Part Three (click here to go back to the start)

I Found Jesus (he was behind my airplane seat all along)

Right  … where was I?

Oh yeah … So … After discovering meditation and DIY Enlightenment I spent the next few years quite blissed out. You know: “Very Zen” as the saying goes. In some ways it helped to kill my ambition for a while, which may or may not have been a bad thing, I’m not sure. I was just plain happy as Larry to hang out, meditate, read, play music for music’s sake (rather than with any career objective) and well, continue to party and have exciting affairs with beautiful young women.

Nothing wrong with all of that right? But as my twenties turned into my thirties and I found myself happily settled with a beautiful young lady (still my partner now and the wonderful mother of our child) I became aware that the old existential unease was returning. How could this be? I could still meditate myself happy, but increasingly over the years the darkness remained, hidden not that far under the surface.

I didn’t think about it too much, but I was certainly aware of it.

Then in 2007 when my girl was 5 months pregnant, we did what most couples do as they are preparing to have a baby – we went adventuring around the globe!

My partner is French and likes to return there as often as possible, but since meeting me the trips back to her homeland had ground to a halt and what’s more, I’d done the tropics and South East Asia more than once but had never made it further north than Japan. I really wanted to see Ireland, from where my Grandparents emigrated to Australia back in the dark ages. So we bought our tickets and got ready to roll.

Hair Raising Adventures … on the way to the airport.

My girl’s father drove us to the airport that night in his big 4 wheel drive truck. As we made our way a small car suddenly swung right from the left lane across our path and consequently we smashed right into it.

We had only been traveling at about 50ks an hour, but that was fast enough to cause an almighty bang. Our truck has an awesome bull-bar on the front, so our vehicle incurred only minor damage, but the car we hit was mashed. We jumped out to find a young lady sitting stunned in the drivers seat with her mobile phone still hovering by her ear. She had obviously been using it while driving and being distracted, pulled about the stupidest maneuver I have ever witnessed.

The back seat on her drivers side was a crumpled mess. If we had hit where she was instead of there, she would have been in big trouble.

Meanwhile, we had a plane to catch, so while my partner stood at the side of the road and (most endearingly) bollocksed the girl driver in French, me and Gramps made sure the girl was ok, got her details, pushed her crippled car to the side of the road, excused ourselves for having to dash and promptly did just that. (Funny thing was the last thing I remember saying to the girl was “Thanks” as we left her to it. “For what”, I mused later, “nearly killing us?”)

The Mini-Van Ride From Hell

By the time we got to the airport we were concerned about our unborn child. Did the impact cause any problems? Were we going to go through some miscarriage nightmare halfway between Melbourne and Kuala Lumpur? We didn’t know, but she felt fine and we were talking expensive air tickets here, so we just got on the plane.

Turned out there were no problems with the bubs (although now, at 19 months old, she is starting to find ways to cause them!) and the flight was bumpy but uneventful.

We don’t like flying much and wanted to spend a few days in Malaysia to break up the journey. The airport at Kuala Lumpur is a 45 minute drive from the city, and we had a mini van organised to take us to our hotel. This drive turned out to the third scariest moment of the entire trip, and definitely hinted at the ongoing trend of insanely scary transport experiences that was to mar an otherwise wonderful holiday.

I won’t go into much detail about this drive other than to say that I nicknamed the minivan service (which repeated it’s hair raising performance on each of the other 3 pre-organised commutes) the “White Knuckle Express”. I will never forget the old Australian man who was in the van with us and his nervous Oh-God-I-am-going-to-die-now laugh of terror. I actually ended up screaming at the mobile phone bearing driver to calm and slow down but he gave me such a look of pure hate into the rear view mirror that I simply shut up and held on. (I am saying this was a scary drive as a fully-confirmed veteran of hairy South East Asian driving experiences.)

The Flight From Hell

Anyway, we enjoyed a few lovely days in the delightful Kuala Lumpur and soon were on our plane for Paris.

Now we flew on Malaysia Airlines. The travel agent back in Melbourne had recommended them, and I had flown on them to Thailand back in 2000 and had found it all very nice … then.

Unfortunately when we boarded the plane I couldn’t help but notice that the nice uniforms that the stewardesses wear wearing back in 2000 seemed to be the same, only a little faded and threadbare.

And the inside of the plane seemed to be the same, only the armrests were coming away and the walls were rattling … a lot.

The entertainment system I had been so impressed 7 years before with was still there, although it kept freezing and crackling, as if all the wiring was dodgy. Same went for the cabin lighting.

Overall I got the feeling that Malaysia Airlines’ bean-counters had been cutting corners on maintenance and repairs inside the cabin. As we took off I had little choice but to hope that this wasn’t also true for the actual business side of the airplane mechanics.

All was well until somewhere over the Indian Himalayas we hit an immense storm. Now, we had been a little late for the airport (despite 2nd insanely reckless “White Knuckle Express” ride) and had been plonked in the very back row of the plane. (Never again.)

As the storm thundered on (we could see lightening and rain out the windows) not only did we get shook up and down in the usual turbulence fashion, but we were also shaking side-to-side. We learned later that this was due to the tail of the plane fishtailing. The storm went on and on, and the cabin crew, who already looked tired and miserable, went very quite indeed.

The captain wasn’t, he blathered on and on but unfortunately my Malaysian language skills arent up to much, so I didn’t understand a word. Eventually he swapped into halting English only to say: “We fly in big storm. Please fasten your seatbelts; this could be dangerous.”

COULD BE DANGEROUS?!

This is not what you want to hear from your captain when you are apparently flying in an active washing machine through a cyclone while the flickering TV screen on the back of the seat in front of you cheerfully insists on illustrating how we were currently over the Himalayan mountains! Those things are spiky man!

I could go on and on, but suffice to say that storm lasted no less than THREE hours, during which time we were shook about like rag dolls and generally scared shitless. My girl, a much better flier than me, was sobbing in my lap and the person next to me actually vomited into her paper bag (I thought that only happened in the movies) and all I could think was “This is it – we are about to die”.

It was at this time that I made pals with God again.

My Theology of Relativity (an incomplete explanation)

Ok so really what happened was that I was so scared that I was doing lots of meditating-in-action to stay calm. You know, deep breathing, focusing on transcending the ego’s fear of death and all of that Zen, “Power of Now” stuff. And it was working for a while, but eventually my fear got the better of me and I began to pray … to God … for the first time in many a year.

And, you know what? It helped. Especially as in my near-delirious state, and always having had a lively imagination, things were going all “Conversations With God” in that I wasn’t just praying into a void but rather the Big Guy was actually talking right back!

But once we landed safely in Paris (and chatted to a nice Australian couple by the baggage thing who dumbfounded us when they remarked what a calm and pleasant flight it was!) I found myself wondering how I had come to this, praying to the God I had previously rejected (and the dogma of whose fundamentalist followers I still do reject)?

At first I put it down to simple fear. Honestly believing I was facing immanent death, I have freaked out and prayed like a big baby.

And to an extent this was true.

BUT

Over the coming months I noticed that if I allowed myself to pray to my own fuzzy, New Age / Christian hybrid of “God” I felt a lot better and that darkness, that unease I had been feeling subsided. And I realised that I had had the Christian God so thoroughly drummed into me as a kid, that it in fact out-and-out rejecting this God (or at least the friendly side of “Him”) was causing some kind of existential dissonance inside me. I realised it is easier for me to simply allow the general concept of God back into my schemata, but to settle my problems with my Christian upbringing by simply updating my version of the whole thing.

I allowed myself to meld my fuzzy New Age concepts of a big, benign Universe or “Great Spirit” with my hard-edged Zen ideas with that nice, friendly, white bearded God-guy that I used to find great comfort praying to as a kid – MINUS all the burn-in-hell-you-sinner crap which is of no use to me whatsoever.

And you know, what? As silly as the whole thing sounds – it works for me! It put paid to a semi-conscious battle that had been raging inside me between the little boy who still believes, and the man who knows better.

Which is all very well, but how can I say that Truth is relative.

Well, I believe that we can’t ever truly know the whole truth – because, in the words of that great philosopher-clown Billy Connolly: “It’s too big”. We are like mosquitoes trying to understand the Sydney Harbour Bridge: it can’t be done.

But we can come to understand what version of the truth works for us to help us achieve happiness, not just on an intellectual level (for me, Zen, Taoism, scientific rationalism) but on an emotional child-within kind of way too (for me, Fuzzy, New Age version of God).

Here’s the crux if it again: You can’t know the absolute truth for certain, it isn’t possible, so make up your own version of Truth and be happy with that (and then leave others to enjoy their versions of Truth).

So ends my mad ramble. Now go forth and create your own Special Theology of Relativity and generally be awesome.

P.S. – After re-reading this, I am not sure that I have really managed to capture the power of what it is I am trying to say. Unfortunately, the “truth” for me today is that I have run out of writing steam and time, but maybe at some point I will come back and add to this rather unsatisfactory explanation of my actual theory, which seemed to get a bit of a back seat to the adventure story in the end. Or maybe I won’t. In case I don’t (highly likely) and you want to know more about this kind of thing, I suggest you look up “perennial philosophy”.

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

]]> http://www.rebelzen.com/2009/04/remixing-god-a-special-theology-of-relativity/feed/ 11 http://www.rebelzen.com/2009/03/there-is-no-try/ http://www.rebelzen.com/2009/03/there-is-no-try/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:32:43 +0000 Seamus http://www.rebelzen.com/?p=106 By Seamus Anthony

Today I had one of those “Little Kensho moments” where I just suddenly saw things exactly as they are, and in this moment I truly realised the inherent truth and power in the famous Yoda quote:

“Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”

In my case what I was thinking about was my three main goals for this year – to lose weight/get fitter, to greatly improve my French and to re-establish myself as a regular fixture on the Melbourne live music scene.

Of the three of these, the only one I have really been doing properly is the latter; I have been getting out and playing lots of gigs, networking and getting right back into the groove of being a busy, active musician again. I am just doing it. There’s miles to go yet but I have started the journey; I’m doing what needs to be done.

As for the other two, well I have been learning some more French, and I have been doing some exercise and have at least not gotten fatter – but the truth is I have been making excuses. Excuses like “I find it hard to find the time to practice my French skills” or “I can’t enjoy life without (excessive amounts of) designer beer and fine food”.

And so at the end of the day, I just haven’t been “doing it”. To do it just means to do it. Simple as that. And as the wise green grommit said, you’re either doing it, or your NOT doing it, there is no middle ground.

Reading about how to do it, isn’t doing it. Thinking about doing it isn’t doing it. Talking about doing it isn’t doing it. Only doing what needs to be done in order to get the result you seek is doing it, everything else is just bullshit and excuses.

Moving Stones Around

The qualitive difference in my two experiences, “doing it” and “not doing it”, is marked. In the case of getting my music out there again, I feel a flow and a sense of satisfaction that I haven’t felt in years. In fact, yesterday and today I was even happy to do very little (in this area) for the first time in a while, without a nagging feling that I should be doing something more constructive. I felt free to rest for a bit because I know I have some good momentum going. It’s like a bike ride: it’s not all uphill, you get to coast down some hills here and there.

But in the two cases of French and Fitness, I feel blocked (or at least I did until today). I felt frustrated and like I keep trying but to no avail.

The mistake I am making? There is no try! Only Do or do not!

But why have I been “Not doing”? Well, I believe it has to do with what’s going on in my head; my internal dialouges and beliefs are getting in my own way.

The lines of dialouge directly preceding the featured Yoda quote do a nice job of exploring this:

LUKE
Master, moving stones around is one thing. This is totally different.

YODA
No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.

In case you don’t remember or know, this whole scene tells the story of Yoda teaching Luke Skywalker to use the Force to raise Luke’s stricken X-Wing fighter from the swamp. Luke believes it is easy to make stones levitate but that he can’t use his mind to lift up the spacecraft.

And that’s what I have been doing, moving stones around instead of “doing it” for real. I have been going for a jog here and there, I stopped putting sugar in my coffee, but really it’s not enough to stem and reverse the middle aged spread that’s been threatening to engulf my hips. And I have been learning new French words at a nice steady pace with my little 16 month old daughter, but I still haven’t been knuckling down to learn all the “difficult” grammar stuff that will really mean the difference to my French language skills.

And why?

Because in my mind, these actions are associated with displeasure and negative beliefs. I believe I find grinding through French grammar “boring”. I believe I can’t enjoy life without eating too much cheese and sweet food and drinking too much beer.

In my mind, these hurdles were too big for me to leap, to which Yoda would say:

“No! No different! Only different in your mind.”

The truth is there is plenty of pleasure to be had from both these activities – but my mind has just gotten stuck in a couple of little dead-ends. If I am going to find my way to my destination, I need to reverse the old brain-car and meander back through the suburbs of my skull until I find the way through to the destination I want to end up at. There I will enjoy the pleasure of understanding what the hell all those Frenchies in my life are always rabbiting on about so effusively. There I will not feel like such a bloated old toad when I am on stage singing my little heart out. And along the way there will be plenty of enjoyable milestones too.

“You must unlearn what you have learned.”

The funny thing is, a couple of years back I was in just the same mental dead-end with gig-hunting. I had convinced myself that the way I felt about getting on the phone and hustling up live music gigs was still the same as it was when I was a depressed, marijuana-addicted, slightly paranoid 23 year old (I hated it then). In fact this was not the case, and once I broke that barrier I have enjoyed applying all the skills I have since learned towards this task, and have had no problems at all with it, in fact I am enjoying it even more than I did when I was a gung-ho 19 year old kid.

So on the one hand, it’s all a process, and sometimes you just can’t rush things…

But on the other, that’s probably just another of those mental ideas that I need to unlearn in order to speed me on my way.

I will leave you with another pertinent bit of dialogue from The Empire Strikes Back:

LUKE
I don’t… I don’t believe it.

YODA
That is why you fail…

I wrote about this ages ago here. Basically sums up my philosophy of life.

By Seamus Anthony

A long time ago in another head space, I wrote the the following:

“Everything is Appropriate

“Just as above you is the Macrocosm, a massive spiralling universe, far too huge to even idly comprehend, so too within you is a microcosm. This microcosm reaches and descends within you to the most finite level, and then beyond measurement. On top of this, every other ‘cosm’ of whatever size or description (a hair, another person, a distant star) has it’s own microcosm descending within, and it’s own perspective on the macrocosm in which it is suspended.

“So it is obvious from this that the concerns of a single human individual do not count for much at all. Yes, that’s right. The often harrowing emotional pain and terrible physical misfortunes that eventually befall all humans to some degree, mean not a blip to the massive universe as a whole. And then, to really push the point, if these issues are so insignificant in comparison to the universe that we know, consider then their significance in the larger macrocosms that our universe must surely be a minute part of…And so on……

“If I were to put a skewer in your eye right now, you would not be very impressed at all. You would, from your perspective, consider my actions to be both ‘wrong’ and ‘bad’. Wrong in that it seems right to you that I should leave your eye in peace rather than in pain; and Bad in that having both eyes in working order is a situation that you see as being ‘Good’(i.e. useful and not painful). But, in reality, all of these events are only true to the universe in terms of energy exchange. All things are comprised of the single component – Energy. All matter is understood to be comprised of pure energy moving around perpetually in an infinite dance. Maintaining a balance; Yin attracted to Yang; and all in abhorrence of a vacuum.

“So, in terms of the Universe, or more accurately the Tao (the Unknowable Hugeness of All Things), when some unfortunate human being’s eye gets poked out by some skewer wielding freak, all that happens is that an amount of configured energy gets moved around. Arm energy moves skewer energy towards and into eyeball energy, eyeball energy falls out. Eye socket energy bleeds a lot and the vacuum left by the removed eyeball gets quickly filled up with air energy. TO THE TAO THIS IS NOT A MORAL ISSUE. This is why ‘God lets bad things happen to good people’.

“On the positive side, this is why you have the opportunity to free yourself from the mental traps of your social conditioning. Not that this is always an easy thing to do. Obviously most people never do. When your car breaks down and your back hurts and it’s hot and you’re going to be late for work and your boyfriend just left you all in the same day, it can sure make you feel like the whole universe is against you. But it’s not…The Universe is impartial. To the Tao, things simply are what they are, no more. No morality, no expectations, no judgment. So if, when under duress, you remind yourself of this (perhaps after a nice healthy tantrum), you can automatically relax. You are able to relax because you realize that none of it really matters, and that no preconceived idea you have about life is verifiable, and that the way your society taught you to respond to situations is completely arbitrary. Therefore you can, theoretically(!), choose to be happy at any given moment.

“No matter what your current personal circumstances, it is important to remember that in an impartial universe, all things are exactly as they are meant to be at any given moment. If you doubt this, then observe nature; is the Tiger remorseful for killing the gentle Deer? Never.”

But What About Karma?

I also posted this essay over at TaoBums, and underneath it you will see a comment asking where Karma comes into all of this.

And what a good question!

I used to take a hard-line stance against what I saw as woolly concepts such as Karma.

Maybe I’m going soft, but these days I am much more open to concepts like ‘God’ as opposed to simply ‘Tao’, ‘Karma’ as opposed to ‘Randomness’, and potentially even the continuation of the soul after death as opposed to simple energetic reintegration into the whole.

This is in fact one of the reasons I coined the term Rebel Zen, because I found myself needing to rebel against my initial rebellious stance, if that makes sense, in order to return to a more balanced position.

To explain more clearly: I grew up in a Christian home, talking each night to God and worrying about “Sin”.

Then, in my late teens, I swung to extreme hedonism.

Then I went back to spirituality, but found myself attracted to a hardcore Taoist outlook. To me this meant no God, no woo-woo fluff, just an unfathomable mystery and cruel, hard Nature.

But then during a terrifyingly shaky flight through a storm over the Himalayas I found myself silently crying out to God to forgive me should I die. Safely back on the ground, I couldn’t just put it down to fear, knew I had to re-address my core beliefs. Since then I have re-adjusted my stance to one of fuzzy (if mystified) openness to the “woo-woo fluff” I once rejected. That’s what I meant about rebelling against my own rebellion.

But then other times I just see this as sentimental poppy-cock fabricated by my fear-ridden ego.

What do you think?

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Mystery makes the world go around. The only reason you are reading this article, and not checking your facebook or twitter profiles is that you don’t know how it is going to end. When things get predictable people tend to lose interest and look elsewhere.

When you get down to the fine detail and study life closely, Mystery is the animating force of the world, the reason why every man and woman gets up in the morning, has breakfast and steps out into the wild crazy world.

The search for meaning and answers behind the events of your life is fueled by your innate curiosity. Curiosity is a force so powerful that it sets the direction of our civilization and species, fills the wallets of gossip magazine publishers and drives people to continue to search for answers against great odds.

You only need to look at prime time TV, with its wall-to-wall crime shows and detective dramas to see the popularity of people searching for the unknown. Do people like the blood, the gore, the tales of tragedy? Some do perhaps, but most glue their eyeballs to the screen 4 nights a week because they are addicted to the idea of mystery.

The Seeker

Most spiritual and personal development seekers start out on journeys of self improvement and inner reflection with the best intentions, looking for truth and insight wherever it appears to be available.

It soon becomes apparent that there is a huge amount of people willing to share their answers with you. Some will give them to you for free, other want you to buy it from them, and of course there are others that will give you their version in exchange for the sane, rational part of your brain. There are simple answers, complex answers, mantras that explain the universe in a single Sanskrit sentence, through to multi-layered pantheons and metaphysical systems.

Some people will get sick of the searching, and go for a “quick fix, one answer fits all” approach to life, which could take the form of joining an organized religion, buying the full $30,000 training package from the personal development guru or becoming a strict and unwavering atheist.

Others will become disillusioned with the search altogether and fall back into old patterns, exchanging the path of awakening for a lifetime of being asleep. For them the seeking is a painful experience, something that must be accomplished or they have somehow failed. They are always looking for that missing part of themselves out there in the world.

Some people think that once you become enlightened, suddenly the answers to all of the questions of the universe are revealed. The true wisdom (or at least my version of it) is in fact the exact opposite. It is the idea that the truth may never be found, but it is in the seeking and searching where the realities of life, the universe and the contents of your inner world become visible.

I tend to search and read and meditate without the need to lock down a certain fact as being true. Once you get to the stage where the answers are no longer important, the search becomes pure joy, it is truly the stuff of being alive. You embrace the fact that you don’t know everything, and will never know everything. There is always another perspective to every situation.

A lot of the things that I once considered true have revealed themselves in my life to be false, and vice versa, so that I can safely assume that any of my beliefs could be thrown on their heads in the very next instance.

OPEN AND AWARE MIND

An open but aware mind is the key. With a developed skill of discernment you can separate the wheat from the chaff (or use another less polite euphemism) and take every “answer” and truth provided to you with a grain of salt, knowing that only via the power of direct experience should you take anything for a truth.

By living this way you can use the perpetual mystery to propel you through life. To always seek new experiences and adventures, to truly experience an enlightened state by seeing everything in the world through fresh eyes, like that of a new born child. Once you realize that every experience in life is unique, and that most of your truths are really just preconditioned assumptions then the everydayness of your life takes on a life of its own.

You are not searching for something outside yourself to complete something that is missing, but marveling at the strange place we call our lives, with all its hidden subtleties and whack-you-over-the-head realities.

By keeping your sense of mystery and wonder at the universe, you continue to feel alive inside.

The answers are the boring part; it’s the journey that is the thing of value. The journey to understanding and wisdom is the thing that can’t be bottled, packaged or put into a 10 stage seminar program. That is the true gold of the eternal quest of the spiritual seeker.

When I despair of and don’t know what to do about this crazy world we live in then I just try to do something positive. Help someone, give a little money to a cause, or if I feel the urge, just have fun making something cool. I believe it all counts.

It counts because every time you follow your creative urge, you are contributing to the great mission we have been charged with: to create a better world.

Creating cool stuff – be it a work of art, a healing practice, a cake, a blog, or just a nice vibe in a room – helps to add a little pebble of goodness to the slow growing tower of joy that (I believe) is the destiny of life on Earth.

Yes, that’s something I believe. I also believe that we all need to believe in something in order to function successfully – we need a purpose. So although I don’t know if it’s true, I choose to believe that our purpose is to make positive contributions to the evolution of Life and to eventually triumph over the unenlightened condition and become a spiritually advanced, peaceful, happy race living in harmony with all of nature.

I know, I know, that last sentence made you raise a cynical eyebrow right?But I don’t care – I have to believe this or else what’s the fucking point?

I like to think of humanity in the future being like one of those super-hip races of aliens that Captain Kirk and his motley lot used to come across sometimes – all synked-in together and totally chilled, in touch with our inherent enlightenment. Space-aged Buddhas in silver outfits. Perhaps no longer in need of a physical body or maybe just capable of living happily and healthily for a couple of hundred years before moving to a known and welcoming after-life.

We as a collective are, obviously, a long way from this yet. But like I said, I believe that every positive contribution, no matter how small,
helps us get closer to this eventuality.

So get up and do something, help someone or the planet or make something inherently “good” and you will be helping the cause.

It’s like the tortoise and the hare. Evil (the hare) raced ahead, but the slow fire of Love (err, the tortoise) will eventually win out through persistence and resilience. We must be unrelenting in our faith in this.

Anyway, that’s how I cope. I choose to believe that every little good creation or act of kindness helps towards the final positive result. Otherwise how could I get up and get to work? Why would I bother write an article or a song only to die and for all my efforts to mean nothing? That’s a dispiriting concept. We need meaning in order to be happy. I’ve tried believing in Meaningless and it left me cold and depressed, no matter how much I meditated or rationalised that this hypothesis makes the most sense.

Of course I could be wrong. Maybe I just need to get over my egotistical need to contribute. Maybe enlightenment, as I used to believe, means admitting that we are just ’straw dogs’ after all (as the Tao Te Ching tells us), that life is devoid of purpose and meaning. Certainly we risk being ‘trampled underfoot’ every day; so many lives lost early and cruelly…

But I have decided to believe something different: that it is worthwhile creating something good and that it does make a positive difference, however small. I don’t know it for a fact, nobody knows anything for certain in this bizarre and trippy dream we call life, but I choose to believe because it gives me the strength to help others somehow everyday (even if it is just by cracking a few lame jokes, although hopefully in more ways than just that).

So have faith and make something good, be it a masterpiece or a plate of slightly over-cooked muffins. Believe in the positive evolution of Life, help somehow, whether it be by saving a bug from getting washed down the drain, or by flying out to serve as a volunteer in a needy part of the world.

It all counts.