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, July 12, 2022

 What is meditation? Really? Full attention. Full attention is always present. There is no method for finding reality. Methods, in fact lead one away from what is there. Methods are aligned with becoming what you are not. 

Full attention, like a lamp,  exposes the truth that there is no self at the center. Full attention exposes the love which is always there like the scent inside a flower. The concept of a self at the center has displaced love. Whatever forces one to embrace full attention is mighty. A thunderstorm. A snake. A thrill. A death. A death



can reveal “I have been living without loving that person who has gone away”. This has been known to happen when the deceased was a perfect stranger, especially when the deceased was a poor, lonely, forgotten bum. Something there is about a perfect stranger sheds light upon another stranger closer than the veins in one’s neck. 

Full attention is enlightened being. Love, which has always been, seems to burst forth for such people. It is everywhere. All there is is love! A monk hiding away in the desert avoiding people never finds this. What this is is the silence inside noise. Not the silence found in the absence of noise. This life we have is all so perfectly natural.

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