Posts Tagged ‘Rebel Zen’

By Seamus Anthony

“Business is a good game, lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.” Bill Gates

The above quote moved me when I first read it because as a wanna-be entrepreneur of many years, I always struggled with bringing my ideas out and into the marketplace successfully – purely (I now know) because my definition of success was fuzzy.

You see, for me, money is not a great motivator. It is abstract and boring. You want to know what I think when I look at my bank account balance?

“Oh … some numbers … “

There are other currencies that I find way more exciting. For example – applause.

Sad, I know, but once you have stood on stage in front a crowd that’s wildly applauding and cheering what you just did – well, sorry to say, “some numbers” just doesn’t compare.

This is why I have always rolled my eyes when people say (about an aging, wealthy performer) “Oh he’s only in it for the money these days”. I bet that’s not the reason at all. Once you have a lot of money, it is pretty easy to stay rich by investing your money sensibly.

They do it for the buzz.

How I Motivate Myself To Earn Money

Of course, applause is all very well. But the fact is that unless you are getting a LOT of claps, you ain’t getting much money, and no money means a pain in the backside and then some.

So of course, like most people, I have to get up each day and earn my keep.

So I use the Bill Gates quote above to motivate me. I view business as a game and the score as money. I am not a businessman – I am a key player in the internationally televised…

World Series MoneyBall Grand Slam

This gets me way more excited and motivated because, as my friends will tell you, I am very competitive when it comes to games. Personally, while I keep it all in the spirit of fun, I can’t see the point of participating in a game without trying to win. Whether it’s a ball game in the backyard or a board game, you can be sure that if I am going to bother play at all – I play to win.

And yes, I get a bit pissed when I lose. It’s just how I’m wired up.

The Point Is To Get Points On The Board

I know that sounds horribly shallow. I know I should probably say: the point is to make the world a better place by helping others – and actually that is my other main motivational drive, but it is hard to think about the problems of the world all day. So instead I just focus on business being a game, and money being the points on the board.

In fact I do this quite literally: I have a whiteboard and on that I write up the name of the current month and a sales goal and then I write up each buck as it hits the bank – but ONLY when it hits the bank.

Because you haven’t scored a goal until the ball travels between the posts, you know what I mean? All money is speculative until it is in your hands.

One in the hand is worth two in the bush, dudes.

I don’t know why this motivates me to make money, but for some reason it does. I do have other motivations: things I want to buy or do which cost money – and most important of all – the welfare of my wife and child. Working from home is great because if the game isn’t going very well at any point, I can take a coffee break, walk into the house, clap eyes on my lovely ladies, and suddenly I am instantly amped to get back out on the field and score some quick-fire goals.

By the way, I am totally not (and never have been) a jock, so I have no idea why this whole game analogy works for me, but then Bill Gates wasn’t a jock either.

What fires you up to make money? Or do you just find the whole thing repulsive?

For more motivational goodness check out The Essential Motivation Handbook

By Seamus Anthony

What follows is the massively-inspired, half-drunk process of me trying to finally define what “Rebel Zen” means in a slogan …

Rebel Zen: It’s not about being perfect – it’s about being alive.

or

Exploring what it means to be alive…

or maybe

Exploring what it means to be human…

or

… and the Glorious Art of Being Imperfect

Yes! That’s it!

Rebel Zen and the Glorious Art of Being Imperfect!

‘Cos to me that is the point – it is about what it means to be a human – warts and all.

What it feels like to be alive; the search for meaning, for authenticity, what it feels like.

The very thing artists strive to express – musicians, poets, madmen.

Forsaking fantasies of perfection – Zen as in “being here now”, whether that feels good or not.

What it feels like to be a human being, with all the inherent imperfection and beauty and baggage that comes part-and-parcel with it it.

What IT means.

THIS.

What THIS all means.

Meaning – and the absence of meaning.

The glorious, never-ending, futile, wonderful search for meaning and our compulsion to look forward when it, this, the answers are here now.

But they aren’t here now at all. They are elusive, or we would find already and stop searching.

The continual paradox of apparent meaninglessness coupled with our insatiable desire for meaning.

The Yin and Yang play-off of ‘Meaningless Life’ and ‘Awareness’.

What THIS feels like – and the validity of this experience.

This is what Rebel Zen means to me – if it must be defined – that we live, impermanently, meaninglessly, and that – surely – THIS is okay…

…but somehow it’s not,

….but somehow it is,

…and on and on without resolution …

Without resolution but with an aching wonder, a beauty, a Love…

… a dream.

…. a dream framed by razors and barbed wire

… and then framed again with clouds of forgiveness and Love …

… and on and on and on without resolution.

Until … ?

Yes … I bloody LOVE it … Rebel Zen … is

The Glorious Art of Being Imperfect

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”

There came a choking noise from the corner of the messy office-cum-lunch room. It was Sashaan, the punk-haired chef who I also had pigeon holed as a “New Ager” simply because she had a “Magick Happens” sticker on her car.

“Wouldn’t be very appropriate if somebody ran in here with an axe and starting chopping heads off now would it?” She grumbled, her mouth full of lunch.

“It would actually,” said Alan. He spoke with a calm that was, in those days, foriegn to me. “Like I said … on a Universal level everything is appropriate.” With this he shuffled off, so tall he had to bow his head to walk through the doorway.

Sashaan didn’t say anything, she just rolled her eyes which were twinkling like she was enjoying a joke that I wasn’t in on. I didn’t know what to think, my mind was blown, but I suddenly felt a strong desire to know more.

For example, what were all those squiggly lines about?

And how could Alan be so sure of his rather brave proposition?

My mind was naturally open enough not to be offended by the statement, but I was pretty sure that a lot of people would be outraged by this kind of talk.

But what if Alan was in fact right? What would that mean and how would that affect my life?

The Five Year Hangover

All of this was set against the backdrop of the unraveling of my life.

I refer to the period from when I was about 22 years to about 27 years old as the “Hangover Years”. Not just because I woke up every day with one, but because from high school to 22 years old, life had been one fantastic trip, a joyous, invincible journey of discovery and fun. I was in a band that was hugely popular in my hometown and was fairly convinced that I was some kind of new God sent to bless the Earth with my presence and talent. I was basically living out a wonderful, ego-movie in which I was the headlining star.

But then, suddenly, it turned to shit.

I found myself alienated from my loved ones. Broke. My local fame had failed to spread and mature into any kind of a sustainable career (entirely my own fault – I know now – but at the time it all seemed very unfair and tragic). I was hooked on alcohol, cigarettes and weed.

Nice one.

So I did the logical thing, I ran away to another city to start all over again, which is how I found myself at Feedwell Café.

While on the one hand, I was having a blast meeting new people and playing in a new band, I was a little disconcerted to discover that not only did my problems follow me over to Melbourne, but they were getting worse and I was getting more and more depressed.

I had no idea how to deal with this other than to keep moving, keep working, keep joking, keep drinking, smoking, tripping, shagging.

I was a mess.

So, desperate to change for the better and inspired by the calm of people like Alan and Sashaan (who despite her healthy cynicism, was a very enlightened soul) I began to investigate a very different kind of ‘spirituality’ to the Christian dogma I had been brought up with. Always a big reader, I began by devouring Buddhist and New Age books, and thus began my fumbling start along the journey to Do-It-Yourself Enlightenment.

This journey would take me into the realms of not only Buddhist and New Age concepts, but Contemporary Western Meditation, Zen, Taoism, QiGong, I Ching, Yoga, Tarot, Naturopathy, Psychedelic Meditation, Traditional Chinese Medicine, New Thought, and much more.

All of the above brought me greatly increased inner peace, health and happiness, but there was still a lingering unease, a nagging fear that I just couldn’t put my finger on, an unease that kept me awake at nights … all until a certain flight from Malaysia to Europe that is …

Continued in Part Three.

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?

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

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 Ennis

Arm Rests. Adjustable ones. The key to happiness is being able to notice that things like this exist. Allow me to elaborate…

When things get wacky (difficult, painful), the hardest thing to do is to see the woods for the trees. Let me begin with an example – the common occurrence of a friend’s advice to a lovesick mate:

“It will be okay; either you’ll break up with your boy/girlfriend or you’ll work your problems through and stay together. Either way you’ll be fine and it will all be for the best.”

An answer to which our lovesick puppy will categorically fail to relate to until later, when he will see that it was absolute truth all along. Until then the problem will seem tragic, unbearable, and probably life-threatening.

Meanwhile it’s comically easy for the friend of our love-sick puppy to see the solution to the problem. Puppy just needs to be himself, do his best, and wait. That’s it. End of story.

But onward, holistic soldiers, to the arm-rest thing, and the promised ‘key to happiness’ I know you are breathlessly waiting for …

Oh, the Pain! The Pain!

Both at work and here in my home office I have been struggling for a while trying to get comfortable in front of my computers. I have tried sitting up straight for hours on end, relaxing back like a slob, stretching every few minutes, sitting on cushions, adjusting the monitor height, adjusting the chair height (at work anyway, my home chair is stuffed). I tried acupuncture, massage, and yoga. Nothing helped. I have been constantly uncomfortable, always suffering pain. In fact, I experience more back, shoulder and arm pain now working at a desk than I did all my long years working in…

…the Hostility Industry

Sorry, *coughs*, I meant ‘hospitality’, of course.

I used to come home from ten hour bar tending/dish washing/table waiting shifts rubbing my shoulders and groaning that I wanted a desk job because I assumed that all the bending and lifting, and thumping and flexing, and go, go, go was causing stress and strain and was directly responsible for my gargantuan shoulder pain.

Hello! It was just the opposite! One month after I stopped pounding the cafe boards I started experiencing a whole new world of distress and pain. Needless to say, movement is extremely important to our overall well-being and we should never forget this, my information dazzled, overly cerebral friends.

Anyway, yesterday, I suddenly had a blinding flash of inspiration. The reason for my pain was not my posture per se but the fact that the stupid arm-rests were forcing my elbows and shoulders skywards – an unnatural position and obviously the cause of my agony. Being a talkative chap in a talkative office I exclaimed ‘Eureka!’ and announced my discovery and my newfound life-mission to solve the problem. “I will make my fortune being the guy who solved the Great Arm-Rest Debacle!” I cockily predicted.

“Dude, too late”, said Karen, the sharp-as-a-tack young lady to my left. “The arm-rests are adjustable.”

And so they were.

Like, Duh.

One click of a button and the problem was solved, my shoulders dropped and I noticed an immediate increase in postural comfort. Then this morning I sat down here at home and discovered that the same applies for my salvaged-from-the-side-of-the-road home office chair. As mentioned, the seat height doesn’t adjust up and down properly, but the arms adjust as freely and carelessly as a wind-sock in an indecisive breeze.

Cripes! Wake up brain! Such an easy answer to a couple of year’s worth of pain and frustration. But how do we train ourselves to see the easy answers that stare us in the face? To see the clever idea that will easily make good? To separate the wheat from the chafe? To best deal with pain and stress?

Well, it’s easier said than done, but I believe it’s best to take Love Sick Puppy’s friend’s advice and just be ourselves, do our best, and wait.

Ask questions; meditate; allow things to work themselves out.

Even when we are ‘losing it’, we do well to recognise this fact and just go with it. It would probably be more damaging to hold it all in and act like a stoic. Energy needs to flow, so if it’s time to freak out, then freak out already. The sooner you release your negativity, the sooner you’ll be smiling again.

And, not least, persist. If after all the cushions, and stretching and fifty-dollar-an-hour treatments I’d given in to the pain and never put my mind to the problem again, then I never would have had the pleasure of, if belatedly, discovering the tactical solution to the Great Arm-rest Debacle.

P.S. By the way, the fact that we are all already enlightened is a bit like the fact that I had adjustable arm rests: the solution was already there – I just didn’t know it yet. Same goes for your inherent enlightenment: it’s there already, it’s just a matter of getting touch with what that feels like.