A WHOOPER SWAN'S DIARY: 07/24/23

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!

Monday, July 24, 2023

EXALTATION IS IDOLATRY

To be or not to be…exalted. What is it? This need to exalt someone or thing? Is it second best to being exalted? The decision, “if I can’t be great I will associate closely with some exalted being even if I have to exalt him or her or it to do it”.

If the society’s most prominent solution is to bury one’s past in a more or less comfortable neurosis short of dire madness why exalt? Is it like dessert? Most importantly, is there even a shred of evidence that any person is superior to any other? Even one other? Of course not. Such measurement is done by a process dreadfully limited- so much so that it cannot approach within light years of a conclusion of superiority when measuring one against even the weakest of all human beings. No one is weak and no one is strong. Nobody’s a success and nobody a failure. Measuring is wicked. It abuses, misuses, strings out or worse. So, can I live without it?

So far, we all lead lives firmly grounded in a belief that it is undebatable that there are great people and mediocre people and losers. Period. We do not want to hear of it any other way. So, we never change. We just like the songs about change. It’s the comfortable neurosis I mentioned. Some day I will change.

If you worship not the image of God but the fact, what then? All one? The absence of division?