The Secret of Life

Eckhart, An Update... And This Time It's A Dolphin

There's a whole big bundle of stuff today. First of all, a bit more about the Eckhart-Oprah webcasts. If like me you've been listening to these on your portable player, you may be interested to learn that Pete at Touchstones has some selected video clips from the webcasts up for discussion on his blog. The pictures seem to give an extra dimension to the discussions - and enhance the sense of presence you can get from experiencing Eckhart Tolle's teaching.

I suspect that different parts of the webcasts will stand out for different people - you hear whatever you need to hear at the time. For me, the part of the second discussion which really grabbed me was when someone emailed in to ask how best to break free of the ego. 'Ego' isn't an expression I've used a lot on this blog but of course this is referring to the part of ourselves which is constantly trying to prove itself and compare itself to others, the part which is constantly seeking validation. Eckhart describes the ego as trying to 'complete itself'. It is aware that something is missing but it's not sure what, so it is constantly searching and looking for 'the next thing'.

Eckhart's advice in response to this question was to try to become as comfortable as we can with the present moment. This is because the ego hates the present moment. In its urge to 'complete itself', it is constantly on the lookout for what is going to happen next, as it searches for whatever it needs to make it whole. It is therefore constantly wishing for the present moment to end. So if you can lose that impatience and become comfortable with whatever is happening right now, you are starting break free from the ego and get in touch with your true self, which can always be found in the peace and power of the present.

If these webcasts have piqued your interest in Eckhart Tolle, you may like to go along to a Stillness group, where you can watch a video of Eckhart's teaching and then experience stillness in the company of others. My friend (and The Secret Of Life reader) Sally runs the group here in Leeds, UK, and hosts a directory of such groups throughout the UK. This site also includes links to groups in Eire and Spain. For US and other international groups, there is a similar site here.

Moving on to other things, the Gateways Of Light video about planetary transformation, which I featured back in January, got some good feedback, and I was recently contacted by Chris Bourne of Openhand Foundation, who developed the video. Chris wanted to let me know that it has now been 'improved and upgraded', so the original post now links to this new version.

I've mentioned before that I attend Ed Harpin's Kundalini Yoga and Deeksha sessions in Huddersfield here in the UK and I've recently written about my experience of the sessions on Ed's web site. You can find my write-up, along with the experiences of some other attendees here.

And don't forget to take a look at the comments on the posts here at The Secret Of Life if you get the time. We've been having some particularly interesting discussions recently, especially in response to the post How Much Do We Really Know? And of course, any comments you would like to leave yourself are very welcome...

Finally, here's a heartwarming story about a dolphin who came to the aid of some beached whales. I don't intend to deluge you with cute animal stories (much as I like them myself!) but I particularly like this one because of what it reminds us about dolphin intelligence and empathy for creatures outside its own species. (And also because it's just like Skippy the bush kangaroo...)

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...

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...

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.

The Elusive Truth

Straying a bit from the usual The Secret Of Life subject matter, I was intrigued by a recent article in The Sunday Times called "According to Wikipedia, I'm The Mona Lisa", this title appearing alongside a picture of Rodin's The Thinker. (Get the joke?) This article is based on an interview with 'net entrepreneur' Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur who argues that web 2.0 is killing our culture. The article is only available online on subscription (which is unfortunate but also pertinent to this post). But you can read about Andrew Keen's book on Amazon.com and on the BBC Newsnight site.

According to Keen, we amateurs who are producing our own content through blogs, pods, and YouTube are like the proverbial infinite number of monkeys who have finally been connected - courtesy of the web - to all those typewriters, and are producing not masterpieces but a deluge of bad art and inaccurate information.

What with all the wacky ideas I go on about in this blog, I suppose that Keen would consider me to be the epitome of what he's talking about. But I try not to be a channel for misinformation, and generally speaking, as far as I can tell, so do the other blogs I see. Some of their material may be opinionated, but it usually seems to be clear enough that this is what it's intended to be - this in contrast to some of the professional news media, which frequently try to pass off comment as information.

My favourite blogs are those in which people reflect thoughtfully - and sometimes wittily - upon their own lives. A problem with the professional media is that we only hear from 'ordinary people' under editorial control. 'Reality TV' is only as real as the editors wish to make it, while radio phone-ins often offer little but garbled repetitions of second-hand ideas. Having been on a couple of radio shows myself, I know how hard it can be to get any more than simplistic ideas across. In a blog, you have the time and space to say what you really want to say. A post can be as long or, crucially, as short as you wish it to be. This latter, too, is a welcome contrast to many newspaper articles, where sparse ideas are often stretched to inordinate length to fill up the necessary inches.

You'll have gathered by now that I don't exactly agree with Andrew Keen's ideas, not that I see web 2.0 as any kind of replacement for the mainstream media, more as a welcome adjunct. According to the Sunday Times, however, Keen sees us driving the professional media out of business altogether. 'If traditional news-gathering disappears,' the article asks, 'who will hold the politicians to account?'

Could that be the voters, perhaps?

This is clearly going OTT. No one is getting driven out of business. Many people realize that the news corporations have their own underlying agendas and if they turn to blogs it's to read the opinions of those who are free from such constraints. It's to broaden their outlook and perhaps be entertained. They're not looking for something to supplant the commercial media.

In any case, which medium you turn to for information and opinion is as much a matter of convenience as anything else. During most people's leisure time, newspapers, radio and TV are more conveniently to hand than the internet. If the predictions of the dawn of the computer age had been correct, paper would have been phased out long ago. And yet, surprise surprise, people still read books, newspapers, and even magazines. These media have outlasted the floppy disc, and I'm willing to bet they'll also outlast the DVD. All this stuff about web 2.0 driving newspapers out of business is simply hyperbole, presumably intended to sell more copies of Andrew Keen's book - just as similar hyperbole is used on a daily basis to sell more newspapers. And what seems particularly remarkable is that Keen appears to be actually praising newspapers for their accuracy. If you have ever read anything in a newspaper about which you had special expertise, you may not share his opinion.

Andrew Keen's ideas about all the fiction and poetry on the web appear to be even less convincing. Here again, he seems to believe that commercial publishers are being driven out of business. Yet what it seems like to me, as the author of three unpublished novels (one of which is really quite good, honest) is that while there might be all sorts of opportunities these days for self-publishing fiction, it's just as hard to get anyone to read the stuff as ever. While the standard of professionally published fiction may be more uneven than it used to be - with some books apparently finding a publisher less because of their literary merit than because they fit a promising marketing niche - professional publication is still the best indicator that a book may actually be worth reading. And with so many such books on the shelves, why should anyone turn instead to a self-published ebook by an unknown author?

Self-published non-fiction may stand more of a chance of finding readers, but only if its subject matter is being overlooked by the professionals. This alternative channel for publication serves to keep the professionals on their toes and is surely all to the good. Keen warns of the dangers of inaccuracies in such books, yet readers are able to judge them the same as they can any other work of non-fiction: at least partly on the strength of the sources they cite. Our modern world certainly requires wary readers, but I suspect it has always been so.

Yet what of the sources themselves? What of our sources of reference? Here, at last, I find Andrew Keen's ideas more convincing. I've touched on the shortcomings of Wikipedia in a previous post but I hadn't realized quite how 'democratic' the site is. According to Keen, no weight whatsoever is given to the established expertise of contributors. The input of a university professor is apparently given the same weight as that of someone who wishes to remain anonymous. If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt Keen's word - after all, it appears in a proper newspaper! - then it does seem to be taking even-handedness a bit far. In some areas, such as - arguably - the interface between science and spirituality which I was discussing in that previous post, expertise may actually be an impediment to the emergence of new ideas. The defence of an entrenched position may sometimes be seen as a greater priority than the establishment of the truth. In others, however, it is simply a matter of getting your facts correct, and turning your back on the experts seems a bit daft.

Keen contrasts the popularity of Wikipedia (17th most trafficked site on the net) with that of the venerable Britannica, with its Nobel prize-winning contributors and 4,000 experts (which comes in at 5,128th). This may be partially a reflection on Britannica's level of readability but it  probably has more to do with the fact that it is subscription-based. And it may say less about surfers' lack of discernment than about Britannica's failure to adapt to the realities of the internet. Perhaps it is time for Britannica to drop its charges and start using Google AdSense instead.

But what should a humble blogger do? I've tended to provide links from The Secret Of Life to Wikipedia as some kind of independent source of information because it is popular, frequently (though not always) readable, and is accessible to all. Is it time for me to re-think this policy? Andrew Keen suggests Citizendium as an alternative, which apparently "aims to improve on Wikipedia's model by adding 'gentle expert oversight' and requiring contributors to use their real names". This sounds like a reasonable compromise between people power and established expertise. What do you think? As ever, your views on this are welcome. (It's OK - you don't have to cite your credentials.)

One closing thought: my wife Chris buys The Sunday Times, so it is often lying around the house, and occasionally an article attracts my attention enough to make me want to write about it here. I find it rather irritating, therefore, that articles on The Times and Sunday Times web sites are only available free for a week after publication. After that, access is only available via subscription. OK, I could pay the subs, but I can't expect all my readers to do so too. So I can never put in a link on my blog to the article I'm discussing.

Why do the Times newspapers adopt this policy, I wonder? Presumably it is to increase their revenue. But I can't honestly see it bringing in that much money. This seems to me to be another case of a traditional medium failing to accept that we are now in an age where people expect to access information freely online. If people start to turn elsewhere, then perhaps the newspapers should look to themselves for the answer.

Changes

Thanks to Pam for leaving this blog's first ever comment with the tale of her mechanical 80s iPod. The fact that a CD changer can now be regarded as an antiquated relic makes me feel very old indeed. And I never even got around to owning one...

Thanks too to Paul for your contribution. (I should explain that I know both Pam and Paul from my previous life as a fanzine writer. It's been great to hear from them, but please also feel free to contribute if you don't know me. This blog is open to everyone.) As Paul says, there is something very compelling about random plays, though it's a bit problematic for me with all the audio books on my player. It's a bit disconcerting when Jimi Hendrix fades into Charles Dickens.

A few weeks ago, I went to my osteopath and we listened to random Hanna Barbera themes on his laptop. There's nothing like having your bones manipulated to The Flintstones. But we both agreed that it's wondering what's going to play next that's the really interesting bit. Actually listening to the tunes themselves can sometimes be tedious by comparison. After all, some of them last over three minutes! - and when Bridge Over Troubled Water comes on, it's positively traumatic. (No, I didn't mean that. I mean that it's long...) It's waiting for what comes next that seems to be what's important.

There's an important spiritual lesson in that last sentence. See if you can spot it, and feel free to comment if you do (or don't). (And this is only the second post! At this rate, we'll all be enlightened by Christmas.)

Pam also mentioned that this blog is a bit impersonal, so I've taken the time to improve and expand my biography. It now tells you a bit more about me and explains how my life experience has finally blossomed into this glorious blog. It also explains a bit more about what the blog is about, which may be useful, especially in view of the rather cryptic spiritual content there's been so far. You may feel that my aspirations  are a bit ambitious in view of the fact the blog so far has approximately two readers, but hey, you've got to start somewhere. So please go and take a look at the bio (just click on "About") and I'll be back with another post real soon.

Malfunction

It seemed like a good idea to buy an mp3 player. I wanted it mainly for audio books but I could have borrowed those from the library, which would have cost me nothing. Instead, I had to buy an mp3 player. It cost me a hundred and fifty quid but it was neat. It was a Creative Zen Sleek, which is made to look like an iPod and even has the same stupid white "here I am - come and mug me!" earphones, but where it differs  is that you can drop it on the carpet and it doesn't break, an intriguing feature which Apple don't seem to have thought of.

The trouble is: it uses Microsoft software.

To get it to work with the audio books from Audible, I had to update the firmware and update Windows Media Player and by the time I'd done all that, it didn't work any longer. Not only that but Windows Media Player could no longer find the licenses for all the music I'd downloaded over the previous year, so I couldn't play it any more. Not any of it. Can you imagine that happening with something you'd bought at a record store? You open up the jewel case one day and find that the shop has taken back the CD even though you've paid for the damn thing. There's a technical error at HMV so one of the managers accidentally comes out and burgles you. It wouldn't happen, would it? Well, not outside a science fiction movie anyway, and even then only one by Philip K Dick. And the record companies are worried about the internet losing them money...!

Anyway, the short and the long of it is that I had to reload Windows on my computer to get my music back. And some of it is still missing, like Heliopolis at Night by Aberfeldy, for instance, and Portions for Foxes by Rilo Kiley. But at least I now had a working mp3 player. At least I could lie in bed and listen to The Time Traveler's Wife or Arthur and George without having to change the CD every seventy minutes. How dreadful it had been having to change CDs! It had certainly been worth all those weeks of tearing my hair out, cursing Bill Gates, and trying to interpret the cryptic messages from Creative Technical Support to avoid such inconvenience. I would have happily swum through shark-infested waters into the bargain - and I can't even swim. (A touch of sarcasm has crept into this blog by the way, in case you hadn't noticed. I expect there's a smiley face or something I can use to signify that but I'm not very good at that sort of thing. And no, in case, you were wondering, I don't get all my book recommendations from the Richard and Judy Show, only some of them.)

But the awful truth I'm leading up to is that today, it almost happened again. After months of happy trouble-free Creative Zen listening - trouble free, that is, except for the way bits of dandruff tend to find their way under the screen and once they're there, you can't get them out (bit of a design fault there, and I suspect it's not even my dandruff) - after all those wonderfully blissful months, I was downloading a few sixties tracks from Napster and switched the computer off without unplugging the player, and for some reason or other, the damn thing froze up solid. "Docked" said the screen, but it wasn't any longer. The player had gone into a vegetative state. I was traumatized! Was it all going to happen all over again? Did I face endless weeks of staring at the computer screen, willing Bill Gates to be competent? Surely it wouldn't come to that?

Fortunately, it didn't.  I managed to find the instruction book, which reminded me that the player could be reset by sticking a straightened-out paper clip up its backside. (If only all of life's problems were so easily solved...) But just for a moment, as I waited to see if this would work, it was as though my life hung in the balance. There I was sitting, willing it to be OK, feeling that the whole of my future existence depended on that little chunk of metal, plastic and dandruff functioning properly. As though nothing else in the whole universe mattered...

Later on, when the paper-clip's work was finally done and the mp3 player was working again, I settled back and listened to one of the tracks I'd downloaded: Rainbow Valley by The Love Affair, one of the forgotten classics of the sixties, in my opinion. I just love that female vocalist. Sigh! The place they're singing about is a bit like the pop equivalent of Brigadoon: a fabulous valley where loads of good stuff happens. And it occurred to me that maybe it would be possible to have such a world, a world in which no one's happiness ever depended on the satisfactory functioning of a small box full of audio books and dandruff.

Or on anything else.