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!

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

 THE HUMAN WAY


Humans remain very busy expressing through our art human feelings that cannot be expressed in the words of our spoken and written languages which are at best contrived because they are a set of definitions by which the meaning of each word is made from other words which are defined in the same way. People watched dogs chase their own tails and picked it up as a human practice. Later some wise guy viewing all this mess said, “This world has gone to the dogs”. In common usage words made like that are forced to change meaning to serve someone’s idea of the need for a new word and they simply steal one. To make matters worse people study these words and make use of them to invent systems within the already confused system to imagine new fields of operation for themselves and others in order to specialize in another screwed up area of endeavor. Corporations and nations and their secret activities are examples we are familiar with. Science is another. Religion, practiced as a thing separate from nature, is another. There are too many more to count and the number of them increases constantly. 


Go back now to the first line of the preceding paragraph and consider the truth that all those longings we have continued for thousands and thousands of years to address through art are necessary only because we have been living contrary to how we long to live. Up to now we have been worshipping, literally, the way described in that paragraph. It is time to cease that way. Upon bringing it to a close we will be absolutely clear in our minds what to do next and forever thereafter. Expression then will be of a completely new nature. Our art will arise out of our nature finally instead of from the pain of betrayal. 


Along comes a human who says there is a way to live in peace and harmony with it all. It is human nature to do so.  At first it may sound impossible yet it is not. In fact, it is a sure bet. It is the only sure bet, too. It can be summed up by saying it is simply the only way it can be done. This way, everyone can awaken each morning in the finest of moods and live the day fully so that at its closing each will declare it was another perfect day for me. 


To any who hesitate to take the way let it be retold it is simply the way.



LOVE is like a faucet

It turns off and on

Sometimes you think it’s there but it’s turned off and gone…Billie Holiday


Art Blakey (Jazz Messengers) said, “Jazz washes away the dirt of everyday life.” I got news. There need be no dirt to wash away if I live the way Jazz is played from my heart and soul. Doing my “thing”. We have available to us a mind so much faster and error free than the one we think with out of ignorance. It arises from a place of actual wholeness.


Love is a word for a felt experience inside a living human being when all problems are absent. The words “play” and “work” are strange. Play requires a whole lot more work than work and “work” is pretending I like what I am doing so as to gain some wished for reward. One “at play” is so totally absorbed by it that “pretense” has no space, no  meaning. Cannot arise. 


Finally I would point out that we have been shown throughout history, over and over and over, that when a people are deprived of participation to a certain point those ones turn out to be the luckiest of all just because they have no choice but to turn to an unknown source or die. They are folks who have to choose between picking up a machine gun or a guitar. They discover jazz in some form. The rest ask themselves “why do those losers seem to be having a much better time than are we, the righteous and chosen?” It’s attractive. Love, I mean. I love you.

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