybe a hike into the wilderness. Go it alone. The point is to find clarity concerning what or who I am. One has come to a conclusion that all this time I have been following rather foolishly a trail loaded with conflict and danger and loss as one who is ignorant of himself, hoping to achieve something I am really unclear about altogether.  But, can I, individually, not as a member of a political movement, not as a  member of some specialization as part of a defined career set achieved through thought as a student in school with diplomas or some other certification process-or by apprenticeship from another person who has been taught a specialization before me- all of which I now see to be bogus- go forward as only naked, unborn me. Up to now I have justified what I am doing by arguing I am responsible now for others-my wife or husband, my children, my fellows on the same trip. Suddenly, I am confronted with a light of truth that I have been actually acting very irresponsibly toward them all and even myself.


 A famous poet once said it so much better when he sang “whoever is not busy being born is busy dying”. One can arrive at a point where such poetry can touch one deeply as “true about me. Maybe nobody else sees it, but I do”. This is when the idea of pilgrimage nags and needles. Go. But go knowing the pilgrimage is within you and not a geographic journey at all. Travel light. That means cease instantly any anticipation of what the journey is for or what you are wanting to accomplish. Kill any of that the moment it pops up. All of it is the beginning of specialization which is the disease that has brought you to the pilgrimage in the first place and will certainly lead you back to the grind…busy dying. One hears or one does not.  He who is not a pilgrim is busy dying. 


A suggestion to one and all: any human being has here and now the capacity to be a total outsider to all signs and symbols of organization and yet function at an extraordinary level among the throng. And this startling fact can only be found out by a pilgrim.




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