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!

Thursday, April 27, 2023

 WHO BUT YOU?


If you, the Reader, are young and have a full life ahead of you, you hope, and you have one or more children, born or yet unborn, and you love them deeply do you want them to enter into this world as it is? Be serious, please. You love them dearly and you know this world must change if it is to be livable. What are you going to do? You tell me you are busy planning to do exactly what you have inherited as a way of living. I believe you. And yet, I want to urge upon you the realization of what a dangerous thing it is you are about doing. People are telling you to get on with it as your parents have done and their parents did and their parents going back as far as anyone knows. They tell you in so many ways constantly that for you to do anything else is unacceptable in the eyes of God.  You buy it! How can you? Tell me you are deliberately going to accept these commands from others in place of the obvious facts before your own eyes! I don’t believe you.


How would it feel to you to say, instead, I know not what I am going to do with my life from this moment out but I know what I am not going to do? Will not the love for your children be enough to make you undertake the unknown that frightens you so? Who else but you?




Wednesday, April 26, 2023

 Pablo Picasso is quoted as having said, “Art washes away from the Soul the dust of everyday life.” It may be so but seeing truly washes away everyday life. 




Tuesday, April 25, 2023

 WORDS AND THOUGHTS THEY MAKE


Words and the thoughts put together using them are very limited in their real usefulness to human beings insofar as having any value in the sensory enjoyment and fulfillment of anybody’s life. Plus they are very dangerous if not carefully handled so as to avoid the effect they can cause by bringing conflict, confusion, and their downright evil consequences in most relationships. So many of our most potent words are meaningless when examined honestly by minds not already deadened in predetermined and absolutely false conclusions. This condition is a widespread and prevailing form of blindness having nothing to do with eyesight. Such is the true meaning of blasphemy or profane talk. People have been burned and lynched and tortured and disfigured and mishandled in horrible and shocking ways that make humans shudder and vomit by this brand of blindness. And so many lives are made to be empty and meaningless.


The first word to be discussed here is “intelligence”. In most parts of the world, “intelligence’ is measured by a person’s ability to use words of a language composed of them to make thoughts with them. If one looks into it or has to live with it in a school it is easy to see that this means most people have been taught that human thinking is ultimate intelligence on the planet. And even a kid having problems with school, especially one of these, sees that it is so only because such a practice makes “measurement” and its separation of the intelligent from the unintelligent quite possible. Sadly, these kids form the belief that for them this world was not made. In that, all of us lose a great deal of human intelligence through blindness to its many other facets. It is concluded even that there is no such thing as direct, immediate intelligence naturally present. It is seldom  encouraged in schools and cannot be measured. See how the interest in controlling a population is involved in the measuring business? The only way into it is by an unaided search within one’s being for it. When found, it is paramount.


The next word to be discussed here is “civilization”. All the word actually describes is “groups of people which have laws and live in cities”. But the word is almost always used so as to carry harsh shame of unworthiness and disregard to any who are labeled as “ uncivilized”. To not live in a city having laws is thought to mean the people in question are lesser until they come to live in cities and have laws. Where has the intelligence gone? Its absence shows people can be civilized and have none. 


Get this- this writer graduated from a law school thought of as brought about by one of these “civilizations” where students are taught that there are so many books of laws in a typical legal system that nobody could possibly read or hear of even a small part of them in a lifetime and more are being made constantly but ignorance of the law is not a defense available to anyone charged with violation of a law. You decide. Can that nonsense be justification for claiming all others, “those not civilized”, are lesser in some way? A study will show all civilizations come “loaded” with such insane terms. In the 1950’s in the civilization “America”, for example, many lives were ruined under a label “UnAmerican”. In the 1940’s, world wide a war was fought at a terrible price in lives over the term “Jew”. 


This writing will close for now with another question. It is supposed by the masses of people “civilized” that living by obtaining one’s food at a grocery store by exchanging money for it from those who claim to own it is superior to all alternatives. That there is no better way. It is a foregone conclusion to them that “uncivilized“ people are “wrong” about it. This, without even considering that to be “civilized” actually has nothing whatever to do with how one obtains one’s food.

Thursday, April 20, 2023


WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US?

 

It seems obvious you are at peace. So, what of all the rest of us? We have our troubles, our responsibilities as wage earners, husbands and wives, parents and so on. We worry. We are anxious. We suffer. How can we have peace?


There are many decent people with good intentions who will tell us every time they open their mouths that it is “language” and “thought” (which invent each other) that are our greatest gifts and which will save us if we use them correctly 

( and if we listen carefully they will reveal that “use them correctly” means “think like me”). Get the joke? I will tell you and mean it that the gifts of language and thought have their place, and it is a very limited one, but they always create conflict and confusion when relied upon to “save” us. The more we reason our way to the light the darker it gets. Love is the great gift. I am the world and the world is me. I am talking to myself here.


Silly. You have it. That is all there is to it. We are our only problem. We refuse to accept what are naturally our gifts. You accept breath and food and water since they do not interfere with your plans. Yet you take them for granted. You have ambitions. You treasure them. You are certain they are what divides you from the other animals, the non-human ones. You have dreams of a better world. Better than what? Look. Be honest. Better than what? It is better than right now. Better than the mess you have made and continue to make in ever-increasing degrees with ambition. What good is it? It has always distorted your appreciation of the beauty all around you. Ambition has you torturing and slaughtering people you never have met who have ambitions of their own and may one day torture and slaughter you. I am talking to myself here. Can you feel that? I am the world and the world is me.


Look. Something or somebody has caste a spell over you that makes you forever discontent. Who would do that? Who profits from you being always discontent? In earlier times they were called the “operators” and were noticeably  out of step with the others. Now, not so much. Who is not in one way or another an “operator”? A boy hunting for a girl to exploit; a girl trapping a boy, for instance?


Look. Consider the lilies. They neither toil nor do they spin. Consider the other animals. Are they parents? Do they mate and make babies? Do they act in the world? Outside the human threat do they prosper? Are they not finely tuned to the whole living Earth? You have been made by mental tricks to prefer ambition is all and that makes you suffer. Even the rich man bemoans the lack of trustworthy laborers. The husband who takes pride in his wife is jealous and suffers too. What is to be done? You fool!


You have it!


In so many ways all of us will blame “them”. Who are “they”? Oh, those of us who will not behave? If a society organized by people and served obediently by people contains “trouble-makers” can it be honestly said that they are less the society that the rest? Look. Be honest. Seek to know, not to justify your predetermined position. One will never see truth through that kind of distortion. You are the man who is only interested in proving his foolish ways are correct and God-inspired in the face of tons of undeniable failure. I am talking to myself here. I am the world and the world is me. Love us. Unconditionally, love us. 






 


Friday, April 14, 2023

 Ideals are not true. That is the chief characteristic you need to know about them…ideals, that is. Marriage as an ideal is not true. What is? Well, there is not a name for it. Just say the truth is true and you will get by fine. Why is that? Well, the place where you and I contact truth is wordless. No dictionary book is of any use there. It is beyond thinking. It is real intelligence. It may surprise you to be told your intelligence is found in a completely still, quiet mind. There you are totally aware. Nothing escapes you. How could it? How many times must a man look up before he sees the sky? “Blowin' In The Wind”, Dylan.


At some point we tipped over into a way of thinking that took us by storm is the best way to put it. Thinking told us it was our best ally in a dangerous world and that has proven to be absolutely a lie.The more we reason our way to light the darker it gets. Those who know true love and compassion found the stillness within and immediately understood undebatable truth and took pure action as if for the first time. Ask an astronaut who has seen the beautiful Earth while standing on the Moon. You are that wise all the time if only we know.

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

 And death set me free…

that death that is a re-awakening of the psychic human with strength enough to withstand society’s mad web of thoughts attached to an image placed inside my brain, with a name and a false clock, that truly can never be me. And, so, I learned to trust Death as a friend to the quiet, still, nameless, loving mind eternal. And I find death erases only images completely dependent upon images completely dependent upon more and more images and all the while there is naked freedom and an unshakable ground to stand upon. Complete, total attention of mind, heart, nerves is unshakable for there are no false images to interfere…only complete attention. It is really quite simple. Nothing there is exclusive about it. All or none.


Complete attention and death are one. At the same time there happens to be no perfect love and nothing else but perfect love. Perfect love banishes fear.

Tuesday, April 11, 2023

 In a world where only you can sing you will be told by everybody that you are terrible and should not sing at all.