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!

Friday, March 18, 2022

 FURTHER COMMENT ON WHICH POWER 


Lust is not passion. They are entirely different. A passionate commitment can come into play in the smallest of matters or the largest. I know a man who agreed to occupy a house at an agreed rental not after having been sold a bill of goods concerning his selfish interest in shelter but by listening to a fellow who owned the house talk about the whole picture of housing for all people on Earth. The tenant joined the dialog eagerly and became passionately committed to the house and the ground upon which it stood as if it were his very own. That man loves his home, the landlord and his family, and his neighbors. And that landlord and that tenant are all the time doing favors for the other out of love. Why cannot all human interactions be of the same nature as that? Nothing is preventing it but fear. And the fear is caused by a separation that is not even there. Rather than more policeman and more defense spending we, all people of Earth, need to put an end to  the nonexistent separation. 


It comes but alone not by agreement, oaths or swearing and handshaking or by protesting. It’s an inside job not a display of false pride meant to bolster a reputation as a caring, righteous  person. Bob Dylan has been criticized from the beginning for not joining protests in the streets which always carry the odor of "look at me be better than the bad guys I am against" which only strengthens  the false ideas of separation and keeps the misery we actually oppose firmly in place. What is being suggested here is that the cause of war is division among humans and it can be ended by ending the cause and will never be ended through what divides. This means we are all responsible for the mess. A living change, not words, that is required.


Consider this everybody! If I see misbehavior in any other it is caused by the system of thoughts in my own conditioned brain and by thoughts and words from my own mouth. Otherwise, I would see only a suffering human, like me, as me, who needs my love. We are in the soup together.


A final note. Instead of telling myself, "I should have..." why not admit, simply, "I could have..."

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