Archive for April, 2009

By Steve Mills

Our mind constantly narrows the stream of input it receives down to definitions,  conceptions and categories.

It makes it easy for our brain to manage the wide complexity of modern life, and make predictive decisions and inferences about what is currently happening. I am sure that we have evolved this way with good reason, and I bet we were doing it back when we all lived in caves or the wild grassland of prehistory.

Our minds treat objects not as they are, but as abstract categories of things. Men are treated with a certain subset of behaviours, women with another. We treat all physical objects as if they are the idea and not the thing. Bowls are treated all the same, as are knives, or fridges, or televisions.

But really I think that life is ultimately unquantifiable. Everything always seeks to transcend its definition, and concrete descriptions break down when you turn up the resolution. The harder you study what defines a certain thing, the more you see the diversity within the category.

It’s a hard concept to grasp, or get our minds around, which is always a good indicator that further thought and study would be worthwhile.

Really our every thoughts about a certain thing are not about the real things themselves, but about our internal concept of what that thing is.

This has made it easy for our modern civilization to develop, because when you can quantify something, person or place then you can put a value on it.

But really, what price can be put on an hour of your life, or a finite resource which is the common good of all, or even the land inhabited by a people for thousands of years, and their culture? It just can’t be done unless the quantisation is taken to the extreme levels we see today, where everything is a commodity, and there can be decisions made.

Should I work today or enjoy the sunshine… hmmmm, not working will cost me $200. The sunshine is worth $0. Ok work it is..  What a shame we look at the $, and not the unquantifiable reality that is really there. The pure experience of living and enjoying life.

By Seamus Anthony

Continued from Part One

Everything Is Appropriate

The above three words were scribbled on a whiteboard in the office of Feedwell Café.

Feedwell, now closed down, was a famous, old, ramshackle vegetarian joint in the hipster suburb of Prahran in Melbourne, Australia. It was the spring of 1998. I had been working in the cafe for a week, squeezing vege juices for hungover groovers and health conscious yuppies.

Next to the words was a very crude drawing of five or six interlinking lines that basically looked a branch of a tree.

“What’s that all about?” I asked Alan, the cafe owner.

Alan was a tall, thin, white-haired fellow in his 70s who, I was vaguely aware, was into ‘all that New Age stuff” as I would have put it at the time.

He was definitely a dude – for example he chose his staff by holding a crystal pendulum over their resumes (apparently mine caused the pendulum to spin in the affirmative direction, something that, later, probably caused him to wonder if his crystal needed replacing).

“It’s true” Alan replied “Everything is Appropriate”

There came a choking noise from the corner of the messy office-cum-lunch room. It was Sashaan, the punk-haired chef who I also had pigeon holed as a “New Ager” simply because she had a “Magick Happens” sticker on her car.

“Wouldn’t be very appropriate if somebody ran in here with an axe and starting chopping heads off now would it?” She grumbled, her mouth full of lunch.

“It would actually,” said Alan. He spoke with a calm that was, in those days, foriegn to me. “Like I said … on a Universal level everything is appropriate.” With this he shuffled off, so tall he had to bow his head to walk through the doorway.

Sashaan didn’t say anything, she just rolled her eyes which were twinkling like she was enjoying a joke that I wasn’t in on. I didn’t know what to think, my mind was blown, but I suddenly felt a strong desire to know more.

For example, what were all those squiggly lines about?

And how could Alan be so sure of his rather brave proposition?

My mind was naturally open enough not to be offended by the statement, but I was pretty sure that a lot of people would be outraged by this kind of talk.

But what if Alan was in fact right? What would that mean and how would that affect my life?

The Five Year Hangover

All of this was set against the backdrop of the unraveling of my life.

I refer to the period from when I was about 22 years to about 27 years old as the “Hangover Years”. Not just because I woke up every day with one, but because from high school to 22 years old, life had been one fantastic trip, a joyous, invincible journey of discovery and fun. I was in a band that was hugely popular in my hometown and was fairly convinced that I was some kind of new God sent to bless the Earth with my presence and talent. I was basically living out a wonderful, ego-movie in which I was the headlining star.

But then, suddenly, it turned to shit.

I found myself alienated from my loved ones. Broke. My local fame had failed to spread and mature into any kind of a sustainable career (entirely my own fault – I know now – but at the time it all seemed very unfair and tragic). I was hooked on alcohol, cigarettes and weed.

Nice one.

So I did the logical thing, I ran away to another city to start all over again, which is how I found myself at Feedwell Café.

While on the one hand, I was having a blast meeting new people and playing in a new band, I was a little disconcerted to discover that not only did my problems follow me over to Melbourne, but they were getting worse and I was getting more and more depressed.

I had no idea how to deal with this other than to keep moving, keep working, keep joking, keep drinking, smoking, tripping, shagging.

I was a mess.

So, desperate to change for the better and inspired by the calm of people like Alan and Sashaan (who despite her healthy cynicism, was a very enlightened soul) I began to investigate a very different kind of ‘spirituality’ to the Christian dogma I had been brought up with. Always a big reader, I began by devouring Buddhist and New Age books, and thus began my fumbling start along the journey to Do-It-Yourself Enlightenment.

This journey would take me into the realms of not only Buddhist and New Age concepts, but Contemporary Western Meditation, Zen, Taoism, QiGong, I Ching, Yoga, Tarot, Naturopathy, Psychedelic Meditation, Traditional Chinese Medicine, New Thought, and much more.

All of the above brought me greatly increased inner peace, health and happiness, but there was still a lingering unease, a nagging fear that I just couldn’t put my finger on, an unease that kept me awake at nights … all until a certain flight from Malaysia to Europe that is …

Continued in Part Three.

By Seamus Anthony

So you’ve downloaded our free eBook, Curly’s Law, about the need to identify your One Thing, your True Life Purpose – but did you actually read it?

And if you did read it – have you managed to actually identify your One Thing?

It’s not always easy is it?

I gave my method for figuring out my One Thing in the book, but that was just one way.

I don’t really know what other ways there are, or at least I didn’t until I read Brian Kim’s excellent “How To Finally Find What You Love to Do AND Get Paid For Doing It!”

The Trouble with the “Do What You Love” Theory

When it comes to careers, the clichéd advice is to “do what you love” if you want to succeed BUT what do you do if you don’t know what you love?

And hang on a second – don’t you know plenty of artists, writers, healers, musicians and wannabe-entrepreneurs who know very well what they love to do but just can’t seem to make it pay?

Well, if that’s you – relax. Brian’s excellent little eBook (with the very long title) is a Godsend for those who are undecided as to what their true purpose is or who haven’t got a clue how to make their passion pay-up some cold hard cash.

4 Reasons I Highly Recommend this Book

I don’t know Brian Kim personally, but I have been twice now impressed with his work (read about the other time his writing blew my mind here). The reasons I so heartily recommend “How to Find What You Love To Do AND Get Paid For Doing It” are:

• There’s no hippy-drippy nonsense; no “open your mind to the Universe and let the love flow in” crap. In case you haven’t woken up and smelled the coffee yet, all that Law of Attraction baloney doesn’t work – not on its own anyway. You can sit around and wish for success all you like, but if you do, all you’re really doing is settling for a life of mediocrity. Instead you need concrete, practical advice about how to get off your butt and make it happen already. This book provides just that.

• It’s a very structured book, a practical workbook that gets you to work it out over a period of time. Brian will have you delve deeper and deeper into your own nature until you find your True Purpose inside of you, just sitting there like a brilliant diamond waiting all this time for you to discover it.

• It’s specific – you’ll learn “What” and then “How”. First you find ‘what’ it is you truly should be doing with your life – your calling. Once you know what this is (and you will) then you move on to ‘how’ to make it pay. If you know you can’t be happy while you’re working a dreary, dead-end day job that doesn’t leave you with enough energy to pursue your dreams, then take my advice – buy this book now and get moving. Life is short! Stop wasting time!

• There’s no fluff. Coming in at 52 pages, this book gets straight to the point and will have you up and at ‘em in no time. In fact Brian says that the book was originally over 200 pages long but he boiled it down to the bare essentials so as not to overwhelm you with too much superfluous information and padding. If only more authors would do this! I don’t know about you but I am a busy man and I like to just get in, get the information I need, and then get on with it.

Who Else is Ready To Get On With Fulfilling Their True Life Purpose?

If you’re happy in your work or have figured out what your life’s passion is – and how to make it pay so that you don’t need no stinkin’ day job, then don’t buy this book. It’s not for those who are content with their station in life and feel they have no more learning to do, no more adventures to go on.

But if that isn’t you then you need to find out what your One Thing is now and how to go for it and succeed. What are your other options? Keep working for the man forever?

Consider these pertinent questions from Brian’s website:

Why sacrifice almost half of your day (if you include commuting) 5 days a week just to enjoy your nights and weekends?

Why sacrifice the best time period of your life so you can enjoy your golden years?

Why put yourself through all this pain and misery for the majority of your adult life?

When did people lie down and accept drudgery, boredom and dissatisfaction as a fact of life?

It doesn’t make any sense.

As I said at the beginning of this article, I already know my true life purpose – and I am making it pay already – but reading this book made me feel even more resolute to move on up to the next level and “go for gold” as the cliché goes.

Now – I paid 25 bucks for “How to Find What You Love To Do…”, but for a short time Brian has reduced the price to about $19 so click through now to check it out and ask yourself this – if you spend $19 on a book that finally brings you the success you have craved all your life – then isn’t that worth it?

I reckon it is, so hop to it and Click Here Now to find out more about the book.

Photo by kirtaph

By Seamus Anthony

Part One

When Einstein theorized that space and time were not constants but were relative to the observer, no doubt there would have been those who dismissed his views as crazy talk. It can be hard to understand what he meant; he wrote and talked in terms of speeds and distances that are beyond our perceptive capabilities. Well, while unlikely to position me as a modern genius, the following article may similarly come off reading like the wacky ramblings of a nut-job as I try to understand, through the act of writing, God, no less.

More specifically, I am trying to get my head around my personal reunification with God and how I came to it by inventing my own theory of a Relative God and a Relative Truth.

Let’s start here:

If time, which we cannot experience as anything other than linear, is in fact not linear at all and also not separate from space (which, I believe – although I could have the whole thing wrong – is what Einstein hypothesized), then why can’t Truth be relative too?

Just because we can only perceive truth in certain patterns or manifestations doesn’t mean that these manifestations of truth or fact are invariable. And for that matter, what does ‘perceivable fact’ have to do with it anyway? It’s not like ‘the whole God thing’ has any historical basis in rational thought per se.

Existentialism, the term I prefer over the clunky ‘spirituality’, has more to do with emotions, mainly fear (of the unknown), and feelings of awe and wonder in the face of a big, beautiful, mystifying Universe.

Actually, no, we should really start back here:

I was brought up in a fundamentalist home where Truth was Truth as according to the Bible (or at least our particular Church’s interpretation of the Bible) and that was that.

This never sat well with me.

After doing a little research in the school library (no Internet then, crazy huh?), it seemed pretty obvious that on more than one occasion, entire civilizations have risen, prospered, declined and fallen without one single citizen thereof hearing diddly-squat about the Christian Gospel. Did those people, I enquired of the tall, wise ones in my life, go to Hell for worshiping false idols and otherwise failing to please the Christian God (who may or may not have been invented yet)?

The answer was “Yes, unless they accepted Jesus as their personal saviour, they went to Hell.”

“Well that seems hardly fair.”

“The Bible says that all people get a chance to hear the word of God and choose to repent before they die.”

“The word of Christ specifically?” I asked, just to clarify. “From the Bible?”

“Yes,” came the self-assured answer. Case closed…

…but not in my mind.

As if some indigenous American or Australian or Chinese people way-back-when, before Europeans started sticking their flags everywhere they weren’t wanted, ever got to hear about the Christian religion! What crap!

But what if it was true that all people got to hear the word of a Universal God, expressed through a variety of languages, and even other mediums beyond language like Love and through Nature? That sounds a lot easier to swallow doesn’t it? Unfortunately, I couldn’t hypothesize such heresies aloud growing up around Born Again Christians – they were, if nothing else, uncompromising in their vision.

Church or Breasts? That is the Question.

So after a childhood spent being alternately comforted by the presence of a loving, forgiving God and terrorized by a ferocious God who was champing at the bit to burn me (and keep burning me forever) for sneaking an extra slice of cheesecake behind Mum’s back, I eventually went mad with confusion over my burgeoning teenage sexuality.

Sensibly, I chose to take my chances and spend some time investigating the allure of female bumpy-bits over those pesky Christians and their square-bear ways. This decision came with an added bonus: sleeping in on Sundays. It was a no-brainer.

From then on I wanted nothing to do with religion or spirituality and gave myself over fully to hedonism.

This was all very well until my mid-twenties when the true nature of my mortality hit home like a very rude comment and I entered into a dark night of the soul. While I had no desire to return to the Church, I began to look around for a different kind of spirituality to help me to get right with my life…

Continued in Part Two

Pic by Smudgie’s Ghost

By Seamus Anthony

Are you pretty ambitious?

I am. And it’s okay – some of us are just wired up that way.

But the question struck me the other day – and not for the first time – why?

Is it because you want ‘more’ or because you want ‘less’?

I am willing to place a bet that you often just think about getting more. (It’s okay – so do I.)

If only you had a bit more money.

If only you had a slightly bigger house.

If only you had more time.

If only you had a more exciting career.

If only you enjoyed more health.

Yadda yadda yadda.

But here’s the rub. I was walking the dog other day, through the beautiful mountainous, forested region where I live and suddenly I realized that I was frowning, staring at the ground, going over and over the question: How I can get “more”.

What the fuck?

I should have been looking around! Enjoying a Zen-out walking session!

“Why do you always want more?” I berated myself.

Then Poof!

I realised that the paradoxical reason I always want more is …

Because I want less!

And I bet it’s the same for you.

You want more money so you can spend less time worrying about money, doing your boring job and putting up with nitpicking tossers.

You want a bigger house so you can spend less time feeling like everyone in your household is in your face.

You want more time so you can spend less time doing shit you hate.

You want an exciting career so you can spend less time doing shit you hate.

You want better health so that you can spend less time worrying about your health and perhaps, feeling embarrassed about your appearance.

And this is all well and good. It’s just the way it is.

BUT we must remember that when we get more – it usually doesn’t end up being less. More money brings more responsibility. A bigger house needs more maintenance and cleaning. More health means more exercise.

And so you see: Less actually is more,

…but more isn’t always less.