OK so my last post was a bit hardcore, but it was meant to be. I wanted it to be a short, sharp, unexpected shock.

Why? Because I don’t want Rebel Zen to be just another blog. In fact, Steve and I do not intend Rebel Zen to just be a blog but something much more multi-faceted than that.

We have both of us had a break from regular posting in order to refresh and now I think we are ready to come back to Rebel Zen with a fresh perspective for 2009. And no, it’s not going to turn into a ‘doom and gloom’ activist blog BUT we are hoping to shake up the personal development scene as best we can – to confound expectation. That’s why it’s ‘Rebel’ Zen not ‘Feel Good Zen’, y’know?

What I am interested in is how can we move boundaries around and mix the idea of a personal development brand with activism, with art-for-art’s-sake, with music, with offline ‘real world’ happenings, and with whatever else we want to throw into the mix. And importantly – how can we make this something about ACTION not just IDEAS – because ideas are fantastic but without action they are just puffs of smoke on the breeze.

So yes, life is wonderful; we have the opportunity to jump on the back of life and ride it like an untamed stallion. It might not always go the way we want it to, but if we work with it then we just may find it leads us to water.

Yin, Yang and The Underlying Whole

The juxtaposition between ‘Life is fucked’ and Life is wonderful’ is the Yin Yang model at work. This model, so often co-opted and turned into a cliche, is an incredibly powerful concept (or rather underlying fact of existence) which, true to its own nature, is at once so simple and so complex that I find it hard to write about the mind-splitting ruminations I have had about its fundamental importance. I’d like to explore this some more this year.

And underlying the opposites of Yin and Yang is the Tao which is complete and all-inclusive. Represented by a simple circle, the Yin Yang model fits into it and is embraced by the Tao. And so as MonkMojo said in the comments under the last post:

“Reality contains the fucked, non-fucked and an infinite number of fucked flavors in between. It is complete. ”

This is truth. But nevertheless, this kind of psycho-babble may be of little help to you if you are having a hard time of it right now because sometimes when you are going through Hell, it can be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. To help with this, in the next post, I will go through some practical ways to experience less of the ‘fucked’ and more of the ‘wonderful’.

Stay tuned and meanwhile, here’s to 2009! May it be wonderful!

Seamus Anthony

Photo of laughing girls by A4gpa