The Secret of Life

The A-Z of Simon

I'm a bit iffy about memes - not entirely sure why. The first time I was tagged, I politely declined. But in retrospect, that felt a bit unsociable. So when Grace of the Wild Pomegranate blog tagged me a while back, I thought I would play along and see how that felt. (It's OK so far...)

It's taken a while for this whole thing to come to the boil in my brain (are there any prizes for slow meme response, I wonder?) but here it is at long last. The A-Z of Secret Simon, 26 things that you may not have known about me:

First off then: A is for Acceptance, the cornerstone of enlightenment and gateway to the secret of life. I'm working on it.

B is for Book and also for Blog, which may explain some confusion which has arisen over my priorities. My spirituality book is called The Skeptic's Guide To God and I started this blog to promote it. The trouble is: I got so interested in the blog that I never quite finished the book. You just wait though...

C is for CFIDS, the American name for the medical condition I've lived with for more years than I care to remember. (Over here in Britain, they still can't decide what to call it.) A few years ago, I might have told you more about the illness, but the truth is I'm sick of the d*mn thing. (No pun intended.)

D is for dictionary, which I've needed to consult on several occasions to complete this post. Word games were never my strong point.

E is for Expert Patient Program. I trained as a tutor for this. It's all about  self-empowerment for people with long term health conditions. I get a lot of satisfaction from this and I've never talked at length in front of a class before, so it's meant getting out of my comfort zone, which is always a good thing.

F is for Fiction. I've written quite a lot of this: four short stories (published - hooray!) and three novels (two for adults and one for children, all unpublished - boo!). I like reading fiction too, though I've been having a problem with eye pain, so these days I mainly listen to audio books.

G is for Gardening, which I took up a few years ago and really enjoy. It's a great way to be in the moment.

H is for Harrogate, the rather cute town in the north of England where I was born. It's a great place to spend an afternoon. The trouble is: I had to live there.

I is for Indecisive, which I can be sometimes.

J is for Jam. Raspberry is my favorite. Or maybe apricot. (I told you I was indecisive.)

K is for Kent in the south of England, where we lived for about sixteen months when I was a boy. I loved it there. So my parents moved straight back to bl**dy Harrogate.

L is for Leeds in the north of England, which is where my wife Chris and I live now. It's quite close to Harrogate, but I don't hold that against it. Leeds is a city, so there's plenty going on, but it has easy access to some nice countryside too, so it suits us both just fine.

M is for Meditation and also for Mind. I do one to get out of the other.

N is for No More Than 13 Letters Left now...

O is for Oneness, which lies at the heart of my philosophy.

P is for Puddings. I like them.

Q is for Quite Nice Really, which Harrogate is, I suppose - but it helps to have a running joke in something like this.

R is for Radio. I spend a lot of time listening to this. Chris says she will bury my DAB beside me - though not for a while yet, we hope.

S is for Science Fiction. I used to co-edit a science fiction and fantasy short story magazine - but please don't make misleading connections between science fiction and spirituality. Science fiction people don't approve of this sort of thing at all - not unless they're L Ron Hubbard (or Philip K Dick).

T is for Travel. I like doing this but I'm not very adventurous. I've seen a lot of beaches...

U is of University, where I studied civil engineering. All in all, I quite enjoyed my job and the company of some entertaining colleagues but when push comes to shove, you shouldn't be an engineer if you're not interested in how things work, which I'm not. So I spent my working life pretending to be an engineer. And if you're not being you, you get ill...

V is for Voice. Never had one of these, not a tuneful one - which may explain my disenchantment with mainstream Christianity.  I couldn't cope with all the hymns...

W is for Writing. I knew that I wanted to do this from a very early age. The impulse has remained with me throughout my life: never quite compulsive enough to propel me to professional success but always too strong to stop me settling down to anything else more useful.

X is for Xenon. Remember this. You may need it the next time you play Scrabble.

Y is for Yoga. Chris and I have taken this up over the last year and I have to say that I really enjoy it. Most of the time it's been Dru Yoga, though we've recently also taken up Kundalini Yoga with Ed Harpin. Both of these forms have a strong spiritual element.

Z is for Zygote. I used to be one of these.

But enough about me. Here is where I'm supposed to pass on the baton to some other bloggers out there to give us some A to Z facts about themselves:

The instructions say that each player starts with some random facts/habits about himself/herself. As you are tagged you need to post the rules (this bit) and your responses on your own blog. At the end of your post, you need to choose some people to tag, list their names and, of course, leave them a comment, telling they have been tagged and they need to read your blog for more information.

All right then, here are the people I'm tagging. I thought I would choose some of the newer blogs I've come across:

Peripheral Vision

Your Caring Angels

Birthing Your Life Dream

Life In 360

Heal Pain Naturally

Silent Cacophony

It's OK guys - there's no compulsion. If you'd like to take part, that's brilliant. If not, that's brilliant too. And if anyone would like to borrow my dictionary, just ask...

Right - that's all done then. That just leaves one more meme and three awards for me still to catch up on. It'll all be sorted by Christmas...

Snakes and Ladders

Angelbaby has overwhelmed me by presenting me with yet another award - which I proudly display here! It's nice to have it officially confirmed that this is an interesting blog - I do my best...

On the slightly less encouraging side, my computer has suddenly decided to deny me internet access. This is not entirely unsurprising, as the machine has become increasingly quarrelsome in recent months, frequently choosing to grind to a halt at inconvenient moments. I need to phone up my friend David (who understands these things) but I think that I feel a Windows reload coming on. In the meantime, I'm reduced to using my wife Chris' computer (in those rare moments when she isn't using it herself) which is why this post is a few days late, and my blogging time is likely be severely curtailed in the near future. I've almost completed another substantial post, but after that things may get a bit wobbly for a while. Apologies! Normal service (which I like to think of as efficient in a sluggish sort of way) will be resumed as soon as possible...

Gateways Of Light

Following on from the previous post, here's a video about the process of transformation which may be ahead of us all. It starts off with a rather downbeat view of the state of the world, but in featuring this video, it is not my intention to be alarmist. I would much rather focus on the second part of the video: about how we can help both ourselves and the world through personal transformation.

Thanks to Ed Harpin for bringing this video to my attention. Ed says: "It's a short, sweet and direct video, that I think quite simply gives the view of the times we are in... the changes that we may be facing just around the corner... and the possibility to transcend."

I'd also like to quote the words of Sue Ann Edwards in her comment on the previous post: "I have Faith in us. I know we're afraid of change but we need to get over it... emotionally grow up... develop. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. We're inventive. We're competent. We're imaginative. We're creative. We will meet any and all changes and challenges, with confidence and courage."

(Note: This is now a new 'improved and upgraded' version of the video - March 2008)

Philip Pullman - A Process Of Evolution

Reading an interview with author Philip Pullman in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, I was reminded of a post I wrote a few months ago, in which I argued that a wholesale change in human consciousness will be needed if we are to survive the approaching environmental crisis. Here's what I wrote at that time:

"Only when we come to think of ourselves as first and foremost an integral part of the human race and the universe at large, rather than as separate entities in competition with each other, will we have the perspective needed to sit down as one and work together to find a way out of this mess."

To some extent, Pullman appears to echo this in his Daily Telegraph interview:

"I think we've evolved in such a way that suited conditions on the savannah 500,000 years ago, a way of life that was acquisitive, territorial and combative. The degree to which the processes of civilisation, or socialisation, can overcome that depends on the timescale. In the long term, I back evolution - if we can survive this crisis that we're in...

"It's like going down a river, and about mid-century we're going to go through the rapids, and it's going to be terribly difficult for all of us. But we can survive and if we can get through this... it's going to be wonderful."

How exactly Pullman thinks that this necessary process of evolution is going to happen isn't entirely clear - but then with evolution it rarely is. Don't get me wrong - I'm no creationist - but the small print of evolution has always puzzled me. How did those fish come out of the water exactly? Gary Larson's explanation (in one of his Far Side cartoons) that the fish were playing baseball and evolved legs in order to get their ball back when it landed on dry land seems about as convincing as any other.

All Pullman seems to suggest is that the environmentalists' storytelling skills need to evolve so that they can better communicate the message about what people can do to help the planet. He says:

"People feel helpless when they see pictures of devastated forests cut down and the glaciers melting and the poor polar bear sweating on its bare rock in the sea. 'What can we do, what can we do?' People need to be told what it is that they can do."

I wish I shared his optimism that this will be enough to make a difference.

Pullman, of course, is widely known for the anti-religion stance of his fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, an ancient, authoritarian 'God' being unceremoniously killed in the final volume. Personally, I kind of like these books, such misgivings as I have about them having a lot more to do with the shambolic plotting than with any underlying agenda. I doubt that Pullman would view this blog in such a kindly light however. He has been quoted as saying "I don't think it's possible that there is a God: I have the greatest difficulty understanding what is meant by the words 'spiritual' or 'spirituality'".

So I assume that Pullman would be fairly horrified - or at best bemused - by my belief that the necessary evolution is going to be a spiritual one, a process of evolution in which we come to realize that all of us are One, that all of us - including our planet and all the life forms upon it - are part of something which some might describe as 'God'.

Yet Pullman goes on to say in the interview:

"I suppose the real story, the basic story, the story I would like to hear, see, read, is the story about how connected we are, not only with one another but also with the place we live in. And how it's almost infinitely rich, but it's in some danger; and that despite the danger, we can do something to overcome it."

Are we really so far apart, I wonder, the 'spiritual' me and the 'secular' Pullman?

I hope not, because it seems to me that it is a gap which is going to have to be bridged in our forthcoming process of evolution...

(You can read the Telegraph interview with Philip Pullman here. This in turn is an edited extract from the forthcoming book Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth? by Andrew Simms and Joe Smith.)

Retail Heaven And Hell

One of the blog posts I read over the festive season which has really stuck in my mind is the December 27 post by Stephen at Birthing Your Life Dream, in which he sings the praises of the new iPod his wife brought him for Christmas.

What with this being a spirituality blog, this might seem like a strange thing for me to focus on in this way. An attitude of skepticism - or even disdain - towards such consumer goods might appear to be more in keeping. Yet there is a genuine innocent delight in the way Stephen writes about his present which is endearing.

He writes:

What joy it brought me to return to those sacred songs of my... (early) ...life, look them up, buy them, then have them ringing through my head once more, with a fidelity that one can only describe as heavenly. In fact, one of my very favorite love songs ever - Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell's If This World Were Mine, absolutely sounds like it was channeled and sung by the angels.

It's as if I said: "OK, God... do you remember this song that I used to sing when I was 12 years old? I loved it so much! Please bring it to me so that I could hear it once again in its grandest form." Then voila! Out of the Akashic Records it materializes, to dance in my head with exquisite aliveness."

Stephen reminds me that all these gadgets we humans have created: these iPods, games consoles, digital cameras, wide screen TVs and the like are actually wonderful things. If they'd been shown to the six-year old me living in post-war austerity Britain, it would have been like I'd died and gone to heaven. What we have done is to grow up and create the toys and artifacts of our dreams. And you know what? There is nothing wrong with these things. They are genuinely wonderful inventions. It is truly magical to immerse ourselves for a while in the fantasy world of a console game, or to watch a nature program or a favorite movie on a screen which almost fills your living room wall. Such things have never been possible before in the whole of human history. It is a great privilege to be able to have such experiences.

And yet... I suspect that Steve is unusual - at least among adults! - in taking such genuine delight in his new gadget. Walking past the shops in recent days, with the January sales in full flow, I have seen little such delight on the faces of the bargain-hunting customers. They seem to walk into the shops not in the expectation of any kind of fulfillment of their dreams, but as though they are about to engage in mortal combat. As they emerge again, clutching their enormous screens or tiny gizmos, they don't look happy. They look as though they've just completed a tedious household chore, like putting out the trash.

Why is this, I wonder?

To some extent, we're justified in restraining our enthusiasm about whatever we've just bought. Bitter experience has probably taught us that in all likelihood a) the instructions won't make sense and b) the thing won't work in any case. In all probability, what we have to look forward to as we walk out of the store is not year after year of blissful enjoyment but many weeks of bitter wrangling with the customer services department. I recounted the sad tale of my own mp3 player in the very first post on this blog. It took me months to get the thing working and I had to erase the hard drive of my PC and reload all my software in the process. I don't have to tell you that this sort of thing is not unusual...

And then there is that insatiable need that we have to find a bargain. If we don't get a large discount, we feel we've been ripped off. We want to feel that we're paying less for the product than everyone else is. Otherwise, we can't settle down and enjoy it. I mean, how can you possibly enjoy watching a 52 inch flat screen TV with stereo sound which cost you five dollars more than the guy next door? It can't be done.

And then, of course, there's obsolescence anxiety. Is the product you've bought going to be out of date before long? Will they bring one out in a few months time with extra bells and whistles that you don't have? And what if the thing gets damaged? That would be terrible, wouldn't it? I myself have to listen to an mp3 player which has visible bits of dust beneath its screen. As you can imagine, this is a source of endless torment to me.

And then there's the stress of trying to find time to actually use the gadget. How on earth can you find a few hours to enjoy watching your widescreen TV when you also have to listen to your iPod, make calls with your color screen cellphone, and take photos with your digital camera - photos, furthermore, which then have to be uploaded to your multi-media PC so that you can download them to the hard drive of your DVD or print them out with your all-in-one photocopier, ink jet and fax machine? To even attempt such a thing, you're going to have to download several audio books on time management to your mp3 player - and how are you going to find the time to do that?

In any sane world, on the other hand - and it may well be that Stephen is living in a small bubble of one! - you wouldn't buy any gadgets that you didn't have time to use, and you would happily go on using them for many years to come, irrespective of whether any newer models had been introduced in the meantime. And because you would therefore be buying less stuff, you would be able to pay a bit more for them,   so that the manufacturers would be able to provide a better standard of workmanship and customer service and your experience as a consumer would be much less troublesome. When your gizmos eventually did stop working - many years down the line - you might even take them to a little shop round the corner where someone would fix them for you, rather than having to go out and buy a new one. And you certainly wouldn't worry if your various gadgets developed a scratch or two because you wouldn't have bought them in order to show off!

The point is that there is nothing 'wrong' with these artifacts themselves; it is our attitude to them which arguably falls short of our greatest good, because a lot of the time here in what we call 'the developed world', we are so caught up in the ego stuff around them - the whole business of possession - that we don't have chance to be there in the moment and take full delight in actually using the things.

It's another example of what we're so good at: failing to live in the moment, of being focussed on the next iPod - the one the guy next door has, or the next model up that we might have bought, or the one coming out next year - and so failing to hear the one that's attached to our ears. The point is: we work so hard for this stuff, but a lot of the time we don't even enjoy it when we've got it. We give up so much of our precious time to work for it that we don't have time to use when we finally have it.

It's all a symptom of unconscious living, of doing things without really thinking about it, of buying things because that is what we do. Like I say, there's nothing 'wrong' with all these artifacts, but it's a terrible waste of the earth's resources if they're not really being appreciated. They can be a gateway to joy, but only if we schedule in time to use them, and make sure that we're actually there in the moment while we're doing it: actually seeing those wonderful pictures, really hearing those marvelous sounds, instead of going off into a fantasy about what we might buy next.

Otherwise, well, perhaps we should just find a better home for these glorious gizmos on eBay.

Perhaps we ought to remember: an iPod is not just for Christmas.

Emotional Freedom Technique

In a recent post, I promised to share some more ways to deal with unhelpful emotions. One approach which is gaining in popularity is Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). You can learn all about this on the net - or if you prefer, you can be trained by a practitioner if there is one in your area - do a Google to check. Once you have learned the technique, you can do it yourself whenever you need it.

Put simply, the technique involves tapping on the body's energy meridians, the same points which are normally used in acupuncture. You can watch this introductory video which will take you through the technique - it comes from the tapping.com site - or you can download a free manual here.

Further free online videos on the tapping.com site are entitled The Science Of Tapping, Self Acceptance, Killing Procrastination, Stress Relief, Waking Up, Insomnia, Overcoming Depression, Anger Management, Quit Smoking, Memory Release, and Chakra Clearing. There's a full list of them here. The technique may seem a bit strange at first, but I'm hearing some excellent feedback about it and I'm going to try it myself - I'll let you know how I get on! And if you decide to try it, I'll be interested to hear how it goes...

Bloggers Of The World Award

Many thanks to AngelBaby for generously presenting me with this splendid Bloggers Of The World award! Thanks so much for thinking of me, Angel. I shall display it proudly on my mantelpiece! Incidentally, some of you may be interested in a post I recently did for AngelBaby's site about the mysterious orbs which sometimes appear on digital photos. You can find it here.

It is now my sacred responsibility to pass this award on to some of my fellow bloggers, which I shall do as soon as I get my head around it, along with another award and two memes that I've been sitting on since before Christmas. Some of us are dynamic and others are slow & sloth-like but get there in the end. But I ask you: who won the race a) tortoise b) hare? There you are then...

Free Teleconference

I was posting recently about the planetary transformation which many people predict will occur in the near future. If you're interesting in finding out more about this idea, then you might be interested in taking part in a free teleconference which is scheduled for this coming Friday, January 11th, 2008. You can find full details of this conference - and sign up for it - here.

The scheduled time for the conference is from 11-11 am to 1-11 pm EST; 8-11 to 10-11 am Pacific Time. Here in the UK, it will run from 4-11 pm to 6-11 pm, which is surprisingly civilized. We British usually have to get up in the middle of the night for this sort of thing...

(In case you're wondering about the conference starting and finishing at 11 minutes past the hour, I assume this has to do with what I've recently been told about '11' being a number of spiritual significance! Having just moved in to a #11 myself, I'm quite chuffed about this...)

One of the panelists taking part will be Kiara Windrider, author of an 'unofficial' book about Deeksha called Deeksha - The Fire From Heaven. So this seems like a good time to mention, by the by, that Windrider's web site is a brilliant resource. The wealth of articles includes information on Ilahinoor, a transformative energy similar to Deeksha which has emerged in Turkey; what seems to me to be a very sensible perspective on recent controversies within the Oneness (Deeksha) Movement; and a valuable discussion of the 'dark night of the soul', about the 'negative' emotions which can arise during spiritual transformation.

A Sun-Filled Room

Eckhart Tolle tells a wonderful story about a candle in a dark room. Because the room is dark, whether or not the candle is lit is all-important. By the candle flame, we can find our way round and are reassured, but without that feeble flame we are totally lost.

If, however, the room is flooded with sunlight, the candle becomes irrelevant. We are no longer dependent upon its light.

Tolle suggests that in our current state of consciousness, most of us live - metaphorically - in a darkened room. We are dependent upon the ups and downs of the material world to illuminate our darkness. As long as things are going well, we are happy enough. But when bad things come along - as is bound to happen from time to time - we lose sight of the light.

If, instead, we can learn to live in sunlight, we can be free of our dependence upon the material world. In the brilliance of the sun-filled room, even when things go wrong, we can still be happy.

So how exactly can we learn to live in sunlight?

It is said that once this came naturally to us. When we were babies, we were in touch with a natural sense of joy. OK, so things would come along from time to time to cloud that joy: a touch of indigestion, for instance, or if we flung our rattle away. But these upsets were swiftly forgotten. There were tears - and then our smiles returned. Our connection to joy was never far away.

As we grew older, however, we lost that connection to joy.

It seems to me that there were two main reasons for this.

First of all, we were taught the importance of thinking, to such an extent that we eventually became so preoccupied with this new pastime of ours that we no longer took much notice of what was going on around us. So we ceased to notice if the connection to joy was there or not.

Fortunately, this can be easily corrected. Just stop thinking and there it is: the connection to joy is still there. Or else, the connection is there if you give it half a chance. You will probably have experienced it from time to time: as a sudden sense of peace while out for a walk in the country perhaps. Or else suddenly realizing that you are inexplicably happy for no apparent reason, absence of thought having caught you unawares for a moment or two. Stopping thinking isn't really so hard. It's just keeping it up for more than a second or two at a time that's the difficult bit...

Rather more troublesome is the other habit you were taught that got in the way of that connection to joy: learning not to cry if you threw your rattle away. Or if your best friend moved out of town. Or your dog got run over. Or you lost your job. Or your marriage broke down. Until eventually you were going through life carrying around a load of suppressed emotions, because somehow or other you got the idea that it wasn't OK to express your feelings any more.

And all this stuff that you are carrying about is a double whammy. First of all because it makes you unhappy and gets in the way of your present day relationships - as you may have already noticed - but also because it blocks that connection to joy, which is something which may have been less apparent.

This was something which was made very clear to me last summer. I wrote a post then about a process called the Quantum Light Breath which allowed me to release some of my suppressed emotions and seemed to open me up to what I can only describe as 'light energy', reconnecting me with that sense of joy. The impression I got was that the connection had been there all along but had been 'clogged up' with the debris of my emotions. It was literally like a dirty flue being cleared!

I have had similar - though less spectacular -  experiences since then, and I have to tell you that being connected to that joy, even for brief periods, is every bit as wonderful as it sounds. That 'sun-filled room' is real, and I am sure that it is attainable by us all.

I've posted previously (here and here) about other ways to clear these suppressed emotions and I intend to post about more of them in the coming months. I have come to realize that it is vital to deal with these emotions if we're to break through to that 'sun-filled room' and start to live our lives there. The good news is that we don't have to analyze all our stuff, but we do have to face those feelings to allow them to be released.

As for stopping thinking, well joking aside, this can also be quite a task, though perhaps a rather less painful one.  Meditation is useful here, as are the teachings of Eckhart Tolle - though I also suspect that as the emotions are cleared, unnecessary thought is also quietened. When there is less hurt, there is less need to go round and round in endless circles of thought.

Please note that by 'stopping thinking', it's this constant pointless mind chatter to which I'm referring, the 'what ifs' and 'if onlys' and just plain gibberish which chunders on and on in our brains for most of the time. So the brain surgeons and air traffic controllers amongst you can relax - it's still OK to think when we really need to! - but you might be surprised at what a small proportion of the thinking which most of us do that actually is.

With the New Year upon us, what I've tried to do in this post is to clarify what the shift in perspective which underpins this blog is all about and the steps we may have to take if we wish to allow it into our lives. Spiritual awakening, self realization, enlightenment, call it what you will, doesn't interest everyone, but if you feel drawn to it, or are tired of the pain which our habitual state of consciousness tends to produce - or a combination of both! - then perhaps you will start to prioritize making that change.  If you choose to do so, then the road before you may be a bumpy one, but the glimpses I've had of the way ahead suggest that it will be worth it in the end. I'll place as many signposts as I am able to find on this blog, and of course there are many more to be found in other places...

The good thing is that you don't have to believe anything in particular to make this change. If you already subscribe to a belief system, that's fine. If you don't, that's fine as well.  All you have to do is to clear the emotions and thoughts which get in the way of that natural connection to joy.

And, as I've mentioned before, this is not just a personal thing to help ourselves as individuals. A glance around at the state of the world is enough to show that the human race is sorely in need of a shift to a higher state of consciousness. As we make that connection to joy and start to live our lives in the 'sun-filled room' to which Eckhart Tolle refers, we will come to realize that we are not after all separate beings but an integral part of the human race, a part of the universe: that we are all in this together. As we move into 2008, that is a realization which is long overdue for us all.

Happy New Year! It looks like it might be a challenging one. May it be a time of positive transformation!