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, September 20, 2022

 The Mechanical Life


As a younger man I was an addicted fan of football and especially the Dallas Cowboys. A young black player made a profound statement on television that shook my make-believe world to the core. It was on Super Bowl Sunday. The young man was Duane Thomas, who was to carry, metaphorically and literally, the Cowboys to victory that Sunday. The young Mister Thomas was asked prior to the start of the game by a commentator, “How does it feel to be in the biggest game of them all, “The Super Bowl?” The player paused and then replied, “Aren’t they going to play this game again next year?” 


That truth stuck in my brain and has remained all this time as a beacon home. 


I have seen for myself that anything done as a continuity is mechanical and is degenerative of the human body. A rut, it grinds away at the living organism. Going to the office every day for 50 years is so unnatural. Cleaning house in the same pattern and watching the children in a pattern of activities and driving them to their own assigned degenerative continuities is likewise. Playing a game season after season the goal of which is a make-believe championship was seen by a young professional player as a costly hoax if taken seriously. I ask myself, what, in our society, is not the same meat grinder? And is it not so that way of life is accelerating constantly? Look into it! It is sold to us as motivating us to further records and that that is progress. Is it? Really? Or is it a terrible form of meltdown into a dull and controllable hunk of dead or dying meat?


Who will have a better life? A mechanical robot with medals or a free human living in complete attention to the present moment deriving the benefit of all the moment has to offer unconcerned about a future? The answer is very important. Critical. Do not fail to consider this question from the point of view of the actual human being and the other actual humans he or she is related to in life. Ignore, if you are able, the point of view of a fictitious corporate system which organizes people in the fashion of robots. Who were the laborers who actually performed the holocaust?

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