By this I mean it’s not (in my opinion, unqualified by any particular dogma) something that just happens and then that’s it – you’re enlightened for the rest of your life.

For me it’s somewhere you have to make the effort to go (although sometimes you stumble upon it without trying, like walking out of the trees into an unexpected clearing in a forest).

And like all visits, you sit, maybe drink some tea, enjoy – but then you have to leave, already looking forward to your next visit.

Usually, I travel to this delightful place by meditation, and it can be a bumpy ride getting there. Sometimes I run out of time and steam and have to turn back without reaching the destination. Usually, if I keep steadfastly on, I get there eventually.

I used to go to this place a lot but over the last year or two I have rarely made the effort or found the time to visit this place.

I think this is ok (I had things to do) but it is not sustainable and the price is always increased feelings of negativity and decreased well-being. Recently I have had to admit to myself that this has been reaching a quiet kind of crisis point and I have really needed to get back on my chair and meditate. Thankfully, my trusty old steed is still happy to bear my load.

Maybe this is also what is meant by “returning to the breath”?

By Seamus Anthony

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.

This is part two of a series about “Going With the Flow”

I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, and also that you must always listen to the messages the Universe is giving you.

There is so much confusing information around these ideas in personal development writing. You get one Guru that says that no matter how many times you fail, perseverence will always pay off. They would say that should chase your dreams no matter what happens along the way.

This is good advice in most circumstances, especially if you follow Curly’s Law and have found your ONE TRUE THING. But it can also lead to going down the wrong river for a long time, and plunging over a metaphysical waterfall.

On the other hand, there are other experts which tell you to listen to what the Universe is saying. If you constantly get the message that your current course of action is not going to work out, then it is time to change course, abandon ship and start something new.

As an example, say you are an aspiring horror writer. You sit down five nights a week  ’til past midnight, banging out story after story. They are  filled with interesting plot twits, fanatical villains and buckets of gore, and you think that they are fantastic. You send out thirty letters a week to publishers trying to get your novels out of the desk drawer, and into the bookstores. As the rejection letters mount up, you read through them carefully and see the consistant message. The market for horror books is dwindling, and so they are not taking on books by new authors.

You could continue to go along the same way as before, and not change direction. But then you realise you would only have your self to blame if it goes wrong. Maybe the world has had enough horror? Maybe you should change direction slightly, and still realise your goal in a slightly different way?

As in most things in life, the middle path wisdom shows us the way forward. True wisdom and awareness is about deciding the right course of action of the events of your life, as they are occuring in the here and now. That quiet, small voice within is the only thing worth listening too. This source of inner wisdom, called by some intuition, or higher self is the part of you that is constantly surrounded by the current of life, that best feels the flow of the river of time and fate.

Its the closest thing to a paddle and rudder that you have got.

This is part one of a series about “Going With the Flow”

There is a lot written on personal development blogs about the concept of “going with the flow.” I am sure most Rebel Zen readers have encountered this term many times during their internet wanderings, and that you have heard many different takes on what it means. Here at Rebel Zen, we aren’t ones to get too hung up on definitions. What I am more interested on is different perspectives on the one idea. So in that spirit, here is one take on the idea of “Going with the Flow”

BIG FLOW : Life Flow

We quite often get to a point in our lives where things get out of control. This can be a major source of anxiety and stress for a lot of people, as they feel that they are constantly fighting against the world for control of their situation in life and circumstances.

Others however, learn to “go with the flow.” They realise that you can NEVER have 100% control of your life circumstances, and anything could happen in the next 5 years, weeks, days or minutes which could completely change things.

The metaphor for this is of sitting in a canoe on a raging river. The river is your life, and the direction it flows is the combination of all of the forces and factors of your everyday existence. All is not lost to the hands of fate, because in your hand  you have a paddle. This paddle is your own goals, intentions and actions.

While I cannot, no matter how hard I try, change the way that the water is flowing, I can paddle myself away from obstacles, or learn to turn my canoe in just the right way to avoid capsizing when things get rough.
Along the stream of life there are parts of the river that you want to visit, and parts full of dangers that you want to avoid at all cost.  I have found one of the ways to get a big, powerful paddle is by having a super clear, laser focused direction. Good Old Curlys Law in practice

In order to know which way to paddle, you need to have Awareness of the direction of the stream. Meditation, or taking some time out from the day to day routine is important, as it allows you to detach slightly from the flow of the River of Life,  and stand on the safe river bank.

From there you can look at things in perspective of the greater picture. Step beyond yourself and see how the actions you make today affect tomorrow.

“Aggh! What’s Wrong With Me?”

Ever asked yourself that? I know I have…

But look – the answer to that question is NOTHING! There is nothing wrong with you dude!
You are a human and humans don’t just feel great all the time – humans feel all kinds of emotions including the unpleasant ones.

Humans make mistakes, they regret their actions, they lose their temper, they get drunk, they spend too much money on stupid things, they hurt themselves and the ones they love.

Normal.

All of this is completely normal and I want you to know right now that you don’t need to be a super-disciplined self-help guru to be happy! You don’t need to try and be perfect – YOU ALREADY ARE PERFECT! Even your so-called flaws, even those things that you want to change about yourself – these things are all perfect. That doesn’t mean you can’t implement positive change in your life – but meanwhile stop giving yourself a hard time, TODAY!

Here is the thrust of Rebel Zen – you don’t have to be an angel to be happy! You don’t have to be some hardcore health-nut to get more out of life via simple meditation and contemporary uses for the ancient philosophies of the East. You can learn simple easy ideas and techniques to be consistently happy for the majority of your life and to be ‘okay with it’ when you’re feeling shit. Full stop.

So You Like To Party – So What?

Most of us know that going full-tilt into a life of non-stop partying and self-gratification doesn’t make you happy – but on the other hand I have come to the conclusion (epiphany more like it) that you don’t need to be the world’s most self-disciplined puritanical yoga health guru to be happy. Forget about it! You’ll just do what I did on-and-off for years and make yourself miserable every time you let yourself down.

Forget expectations of becoming perfect – and realise that you are perfect now!

Warning: This can be hard to do. It’s easy to pay this sort of philosophy lip-service but not as easy to really practice it when the shit hits the proverbial fan…

Perhaps being able to live like this is the definition of enlightenment?

For most of our daily life, we are completely saturated with ideas and messages that do not originate from ourselves. Walk down the street and you are bombarded with advertisements, sit down on the internet and you are quickly mind boggled by the sheer amount of content available. The modern world has provided us with access to information that would be beyond the wildest dreams of someone even 20 years ago.

The paradox is with access to so much information about other things; we have become detached from a large amount of knowledge and wisdom about ourselves. There are so many distractions available, and so many different types of media to consume. The very fact that we may have to sit alone, with our own thoughts for even 30 minutes fills most people with a small sense of dread.

I am sure that this is not the natural state of human consciousness. In the past, you would assume that there were vast stretches of time, once food and shelter had been looked after, that men and women would be able to sit around and think. In this time they would have the power to consciously address the contents of their minds, rather than let themselves run on autopilot, never really exploring the depths of their inner life.

People in modern society however just aren’t used to the idea of having nothing to do, and we have been pre-conditioned to think that time not being productive or time spent with our internal thoughts and feelings is wrong. We get the idea that time with ourselves is time wasted, and so we push on without really taking stock of our own mental landscape. It seems as if the only types of introspection that people undertake on a regular basis are based on worry and anxiousness. People worry about the future endlessly, and they go over past events with an eye to what they could have done better.

Most people will do just about anything to escape their own company and feelings of “boredom.” They will read 5 year old gossip mags while waiting for the dentist, or watch endless repeats of shows on TV. They will surf the internet aimlessly, going to the same sites over again. But in reality, a little time addressing “boredom” is extremely well spent. When the mind finds that it has nothing active to address, it brings up unprocessed information, allowing it to come up to the surface, and be “seen” by your conscious mind. Your worries, your frustrations, your fixation on things like work, being productive or becoming free. All of these things which are always “kind of there” in the background become more real and tactile.

The three different points below are things that you can try to address next time you find yourself with a spare hour and nothing to do. Just sit and let the mind go where it wants, without your conscious interaction :

1. Use the time to break cyclic thinking
Realise that your mind is the most powerful tool and resource we know of in the UNIVERSE. There has been nothing more complex ever discovered. Although it may not fit in with a number of current scientific paradigms, I am here to tell you that for most practical purposes, YOU (the observer you) are in control of your brain and your thoughts.

If you find yourself in these times of introspection going over the same thoughts without ever resolving a solution, then make it your goal to break out of that cycle and get some closure. Look for patterns in your thinking, and devise some clear action points to get from where you are, to where you want to be. This is not worry time, this is looking at the deeper thoughts and addressing them head on.

As the Buddha said “Strive for your own liberation with diligence.”

2. Is there someone you need to call?
Quite often in times of introspection, my thoughts will (for no apparent reason that I can fathom at the time) find their way to a past or current friend or acquaintance. I think about something they once said, or what they are doing, or things that I may have said to them.

I can’t tell you the number of times that this has happened, and a week or so later I get a phone call or email from the person saying they really want to catch up with me, or I hear through the modern grapevine (facebook) that they are in need of something, or having a rough time. If you have thoughts about people that may have once been part of your life, perhaps it is time to give them a call “just because” and see what is going on.

3. Get to know your true self.

I am sure that there a lot of people out there in blogoland that don’t even know who they really are. I mean at a deep level, life is a process of discovering exactly who we are as people.

In quiet times, is there a voice inside you saying that the life you are presently living is not for you, that you yearn to do something different? Modern life is very good at pigeonholing people into neat little boxes, and railroading them into careers that sound promising, but in reality are a minefield of stress and boredom. Use the time to look at the possibilities, not just a few but the massive set of options that are available to everyone. I heard it said in the last week that people under a great deal of stress can only see 3 options at most to any situations, where in reality there may be 100’s

Also I am sure that there are people very well acquainted with their ego selves, as they see that aspect expressed every day, but not the true, deeper self that is connected to the universe and everyone else around you. That aspect needs time to come out on its own, in quiet and creative time. By listening to the quieter voices within, we get a sense of the whole of ourselves, and a more intimate understanding of the parts of our personality that make us unique.

As the Greek philosophers were fond of saying “Know Thyself!”

To find your true purpose, click here to get the first Rebel Zen Ebook – Its FREE!

You will never, ever achieve enlightenment.

I will never, ever achieve enlightenment.

The Buddha did not achieve it.

Nor did Jesus.

Nor did Mohamed.

Nor did Lao Tzu.

Nor did Osho.

Nor did Alan Watts, Thomas Merton, Krishnamurti, Chogyam Trungpa, The Maharashi, Rudolf Steiner, Douglas Harding, Mother Theresa, Brad Warner, Deepack Chopra or Eckhart Tolle.

In fact nobody in the history of the world has ever achieved enlightenment.

And nobody ever will.

How can I say this?

Because enlightenment is not something you achieve, it’s something that you realise.

That might just be a little nit-picky matter of one word, but I believe it makes a lot of difference. Why? Because it changes your whole focus. My advice (not that you asked for it) is stop trying to achieve enlightenment (whatever that means to you anyway) and just let that shit go.

Enlightenment isn’t “out there”. You don’t have to become a ’seeker’ and go on a ’spiritual journey’
to find it. Nor do you need to go on some kind of Jules Verne type mission to centre of your being to find it either.

Enlightenment is right here in front of your nose. It is something innate. It is everything everywhere.

You realise your inherent enlightenment by accepting what is here now.

Click here to get the first Rebel Zen e-book – free. It contains a powerful trick to realising your inherent enlightenment – and what’s more it’ll help you kick butt in more pragmatic areas of life too (like career etc.). Go on – click already (it’s free).

Many eastern spiritual texts put forward the idea that you must learn to have a full awareness of your whole self. While our self looks like it is an integrated whole from one level, scratch the surface (via meditation or other methods of self-enquiry) and you will find a whole heap of different parts of your personality, all striving to express themselves. The one that stands out the most initially is the Ego, the self-important, self-centric aspect of our personality . The ego (which is a modern western psychological term I might add) has been given a fairly bad rap in the modern “new age” scene.

image by Swiss Bones

Somewhere along the way, our Western minds have turned this into the ridiculous notion that to be happy you must get rid of, or even completely destroy the ego.

My own personal experience has brought me to a different understanding. I believe that there is no reason to destroy what is essentially a part of yourself. The real power is in learning to integrate this and all of the other interesting and unique parts of your personality into a functioning whole.

People go through life without a second thought to the idea that there are separate parts of their self, which manifest themselves at different times and in different situations. The ego is just one of these parts, the one that thinks that it is separate from the rest of creation, and that IT is the most important thing in the known Universe.

And quite frankly, it is good to have this instinct kick in from time to time. It stops you getting walked all over, gives you the confidence to claim your place in the world and also to create and express yourself. Knowing that YOU are you, what your place in the world is has a profound importance to our whole selves. But it also has a negative side of selfishness, aggressive behavior and helping us justify doing things that may not always work out best for everybody involved.

The image that makes the concepts more tangible for me is the Yin-Yang. Your personality is in constant flux, and each part must be in harmony with the other for balance. The Ego, or separate, selfish self must be brought into balance with your quiet, inner, calm, connected observer self. Let one part express itself too much and you become overbearing, self-important and obtuse. Too much of the other and you become meek, mild and can have no meaningful interaction with the outside world.

Hey, and don’t get too beat up if you find yourself acting like a complete tool from time to time. Seriously, everyone does it!

DYNAMIC balance means that even though you may find yourself at one end of the Ego scale, you have the self awareness to bring yourself down to a centered state at the appropriate time.

Of course it is not as clear cut as all that, and these are only arbitrary labels that we have placed on very strange and complex phenomena. But at least it gives you a framework to get our talking monkey-brains around and be able to see where all of the pieces fit in.

So in order to address this all important balance, here are my top 5 strategies to keep your ego in proportion.

1 Realise your size in proportion to the universe

When it comes down to it, you are a tiny speck on a tiny speck, floating in a vast sea of nothing more giant and unfathomable then you could ever get your head around. The very notion that what you do on a daily basis affects things at the scales that really seem to matter in the universe is wishful thinking gone crazy. As Seamus put it in his excellent “Looking through the wrong end of the telescope“: You. Don’t. Know. Anything. About. Anything.

The liberation and true freedom of insignificance is yours to grasp at any time. When the ego gets up and starts jumping up and down about its importance, just keep this fact in mind to bring it all back to perspective.

2 Realise that you are where you are only through the help of others

The network of other people you build up around you in friends, co-workers, family and neighbors is one of the most fundamental assets in life. Think that you have accomplished so much in your life? Sure, a lot was done by you, but there is no way anyone could get anything done without the help, co-operation and support of people around them. All of life is a team exercise.

3 Understand that everyone is just as important as you

A lot of the ego’s jumping up and down, complaining and self importance is because it believes it is more important than ANYONE else in the world. You know why so many people in traffic jams start getting irate and honking their horns? It is because each of those people think their journey is more important than the person in front of them. Next time you feel the anger and indignation that the ego fires up when it feels like it is being threatened, just remind yourself that everyone, and everything is just as important as you in the universe. No more, and no less.

4 Realise the inherent impermanence in all things

As I stated before in the “Impermanence Top 40“, today’s front page news is tomorrow’s forgotten fact. So many events in our life that the Ego blows up into monumental proportions seem trivial the next day, and are forgotten next week. Nothing lasts forever, and nothing remains in the same state as it is now for even a second. Strive for your goals, and enjoy the journey. But realise that everything is just a castle in the sand, to be washed out to sea by the waves of time.

5 Realise that humour is the true currency of the universe.

Just about anything in life has a funny side to it, when looked at from a certain perspective. The greatest way to disarm the Ego is to see the inherent humour in everything. When we laugh, we see the connectedness of things, the joy in everyday life and realise that the world is not such a serious place after all.

Humour is all about connectedness, it shows us how previously unthought-of concepts are connected in unexpected ways. It connects us to others in the shared experience of having a laugh and goofing off for a while. Next time you find yourself acting from ego, have a laugh.

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.

By Seamus Anthony

The Age of Do-It-Yourself Enlightenment has arrived. Here’s social proof (check out the comments).

But what does this actually mean? Well, in our welcome post Steve and I explained this concept quite well. No real need to go visit that post, here is what we wrote:

“DIY Enlightenment is about finding your own version of truth, peace and happiness. It’s about learning to go with the flow and really experience life free from other people’s rules and dogma. It’s about recognising that ‘enlightenment’ is a concept that you are free to research, define, and achieve on your own – you DON’T need a guru to tell you what to do or to decide when you have achieved enlightenment…

“The Guru (or in the west, the Hermit) used to have the monopoly on the enlightenment niche because information about ‘enlightenment’ was not readily accessible and so it had to be transfered by direct verbal instruction.

Then as the written word came about, well these handwritten texts could only be in one place at a time so they naturally stayed in the guru’s library. And, frankly, it was good for business for the guru to have all info, so this model was maintained for a long time, even after crazy ideas like the printing press and *whoa* the interweb came about.

But dudes! This system is just a clunky, rusted artifact of the past! Never before has so much information been available so easily to so many people!

So, while it may mean bad news for those in guru business, there is no reason why an intelligent person such as yourself can’t access and study all kinds of different viewpoints and realise your own version of enlightenment right there in your own home in your own time and by whichever method suits you.

Because it’s not the method that matters, it’s the result.

Anyone who tells you that their method is the only way, is either a cynical bullshit artist, or is seriously self-deluded, and if you believe them… well, that’s your decision. We hope it works out for you.”

A Simple Three Step DIY Enlightenment Process

Like most truths, it is actually simple to get in touch with the enlightened state of mind and experience a remarkable increase in the amount of time that you enjoy inner peace and happiness. Probably the most difficult thing is getting out of your own way and allowing new ideas to take hold in your mind. Here’s some of my suggestions.

Step One: Read

Realising your inherent enlightenment is a matter of taste-testing a lot of different ideas. It’s about trying different concepts on for size; mixing and matching until you come up with a personal ‘look’ that suits you. And the most tried and true method is by reading.

There is so much stuff out there on the internet that you could probably read enough to get the ideas you need just by surfing the web. Personally I also recommend an old fashioned concept called the ‘book’ also, but maybe that’s just me being old school!

However, apparently a great percentage of people dislike reading (although I suppose they probably wouldn’t have made it this far into the article) so, personal preferences aside, listening and watching audio/video is probably just as good if that’s what suits your learning style.

Another great option these days is to join in conversations via social media – or start them. Ask “what is enlightenment?” and analyze what people say!

The point is to take in as many different viewpoints about life and philosophy so that you have a wide knowledge base from which to make your own decisions about “what is”.

Step Two: Live Life

Get out there an experience the wonder that is life on Earth.

Travel around the world. Have adventures. Take risks. Open a business. Work hard for the thrill of it. Find your passions and embrace them. Climb Mt. Everest. Explore your dreams without caring what others might say (let them stay home and be safe while you really live). Get tattooed from head to foot. Spend six months in a remote place by yourself painting and writing poetry. Train to become an Olympian. Have several wild, passionate love affairs and then experience what real love means (it’s different). Or the other way around!

Learn what it means to be alive. Get into trouble and then get yourself out of it. Take risks. try as many different experiences as you can and really be aware of these experiences as they are happening (see step three).

I am nearly 35 and have packed more flavour into my life so far than a lot of people ever do. I have been a (seriously minor) rock star, run a vibrant cafe in a strange city, studied acting, French, Kung Fu, Chi Gong, and yoga. I’ve flown around the world and spent weeks – even months – living with locals in foreign lands. I’ve worked my balls off in the corporate sector (Blech! But the experience is priceless) and I’ve spent months doing nothing much but contemplate the breeze.

I’ve thrown myself into excessive hedonism and spiritual asceticism – and wriggled my way back out of both. I’ve had the beautiful lovers and had my heart broken on several occasions. I’ve enjoyed a close and truly satisfying relationship for 8 years now. I’ve sat in deep, silent meditation with true masters, and danced and babbled in tongues with Born Again Christians. I’ve started and run a nightclub of the all night variety. I’ve fathered a child. I’ve taken six months off to write a novel. I’ve battled addictions. I’ve tried any experience that in any way appealed to me, more than I can write about here, and there are many more I intend to try.

I’ve even tried stuff that I am ashamed off (and really don’t want to share with the world) but I am GLAD of those things I did (even if I regret the consequences) because it has all given me one thing: a decent measure of wisdom.

And without wisdom you will never have self-confidence, peace of mind or joy of heart.

Step Three: Meditate

It doesn’t matter what kind of meditation you try. Just try it. In fact try several different types and read lots about it because if it doesn’t blow your mind straight away (and it probably won’t) then be assured it will eventually.

Why is meditation so important? It is essential to enlightenment practice because it develops Awareness, with a capital A.

Awareness, the ability to truly be present in this exact moment, is the most important skill you can ever learn because without awareness you are never really living authentically, but rather you are all in your head living in the past and future and living out twisted versions of reality as filtered through your unchecked ego.

Meditation is probably the best way, but it is true that people achieve Awareness in other ways. Why do you think skydivers get addicted to the thrill of jumping out of planes? They sure as hell aint thinking about much else other than the present moment when they are hurtling through the sky!

As this blog grows, we are going to go further into meditation and how it works to help you realise liberation in this lifetime, but this is too big a topic for this one post.

So for now: get reading, get living and start experimenting with meditation – before you know it you will be a card carrying Rebel Zen Master!