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!

Saturday, January 15, 2022

A STORY


Here is what happened to me. A story. I tell it as it comes to me. I was born. I grew. I attended school. I got married. I got a job. In each of my jobs I learned a bit then wanted to do something else. This continued through about six jobs. In a couple of the jobs I was my own boss. I tired of me as a boss as easily as I tired of the others. I was 39 and very miserable by this time. My wife and I  had divorced after two children were born and the eldest was 5 years old and the youngest still a baby. Living as a divorced man with children and another job I burned the candle at both ends you might say as long as I could until I was really running on fumes, My life seemed to have no direction, like a sailor without a compass lost at sea might feel. I even considered suicide. 


One day I stood by a lake as this question formed inside me “If you are there, please help me.  Send to me a mentor. Somebody who can understand me.” It struck me as odd that I used the term “mentor” for it was alien to me and was a word from my ex-wife’s line of work. But it came to me at that very moment. The feeling was that I could really use a friend who was as crazy as me, or had been, as inept at life as I was. And at that moment I became aware of a man on a bicycle peddling toward me. That man stopped because he and I recognized each other from having attended the same workshops in the past for the purpose of quitting the habit of smoking cigarettes. Both of us had been smoke free for several years. We talked. Actually I am certain I did most of the babbling while my friend, named Buddy, listened. When he had heard enough he invited me to attend a meeting with him. I agreed without any description of the nature of the meeting we were to attend. I did not care so long as Buddy was going I wanted to go. The meeting turned out to be a group of drunks from Alcoholics Anonymous. 


I attended meetings for several months where I was overwhelmed with a large number of friends, mentors, who knew and understood me very well indeed. My time with them led me to investigate another world. The world within me is what I mean. To begin to understand me. I am pursuing that knowledge right up to this moment for very many years.


I want only to tell at this time that I became acquainted with a teacher who agreed to teach me how to meditate. He called what he teaches “The Knowledge of oneself” and said it was different from what most call “meditation”. There were some techniques. We were to pay attention to the fact we happen to be alive through the techniques is all I will say. I found it very difficult to do them for even a half hour. It was a struggle. I felt I was doing something wrong. Or there might be something wrong with me. Then the teacher offered to all his students a second chance to come to a review of the directions he gave and I attended. At this time what I heard him say that alters the whole affair for me was this: “These techniques I suggest are very simple. You were fully capable of doing them when you were an infant. No effort at all is required. If you are experiencing difficulty you are causing it.” From that moment until now I have experienced the meditation with ease and comfort. It began for me a lifelong friendship with something back of life that is immense. The fact of life. There is no effort at all to my spending time that way everyday. That concludes the story. It is just a story. There is no hidden meaning. If the subject interests you check it out for yourself. 


No comments: