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, May 20, 2021

 Memoirs of a True Slave, 2021 USA



What’s wrong with me?

Why do I continue to fall short of my own ideals…are they not really mine?


Why do I do things I do not believe to be right and fail to perform things as I feel I should?

Why am I a good father sometimes and yet other times down-right refuse to fulfill my obligations to my own children?


Why can’t I lose weight and keep it off?


Am I some type of slave?  If so, who is my master? 


Religious folks tell I am a sinner by nature and it was a Supreme Being (God) made me to be so and it is not my place to question the Plan. I always wanted to puke when I heard that but I could not find the thought to speak which might set me free from such awful tyranny. They seemed to have a lot of power and I seemed to have little or none. In Christianity, I was taught God made me weak and sinful by nature, and that being so, would judge me as bad and send me to Hell forever. And I was supposed to rejoice that God sent a Son who’s perfect (not like me) to Earth to be crucified in my place and if I chose to believe that I would obtain a free pass to Heaven while those who did not believe a God would do that must go on to Hell same as before the alteration to the Plan. As I write this I am beginning to find the answer to my own original questions set out above. Being taught as a child those ideas by Christian leaders how else was I to respond but as a royal and confused fuckup? And who is my slave master? None other than my own mind filled with the confused thoughts of the civilization in which I exist. Many of these thoughts are old, dead already. Others are so rigid and inflexible they bind as surely as whips and chains. All are based from past behaviors that have failed us miserably and must be expected to continue to do so. The use of violence to bring about peace is one classic example. Rather than abandon it, though, our leaders always threaten to be more violent than the time before. This sort of reminds me of parental methods of making good children through beatings. And of an education system that expects to make a society of most excellent adults by a system of grading all the children and labeling losers. I wonder if I can kill these old ideas of mine in place of striking out at people? Is it possible to clear a mind so terribly wounded as my own? If so, I see it as a wonderful work of a Divine Creator. Can it be so simple that all that is required of me is the willingness to look directly and thoroughly into the face of my very own thoughts as a construct of me made by me and for me and by doing so find me underneath all the falsehood? Find who I am and what I am here to do? If so, I see that as truly a Super Power and a wonder work of a Divine Creator in which I participate actively and voluntarily. Wow! I’m all in!