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, July 8, 2022

 ON SUSTAINING A WAY OF LIFE


You might ask, “Why am I not able to sustain my commitment to self fulfillment from within me like an artesian well of energy leading ever onward to a deeper and more adventurous experience of life as magical existence?” 


Why do you want that sustaining? Let us consider what is an ordinary life?  Is there such a thing? Have you considered it? Could it be that your wish to sustain some thing you like is your real problem? Can anything that is real be “sustained”…need it be…ever? Is that not hogwash?


Is it not so that sustaining anything is mere “thought” and one more attempt to control according to your self interest what is uncontrollable ? Why have we divided life into “ordinary” and “magical”? By thought? Again, what is an ordinary life as opposed to a “magical” life? Is a “magical” life to you a thing you want to sustain because somebody told you that you can have that?  Or, is it because you have discovered for yourself the true nature of life is “magical”? Which? If the latter, of what possible use can be an effort to sustain? It is real! We humans have merely concocted a “magical” life and then have challenged ourselves to have it. Most religions teach you can only have that in an after life. But if you discover life itself to be “magical” you need not await an afterlife to have it. That is what this has been all about. Life. Here. Now. 


Anyone who is postponing the full attention to life as it is now in reliance upon an afterlife can be said to be busy dying, don’t you see? Anyone considering through thought an “ordinary” life is thinking about life. Is “life” a thing that is acquired through practice? Or some psychological exercise? Or, is there “life” and "life" only?






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