Read Johnny's "Metaphormorphic Book of Days, Dreams & Shadows"

Monday, February 25, 2008

In the beginning there was nothing.

In the beginning, before the "big bang", there was nothing.

A nothingness so No Thing, that it was nearly the opposite of nothing.

The Yin.

The Receptive.

Into this came the Creative. The "big bang".

The Yang.

And the product, is reality. And Consciousness born out of that "reality".

And Reality, is of course, not real.

But we are.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Betrayal

Another chunk of excerpts from “The Invitation” by Oriah Mountain Dreamer.

I really can’t recommend this book enough. (Of course remember, I also recommend everyone read the Marquis de Sade for deeper understanding of freedom, history and sexuality.)

From her section on Betrayal.

~~~

It doesn’t interest me it the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can
Disappoint another
To be true to yourself;
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
And not betray your own soul;
If you can be faithless
And therefore trustworthy.


We often look for someone we can trust more than we trust ourselves. Perhaps this is because we know how often we betray ourselves.

I suddenly realized that the people in my life who are the most trustworthy—those who tell the truth, even when the truth is hard—are not those who always keep their agreements with me. Those who can be faithless—who can bear the responsibility of breaking an agreement with someone when the alternative is to betray themselves—are trustworthy.

As the original version of “The Invitation” was copied and shared by people all over the world, the most frequent change made to it was to substitute the word faithful for the word faithless. I received phone calls and letters asking, sometimes demanding, that I explain my use of the word faithless. People didn’t like it. It made them uncomfortable.

If we cannot live with our need to renew agreements we have made, we break the only promise we really owe each other—to be truthful. This means finding both the courage to be truthful with ourselves and a way to live with how our actions affect others, even when there is no ill intent and no one to blame.

We have all been the betrayer and the betrayed. If we cannot acknowledge this we will find ourselves harsh and unforgiving, unable to grieve for the times we have betrayed ourselves.

When an agreement that is important to us is broken, we feel hurt and angry. And if an agreement is broken but we pretend that it has not been violated, we learn to distrust ourselves or those others when the truth is revealed. The real damage of betrayal is in the lies we tell one another and ourselves, the lies that cause us to lose faith in our ability to recognize and act on the truth.

Being trustworthy, not betraying ourselves, is, in part, about recognizing moments or situations when we are likely to be untrustworthy and seeking the counsel of people who love us and are willing and able to be honest with us. This may mean that we will sometimes hear things we do not want to hear. It is almost always means slowing things down a little and considering that we may be wrong, that we may not be trustworthy in that moment.

Refusing to betray ourselves is not a license to break agreemenst on a whim, to disregard the very real repercussions of our actions on others. The hard part , the place where we hope wisdom will find us, is in deciding where and when we must break a promise to be true to ourselves. We must weigh the cost to our soul if we keep our agreement—the cost to that which is essential to who we are—against the cost to others if the agreement is broken.

Sometimes we may to decide to make a sacrifice for another. Ask any parent about the small daily sacrifices.

Tell me, can you do this? Can you take the choice that’s for life even when that choice is hard, when doing so means others will see you as faithless? Can you make the choice without putting yourself or the other person—no matter who is the betrayed, who is the betrayer in this moment—out of your heart? This is what I want to know. This is what I want us to learn together to teach each other in the way we hold each other when the choices are hard.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The Three Metaphormorphic Faces of Johnny

Johnny Lightheart and Johnny Darkheart were "born" in a place called the Sand Hills, as the moon climbed up into the night sky, beneath the Rainbow Bridge. I had just been told that it was possible that I was a/the "Pahana", The Lost White Brother, or The Honorable White Brother. (I believe the exact wording I was given translates as "candidate")

I cannot tell you why this was said to me, or the events that lead up to hearing it, except to say I was on a Journey, a Vision Quest at the time, to find and tame my Dragon.

I would normally have laughed something like this off, and just let it feed my ego, except for the events that surrounded being told that, which of course, in typical form, I cannot tell you.

Although I can say, I was among descendants of one of the oldest American cultures, and in their holy land. Oddly enough, it was not the culture that this myth actually comes from.

I couldn't ignore it, even though, of course, it isn't true, still, it pointed me in a direction. And in that direction was the White Feathered Dragon. It was especially odd that I was on a quest at the time to bring the Dragon back into my life.

And that is when the two were born.

Light is not the opposite of Dark. They are the opposite of appalling emptiness.



The Lightheart came from the following excerpt from Tom Robbin's "Jitterbug Perfume":

The woman in the snowy tunic notices Kudra. She smiles. "Do you understand what is happening here?" she inquires. "We weigh their hearts. Should a person possess a heart that is as light as a feather, then that person is granted immortality.

"Indeed? Are there many?"

"Few. Precious few, I am sorry to say. One would think that people would catch on. Those who pass the test are usually rather odd...the ordinary rarely beat the scales."

"Where do they go, then, all of those who fail?" Kudra pointed toward the water, where another ship of light was just whooshing away, leaving a milky wake.

"To the energy realms."

"Never to return?"

The woman shrugs. "As energy, perhaps. As light."

"But the ones who pass the test...?"

"The immortals? They are free to take any direction they like. Free to embark on a sea voyage, to return to your world, or to some different world." She places yet another heart upon the balance, squealing with delight when it does not send the balance dish plummeting to the altar top. "Look," she says to Kudra, "Look at this one. Now here is one that is fairly close."

This organ was ripped from the corpulent breast of a jolly-faced troubadour. He doesn't comprehend the commotion, but he is winking at Kudra, rubbing his belly, and looking as if he'd gladly trade his butchered heart for a pint of ale.

"Had he combined his hedonism with a pinch more wisdom, had he poured slightly less into his gullet and slightly more into his soul, he might have made it," says the weigher of hearts. "Still, he earns a pink ticket."

She hands the troubadour something strongly resembling a carnation petal and motions him to a side door. Kudra follows him and learns that this door, too, leads down to the water, but to an empty dock. From above, the woman signals him to wait.

For quite a long time, the troubadour stands there. To relieve his tedium, he whistles a tune, a medieval ballad of courtly love. Suddenly, he is silenced in mid-whistle, his lips periwinkled in a frozen pucker. A ship is pulling into view.

As it nears dockside, Kudra sees that it is a barge, of considerable length, and canopied with pink lined, from whose edges fringe and tassels dangle, The barge is hung with paper lanterns, in which candles blaze gaily. Scattered about the deck are tables and chairs, resembling those of an inn, and here sit people eating spicy southern foods and sipping beer and pineapple coolers. Minstrels with droopy black mustaches wander the deck, strumming guitars. Women in shoes with heels like daggers dance, rattling tambourines all the while and cooing lubricious phrases to the many parrots that occupy crude wooden cages. From below deck, a katzenjammer of libidinous voices is heard. On the side of the barge, the name Hell has been painted.

Despite the fact that there's no odor to give magnitude to the foods on deck or to the sex below, the passengers seem merry. Kudra believes that she recognizes one of them. Unless she is mistaken, it is Fosco, the calligrapher from the Samye lamasery. He is at a table, in repartee with a pair of elderly Chinamen, whom he addresses as Han Shan and Li Po. They hurl lines of spontaneous poetry at one another, each trying to top the last, often slapping the tabletop and laughing wildly. Kudra waves and waves, but it is impossible to get Fusco's attention. The dead have little interest in the living, she surmises.

The barge scrapes against the dock with a careless rasp. The captain, a seedy Spaniard in a comic-opera version of a military uniform, leans over the rail and takes the troubadour's pink ticket. Once the fellow is aboard, the vessel floats lazily away, bound for unknown sprays.

As the barge departs, it turns, affording a view of its starboard side. On this side, the vessel wears a different name entirely. Heaven is what it says.

Kudra returns to the scales. The young woman is hard at work, testing hearts, assaying the precious metals of the life well-lived. "How did you land this job?" asks Kudra.

"I was not feather-light, but I was feather-bright," she answers.

"I am not sure I understand. Yet I cannot help but notice that we strongly resemble one another, you and I."

"Indeed we do."

"Are we related? Am I an incarnation of you? Or something?"

"What makes you suppose that you would be an incarnation of me, rather than me of you?" She giggles and shakes her skunk-black curls. "It is so amusing the way that mortals misunderstand the shape, or shapes, of time."

"I am not sure I understand."

"And I cannot help you understand. In the realm of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. Remember that, when you return to Your Side. Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received."



The Darkheart comes from the darker side of Pan (a character both in ancient legends and in the same book) and represents to me, the primal undertones to sentient existence. The Divine Madness. The Hand of Pan. The "Devil" in the Tarot.




Pan's song, because it served no purpose, because, indeed, it transcended the yoke of human purposes, was, above all liberating. It was music beyond the control of the player's will, or the listener's will; the will, in fact, dissolved in it...it was the aural equivalent of the rope trick: a giddy ascent up a shaky coil, to arrive in a place of mystery, where the sense of all-encompassing oneness with the natural world and the sense of the absolute aloneness of the individual coexist and commingle.

From the same book.



A few months later, I met Storm, and she gave me the appellation "Law", she also designed this for me.



Not the Johnny Law that truckers talk about at night, not the law of order, or enforcement, but the Law of that which is. The law that can never be seen except through the heart. The dream, the wheel of Karma.

It is assumed by many that the universe is illusory, it is but a dream, and true that may be, whether it is the "Christian" test, or the Buddhists seeking the void, they say ignore the illusion. And yet modern Many worlds theory tells us while right, they are wrong. Universes are infinite, so that any turn you take in the road, will somewhere, be taken by your exact image, except they will take the other turn. Some might look on this as meaning that there is no free will, but it actually is the ultimate expression of free will, for it indicates a nearly infinite palate to choose from. For what other difference could there be between two otherwise exact entities in different universes choose differently? The inner choice. The choice of an individual. The choice of self.

And it in that inner choice, that realization that the self matters, that we realize it is not the void we need to examine, but the illusion that fills the void, for in that illusion, consciousness finds a voice, the voice of choice, the voice of the Self. And that voice sounds like the voice of "god".

Without the illusion projected onto/into the void, there would be no fruition of self-awareness.

This is the Law that Johnny Law is a student of, a student of the Dream.

Johnny Law seeks to lose himself not in the void, not in the loss of the sense of self, but the loss of ego, and the beginning of a real awareness of self, and to finally Dream the way the that we were meant to. The Shock of Existence leading to the Shock of Awareness.

"Because we are so very beautiful...we are so beautiful and live so little against the greatness of time, and yet we can celebrate ourselves. And that is what makes us Malandros’, what makes us so different... They pretend that they are important, that what they do matters. While we know that the only thing that matters is our beauty and passion, the song of a single cycle, and then it is gone, and it is all gone with us."

S.N. Lewitt from “Songs of Chaos”




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The "learnings", the Logos, of Johnny Law:

10 actions of being/becoming:

Ecstatic-Joy, Loving, Dancing, Doing, Thinking, Learning, Listening, Laughing, Touching, and, the Art of Now.

Which grow from these roots:

Respect, Friendship, Trust, Loyalty, Love, Intimacy, Commitment, Dependability, and Passion.


(the roots always need tending, especially by the earnest application of the Actions, as we silly humans have a tendency to whack them a bit, failure in proper application is inevitable, but it is the doing that the being is found.)
~~~


Metaphormorphicly speaking, these are not the sons of Adam & Eve, they are the Children of Lilith. Although they do honor Eve for the difficult, and wondrous choices she made.