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!

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

 FOOTBALL FUN


Let’s see. I love football as a child and want to play it all the time. It is important to be clear that this is a team sport. All parts of the team are equally important to its perfect performance. The object of the game is that he who has possession of the ball will not be knocked off his feet and be down as defined as a knee touching the ground while carrying the ball across the opposing team’s goal line. Am I right? 


If so, as a coach I want to tell the boys who are to play for me that there is a way to play the game perfectly well by absolutely not thinking or reasoning about the process, only playing with full attention. Thinking, using time and memory when it is of no assistance, only slows it down and that results in bad decisions. 


This way of play is likened to a river constantly flowing not by cause and effect or any such thought produced system being involved but a river flowing by its own logic in its on DNA. Each player is to be totally unconcerned with explanations. This requires tremendous awareness, intelligence, energy and courage. These are so appealing to humans. People want to be in contact with them as much as possible. Observing them in others is very pleasant for fans. But it is so important to have my own emersion in them. Such is known as fulfillment. The experience described is felt as an effortless flow. One can continue to play until he passes out.


Can life be this?


* When a player is asked to explain any part of a game he will reply that it is a game to be played as team. Either we do or we do not. There is however an ingredient that is invisible that must be present that only players know. It is sacred.

Thursday, November 24, 2022

 A thing of greatest importance has been discovered that will speed the transformation of humans from the overwhelming weight of our mental chains. Only you can free you, so, pay careful attention.


It is up to each human to see clearly that (s)he is driven by words. A word, defined by other words, mere illusions all, never can be the thing described. To continue under the spell of having given such enormous power to words to the end of your days means a totally futile existence unworthy of a flea. Try for once that action that thought never touched and you won’t be goin’ in circles of confusion no mo’ living as the word ghost who claims to think for you with an unnatural language compiled by all the other word ghosts who have never been there. Oooohhhh.


Seeing this, the whole mind will cease completely its addiction to words as it opens wide to the whole picture it belongs within with a great deal of astounding new intelligence and a release of terrific energy from the falsely arrogant need to philosophize, argue, explain, judge, criticize, persuade and draw conclusions from dead language and a true human acts from a dimension beyond time and thought with a purity of action based in compassion for all, compassion and that’s all. Service to the words good and evil banished shows things too long dreamed impossible. Then you’ll see compassion’s clue. E-v-i-l is l-i-v-e spelled backward.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

 Simple Direction 


The one you and I think to be independent from thought and is doing our thinking ( as the person who thinks) needs to be abandoned in favor of the one we are really who is completely independent of thought like nature is (which is obviously something not put together by thought) and is in fact an indivisible part of all nature. Then and only then it all works to perfection. You see, the thinker we think we are is an imposter, who is, like any gremlin when improperly followed, a being out to darken our world in confusion, fear, ambition, jealousy, greed, lust, and competition all in order to keep its image at the center of our being. Thought is disguising itself as who we are in reality and needs only to be put in its proper place as a servant. Shame on thought!


All you love when you love them know in certainty, in a feeling “I am an indivisible part of nature, the whole of life, therefore, I AM!” There is a legend about The Flying Dutchman cursed to ride the seas on a ghost ship until he finds someone to love him enough to die for him. The story is about you. The ghost ship legend goes back to ancient Egypt. We sail that ghost ship as nations of the world we have put together by thought.


When you as thinker meets You As You Are you will have found one who loves you as you are who will die for you. Those who remain as the thinker, as you were before, will never find love. Now you will find only love. All thinkers who are fortunate enough to meet you as you are will love you enough to die for you.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

 ONCE A KID


Once there was a child who did not want to go to school. “I want to stay home today” he told his parents day after day and  an argument followed. 


The child, being so young, had no vocabulary yet to answer the question his parents asked “What’s wrong with you!” He might have told them: 


 “The school is narrowing my view of life day after day and I am inadequate to defend what I am from their line of reasoning which I find utterly alien to me. They let me know they have plans for me and I am so determined I should follow my own plan all the days of life. I pray to find someone who understands my great anxiety.”  


The child’s body is older now but his heart remains forever young and still beats out the same message and he has found a way today to express his life long pain in his own words. It is the lament of every kid ever born on Earth. It is all inclusive and springs from no goal or motive….encourage me and let me be. Encourage me and I will show you things you only once dreamed of.



For Charly

Sunday, November 20, 2022

 Some things are more important than others. One important thing is this- 


Whenever you speak to a tree and say something like, “hello, I am So-and-So and who are you?” the tree utters nothing as a response to your question. Have you noticed that? You told the tree your name and the tree ignored you. You may say then “I am a person” and ask “Who are you?” Still there is no response from the tree. You probably do not notice these things, do you? And yet the truth is these are among the very most important things that I mentioned earlier. I tell you this to inform you that you are ignorant of the important things and you are an absolute slave to things that matter not at all. The writer is trying to assist you to find out why it is you have so many troubles in life as you know it. What is written here is given you to show you that you need to make a profound change and make it soon.


You are some being that is filled with explanations all of which are so very limited and are therefore untrue. They are then trivial and yet to you they really matter most of all…they are how you think. You are what you think you are, see? You are your consciousness. That is another way to put it. And if you were really familiar with what that is filled with you would surely be frightened to death.


Have you ever looked at a tree, for example, with no words concerning a tree on your mind between you and that tree, I mean? Until you do you will not see the awesome beauty of a tree. That also goes for your children and wife or husband and everything else. That consciousness we mentioned acts like a veil preventing clear observation. Absent clarity your brain is handicapped. Your best thinking is not available to you. You will constantly be making poor conclusions and acting in a corrupt manner. Herein lies your life as you know it. All your messes are of your own doing. You are totally responsible and act completely irresponsibly. See your dilemma? 


When you leave this page will you ask someone, “How can I become more responsible in my life?” Will you agree with what you have read and make it a point to improve yourself? Improve your world? That is your consciousness speaking. Remember what that is? This has been your response always up to now every time you hear a  lecture or sermon or read a book that moves you to change. You live by words! You must find the courage to stop it! A wise man told that his secret is “I do  not mind what happens”. That means, of course, he does not throw a cloud of words at facts and stir up uncertainty and fear. All links are in operation for the wise ones.


I met a young woman once who was on her way to pick up a diploma from a major University after maintaining a 4-point average for all four years of study. She had made only A’s. As we talked she listed a number of conflicts in her thinking and told me she had many worries about her future and felt inadequate for a good life. I suggested to her that she go over to a bench in front of tree nearby us and sit quietly for awhile to allow the tree an opportunity to tell her something important and report back to me what the tree said. She left me and I departed for home and wondered if she would actually try the experiment. Next day she and I arrived at the same place again and she was so delighted to see me. She was anxious to tell what the tree told her. The tree, she said, was silent at first and then told her “Stop taking yourself so seriously”. Later, she told me, “I have learned from you more in a short while than I learned in four years at that University”. What I had done was to spend a brief time looking at her with no veil of words between us to prevent my seeing her as she is and she took that experience to the tree I pointed out. 


There happen to be more links in your brain than there are atoms in the Universe. And you use so little of it for anything important in most cases. You tell your name and how it is you make money for yourself. All of it amounts to the same profession…prostitution. A prostitute is anyone who does for money what they would not do if the money were not offered. So, whores assemble often to talk about stupid shit and tell jokes while Rome burns.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Human Authority 


As a human being I wonder why it is that I am told there is a loving Higher Power that made the Universe and all that is in it who loves me as Its child and I need to believe that in order to find Paradise or a State of Enlightenment which I do not have but will have after I die and yet all the while I notice that the people who so believe have been living here for thousands and thousands of years and still they hate each other and compete for trophies of all kinds and kill each other and  live in families embroiled in constant conflict with each other inside their very homes. And whenever I question the story of a loving All-Powerful Authority who chose not to make me something fully capable of living in harmony with all Its Universe I am given nothing but “well, that’s just the way it is and we are to accept that without questions.” They say I must surrender my will to what an authority who is also human will tell me he knows that I must do to find how to be saved from myself or something like that which makes no sense to me simply because that means Higher Power not human prefers some people over the rest and that is not anywhere near to being love in the book of my heart.


As I struggled through life in a cock-eyed world in the state I have described I became more and more discontent doing what I did not want to do and failing to do what I wanted and so weary of being thataway. Those who I mentioned who are believers kept on quoting from books and saying that if I would only join them I could have my brain straightened out so as to think as they do and still I saw how they treated everybody and refused, in my own way, to join. Once I found what booze does to me I got drunk as often as I could afford to let myself get away with it and that got to be greater each year until  

I found myself in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. 


There the group of former drunks welcomed me and said they had a program that would relieve me of my addiction to alcohol. Rather quickly I came to want what some of these people seemed to have I call peace of mind. By then I was desperate enough to try the program. I joined. 


Having been told I needed a sponsor to assist me with the “program”,  while attending the meetings I began to look for someone among the group who struck me as being my “leader”. And a truly unexpected happening intervened for which I am forever grateful.


A man came to a meeting where I was in attendance and spoke up early introducing himself as a traveler or pilgrim looking for a new home and telling the group that Austin, where we were, was on his list of places he should go. The man added that he was quite sick with a high fever and could not explain why he was in attendance at the meeting and not in his bed treating his illness but continued for about a half hour speaking about his recovery from a helpless, dark state in alcoholism. Said he had been sober for years.


As I listened to the pilgrim I became more and more drawn to his story and was sorry when he ceased his talk. I wanted more. However when the meeting concluded that day I did what I was accustomed to do and that was to beat a quick path to my car and speed away before anyone could corner me and talk to me for that would bring into my brain the suggested need for a sponsor if I were to have success in my effort to recover from my own helpless state. 


When I arrived at my car to flee what did I see but that pilgrim leaning himself against the driver’s door blocking my entry? We two introduced ourselves and I began to share all I had experienced since my first AA meeting. I kept repeating “I need to find a sponsor”. After listening to me for sometime the pilgrim spoke softly this way to me: 


“Look, I am not going to tell you that you need a sponsor nor am I going to tell you not to get one. That is up to you entirely. But, I am going to suggest that before you ask someone else to be your sponsor in following the program of recovery outlined in the book follow these people around and watch carefully to learn all you can about how they actually live outside of the meetings for who you ask to be your teacher about the art of living could cost you your life some day.”


Completely relieved from the urgency to have a sponsor or “authority figure” in life brought me peace. I can even say it was a clear answer to my life long struggle with the concocted belief that “God” would make a world where people were not absolutely responsible for their lives and made me glad I  had not not abandoned my own very vital concern while up against all the pressure to cave in to one of the organized religions and I knew for the first time clearly that religion for real should never be organized. AA is just that- unorganized. So, I took my own journey to recovery questioning every belief in my path as I go. That means becoming fully responsible for a spark of life in all its many aspects. What more can be said? Words, as servants, can serve life well but as a master they are the worst.


I have not had a drink in thirty years and more important by far I have had a life of unparalleled beauty for which my gratitude is too great for any words. For me, each day of life is brand new meant to be lived with all my attention for what it happens to bring as the present in the precious knowledge that the future and the past are contained therein. That alone assures my future if I have one. Once a human knows who (s)he is truly (and who (s)he is not) it is clear what death is and that it is nothing to fear. It is only the illusion of a separate self taught me by the world of conflict,  separation, and violence who has fear of dying for it will certainly not go to Heaven or anywhere else it does not belong. What a silly idea!  A self-absorbed being without existence at all who is bound to be disruptive in Heaven? Ridiculous! . And it’s a good thing for Heaven. That goofball has no anchor so is filled with fear and has to be concerned first with itself. And deep down it knows that death is the end of it for certain. 


Selfishness and self-centeredness, that is the root of man’s troubles. One need not grieve the passing of such as that. The truth is that we are all of us the consciousness of one great humanity, indivisible,  which its Source can love and welcome home. It amounts to life acknowledging and embracing itself and happens daily.


The most important thing is yet to come though. Each of us is our own guru, our own authority when it comes to living. Life is within us. The writer does not want your agreement, does not seek it and even discourages it. Do not believe me. If anything moves you here or ever you must move on your own journey within to discover the truth of your situation and become clear about the actual trouble so it vanishes from the mind. Humans are equipped to do that. A human is not equipped to behave as an authority over any other. You can find out clearly why that is from courage that resides inside you. Now is the time for you to expand exponentially in love’s way. 

Monday, November 14, 2022

 YOU ARE YOUR OWN GURU


You can observe you have a conditioned mind that is always chattering. The false guru outside says you must make your mind become quiet in order to enjoy peace. That is just not possible. The observer is the observed. Who is to do it? The mind that thinks and chatters? The chattering mind is clever. 


The mind that chatters will play along by even assuming a correct posture so as to recite mantras or concentrate on a pretty object that is peaceful or your breathing or pray if you wish for boons all of it to give you a brief break from its chaotic behavior but soon after it will return and as strong as ever. This is the clever mind’s way to keep an eye on you and continue to control you. The guru will make a lot of money. It will amount to a self-mesmerizing folly.


The true message is that you must find a silence within that is not the absence of sound and a stillness there that is not the absence of motion. Such a place is unknown to the thinking mind. When it is found you will discover you have entered a gap in the traffic jam of your brain where you may have peace under every condition and then the mind in awe itself will settle down by itself. In a moment there will have been asked: who is meditating? And the answer will totally throw the would-be meditator out the window. And the answer to the question “How can I keep this?” that follows will be “It is entirely up to you.”



You will find when freed from all the effort required by one bottled up in the traffic of a misused brain you have available an enormous surplus of energy now and a much deeper intelligence is present. In gladness all will have been well worth the mercifully small effort required. And the effort to do this will have been a joy.

Sunday, November 13, 2022

 


As I See It



I really don’t know whether anybody will get a thing out of whatever I have to say, but that being said, I’ll go on and try. It’s like this I write is off the main grid or something. It is not mere verbal sentences.


Everybody has got to be careful when they listen to anybody. Because the words that come will not be said by anything that is real.They will be said, instead, by an image the guy speaking them has invented to live in a cock-eyed world. 


Time and the thoughts that belong to it were introduced in human existence when people first decided it would be better to be different than we are. Language enabled the attempt to make up a method to try that out. That requires time. It is a mechanical process. Inwardly, there is no time. See the impossible contradiction? It has made an awful mess but people are too far gone now to even begin to see we are doing it. 


I mean to say that we are actually on many different paths each of which was originated to improve humans. Time is necessary to carry on. Now many ways are being invented to get us back to where we started. None of them work. Using a method based on time and thought to get back to the place we started from only takes us farther away. This is so because an image that began using time and words as a basis of living is being relied upon to free us from all images while only images are in need of freedom. Those Images are the mess. For any human to be free the images and all their museums must go. Images created the concept of death as the opposite of life and fear it.


Look at how strongly we are wedded to a story form. It must have a beginning, middle, and end. There is no story unless it ends and unless we know it will end we cry “Foul!” And yet life is a constant motion. Everybody has got to be careful when they listen to anybody. Taking great care is all we can do. At some point by simply taking great care the truth within us will act to restore itself. Enjoy the beauty! It is here now.

Friday, November 11, 2022

 


 

A Life Based Entirely On The Future Is 

Misery for All


Maybe you and I wish to understand what has happened to us already and why it has happened before we launch yet another program to bring a future we desire to ourselves and our friends and relations? I am speaking about the way families live and have lived here on this planet for untold thousands of years. I am speaking not of one nation but of all humanity. Humans are suffering now as you read this all over the world. We are all in the same boat.


What causes this? Desire? I want something I do not have or I want to keep something I think I must have and may lose? Why think that way at all? 


A good friend once said to me seated together in a relaxed feeling of well-being at a delightful party, “I want both”. She meant that she wanted inwardly to be a contented, free person who enjoys good, healthy relationships with other contented people who love one another and she wanted to be very rich outwardly. Since that night we have seen very little of each other and my friend has accumulated great wealth which includes a larger and larger house and a swimming pool and numerous vehicles and servants and so on and on. She has also become an active member of an organized religion and has taken the matter so far she is one of its official decorated leaders who conducts rituals and voices its doctrines. Has my friend created a Utopia? I can say with confidence “No” for it is impossible to create a Utopia based upon a desire for some outcome in the future and that has been demonstrated over and over in all parts of the earth by all societies put together by humans since the beginning of time. All nations that have come about have tried it and all are trying it today and nothing about us has changed. And this even includes every attempt by only two people to live together in peace in what is practiced universally as a marriage.


All humans today must look once and for all and see clearly what we speak of when we speak of the future. The answer is simple and anyone can see it but only if one is able to stop denying the fact. The fact is the future does not exist, never has existed, and never will exist inwardly where we all experience our lives. By relying on it for our happiness psychologically we are fools for to choose not to open our presents today which exists as a fact in favor of what is mere abstract thought is to assure that one will never be happy inwardly today. What fools! Today is perpetual. Tomorrow is never.  Happiness for a human has been forsaken to ashes. If a forest of trees were to be able to live thinking of ways to become something other than what it is there would remain not a tree. Few will disagree with the saying “we have lost our humanity”.


One should recognize that all who live to become something else tomorrow or next year are driven to compete against others by selfish thoughts which build into greed and violence and hatred and all manner of suffering. Each bunch seeks to better itself at the expense of some other group. Conflict, not peace abides. It is a fact.


To top it off, one says we must fight this next war. It will end all wars. After all the deaths and suffering we will be happy. So, we kill each other. There is a celebration only of the cessation of the horror and madness and suffering the war has caused then we prepare for the next war. This brand of insanity is spread through and perceived in every sector of every society. It must end if we are to be true humans.


Immigrants have always thought when we go to another country we will find plenty and live well. This cannot be. The same people with the same policy of giving up today for tomorrow cannot help but to recreate another miserable, unlivable society in place after place. All societies are headed in the same direction using up their water supply, using up the air clean enough to breathe, using up their food supply creating more disease.


The obvious way to a happy future is to live fully as human beings today. The first step is to be clear what a human being is actually then live committed to that fact each moment. Watch like a hawk for the appearance of the slightest suggestion to return to base the practice of living on some future goal. Remain thereby true disciples! That and only that is real human discipline.


Nobody wanted a light bulb!  Far more fulfilling is it for a human to sit ‘neath the glow of the Moon and the twinkling of stars holding the hand of another real human than to plan a trip up there. In truth, the Moon may come to you if you really love Her. And , if so, the trip could be both effortless and beyond time and distance once you know yourself.


I know a fella who when he first saw Orion in the night sky was struck by a feeling of pure love beyond any he had known before and although many years have passed the feeling remains as great every time he looks on the constellation. No time. No distance. Love omnipresent. At heart, so is the human being.