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!

Thursday, August 25, 2022

 It Happens This Way


I tell you it happened to you this way.  It happened this way to me. 


I was born. New. Empty of all thought.  As a new-born, life observed the things around the body gathering sense data, storing it in the brain as memories with no limited language involved as every animal does. Sometime in the first year words began to be spoken from memory of sounds spoken to the baby by older humans. Through repetition a language made by humans was learned. Everybody was doing it.


At a critical moment the idea was introduced that later would be called “time”. I was taught to think in terms of time. I got it that there were present people of different ages…and that I was going to “grow up” in time. I was asked in many ways “what do you want to be when you are older”? The effect of this verbal dance was that I built in my brain through memory a fiction that there is a separate “somebody” inside the body who has a “future” and a scheme began to teach “me”  how to make plans for that fictional character I learned to call “I”  and “me” and “myself”. Others called me by a “name”. “Johnny” was assigned to the “somebody” I was supposed to be. 


The important thing is that nobody pointed out that by mastering the game outlined above was I actually going to limit that baby who took the first breath to a life as a stupid, angry puppet manufactured by human beings out of what was originally a quite amazing living creation of an unknown beginning. The human teachers who molded “Johnny” did not point this out because  they had been limited in the same stupid way themselves as robots managed as  pieces of property belonging to a bunch of organized nut cases. It all boils down to the fact that “we” who call ourselves “humans” have made a world that is terrible…horrible… and “we” are all to blame. The inmates are in charge! Anything we do without first making a complete change in ourselves is doomed to make things worse and worse. That is the fix we are in. Do not agree or disagree with this. Find out!


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