The Secret of Life

The Door To The Garden

I didn't intend to go quite so long between posts as this, but things have got in the way. I mentioned before that I was going to spend more time gardening over the summer, so you might assume from the title here that I'm going to entertain you with stories of all the blissful afternoons amongst the shrubbery that have kept me away from blogging. But as so often in life, it hasn't been quite like that.

There has been time for a bit of horticulture in between the traditional English summer raindrops - not to mention the gale force winds that ripped the honeysuckle off the side of the garage - but in fact my protracted absence has had more to do with unscheduled health problems than to undue time spent dawdling over the bedding plants.

I mentioned a while back that I was going to be consulting a specialist clinic about my CFIDS. Tests have now been carried out and I'm duly imbibing a host of noxious concoctions to start to put things right. Which means that I'm now in one of those 'worse before you feel better' situations, with which all of you who have consulted an alternative practitioner will no doubt be only too familiar. On top of which, I think I may have contracted a stomach bug, though with everything else that's going on, the truth is that it's difficult to be sure.

I've been ill for about twenty years all in all, so you'd think I'd have got used to it by this time. But my condition is variable, so I experience different degrees of feeling ill. There are times when I've managed to organize my life around the condition so well that I pretty much forget about it altogether. But these last few weeks, I've found myself remembering how I was at my worst, and tapping into some of the trepidation, helplessness, and sheer mind-numbing frustration which went along with that.

In other words, I've been arguing with reality. I've been feeling ill but wanting to feel well, not just at some time in the future, but right now, this moment.

If I'd read my blog carefully, I'd have known this wasn't a good idea.

It's fine to imagine a healthy body, to conjure up dreams we would like to bring into being, but to wish for the present moment to be something other than how it is is like banging our heads against a wall. And that's what I've been doing.

It's funny - when you're down there, when you're doing that, it's often difficult to see that you have any alternative. I found myself wishing I had some complex routine of spiritual practice to which to turn to help me to find a way out of it. There's something to be said for Dharma, I think. The only thing I do every day is meditation, which isn't always enough to knock me out of that old familiar human condition of raging against what is.

But then, the other day, I suddenly found my way back. I found the key and turned it in the lock and emerged into that wonderful garden where struggling ceases. The tension inside me faded away and I felt an energy flowing through me, as though everything I'd been raging against was now a part of my own power instead. It was as though I had been struggling against the river of life, but now I had turned and allowed it to carry me forward.

All of this was familiar enough. I've now experienced it numerous times and have written about it here on the blog before. The key, too, was familiar to me. I've written about that too, over and over again. And yet, as always, to take that key and feel it turn in the lock and actually emerge into the sunlight of the garden came as a wonderfully welcome surprise - as though it was happening to me for the very first time.

Regular readers may have guessed that the key I used was acceptance: that I simply accepted the way things were, including how I was feeling, instead of raging against it and demanding that the universe be other than it is.

I feel I should scream this from the rooftops. Simply accept this present moment, really accept it, and you hold the secret of life in your hands. That is all you need to know about enlightenment, all you need to know about anything. Once you accept What Is, in this one moment, right now, then all the tortuous ego dance of 'what if', 'if only', 'I really have to' and 'I shouldn't have' can finally fall away and leave you free to live your life as it is, in the glorious wonder of the present moment.

It really is that simple.

At least, when you're there in the garden, it seems to be that simple.

And yet, curiously enough, when you're here on the other side of the door, it doesn't always seem to be quite so straightforward.

I spent that whole day 'in the garden', 'in the zone', feeling the universe moving through me. And just for the record, no, I didn't make a miraculous recovery. Yet feeling as relaxed as I did, I felt a lot better, and the remaining discomfort no longer seemed so important.

But now, several days later, I am outside the garden again. I have found my way back to the door and am holding the key in my hand. But I can't seem to quite turn it in the lock. You know how it is with keys sometimes. You need to have the knack. Just jiggle the key a bit to the right, or a bit to the left. Or pull up the handle of the door while you're trying to turn it. Every key is different.

But right now, I no longer seem to have the knack of opening this particular door.

I know that the key is acceptance, but I can't quite seem to quite manage it. I tell myself I am willing to accept what is. From time to time, I even seem to do this. But I am still outside the garden.

So I ask myself: what is wrong? What I am not accepting? Is it the way I am feeling? Or is it something else?

And I have come to the conclusion that it is something else.

What I am not accepting, right now, is that I am standing outside the garden.

And I won't get back in that place until I do.

The Taste Of Tomatoes

I recently attended a workshop run by Sally Chaffer, in which she introduced us to the spiritual experience of eating strawberries. Now, this may seem more like recreation than spiritual development, but it was all about mindfully eating strawberries: being aware of their appearance and texture as we held them in our hands, smelling their fragrance, and then eating them slowly a bite at a time, giving ourselves a chance to enjoy their luxurious taste.

I have to confess that this is very different from the way I normally eat: gulping things down mindlessly as I focus my attention on something else entirely.

I'm not sure how I came to eat like this. Was it because I would get into trouble with the adults if I didn't eat up my dinner, so I learned to eat as quickly as possible lest my appetite dwindled away and left me stranded half way through the green beans? Or is it because some primitive survival instinct kicks in and prompts me to eat up my food before some competitor grabs it away and I starve to death?

Whatever the truth of it, Sally's approach to eating is much more fun. And as you might have guessed, she was using the strawberries as a practical exercise in being in the moment, illustrating the advantage of focusing your attention on what you're actually doing, instead of being somewhere away in the past or the future, missing the experience of actually living your life.

If you happen to live within traveling distance of Leeds, UK, you may be interested in attending one of these workshops of Sally's. The next one is scheduled for 19th July. She titles the workshops Inner Peace Now! and you can find some details about them here. (You may recognize Sally from the comments she leaves here at The Secret Of Life - I've written more about my experience of her workshop at Sue Ann Edwards' blog.)

That experience with the strawberries reminded me of something which happened to me several years ago. A friend offered me an organic tomato she had grown, inviting me to taste it and see what I thought. Biting into that tomato was a real revelation. There was a sweetness to it, a subtlety of flavor, which brought me very vividly back to my childhood. It was a long time since I had tasted a tomato like that.

"Wow!" I said. "That's what tomatoes used to taste like!"

My friend smiled, clearly pleased at my reaction.

But afterwards, something unexpected happened. The next time I ate a tomato, just an ordinary non-organic tomato I bought at the supermarket, I tried tasting that one as well. And you know what? That tasted pretty good too. Not as good as my friend's tomato perhaps, but I could still detect that same sweetness and subtlety of flavor. And gradually, as I tasted more and more tomatoes, I realized that tomatoes generally tasted pretty good now, a lot better than all the tomatoes I'd tasted for many years. And I soon realized that this had nothing to do with the tomatoes themselves. It was all to do with me. It was simply because I had started paying attention as I ate. Tomatoes had really always been this good. It was just that I hadn't been focusing on what I was eating. I had been biting into something which my mind had labeled 'tomato' and then dismissed from my attention. Why go to the bother of tasting those things, my mind had been saying, I know all about them already!

But now I knew better. Now I had experienced the benefit of actually tasting the tomatoes, of being present while I was eating them.

Of course, I had failed to extrapolate this fully and bring the same degree of attention to all my eating, but it's never too late to start. And there may be more benefit involved than simply enjoying the taste. Some people believe that eating mindfully improves our digestion and allows us to extract more nutrition from our food. This seems to make sense. Why shouldn't our digestive system operate more efficiently if we're paying attention while we're using it? So many other things do - why not our stomachs?

Mindfulness can also be helpful in losing weight. Compulsive eating doesn't tend to be mindful eating. It tends to be something we do while we're thinking of something else, perhaps focusing on whatever problems have led us to eat compulsively in the first place. Or perhaps what's happening is that we're focusing on what we're going to eat next: eating a biscuit while our mind is on the biscuits that are still in the packet. Or worse still, on the packets that are still in the shop, just waiting there to be bought...

If compulsive eating is a problem for you, you could try eating mindfully for a change. Focus on that biscuit. Enjoy its taste, its texture. You may then derive more pleasure from eating that single biscuit than you did from all those packets you slung mindlessly down your neck.

And then: who knows? That one biscuit may be all you really desire.

Postscript: My blogging platform, Typepad, has now introduced more flexibility in typefaces, so I've taken the opportunity to increase the font size. I find this a lot easier to read. Do you agree, or do you find it too large? Any feedback is welcome!

Eckhart, Oprah.... And A Giraffe

There's been a lot of publicity, but just in case you hadn't heard, Oprah Winfrey is talking to Eckhart Tolle about his book A New Earth in a series of ten live interactive webcasts on Monday evenings. Each of the webcasts will focus on a different chapter of the book. You can sign up to participate here.

The first of these webcasts took place last week and is now available to download here. The project seems to have been very well planned. There's even a handy reckoner here to work out when the webcast will take place in your particular time zone. It works out at 6pm US Pacific time, 9pm US Eastern time, and 2am here in the UK (where the downloading option is proving rather popular).

Apparently half a million people watched the first webcast live, so it looks like the project will bring this kind of teaching to unprecedented numbers. I know it's shamefully frivolous of me, but I can't help wondering if Eckhart's trademark beige sweaters will become the must-have fashion accessory of 2008.

I have to say that I found the first webcast compulsive listening. Oprah Winfrey's contributions brought an interesting new perspective to Eckhart's teaching and the webcast may be of particular interest to those who are unsure about how to integrate spiritual teachings with existing Christian beliefs. Do let me know what you think...

And finally... What was that about a giraffe, you may be asking? Well, we've recently touched on IQ tests here on the blog and some of you expressed a bit of skepticism, so I though you might appreciate an antidote to such tests. Here's a link to a test of... well, something or other. I think you'll enjoy it. Take the giraffe test here! And if you'd like to let me know how you get on, I'll be happy to hear from you...

The Fifth Cowboy

Sorry I'm posting a bit less frequently right now, but as I mentioned before I've got a computer problem - and there's some other things which are slowing things down a bit too. One of these is that I'm working on a series of posts called 'The Ultimate Truth'.  (I hope you're impressed with the title!) As with the earlier 'Heart Of The Secret' posts, I'm planning to get this whole series written before I start posting them. This is because - as you might glean from the title - they're kind of challenging and there's a possibility that I'll lose my thread in the middle and the whole thing will fall apart. In which case, you'll get a really interesting post about the weather instead...

On top of which, I'm traveling down to the Optimum Health Clinic in London in a few months time to get some treatment for my CFIDS (or ME as it is most usually known here in the UK). Just to explain briefly: the theory on which this clinic operates - which is not (as yet) mainstream - is that the root cause of the condition is a dysfunction of the mitochondria, the energy-producing part of the body's cells. The theory goes that this dysfunction has been produced by a viral illness (or some other trigger) and does not heal because the person gets stuck in a highly stressed 'fight or flight' state. The clinic treats this on two fronts: a nutritional approach to help heal the mitochondria directly and also a series of cognitive techniques (including Emotional Freedom Technique which I mentioned in an earlier post) to treat the 'fight or flight' condition. If you have CFIDS yourself and would like to discuss this further, then please leave a comment.

But the main reason I'm mentioning all this is that, ahead of my visit to the psychologist at the clinic, I'm writing out an account of my early life, and my writing energy has therefore been channeled into that instead of into the blog. Waste not, want not, though, and I thought you might be interested in something I've been remembering. Don't worry - I'm not planning to make this blog 'all about me', but the following story ties in with some of what we've been talking about in earlier posts...

One of the things that has come up for me is how isolated I felt in my early years. I was an only child and my parents didn't seem to understand the need for me to socialize with other kids. I remember well the trauma of my first day at school. It wasn't the lessons that were the problem - it was playtime. I remember standing at the edge of the playground, feeling utterly baffled. The teachers couldn't understand why I didn't know any other kids. The only one I knew was the little girl from down the street, but she wouldn't play with me because I was a boy. She later sent apologies (via her mother) which was kind of nice, I suppose.

Eventually I became friends with a boy called David, who bullied me. I can remember very little about this relationship except that I didn't enjoy it at all, and I suspect that is the reason why my memory has blotted it out. I can remember distinctly the reason why I put up with it though: the only alternative was being lonely and alone.

Then one day, David was away sick. I remember standing at the edge of the playground, once more alone, but watching in wistful fascination as a line of four boys snaked in and out amongst the other kids, occasionally firing imaginary guns and frequently slapping their hands against their thighs, as though to encourage the imaginary horses they were riding.

I should explain that this was round about 1959, and if you were a British boy at playtime, you had two options. You could either be a second world war soldier, Hitler having been vanquished in the relatively recent past and the war still being very prominent in the nation's psyche, or else you could be a cowboy. This was the age of Cheyenne, Bonanza, Rawhide, and numerous other western series. It may seem strange to us now, but if you switched on the TV in those days, it wasn't going to be very long before you saw a cowboy.

There was also another option, I suppose. You could always be an Indian - and I'm proud to say that I possessed both a tomahawk and a teepee - but this was kind of alternative and I remember having a long argument with one kid who thought it was ideologically very suspicious to be an Indian. I don't think he ever came to play with me again. The term 'Native American' had not yet been invented, of course, and no one would have understood why there was a need for it.

But these kids I was watching were cowboys and I desperately wanted to be one of them. So it was like the answer to my wildest dreams when the lead cowboy - who turned out to be called Keith - suddenly held up his hand in a signal to halt, drew sharply on his reins to pull up his 'horse' beside me, and asked me if I wanted to join his gang. I could hardly believe my luck. Moments later, I was running along at the end of the line behind the charismatic Keith, mischievous Andrew, amiable Paul, and sullen Graham. I was the fifth cowboy, the lowliest member of the gang, but I was firing my gun and slapping my thigh with the rest of them. I was wild with excitement. I was where I wanted to be...

But I hadn't reckoned with the little girl down the road. She told her mother that I was in a gang, and of course my mother got to hear about it and wanted to put a stop to it. She didn't want any son of hers involved with a 'gang'. I had plainly got in with the wrong sort. She told me I would have to stop playing with this gang. And what was wrong with that nice boy David anyway?

I was in floods of tears. I couldn't believe it! After the uphill struggle of trying to hold my own amongst the other kids after the isolation in which my parents had chosen to bring me up, I had finally managed to find some proper friends, but now my mother was trying to put a stop to it! I understood perfectly the injustice - and utter stupidity - of what my mother was trying to do, but I didn't possess the ability to explain it to her. I was helpless, totally dependent on a couple of clueless parents. There was nothing I could do to help myself...

When my father came home, my mother told him the bad news and he came across to talk to me. What was this 'gang' I was in?, he wanted to know. Still crying, I couldn't bring myself to look at him as I explained.

When he had heard what I had to say, he went next door to talk to my mother.

I can still remember those wonderful words coming through from the other room.

"It's all right," he said. 'They're just his friends."

My father had 'got it'. We just called ourselves a gang, that was all. We didn't go round robbing banks. It was going to be all right after all...

So I got to stay in the 'gang'.

OK, so I was the fifth cowboy, but I always got along very well with Keith and I think he would have promoted me up the line if he'd had the chance - but he knew that the other cowboys wouldn't have liked it.

When he got back off sick, the bully David was angry. I can still remember his words to me: "You're not playing with them - you're playing with me!" But I could afford to turn my back on him now. I didn't have to be scared of being alone any more.

I remember all these emotions I felt so clearly - and also the frustration and confusion of being unable to express them. It's been useful for me to reconnect with them. I've spoken quite lot in this blog about the need to release the suppressed emotions we carry around with us, so it's helped to get in touch with the way some of those emotions felt when I first encountered them - and how the inability of a child to express them is part of what led to them being suppressed in the first place.

And we wonder why children throw so many tantrums...

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...

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.

Foreign Bodies

After all those serious posts about The Secret, it's high time for an anecdote. So here's one about guess what?: the law of attraction. But I warn you, it's not for the squeamish. I mean, it's really not for the squeamish. This is an official warning.

But it's quite funny, I think...

Chris recently drew my attention to the fact that I'd put on a bit of weight. So I checked on the scales and found that, yes, I'd put on half a stone (about eight pounds). This was a bit of a problem. How was I going to lose it? You see, I don't really do diets. I try but they don't seem to take. The truth is: I like the eating too much.

And yet, thinking back, I realized that I do sometimes lose weight. It usually happens by accident, due to some fortuitous circumstance or other. Like, er, gastroenteritis - that's been a popular one over the years. But I thought it best not dwell on that one too much: what we focus on grows. I'd learned that much from all those posts I did about the law of attraction.

So guiding my thoughts swiftly on, I tried to think what else had turned up to make me lose weight over the years. Well, there was falling in love with Chris. That seemed to do the trick at the time - the pounds fairly rolled off me. But I'd already been and done that one. There was always the chance of an affair on the side, I supposed, but Chris might not like it and I didn't want to upset her.

So what could I do? How was I going to lose those extra pounds?

I decided that something would probably turn up...

Carbohydrates are my downfall. I can eat muesli till it's coming out of my ears. Gluten free muesli, that is, because I find I'm best without too much gluten in my diet. Another favorite is gluten free porridge, made out of rice and millet flakes. Yum.

I was helping myself to some of this the other morning, pouring it into the bowl to warm it up in the microwave, when I suddenly noticed something strange in it, which I took to be some sort of husk. A millet husk, I supposed, not knowing very much about millet or how it grew or anything. The truth is: I tend not to know a great deal about anything much. I'm remarkably incurious really (except when it comes to the meaning of life and stuff like that).

But I'm quite good at eating things...

Anyway, I thought I'd better take a look at this thing in the porridge, so I went and got my glasses and found to my surprise that it wasn't a husk at all. It was an insect. Quite a big insect as it happened. It had its wings outstretched as though it was about to fly away - but it wasn't going to go anywhere. It was far too dead for that. And far too toasted.

My first thought was to pick the insect out and carry on making the porridge. After all, that's what you'd do if you were washing vegetables, wasn't it? And I was really looking forward to that porridge...

But I decided that I really ought to take a closer look at the packet. And that's when I noticed that there were other things in there as well. Things that also looked like cereal husks - but on closer inspection, weren't.

On closer inspection, the packet contained rather a lot of dead insects.

Suddenly, I didn't feel very much like the porridge any more.

And that wasn't the end of it. There were other things in the packet as well: things that were harder to identify. I delved inside and picked one of them up to take a closer look and found that it was attached to a string of grains of millet as though they were all on a necklace. My mouth was gaping wide open in awestruck wonder by this time. I seemed to have found a kind of Aladdin's Cave of Yuck. I saw that what I was holding, with the grains of millet attached, was a string of white cotton.

Well, that settled it then! I was going to have to complain about this...

My mind started making connections now. I had previously only identified the insects as 'insects'. That had seemed to be all I needed to know. Delving any further into the zoological details would have seemed over-fastidious. But now I realized that these creatures were actually moths. And moths eat cotton, don't they?

Which kind of made sense - and yet didn't. I mean, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was the cotton in the porridge to start with and then the moths found their way in, attracted by the cotton? Or was it that the moths were in there first and then some concerned operative at the porridge works came along and fed them some cotton in case the poor things should starve? Or else - my mind was going into overdrive now - had one of the operatives fallen into the vat of flakes and these threads of cotton were all that remained of his T Shirt? In which case, where was the rest of the operative? Was he all mashed up in another part of the porridge?

I threw a sidelong glance at the packet. It was sitting there looking all innocent, apparently filled to the brim with its humdrum load of rice flakes, millet flakes and dead moths - yet did it also hold a sinister secret?

I thought it best not to delve any deeper...

So I took the porridge back to the store and complained. The young lady at the desk looked suitably horrified. She took a look at the packet.

"I didn't realize that's what 'organic' meant," she said.

"Neither did I," I told her.

So they gave me my money back there and then - how's that for customer service? - and told me that the packet would be sent to their laboratory for inspection. I would hear from them in due course...

I d*mn well better do...

But I kept quiet about the terrible truth - I was too scared that I would throw up all over the customer services counter if I told them about it.

The truth was that I'd actually bought two packets of porridge. And I'd already eaten the other one.

I'm definitely going to put on my glasses when I fix my breakfast in future...

"What do you fancy for tea?" asked Chris, when I got back from the store.

I told her that I didn't feel very hungry.

And indeed, I haven't felt very hungry ever since.

So what did I tell you? I knew that something would come along. There's the law of attraction for you...

Because it seems to me that I'm not going to be putting on very much weight over Christmas, not this year.

I'll be sliding into those skinny jeans in no time...

A Virtual Tour

Did I tell you we'd moved house? With so much else to blog about, I don't think I've got round to mentioning that we moved into our new place a few months ago. Which is kind of rude, considering that I shared so much of the stress of our move with you. The least I can do is show you round...

One thing I like about the house is that there's a kind of warp in space-time between the front and the back. There weren't many houses with one of those in our price range. The front is all light and airy and kind of public. Our front garden is on quite a steep incline so that our house is elevated above the road, yet on the other side of the road the ground rises again, so that we're looking out on a great sweeping panorama of suburbia, with houses and gardens rising each upon the last, like something out of a painting by Mr Zip.

There's excellent scope for snooping here. If I wanted to, I could sit at our large bay window with a cup of tea and a writing pad and make copious notes on the doings of all our neighbors. If any illicit affairs go on, we'd be the first to know about it. Maybe that's an idea for another blog...

All in all, though, I think I'd rather sit at the back of the house instead. It's altogether different here on the other side of the space-time warp. It's cozy and private and it's like looking out on a meadow. There are cottage garden type flower beds near the house, while at the bottom of the garden on the far side of the lawn there's an apple tree and an overgrown patch of shade-loving plants and weeds. If you go out there at dusk, you can hear a very noisy rustling of leaves as our heavy-footed hedgehog comes traipsing through on its nightly rounds, rooting out supper. It's a good thing those slugs and snails and whatnot aren't too bright - or else are hard of hearing - or they'd be oozing off out of the way before the poor thing could get within sniffing distance.

The kitchen is kind of tiny and the porch is falling down, so we'll pass those swiftly by and take you up to the next floor instead, where there's a massive new bathroom with a walk-in shower. Our predecessor led us to believe he was into communal bathing - or at any rate, he clearly had this earmarked as a principal selling point for the house, being careful to emphasize that the shower and the bath would both take two people, though whether both appliances were supposed to be in use at the same time wasn't clear. I'll draw a veil over whether or not we've tested this out, but suffice it to say that we don't have to worry about getting claustrophobic when we're taking a shower.

The back bedroom used to be the kids' room and is decorated in glaring blue and yellow. There used to be a picture of Bart Simpson on the wall but our predecessor took it with him, which is kind of upsetting but I can't quite bring myself to bother to buy a replacement. Without Bart, the blue and yellow color scheme doesn't really make sense any more. It's like a piece of modern art which has lost that manifesto thing which explains what it's all about, and the room is now under threat of being magnolia-ed.

The front bedroom is even more light and airy and public than the room below - kind of like Turner meets suburbia - so it's rather intriguing that there aren't any curtains. Nor any means of hanging curtains. Nor any sign that there has ever been any means of hanging curtains. Curious, eh?

The last room on this floor is the tiny study - The Secret Of Life's control center.  You can commiserate with me for a moment about the impossibly cramped and squalid conditions under which I toil, then follow me up to the top floor, where you have to mind your head because of the roof beams. This once used to be the loft, but it is now an en suite bedroom, and due to the low ceiling it's the coziest room in the house. We can lie here and watch the sky though the Velux window.

From time to time, a white feather appears on this window. Some of our friends tell us that this is because we've been visited by an angel. We like this idea, but I have to admit that the skeptic in me keeps looking out for a balding seagull instead.

So that's the house. It's a nice place, but the main reason we moved was actually nothing to do with the house at all. It was because the part of Leeds in which we lived before was rather soulless. Here in Roundhay, there's much more sense of life. Just a short walk away is the Friends Meeting House, where Sally (who often leaves a comment here) runs an Eckhart Tolle group on a Monday night, and which hosts many other interesting meetings and classes: meditation, healing, yoga and so on. Further along the main street are bustling bars and cafes, while a bit further still are Roundhay Park and the Canal Gardens, which I may well write about in a future post. Here too is the Roundhay Fox pub, where you can sit outside on one of the rare summer days we have and watch the world go by - on its way to the park and back again - while the staff pour you endless refills of excellent coffee.

This being the internet, I'm conscious of the fact that the manager of the Roundhay Fox is likely to google this at any moment and set me straight, so I'd better point out that customers are really only entitled to one refill of coffee. But it's worth taking a chance or two in life, don't you think?

Which brings us back neatly to the subject of moving house. If you want to step outside your comfort zone, I recommend it. As I mentioned in that earlier post, Chris and I built up a lot of drama around the whole business. OK, so there was a guy along the chain of purchasers who was playing around and complicating things, so there was plenty of scope for drama. But then, in life there usually is. We didn't have to feed it if we didn't want to. Instead of getting all anxious, we could have just trusted, which on reflection would have been an awful lot easier on our nervous systems.

And after all, it turned out fine in the end. Which is probably down to Sally, who was using the law of attraction on our behalf all along. As indeed was Chris, who had written our names and our new address on a sheet of paper which she kept on prominent display at all times.

As for myself, I found that acceptance did the trick. As you may have gathered, I'm not exactly accomplished at putting out positive intentions, but when the sale got very difficult, I trusted nevertheless. I trusted that what would be would be and that whatever happened, it would be All Right. And as soon as I started thinking that way, it so happened that everything fell into place and the sale went through.

Which kind of begs the question, where should we put our focus: intention or acceptance? And is there a conflict here? Can we seek to attract specific outcomes in our lives yet also accept the way things are? I raised this point in my earlier post (Positive Thinking For Beginners) and The Secret Of Life reader Bet has also raised it here.

Meanwhile, Sally (who is getting rather a lot of name-checks this post) recently attended a retreat with Eckhart Tolle, at which he was asked about that incredibly popular guide to the law of attraction, The Secret - she has shared Eckhart's response here.

All of which makes me think: I've written quite a lot about 'acceptance' recently (in the posts How Does It Feel To Win A Million? and Ripples On a Sea Of Peace), so perhaps it's about time I turned my attention to the law of attraction again...

(I hope you liked the house, by the way. Do call again!)

How Does It Feel To Win A Million?

Looking through the biography notes on Arjuna Ardagh (author of Awakening Into Oneness, the book I mentioned in the previous post) I came across this interesting quote about the culmination of Ardagh's search for enlightenment:

(Ardagh) had the profound realization that he had been seeking for what he already was, and always had been. He realized that it was in the abandonment of seeking and wanting that his heart found its fulfillment.

What might he mean by this?

It seems to me that if people think about enlightenment at all - and it helps to remind myself from time to time that not everyone does - then it's usually in terms of lots of foreign travel. People are expected to journey along perilous mountain passes to isolated monasteries, where they rise in the middle of the night to pray, drink yak's milk, and smite themselves with sticks at frequent intervals. If they are lucky and survive twenty years or so of this, they become enlightened, which means that they sit around with their knees crossed and make cryptic remarks to their students.

Whatever this enlightenment thing is, the idea goes, it is out there. You have to go out and find it. It is all about long haul flights and frequent flyer points. You have to search under every stone, and having searched, search again. There is no such thing as a long weekend to enlightenment.

And yet increasingly, people like Ardagh seem to be suggesting that this popular concept of a lonely soul scouring the world for some hidden truth is mistaken: that enlightenment is really closer to home than we think. That if we only understood, we could have it here, right now, in this moment.

But if so, then what is it? What is this truth which is supposed to be staring us all in the face?

Eckhart Tolle tells a story about winning a million dollars. This is something which makes people happy. But why should that be, he asks?

We know from reading the newspapers that many people who win such a large amount of money don't stay happy for very long. They may be bouncing off the ceiling a while, but when the elation has worn off, they find that they just have a new set of problems. They may be besieged by people begging for money; they may have trouble with jealous relatives; they may have arguments with their partner about how to spend all the money; or they may simply become morbidly obsessed with the fear of losing this vast fortune, in spite of the fact that they have managed perfectly well without it until now.

So with all this in store, why are people still so happy to win the lottery?

It clearly isn't the money itself, not really, for even if they manage to hang on to it, the chances are that some of these problems will come along to make them miserable anyway. Even at best, it seems inevitable that the elation will start to dwindle away over the weeks and months, even if all the money remains.

So if it's not the money itself, what causes that initial burst of elation?

Eckhart Tolle points out that we tend to spend a lot of our time 'disagreeing with reality'. We refuse to accept that things are the way they are. He describes this as a kind of madness, and if we think about it a while, we can see that he's right. Things are the way they are. Period. There's no getting away from it and no amount of raging against it is going to change it. We might wish we'd done this or wish we'd done that, and want to have this or want to have that. We might want politicians to tell the truth, or our relationship not to have ended, or to have got that job we wanted, or to have eaten a bit less chocolate for breakfast. We might want it to be warmer in winter and cooler in summer. We might want the trains to run on time. But things are the way they are are the way they are - and banging our heads against the wall and wailing isn't going to make them any better.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying we shouldn't take action to change things. If we notice some injustice that's being done to us or to someone else, or if we see how something might be done more efficiently, it's perfectly reasonable to set out to change that. But it's important to distinguish between that will to change and our absolute point blank refusal to accept the less than perfect nature of how things presently are.

The truth is that when we see something we think is wrong, we don't put all our energy into changing it. We don't do that at all. We channel a lot of that energy, perhaps most of it, or - let's face it - in most cases all of it into moaning about how things are right now, in refusing to accept reality, in resisting what we can see in front of our eyes. "The buses should run on time," we will say. "You shouldn't have walked out on me." "Chocolate ought to have less calories and then I wouldn't get fat!"

This resistance does nothing to change things and neither does it make us happy. It makes us tense. It makes us angry. It makes us frustrated. In the end, it is not the situation to which we object which causes us so much pain, but our blind, obstinate, utterly mad refusal to accept that it is so.

And this, Eckhart Tolle suggests, points to the reason why winning all that money can make us happy: because for once in our lives we are willing to accept that things are the way they are. We have won a million dollars - yes, we can accept that. So just for once in our lives, we can drop our resistance to how things actually are. We can drop our disagreement with reality. We can drop our obsession with how things were or how they might become, put our plans and dreams to one side, finally stop resisting and let in life. It is not the money itself, it is the great relief of doing this, of letting go of that struggle, which feels so wonderful.

Which brings us back to Arjuna Ardagh "seeking for what he already was, and always had been". Ardagh reports that he found fulfillment when he stopped this seeking, when he abandoned his wanting. In other words: when he no longer disagreed with reality, when he simply accepted the way things were - and accepted the way he was.

So perhaps it is this acceptance, this surrender, not just from time to time but continuously, from one moment to the next, which forms the cornerstone of enlightenment. Which means that we don't, after all, have to search the world for the ultimate truth. It really is waiting for us right here. We just have to give up the struggle and accept the way things are.

So if you want to know what it feels like to win a million, just try accepting the way things are in this moment, really accepting. Then feel the tension ease...

Feel the lightening.

Update and Events

Events at The Secret of Life HQ are continuing to produce serious impediments to effective blogging. Not only do we (strictly speaking) not actually have an HQ - unless you count the occasional work station I manage to worm my way into here at the public library - but my wife Chris has gone and scalded her leg very badly by spilling a cup of (almost boiling) tea all the way down it.

I'm please to report that her recovery is progressing successfully (if somewhat painfully) and she has learnt the important lesson that next time she makes a cup of tea she doesn't like she should pour it down the sink instead. But what with all the trips to the doctor to get Chris' dressing renewed, the seemingly endless process of house moving, and grabbing a few precious minutes once in a blue moon to sneak away to the library only to find that all the computers are down, there hasn't been much opportunity to post on this blog in recent weeks - though you may have noticed this already. Your patience really is greatly appreciated - but I am even now researching ISPs for the net connection at our soon-to-be (permanent!) residence, so I hope that normal service will be resumed here very soon eventually.

I hope to have a more substantial post completed shortly, but in the meantime I encourage you to take a look at the comments on the previous post, where you'll find some particularly intriguing insights on enlightenment from Deeksha giver Ed Harpin. I especially like this bit:

Just to avoid the idea of hierarchy or competition... it can be good to know that there are always infinite beings less Enlightened than you, and always infinite beings more Enlightened than you..! so wherever you are on the path, you are always in the middle...!! And wherever you are, that is the only and most perfect place for you to be.

You can read more from Ed here. And just in case you were wondering what Deeksha is, you can read all about it - and find out how to get info on Deeksha events worldwide - in this previous post. If you happen to live near me in Yorkshire, Northern England, Deeksha giver Heidi Fawkes is running numerous Deeksha events over the summer. You can contact her via her web site here.

Finally, a bit more information for British readers (which I realize a lot of you aren't!). The Secret Of Life reader and peace activist Linda has asked me to mention some upcoming British concerts by James Twyman. According to Twyman's web site, Twyman is "an internationally renowned author, singer and "peace troubador" who has a reputation for drawing millions of people together in prayer to influence events of world crisis. In 1995 he had an experience in the mountains of Croatia that led to his best-selling book Emissary of Light, called "the second coming of the Celestine Prophesy" by Variety magazine." You can read more here.

The James Twyman concert dates are as follows: 18th July Liverpool; 20th July Leeds, 22nd July Shrewsbury; 24th July London; 28th July Devon. Tickets are £10 in advance. For full details re. all these venues, phone 0870 879 3623. Linda herself is a contact for the Leeds concert at Lidgett Park Methodist Church. You can email her for full details.