A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 05/02/23

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, May 2, 2023

WHAT MATTERS?

I can read and write and think. Do not speak to me of going back to a simpler time when we could neither read nor write. Once I got an education I could get a job and earn money to buy what will make me happy and make my family happy. Before that I was penniless and poor and had to do without. That was terrible.

Are you sure about that? Are you happy? Are families happy?

Really, I mean are you certain that you are better off knowing how to read and to write? Let us examine into it, shall we? A baby can neither read nor write and cannot get a job or money or buy anything. However, you cannot insult a baby or flatter a baby with words. On the other hand you can be flattered and insulted many times a day. Day after day for the rest of your life it can happen and you will file these insults and flatteries away as memories to relive them as your knowledge about yourself and as bricks with which you build what is called a self image and soon you become identified in your own mind by your self image. The effect is much like being locked up in a jail, is it not? It also plays out as a life you live where every day is the same and you repeat the same things and nothing you do matters. So, again, I ask are you sure you are better off than an uneducated child of nature? Such being has no self image at all. You have one and it torments you. You look in the mirror to see if your appearance is correct. What do you think is a correct appearance and where did you get that bit of knowledge? Is it true? Is it true at all? You obey it, though, do you not? Images. Images. You serve images. I am talking to myself now.

The writer has spent time simply watching with total attention a tiny dung beetle as it rolls its ball of poop somewhere? Presumably, it is headed home with the ball which is as big as or bigger than the beetle. The beetle never ceases its journey no matter how difficult it becomes. Every few seconds its ball rolls off course and must be maneuvered back on track toward the destination. One thing matters to that beetle. Have you ever experienced being in such a state where only one thing mattered to you and you would not cease the effort required to pursue it for anybody or anything?

There is a book wherein a poet says there’s something that if you do not have it nothing else matters; and if you do have it nothing else matters. That is a book I would recommend be read by anyone; however, it is obvious a baby would have no use for such a book since it already has that wisdom and lives by it all day every day…until it is taught to try to be something else. So, my point is only that we learn how to return to the wisdom we had as a newborn child and maintain it and have what if you do not have it nothing else matters and if you do have it nothing else matters. Freedom! Going back to a simpler time means that to me not regressing in technical know-how. It means escaping from a prison of my own making. It does mean we would definitely have the ability to use whatever technology we gain in a wise manner rather than as a fuel for self-tormenting images. And that means a much better life for all humans everywhere.