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, January 3, 2022

 GREAT NOTHINGNESS  


Seek Great Nothingness with all your might for it is the home of love, peace  and compassion. We are creatures absolutely inseparable from Great Nothingness and yet to seek that, which is totally alien in our lives, is quite extraordinary in the world as we know it. Thought separates everything and demands concentration. So it is at odds with anything outside the limited area to be concentrated upon. Teacher does not want the students to look out the window when teacher is lecturing. That is supposed to make the students smarter. Does it? Or, might it actually make them accept and admire dumbness? Find out. The King does not want any of his subjects to object to a war he is waging which is always said by the King to be a war to bring about peace. That is an example of dumbness brought about by concentrating on but a fragment of reality. Can you see?


Through paying full attention to nature, what everything else living participates in, one can happen upon something extraordinary. Call it what you will. It is called here Great Nothingness. Such a non-thing cannot be organized and taught in schools by a method of concentration and memorization. One has got to look out the window. Nature is in perfect order by the fact it is nature. It belongs to everybody equally. Excludes nobody. Rather than separate it unites. I am reminded how music united rednecks and hippies in the seventies. Extraordinary happenings like that are worthy of all of every child’s attention. Organized religions separate people by arguing over God. That is another example of dumbness. It is possible to find that which unites all people as one by simply joining without reservation the world to  which we obviously belong. Truly, it is impossible in this way to fail to find it.  Science is indeed unscientific in failing miserably in this regard. I know a math genius who cannot ask a woman to go for a walk.


To close, I am reminded of a great saying attributed to Plato and to later mortals. The saying is: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. Everything I read on the internet about the saying totally misses the point. So, it is no wonder the identity of its author is unclear. Nobody seems to grasp that the battle everyone fights all the time is within the fighter, not a struggle against any outside circumstances. Really listen to Bob Dylan’s music. 


Once that is clear one sees immediately the cause of all other conflicts. The war within us is the cause. Why do we continue to wage wars of all kinds against one another…why did Cain kill Abel? Only when the cause of conflict is seen, really seen as fact, will anyone cease conflict with everybody and be kind. Until that happens the slogan is just a slogan reminding one that we ought to be good, not bad. And like all slogans committed to memory and repeated, ad infinitum, it will have no real effect. But, anyone can be kind to a stranger for real at any time without joining a peaceful movement or asking anyone’s permission and regardless of what all others do by seeing the cause of all conflict as the battle inside me. Looking within, into the battle there, conflict ends for that one individual. Great Nothing cheerfully accepts the blame. 





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