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

Have you ever had one of those weeks where you start out with a really punchy list of awesome things that are going to get done and then it all goes pear-shaped?

Well, I am in the middle one right now and it’s been a darn good litmus tester for all the Zen waffle I spout, let me tell you…

Entrepreneurial Action Stations – Go! Go! Go!

The week started out looking like it was going to be a corker, I had two articles coming out, one about The Way of Retreat over at the Change Blog and another about meditation over at Pick The Brain. Next in line was the release of a new e-book here at Rebel Zen, not the Curly’s Law one featured up top right (you should grab that now if you haven’t already), but one on Meditation (with a twist).

Then we (as in Steve, my business partner and I) were planning to finally launch PeoplePages for our client LivingNow. Only Steve has been struggling through great swathes of jungle-like code (or whatever that impenetrable babbling is behind the scenes here at the Internet-show) which incidentally is why he hasn’t written for this blog for a while.

On top of that we have another very exciting project we are about to launch (It’s hush for now but not for long) and I am getting back out there and resuming playing my songs live again tonight.

Enter the Tradesmen…

Just to add a bit of extra spice to the mix, we begin renovating our house this week. Anybody who’s been through that before might already be able to guess where all of this is heading.

So that we may be fabulous this Australian summer, we are getting a lovely deck added out front, which requires rewiring the house first and running the main cable under ground.

The electrician assured me it would be far cheaper to call in a specialist digger to dig the trench. So I do so, and in he comes with his mean looking machine and I tell him exactly where we need the trench dug and go in to get back to work.

After twenty minutes of pretty much failing to get anything significant done due to the racket, I notice the internet has stopped working so I figure it’s just having a moment and decide to get up and see how the great trenching expedition is faring.

Not too well by the worried looked furrowing the digger’s brow as he stares at the ground, mumbling to himself.

As I am walking over to see what’s up, I notice that the straight trench I asked for has turned into a kind of a Z pattern: straight across my drive, then down one side of it, then across the outside of the front fence line.

As I walk up I see he is holding up a length of severed wiring about two inches thick.

“I guess that’s why my internet isn’t working then”, I venture, genius that I am.

Why he went around the front of the fence line I never figured out, why he didn’t just do as asked I never figured out. But I pretty quickly figured out that it was going to be my job to spend half a day on the phone to the main telephone infrastructure provider over here in Australia trying to get them to get it fixed.

It took several hours for a telco-man to rock up, look at the issue, (while the digger hid behind a tree, I might add), spend an hour on the phone talking about it with a large population sample of Melbourne, tell me we have taken out the whole street and then drive off, without any reassurance as to when somebody was going to fix it.

Business As Usual on The Eastern Front (Not!)

Meanwhile, the electrician rocked up, got into a barny with the digger, and made him re-dig the trench the way it was supposed to be done in the first place, which resulted in our driveway looking not unlike a scene out of Mel Gibson’s ‘Galippoli’.

I figure at least I can write some stuff up on Microsoft word, but then the digger tips his bulky great machine over on to its side, ten minutes after the electrician and his burly apprentice had left. The next hour and a half is spent helping him to get it upright again.

Fast forward three days, mostly spent dealing with more shenanigans of this sort, and generally keeping everybody onside in the way that trades and service men like (if you want to get anything like a good job done). This means spending many precious moments listening to their (mostly disparaging) opinions on everything from tradesmen of other varieties to “all that computer stuff”. Oh, and making coffee.

(By the way, rigorous testing on my behalf has revealed that ALL tradies without exception have theirs “white with two”. Unfortunately it wasn’t until this morning that I realised that if you run out of cow’s milk and offer soy instead, they will all decline enthusiastically. Our household no longer stocks dairy, apparently it’s bad for you.)

… and no internet until this morning.

Ground Yourself in a Sense of the Greater Perspective

Now it would be a lie to say that I spent these last three days stomping around in a terrible mood due to the frustration of it all, after all, I don’t do all this personal development jazz for nothing.

It would also be a lie to say that I didn’t have a knot in my stomach that was becoming increasingly bothersome. “Just so much to do and so little getting done!” I felt like screaming as tradesman after tradesman rocked up at random and proceeded to waste half an hour of my time over nothing much. But I didn’t scream, I took some extra time with my little bubs, and did some meditative-breathing-in-action while contemplating the frolicsome sounds of springtime whipper-snippers and swearing tradesmen.

If Nothing On Your To-Do List Gets Done, Does It Really Matter?

When I finally logged on again today at home without the imposed rush of the interim library computer session I realised that yesterday was world Blog Action Day (or something like that) and the topic was Poverty.

This made me feel glad that I didn’t let all my little frustrations and dramas get to me too much, and that I managed to keep a sense of greater perspective about it all. It’s important to keep it real because, with the exception of those who experience major life-tragedies, the kinds of trials that all of us (whether we are working, middle or upper class) go through are Mickey Mouse compared to those suffering the plight of poverty, war and injustice.

And anyway, I am back online now and we are looking forward to releasing our new e-book early next week. Please opt-in below for your free updates by RSS or email or join our mailing list (and get another e-book free) so we can let you know when it’s ready.

]]> http://www.rebelzen.com/2008/10/the-subtle-art-of-getting-jack-shit-done/feed/ 7 http://www.rebelzen.com/2008/07/looking-through-the-wrong-end-of-the-telescope/ http://www.rebelzen.com/2008/07/looking-through-the-wrong-end-of-the-telescope/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:19:12 +0000 Seamus http://www.rebelzen.com/?p=10 By Seamus Anthony Ennis

It’s just my opinion, and I have no idea what I am talking about, but you – yes, you – have absolutely no clue what the hell is going on.

Yes, you heard me, and that goes for your guru, coach, expert or teacher also.

You see, sometimes when I am at barbecues, beer comfortably resting on my belly, paper plate piled high on my knee, the subject comes up that I write personal development articles and, for better or worse, I cringe. Why? Because the first thing that happens, at least in my mind, is that people look at me and think “Well, what the hell does he know that I don’t? He’s no guru; look at that blob of mayonnaise on his beard! And isn’t that the guy who drank a couple too many at Jo’s party last fortnight and made a fool of himself? Personal development writer indeed – hmmph!”

And the truth is they are right. I don’t know diddly. But neither do ‘they’ and neither, my friend, do you.

You might have chosen to believe certain things, and these beliefs are most likely an integral part of your sense of personal identity. In fact they are probably very useful in keeping you from just collapsing under the weight of a total existential breakdown, but nevertheless…

You. Don’t. Know. Anything. About. Anything.

Believing something is not the same as knowing something. One is a choice, the other is a certainty, and in this life there are no certainties.

Everything you think you know is all just your own unique perspective and is completely unprovable as ultimate truth.

I once saw that great, mad, rambling comic Billy Connolly expound his view on this. Minus a few expletives, he said:

“We are part of something enormous that’s too big for us too understand. … We’ve been looking through the wrong end of the telescope for God … See those wee things that live in ponds … they don’t have a clue that we exist, because we’re too big for them … Well, there’s something too huge for us. We’re the leg of a chair. We’re a cup of tea. We’re something dead simple.”

In other words we just see this little circle of possibility that just doesn’t give us a particularly insightful view of the big picture whatsoever. We are too big for the little water bugs to comprehend, and that, my little insect friends, is our lot too. If you’ve ever seen that email that goes around comparing the relative size of the planets to each other and then to the sun, and then our sun to the other even bigger suns out there until planet Earth is so little it can’t even be seen on the computer screen anymore, then you’ll know what Billy means. We are so, so tiny in the grand scheme of things that we are conceited to think that we will ever understand our Universe …

… and herein lies our freedom.

(”Everybody! Follow me!” screams Connolly, doing a Nazi salute and marching off, “We’ll come back for your valuables later!”)

But seriously, given that you will soon be dead, and given that you can’t be expected to understand God or the big picture, there is simply no good reason why you shouldn’t dream ‘big’ (which will always be comparatively small) and, to reclaim a corporately-hijacked cliché, just do it.

I Don’t Know What I’m Talking About

I don’t know what I’m talking about of course, but in my opinion our mission is to help to raise the vibration of the universe just a little bit. To make a positive contribution. Now, this contribution, even if you became the single most important human being in the history of the world, will by default always be tiny in the grand scheme of things, but in the earthly context of this and subsequent generations, you can help to make our world a better place, and this can bring you (and others) happiness.

Far be it for me to bark orders, but there’s no point trying to understand the Universe, because that is a waste of time, and there’s no point wasting our lives chasing security, because there simply is no security. Soon, very soon, you will be dead and whatever happens after that is anybody’s guess. So be free. Do what you want. Dream a dream and have a go. Sure you’ll need to consider practicalities, and you’ll need to decide whether or not you really do actually want the pressure and risk that comes with being a working astronaut or high-wire trapeze artist, but don’t let others put you off by telling you what-is-what, because those people, be they priest, parent, spouse, whoever, have absolutely no clue – and neither do you.

If you ponder it long enough, I hope you will see the ultimate freedom that lies in this fact: No matter how hard you peer up above you, you will never really know what the heck is actually going in outside of your little muddy puddle, so you are free do what you feel.

My only sub-clause is this: The one apparently apparent fact in this life is that doing good is infinitely more satisfying for any sane person than doing evil. So please don’t use this article as an excuse to do something horrible. After all, it’s not like I have the foggiest idea what I am on about.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and find a napkin to wipe the mayonnaise – and forty seven thousand, three hundred and eighty nine tiny doomed critters – off my beard. Good day to you.

This article was first published in print in Living Now Publishing’s DaretoDream magazine (March 2008, Australia)