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.

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”

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?

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?

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!