A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 07/17/22

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!

Sunday, July 17, 2022

So, we may find ourselves at a regularly scheduled hourly meditation meeting with others. We have lately become quite a regular attendee at these meetings and become attached to the friends with whom we meditate. Or we pretend to. There is the introduction we all expect and a reading concerning what is meditation. I look about the room. It strikes me how very unlikely it is that any one of us is going to meditate. Our mission is to be rid of the self at the center that causes so much havoc. A terrible war is ongoing inside us and has been for many years. Who among us is really ready to abandon the old friend (enemy) and risk being nothing at all? It has been expressed as wanting to stay where I am for old time’s sake because though it is terrible it is familiar and “my own misery” coupled with a knowing I must leave and take my chances with an unknown place. We all know but seldom admit that we are kidding ourselves. We will stay put with some sense we tried at least to be free. As soon as we leave the meeting hall we will be totally back in the grip of me, myself, and I first!

That feels safer when compared to a trip into the unknown. But, is it unknown really? A part of the game was to plant in my brain a story about a world of individual selves each of whom have a chance to become the royalty of that world by attaching to some imaginary concept greater than the little self. As soon as they persuade me to attach to the concept they have me and in time will steal all I am. Along the way I will be doing things I never dreamed I would do to hurt others and make my climb on the ladder. I have become convinced I have the right to call the shots for others.

The first time I heard “Like A Rolling Stone” sung on the radio by Bob Dylan’s voice I was shocked at first but by the ending was completely lost in the unknown, or what I had previously thought to be unknown to me, and encouraged by the singer to find out for myself what life really can be. It was another 20 years until I took the chance. The singer to me was suggesting I dig into “nothing” and discover “nothing to lose” and to know a place where “I got no secrets to conceal” which place, on that day I first listened to Dylan was known to me. So briefly familiar was it I could taste its presence on my tongue. I may have seemed to put it aside and go on with my way of life as it was before hearing that song but deep inside I felt it there every time I looked thereafter. Finally I dived off the board whole-heartedly.

It became “Wow!” I came into the world without secrets, with nothing that was my own, a complete unknown and was talked into giving that up for an illusion everybody around me was cultivating, became lost in the illusion, only to find out those people who led me there were always going to take from me everything they could steal and leave me when they used me up. I had to dive off that board. There was no choice about it. It was clear. The unknown is the known! Self as separate from other selves is by its nature an isolating process incapable of love. When it happens jump! I now know that what dissolved the self truly is love.