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, May 10, 2021

 The Man Who Drove Madness Away


He was famous for his anonymity.

And saved the throng by realizing his own impotence. 

He found all when he discovered nothing has what he needs.

He won the war by finding he had nothing to lose.

He was surrounded by friends when he had nothing left to give.

He had been surrounded by enemies when he held what they wanted.

Ambition is the weaker impulse.

Humility is fiercely unstoppable.

He helped them all when he realized he could not help himself.

He fed many when he understood he could not feed himself. It was like he had been given a spoon too long for his arm to reach his own mouth but exactly right for feeding any others.

They recognized him as leader when he learned how to serve others exclusively.     

He became an artist the day he had nobody to talk to but himself. Alone became, suddenly, all one.


-Johnny W

Sunday, May 9, 2021

 To Seek A Love That’s True


You treat me like some half-dollar screw hound me to go out to work and bring back something new pretend you do not see me but keep me in your view;

I see ambition- 

ambition at full throttle driving you- 

while I seek a peaceful ride- one inside a love that’s true.

Would it help if I told I am the Light 

returning to save you?

I am truly outcast.

Feel so alone and blue.


No prophet sent me. This is not a place to settle down for I was born to roam.

If this is how you feel about me I believe 

it’s time I go back home.

Saturday, May 8, 2021

 The Takers


Nations are to peace as toothless paper tigers are to playful children. When will we ever learn it’s never been the fault of love it is the mad lunacy of nations, boundaries, courts, kings and all the rest of it. It is therefore ambition makes all the tragic legendary stories of some imagined conflict between love and honor, between love and duty, between love and decency where conflict has never been. The Emperor has been always naked. Illusion alone clothes him. A taker. A child knows this to be so. When the game ends…really ends…peace is right here present for all beings. And it is known by all then that peace is not the absence of conflict, conflict is the absence of peace. Violence grows like weeds when people turn their backs on peace. Cease trying to end conflict (that is like trying to shovel darkness out a window) and try for a change to switch on the light of peace.



Sunday, May 2, 2021

       Our Task must be to free ourselves, by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living things. Albert Einstein

Thursday, April 29, 2021

 WHAT IS IT YOU WANT?


Do you want to know what it is you do not know, or not? Do you prefer to remain ignorant as you believe that way is safer for you than knowing?


Sounds to me like you are saying you want the unknown to be revealed but first you want to know what it is going to be, is that so?


Do you not see clearly how stupid that is? See how you have canceled what it is you ask for in the same breath?  It was promised long ago, “Ask and you shall receive” but it was not suggested you will receive what you ask not for.


I had a friend once tell me she wanted both knowledge and ignorance. I pitied her. Does she want a ridiculous and trivial thing or does she want something deeper? You are confused when you say I do not know but want to know but first want a guarantee that I will like it. Now you see clearly, make use of it for its value is beyond measure. Remain in clarity.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

 It wasn’t a thing that had been learnt through choice; it had come about through sheer necessity. Anonymous

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

                               Does Life Need Saving?


There is a phrase (saved my life). DID I HAVE LIFE or DID LIFE HAVE ME? Which reminds us now who among us knows what life is? Yet nobody denies its existence? Can ELECTRICITY ever be lost or DESTROYED? That is the question. 


How big life? And is it a thing which can be possessed by some vain, dying entity named “me”? What would be the nature of such an entity as one that could possess life? Is it not so that life brings to a body consciousness enough to even ask these questions? What can make or destroy consciousness?


People are so conceited as to speak of matters concerning which they are in complete darkness as if everybody listening knows the matter clearly and thoroughly. It is often said by the ignorant that God made us that way...stupid. It is such arrogance that is back of suffering, not death. Such is the enduring draw of every tragedy of literature. It could have been avoided. Vanity, vanity.  All is vanity. And that is funny and freeing, not sad.


Is it not possible at least that life itself lives and all other inquiries follow and depend upon that fact? In death nothing much happens. And you can even say bye-bye before you die and mean it.



It is no tragedy that there is no answer to a prayer however fervently delivered for electricity to please surrender forth its power on behalf of a fictitious entity. Recall Pinocchio? Any boy who wants to be a real boy is one, by Golly!


Wake up. There are more links in your brain than there are stars in the observable Universe. Meditation changes the cells of your body and the contents of those cells change.