Do you suffer from a lack of self-confidence? Is so you should know that learning to meditate effectively can really help you to build your self-confidence levels up.

I recently started doing stand-up comedy as a hobby. Many people I know commented that I must have such strong levels of self-confidence to even consider such folly!

They are correct.

Despite my dubious comedic material, the reason I can go through with it (even though I still get very nervous before getting up on stage) is because I do actually have a lot of self-confidence and yes, a major reason I have this personality trait is due to meditation.

Allow me to explain.

How Meditation Helps You Become More Self-Confident

It is a sad fact of life that as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we invariably go through various degrees of emotional trauma. This is true even for those of us with relatively stable upbringings; think about how horrible kids at school were to you sometimes. This stuff all takes it toll on our developing minds and to protect ourselves from unwanted emotional pain, we build up defensive emotional walls.

These defenses can manifest as aggressive or assertive personality traits - or they can manifest as low self-esteem. By adopting an image of yourself as a person who is not very confident, your ego feels safer knowing that you won’t volunteer to put yourself in the limelight (i.e. in danger of being criticized or mocked).

Now while this may (or may not) have helped you to cope throughout school and your adult life so far, you may be aware that in fact your lack of self-confidence is limiting your ability to shine, to enjoy living the full expression of your talents and abilities. And yes, it may be stopping you from showing them all (dammit) just how good you could be … if only you could find the guts to stand up and be counted.

Using Meditation To Over-Ride the Ego and Find Your Self-Confidence

When you learn how to meditate effectively, interesting things happen.

For starters, if all goes well, you will begin to relax.

And I mean really relax.

At this stage you will feel at peace, and forget about your problems, even if it is just for a little while as you meditate.

Then as you go deeper and deeper, you will begin to bypass the fearful “ego” part of your personality and begin to get in touch with that part of your being that is at peace, happy and free.

You may not believe that there is a part of you that is so carefree and happy - but believe me it is true. It’s just that you may have never bypassed your fearful, wounded mind enough to experience this level of contented awareness that lies at the core of us all.

I could write forever about this process, but in the context of this post, it is enough to say that if you have never meditated successfully enough to have felt this state of being, then it would be well worth your while to explore this phenomenon (by reading and more importantly, meditating) until you get in touch with what I am trying to describe.

When you reach this blissful stage of meditation, you begin to see things from a different perspective. You will begin to understand life from a universal perspective, your own life with all it’s troubles will not seem as urgent and all-encompassing, but rather you will see how small you really are in the grand scheme of things and how this is not something to fear but rather is just fine.

You are a tiny little speck in a vast, vast universe - and that’s ok with you. It’s how it should be.

Go even deeper and you will understand how in fact you are not just a speck - a separate part of the universe - but (woo-woo as it does sound) you are in fact ALL of the universe. Everything is One Thing and you are that One Thing and in a certain way (not the egoistic Christian way) you are in fact eternal.

Then your meditative thoughts may turn to your problems of self-confidence. And suddenly you will not feel so concerned about what people think of you anymore.

And when you are no longer meditating but are back in the “real world” facing your self-confidence issues, you will find that regular meditation will help you with “mind skills”, mental abilities (almost like mild super-powers) to over-ride your ingrained patterns of low self-confidence and rise above your low-self esteem.

Because if you are all of the Universe, and if everybody else that you know is One with you, then what is there to fear?

Nothing.

Fear has no place in your life.

It is a mirage.

Let it go.

Stand up tall, with confidence - and live your life to fullest!

Photo by Kalandraka

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I enjoy meditating. Personally I wonder what would have become of my life if I hadn’t discovered it at the time I did.

Recently I have decided to put my own personal meditation techniques down into a more general eBook about meditation (which is finished and coming out shortly).

A meditation book, that is, more general than Psychedelic Meditation, which sells quite nicely and in fact contains meditation instructions which will suffice anybody, but is if course angled at the “get high without drugs” niche.

Admittedly, using meditation to get high is a pretty obscure reason to practice such a noble art, and as I was doing some research to assist with the writing of the book I noted (not for the first time) some of the many reasons people meditate. From what I could tell, the two main reasons can be loosely categorized as:

1. Health
2. Happiness

And with good reason; meditation is well and truly proven to be excellent at improving your health and helping you to feel happier. I myself have more than once used meditation to help me to focus become healthier when I have been a slack little fatty and to fight off depression when it came a knockin’, it’s foul stinkin’ breath comin’ in under my door.

(Hey a bit of poetry there, cool!)

Now - health and happiness are two fine over-arching categories for the reasons people meditate, but they are not very specific. I want to know in closer detail, why people “sit and do nothing”.

Here are some of my guesses, maybe you have some more, if so please add them to the comments section:

Reasons To Meditate

• Mental Clarity
• Improves Physiological Health
• Facilitates Healing
• Decreased (effects of) Stress and Anxiety
• Increased Happiness and General Feelings of Well-Being
• Lowers High Blood Pressure
• Increases Energy and Vigor
• Increased Creativity
• Increased Ability to Focus
• Supports efficient post-operative recovery
• Increases serotonin production, which affects your mood (low-levels can cause depression)
• Helpful for those suffering from insomnia
• Helps Eliminate Headaches
• Can Help You Overcome Addictions
• Can bring on blissful “Cosmic High” type experiences
• Helps manage symptoms of Pre-Menstrual Syndrome
• Greater Self-Knowledge
• Can help you identify your life purpose or ‘calling’
• Sharper Intuition
• Spiritual insight and enlightenment

Photo by Manaki5

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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”.

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It contains some pretty universal points so will be of help to any people who have struggled with things like self-worth, self-identity, growing older, lack of focus.

It also partially fills in a gap in the Special Theology of Relativity series (which I will finish shortly).

Musician 2.0 - Redefining Your Self-Identity

Enjoy!

Seamus Anthony

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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.

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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.

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So you’ve downloaded our free eBook, Curly’s Law, about the need to identify your One Thing, your True Life Purpose - but did you actually read it?

And if you did read it - have you managed to actually identify your One Thing?

It’s not always easy is it?

I gave my method for figuring out my One Thing in the book, but that was just one way.

I don’t really know what other ways there are, or at least I didn’t until I read Brian Kim’s excellent “How To Finally Find What You Love to Do AND Get Paid For Doing It!”

The Trouble with the “Do What You Love” Theory

When it comes to careers, the clichéd advice is to “do what you love” if you want to succeed BUT what do you do if you don’t know what you love?

And hang on a second – don’t you know plenty of artists, writers, healers, musicians and wannabe-entrepreneurs who know very well what they love to do but just can’t seem to make it pay?

Well, if that’s you – relax. Brian’s excellent little eBook (with the very long title) is a Godsend for those who are undecided as to what their true purpose is or who haven’t got a clue how to make their passion pay-up some cold hard cash.

4 Reasons I Highly Recommend this Book

I don’t know Brian Kim personally, but I have been twice now impressed with his work (read about the other time his writing blew my mind here). The reasons I so heartily recommend “How to Find What You Love To Do AND Get Paid For Doing It” are:

• There’s no hippy-drippy nonsense; no “open your mind to the Universe and let the love flow in” crap. In case you haven’t woken up and smelled the coffee yet, all that Law of Attraction baloney doesn’t work – not on its own anyway. You can sit around and wish for success all you like, but if you do, all you’re really doing is settling for a life of mediocrity. Instead you need concrete, practical advice about how to get off your butt and make it happen already. This book provides just that.

• It’s a very structured book, a practical workbook that gets you to work it out over a period of time. Brian will have you delve deeper and deeper into your own nature until you find your True Purpose inside of you, just sitting there like a brilliant diamond waiting all this time for you to discover it.

• It’s specific – you’ll learn “What” and then “How”. First you find ‘what’ it is you truly should be doing with your life – your calling. Once you know what this is (and you will) then you move on to ‘how’ to make it pay. If you know you can’t be happy while you’re working a dreary, dead-end day job that doesn’t leave you with enough energy to pursue your dreams, then take my advice – buy this book now and get moving. Life is short! Stop wasting time!

• There’s no fluff. Coming in at 52 pages, this book gets straight to the point and will have you up and at ‘em in no time. In fact Brian says that the book was originally over 200 pages long but he boiled it down to the bare essentials so as not to overwhelm you with too much superfluous information and padding. If only more authors would do this! I don’t know about you but I am a busy man and I like to just get in, get the information I need, and then get on with it.

Who Else is Ready To Get On With Fulfilling Their True Life Purpose?

If you’re happy in your work or have figured out what your life’s passion is – and how to make it pay so that you don’t need no stinkin’ day job, then don’t buy this book. It’s not for those who are content with their station in life and feel they have no more learning to do, no more adventures to go on.

But if that isn’t you then you need to find out what your One Thing is now and how to go for it and succeed. What are your other options? Keep working for the man forever?

Consider these pertinent questions from Brian’s website:

Why sacrifice almost half of your day (if you include commuting) 5 days a week just to enjoy your nights and weekends?

Why sacrifice the best time period of your life so you can enjoy your golden years?

Why put yourself through all this pain and misery for the majority of your adult life?

When did people lie down and accept drudgery, boredom and dissatisfaction as a fact of life?

It doesn’t make any sense.

As I said at the beginning of this article, I already know my true life purpose – and I am making it pay already – but reading this book made me feel even more resolute to move on up to the next level and “go for gold” as the cliché goes.

Now - I paid 25 bucks for “How to Find What You Love To Do…”, but for a short time Brian has reduced the price to about $19 so click through now to check it out and ask yourself this – if you spend $19 on a book that finally brings you the success you have craved all your life – then isn’t that worth it?

I reckon it is, so hop to it and Click Here Now to find out more about the book.

Photo by kirtaph

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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

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Are you pretty ambitious?

I am. And it’s okay - some of us are just wired up that way.

But the question struck me the other day - and not for the first time - why?

Is it because you want ‘more’ or because you want ‘less’?

I am willing to place a bet that you often just think about getting more. (It’s okay - so do I.)

If only you had a bit more money.

If only you had a slightly bigger house.

If only you had more time.

If only you had a more exciting career.

If only you enjoyed more health.

Yadda yadda yadda.

But here’s the rub. I was walking the dog other day, through the beautiful mountainous, forested region where I live and suddenly I realized that I was frowning, staring at the ground, going over and over the question: How I can get “more”.

What the fuck?

I should have been looking around! Enjoying a Zen-out walking session!

“Why do you always want more?” I berated myself.

Then Poof!

I realised that the paradoxical reason I always want more is …

Because I want less!

And I bet it’s the same for you.

You want more money so you can spend less time worrying about money, doing your boring job and putting up with nitpicking tossers.

You want a bigger house so you can spend less time feeling like everyone in your household is in your face.

You want more time so you can spend less time doing shit you hate.

You want an exciting career so you can spend less time doing shit you hate.

You want better health so that you can spend less time worrying about your health and perhaps, feeling embarrassed about your appearance.

And this is all well and good. It’s just the way it is.

BUT we must remember that when we get more - it usually doesn’t end up being less. More money brings more responsibility. A bigger house needs more maintenance and cleaning. More health means more exercise.

And so you see: Less actually is more,

…but more isn’t always less.

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Probably depends what kind of a life you aspire to!

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