The Secret of Life

One Last Secret...

After two and a half years and a hundred and forty posts, it looks like the time has come to put this blog to bed, at least for a while. I think it has built into a valuable source of spirituality-related information, so I very much intend to keep it up here on the net. If you've just discovered it and would like to find out more about what the site has to offer, then this page is a good place to start. And do feel free to email me or leave me a comment. I'll still be hovering about, and still very much involved in spiritual development - especially my own...

Which is why I'm taking a break really. I hope that The Secret Of Life has helped other people, but one thing I know is that it has certainly helped me. When I started it in October 2006, my experience of all this spiritual stuff was pretty much theoretical, but now it has very much become real, an integral part of my everyday experience. Writing here on a regular basis has kept these ideas to the front of my mind and has helped me to make that important transition.

But Eckhart Tolle has remarked that he gauges a person's spiritual development by the extent to which they have stopped thinking, and that's been the problem the last few months. I need to stop thinking so much, to get out of my mind and into my body - and running a blog like this tends to keep my mind buzzing away. Which is all very well in its way, just not what I need right now.

There used to be things I needed to discover - and this blog has been a useful gateway into that adventure. But now I think I know what I need to know, at least for the time being. Right now, I don't need more knowledge. I don't need more techniques. I just need to put what I already know into action.

Because that is the one last 'secret' I'd like the share here. You already know it, I suspect, but it won't hurt to remind you...

The point is that you can read all the books you like, watch all the DVDs you like, attend all the courses and workshops you like, but unless you use the techniques you've learned and carry the peace you may have experienced with you into your everyday life, you're not going to experience spiritual transformation. You might know more, but your life's going to stay pretty much the same as it always has been. So the time may have come to stop reading and live it instead.

Alternatively, you may not be at the stage right now of feeling that you have all the knowledge you need. There may still be things that you need to find out. If so then you've come to a pretty good place. This blog contains everything that I needed to know - or, at any rate, links to where to find it - and it may be the same for you. But all our journeys are different, so you may also have to look elsewhere. In which case, a good place to start are the sites of my fellow spirituality and self-development bloggers. There are links to some of my favorites here, but there are many more of them out there. I hope you enjoy your voyage of discovery...

If you have been a regular reader of this site, or have left comments here, or are one of the bloggers I've been lucky enough to come to know (or, indeed, if you are all three!) then thank you so much for your interest and support. It has been very important to me and has been appreciated more than you probably realize. I feel kind of sorry to be leaving you like this, but I don't really feel that I have a choice. It's just that the time has come to be doing something different.

Like I say, I may well return - either to this blog or to the internet in some other form. It occurs to me that when the time is right, I may write an eBook, for instance: perhaps the essence of The Secret Of Life in a compact form, perhaps including some of the other posts I had in mind but never quite got round to writing. Whatever I do, I will post about it here, so please consider maintaining - or taking out - a subscription to my email list. See the button in the sidebar. It's the best way for you to keep in touch with any future developments.

Before I go, I'd like to mention that my friend Sally Chaffer (who you may recognize from the comments she's left here at The Secret Of Life) now has some excerpts from her workshops available on a CD. If you can't get to one of Sally's workshops here in Yorkshire, UK in person (like there might be the odd few thousands of miles in the way) then her 'Keep The Peace' CD will give you a taste of her teaching. I was talking about the importance of carrying peace with us as we go about our day - and that is what Sally is all about.

Or if you prefer to stay here at The Secret Of Life for a while, here are a few of my favorite posts to take a look at:

My New Year Strategies For Spiritual Development, Equanimity and Walking The Walk are recent posts which will give you some idea of the kinds of techniques I'm currently putting into practice.

Feeling What Is, How Does It Feel To Win A Million?, Ripples On a Sea Of Peace, The Ultimate Truth Series, Earth Doomed (see page 53), A Sun-filled Room and Letting Go are choice blasts from the past.

Right then. That's about it. I feel that a resonant final paragraph would go very nicely here, but the truth is that if I could write one right now, I wouldn't be retiring the blog. So all I will say is: that's it for now! Namaste. Love and peace to you all...

The Age Of Stupid

Following on from the previous post on Earth Hour, if you get the chance, do take a look at The Age Of Stupid, a powerful new movie about climate change. It's currently being screened at a series of one-off showings at cinemas throughout the UK and the makers are hoping to generate enough interest to get it on general release. If you live in the UK, check here for a screening near you.

International screenings will follow. US release is scheduled for May, Australia for July, and India for September... You can also organize a screening yourself at your college, school, pub, bookshop, cinema, local group etc. See details of how to do this here.

Earth Hour 2009

Earth Hour is an initiative by WWF which is scheduled for Saturday 28th March 2009 at 8-30pm your local time. Individuals, businesses, governments and organizations around the world are being asked to turn off their lights for one hour - Earth Hour - to make a global statement of concern about climate change and to demonstrate a commitment to finding solutions.

Some 1180 cities from 80 countries across the globe have already signed up and a great number of iconic landmarks will be plunged into darkness, including Nelson's Column in London, the Forth Bridge, the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, the Eiffel Tower, Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Table Mountain in Cape Town and the Sydney Opera House. 

To find out more and sign up to take part, check out the US site here, the UK site here, or do a Google for your local details.

Earth Hour originated in Australia in 2007. This video gives more background to the project:

Walking The Walk

A couple of weeks ago, my wife Chris and I attended a course at a clinic in London. This was quite an achievement in itself as we'd previously hoped to attend last year but Chris' back went in the shower on the morning of our departure and the trip had to be postponed. We nearly didn't make it again this year, as Chris' back was dodgy again and the weather did its bit by flinging copious amounts of snow in our direction, not least on the very day of our travel. But gritty determination - helped by the grit on our driveway - won through in the end.

After all this effort, it was quite ironic that there was nothing in the substance of the course which I hadn't already written about here at The Secret of Life: namely coming into the moment; NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and EFT (emotional freedom technique). What was very valuable, however, was the realization that these tools could be used not only for our spiritual development but also to help with our long term health condition: we've both had CFIDS (also known - principally - as ME here in Britain).

Increasingly, in recent years, these and other such techniques are being used to treat CFIDS, the theory being that those of us who have had the condition are prevented from healing because our bodies are stuck in a highly-stressed 'fight or flight' state (known as 'maladaptive stress response'). The suggested aim is to develop the habit of spending most of our time in a more relaxed 'healing state' instead.

I'm occasionally asked if all the spiritual work I've done has helped my physical health as well, and I've always replied with a cheery "no - not really". This has never bothered me very much because I haven't been doing the spiritual work with such an expectation in mind. But I realize now that there may be a very good reason why there hasn't been a physical 'pay-off': because I still have a lot of work to do to integrate such spiritual progress as I have made into my everyday life. I have written on this blog about being 'in the zone', in tune with the universe, and so on, but the truth is that I am only in that sort of state of consciousness for about one or two percent of my time. For the rest of the time, I'm still in the same uneasy relationship with life that I always have been, with an eye out for the next thing likely to go wrong and a pathological desire to please all the people I meet: by no means the most relaxed state of mind to carry around with me.

Or to put it another way: there is a considerable disparity between the beliefs I write about on this blog and those ideas which are fixed at the front of my skull as I go about my life, the two big ones I've lumbered myself with being a) if I'm not careful, something terrible will happen and b) other people's opinion of me is important - neither of which are exactly conducive to peaceful healing.

So I need to really work at this (in a gentle, therapeutic kind of a way :-) ): to allow the ideas I espouse in this blog to penetrate into my subconscious mind so that I carry them with me through my day. I need to integrate them into my life, integration being the term which my friend Sue Ann has used to describe this process. Or to put it another way, I need to walk the walk instead of just talking the talk.

So, this is yet another one of those posts where I say I'll be blogging a bit less in the near future, though you've probably got used to them by now. To judge by past experience, the likelihood is that the blog will plod along in much the same way as it always does, though if I seem to be slacking from time to time, you'll know that I'm doing what I really need to be doing, which is working on myself - I hope you will be kind enough to be patient.

In case anyone is wondering, the London clinic we attended is the Optimum Health Clinic, and as well as the psychology-based approach I mentioned above, they also provide nutritional therapies (aka 'functional medicine') which we also receive. If you have CFIDS/ME yourself and would like more feedback about the clinic, please leave a comment or send me an email (see the email link near the top of the sidebar).

It's interesting, though, that the clinic advocates this kind of approach for CFIDS. They don't market it specifically as a spiritual approach, and it is possible to use the techniques they teach without getting into the spiritual dimension at all, but it's kind of lurking there beneath the surface and there is a spirituality section on the clinic's web site.

I have occasionally come across the idea of CFIDS being linked to spirituality in some way and there do indeed seem to be people with the condition at most of the spirituality events I attend. This is scarcely surprising perhaps, because the 'enforced leisure' which the condition affords provides ample scope for asking such questions as 'who am I?' and 'what is the point of life?', enquiries which might normally be overlooked in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

More controversially, I've heard it suggested that people become ill with CFIDS because of the spiritual transformation involved in developing a 'light body'. I haven't been convinced by this theory, however, because it seems to me that plenty of other people are undergoing spiritual transformations without any such inconvenience to their health.

But the clinic's approach to CFIDS makes me speculate. I've written before on this blog about the need for the human race to undergo a transformation in consciousness if we are to survive our present difficulties. But how is such a thing to be achieved when the need seems to be so urgent? People talk about something big happening in 2012, but that is only a few years away now. We seem to be running out of time. How is all this transformation supposed to take place?

Perhaps the economic upheaval in the world has come to entice us towards this change in consciousness, and perhaps there are other such uncomfortable incentives waiting in the wings. But perhaps it is also significant that CFIDS/ME seems to be affecting an increasing proportion of the population, and that the ultimate cure for this condition may now prove to be nothing less than spiritual transformation itself. I'm not sure if this is a carrot or a stick, but it's a big enough incentive to walk the walk...

I'm always interested to receive your comments. This platform is sometimes dodgy, so if you have trouble posting a comment, please email me using the link near the top of the sidebar and I'll post it on your behalf.

Equanimity

'They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God, you get to keep him.' - from Valis by Philip K Dick.

In the novel Valis, Horselover Fat, the thinly disguised alter ego of science fiction writer Philip K Dick, had a peak experience which he spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of. Yet the more he sought to find his way back to that experience, the further away it seemed to become.

I understand how Dick / 'Horselover Fat' must have felt. A few weeks ago, I posted rather smugly here about being 'in the zone', about the 'connection to joy' I sometimes experience. The postscript is that the following day, this connection was gone, and I have rarely felt so far away from getting it back.

This should not have come as a surprise to me. I've blogged about a similar experience before. On that occasion, I described what it's like to be 'in the zone' rather well, I think, even though I say it myself:

' The other day, 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.'

Yet a few days later, sure enough, I had lost that wonderful connection again. I was 'outside the garden' again - and I didn't know how to get back in.

What I concluded in that previous post, and which I have just discovered again now, is that I couldn't find my way back because I so much wanted to do so. My very wanting was pushing it away.

This shouldn't really come as a surprise to any of us. It's the cardinal rule of what has become known as the law of attraction. I first came across it in Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations With God Book One . All of us who have read about the law of attraction know about it, but we tend to forget it because it's the awkward bit. It's the tricky sub-clause which means that for much of the time, the law of attraction doesn't actually work the way we want it to.

As 'God'/Walsch puts it: 'You will not have that for which you ask, nor can you have anything you want. This is because your very request is a statement of lack, and your saying you want a thing only works to produce that precise experience - wanting - in your reality.'

So just when we think the law of attraction isn't working, it's actually working very, very effectively thanks very much - it's just not quite what we had in mind when we expressed our needs in the first place. What's happening is that when we want something, we are indeed attracting exactly that: a condition of wanting. The more we want, the more we push it away.

My recent experience of feeling very much connected in to the universe, then losing that feeling and very much wanting it back, yet now feeling further away than ever, has confirmed to me what a powerful mechanism this is. Whatever we want to manifest in our lives, we have to lose our attachment to it first. Otherwise, we're just pushing it away.

This applies to whatever we'd like to see in our lives, whether its a new car, enlightenment, or world peace - the mechanism is the same. If we don't lose the attachment, we're working against ourselves.

It's important to understand that, in contrast, it's fine to have a vision - and to use this vision as an incentive to take the action we need to achieve it - but if we get stuck in wanting something, if we resist not having it, that's where we run into trouble.

It's the same with however we're feeling, whether it's being out 'of the zone', sad, or angry, the more we want to feel differently, the more we reinforce that condition of want. It comes back down to my favorite word, acceptance, though for this post - just to ring the changes - I thought I'd use a related word 'equanimity' instead, just because I like the way it sounds.

Now I look up the definition of 'equanimity', I see that at first sight it's not exactly right. Apparently, it means 'evenness of mind, especially under stress'. So it isn't really right - and yet it is. It actually highlights the enigma which lies at the heart of all this. I'm talking about evenness of mind while feeling angry, evenness of mind while feeling sad or even depressed. Is such a thing possible? Well yes, it is. It's all about calmness in the eye of the storm. It is possible to feel these so-called difficult emotions and feel OK about them. It is possible to feel sadness and equanimity at the same time.

And you know what? When we can do that, when we can be OK with these feelings, the sting goes out of them. It's actually our resistance to them which makes them feel so heavy - and which keeps them hanging around. Because the added bonus is that as soon as we stop pushing these feelings away, as soon as we stop wanting to get rid of them, they're much more likely to go away of their own accord.

None of this is new to The Secret Of Life. I covered it in the Ultimate Truth series of posts - and it's no less the Ultimate Truth now than it was last year. It's just that I don't read my blog as much as I should so I keep forgetting it. So now I've reminded myself, I'm reminding you. Because this is really it. This is the secret. Be OK with what is, however you are feeling, whatever is going on, and you have taken the most important step towards freedom.

As ever, I look forward to hearing what you think about this post but Typepad is still playing up. So if you have a problem posting a comment, please email me using the link near the top of the sidebar and I'll post it on your behalf. I'm hoping to go away for a few days next week, so please be patient if I take a while to respond.

 

These may also be of interest:

The Ultimate Truth

How to Have It All

The Door to the Garden

How Does it Feel to Win a Million?

The Sheep Strike Again

When I wrote in the last post about the tendency of us humans to follow each other like sheep, I didn't know that such a typical, though potentially tragic, example would present itself a few days later.

What has happened is that the BBC, the public broadcasting corporation here in the UK, has refused to broadcast an appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee (the DEC, an association of thirteen British charities) for contributions to humanitarian aid to Gaza. It cites two reasons for this extraordinary decision:

1) Concerns that the aid would be unable to get through to where it is needed, an argument which has already been dismissed as nonsense by the British government.

2) The BBC would apparently run the risk of 'reducing public confidence in its impartiality' if it carried the appeal.

The BBC's decision has already been attacked by senior government politicians, religious leaders, and senior members of its own staff, who have pointed out that this is a humanitarian issue, not a political one. It is not about which side is right or wrong in the conflict. It is about saving lives.

But in spite of all this, at the time of writing, the BBC has refused to change its decision.

Now, you might argue that this is the very opposite of sheep-like behavior. The BBC is resolutely staying in its field, in spite of the fact that everybody else is heading through the fence. But we have to look a little more deeply at what is going on here.

In recent months, the BBC has been subjected to persistent criticism by what might best be described as those of a conservative disposition here in the UK, exemplified most vociferously - and some might say ludicrously - by the Jonathan Ross affair, which I described in an earlier post. In the wake of this incident, in which 35,000 people were persuaded by the conservative newspaper the Daily Mail to complain about a radio program which most of them hadn't heard, the BBC has become extremely wary and sensitive to criticism. Staff report that a 'risk averse' culture has developed in the organization. You can imagine senior managers studying the latest edition of the Daily Mail before making programming decisions.

Add to this the fact that a particular area in which complaints have been made in recent weeks is the BBC's supposedly pro-Palestinian bias in its Gaza coverage (a so-called 'bias' which has somehow passed me by) and you can start to see why the decision to say 'no' to the DEC appeal might have been made. Further add in that the decision to reject the appeal was made on the same day that Jonathan Ross returned from his three month ban in the wake of October's scandal - to the accompaniment of howls of protest from the Daily Mail - and the whole thing starts to have a kind of surreal logic to it. The BBC is so busy watching its back - 'coming from fear' as we put it - that it is starting to make bizarre, sheep-like decisions. This would be almost funny if it wasn't so potentially tragic. The BBC's decision is likely to lead to a shortfall of millions of pounds worth of aid in Gaza. People are going to suffer because of it.

The Gaza-Ross connection may seem a ludicrous one, but I am not the only one to make it. Marina Hyde at the Guardian expands on the theory in this excellent article. She even brings in Chaos Theory, the butterfly wings behind this particular phenomenon being those lewd phone calls which were made by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand all those months ago. She writes: 'what seemed like good sport in a slow news week in October may compound the most unimaginable suffering in January'. Grotesquely, people in Gaza may die because of a message left on an answerphone in England.

Anyway, why am I telling you all this? Am I getting into conspiracy theories instead of spirituality? Or am I going to combine the two and start writing about seven foot lizards like David Icke? Well, no please, that is not my intention. I'm not trying to get you hooked into this drama I'm describing. I'm not trying to get your blood pressure up. It's just that, well, there are waves of energy around at the moment. We see one in America, the wonderful tide which has swept Obama into power - and I suppose I feel a bit bad that a wave which seems to me to be a lot less wholesome, which is rooted in fear and anger rather than love, seems to be holding sway in my own country. Perhaps I am exaggerating the situation, but I have always seen the BBC as a benevolent force, a force for truth, and if this great tide of so-called 'opinion', with the Daily Mail as Chief Sheep, has led it to make such a ludicrous, foolhardy, and potentially tragic decision as this, then what's going to happen next?

Recently, on this blog, my favorite spiritual Rottweiler, Sue Ann Edwards has been taking me to task for encouraging people to use intention to influence world events. To be honest, this sort of thing isn't the principal focus of The Secret Of Life, my primary interest being our own personal development, but Lynne McTaggart's Intention Experiment and Marianne Williamson's recent blog post both appealed to me as being worthy of your attention. Sue Ann, however, believes that this sort of thing is all attempted mind control and is counter-productive. If you have a bit of time to spare, you can read our discussion here. I'm partially persuaded by Sue Ann's arguments but I personally feel that it's not about whether we should do intention experiments and the like but exactly how we do them that's important. I hope to discuss this in more detail in a future post - when I've recovered from Sue Ann's recent mauling! - but as another favorite blogger of mine, Grace from The Wild Pomegranate puts it: 'love is never the wrong answer'. And perhaps that is what we should focus on whatever we do: whether we're looking at world events or going within ourselves to confront our deepest fears, if we're coming from love, we are on the right track.

Like I say, there are waves around at the moment. It's not up to me to start another one, but if we all feel free to be ourselves, to follow our wisdom, follow our hearts, then perhaps some of the madness will fall away.

So with this in mind, I ask you to consider complaining to the BBC about their refusal to carry the DEC broadcast (even if you don't live in the UK, you may still be one of their 'customers', using the BBC's broadcasts or their web site), donating to the DEC's Gaza appeal (or to your own local charities who are working in that area) or using the Ho'opnopono techniques I've described here to 'clean' the issues I've been writing about in this post. I've mentioned Ho'oponopono in particular here because it's not about trying to control anyone else - it's all about healing the parts of ourselves which have contributed to the events we see in the world.

But of course, you won't do any of these things just because I say so. You will only do what your own inner wisdom, your heart, tells you to do. I didn't have to tell you that, did I? You knew it already.

Follow My Leader?

Many years ago, I was having a lot of trouble with a group of people with whom I was involved. As individuals, they all still seemed to be fine, but when they got together, they started behaving in ways which seemed to me to be dysfunctional.

One day at around that time, I went for a walk in the country and saw a sheep walk through a gap in the fence between one field and another. The nearest sheep in the field it had left noticed it had gone, and followed it through the gap. Then others noticed what was happening and made towards the gap themselves. There were lots of sheep in the field and the effect was like great ripples spreading out through a sea of sheep. It was a big, big field and because of the lie of the land, I couldn't even see the far side of it, so before long there seemed to be vast numbers of sheep heading towards me, appearing out of nowhere, all heading to the gap in the fence and into the other field.

It was such an extraordinary sight due to the vast numbers of sheep involved that I took it as a 'Sign' that a leader would emerge in my problem group and sort things out. As I watched the first field slowly vacate while the sheep headed for pastures new, I felt some comfort that order would soon be returned among my friends.

I walked on feeling rather brighter.

But after a while, I glanced back at the sheep - and saw what happened next.

One of the sheep - I don't know if it was the same one - was heading back through the gap in the fence. And slowly at first, one by one, the other sheep noticed and followed. Until before long, all the sheep were back in the original field.

I realized I had been mistaken in what I had thought. This wasn't order at all. It was chaos. There was no reason underlying any of it. I decided that the 'Sign' hadn't been about the emergence of a sensible leader after all. It had been about people's tendency to mindlessly follow each other: to behave in a particular way, often very dysfunctionally, simply because others are doing the same thing. I no longer felt comforted - but I was wiser.

Looking now at the global financial crisis, it seems to have been inevitable. The banks were lending recklessly. They were even encouraging people to exaggerate how much they were earning when they applied for loans. It was madness. And yet hardly anyone saw it coming. Those who did, had their warnings ignored. Why was that? Because everyone was doing the same as everyone else. They were all following each other into the same field, so everybody felt safe. But look what happened...

Throughout history, humans have blindly followed each other, ignoring their own common sense, their own knowledge of what is 'right' in order to 'fit in', to follow the pack. Without such an attitude, Nazi Germany could never have happened, nor any number of other atrocities - and idiocies - throughout the world.

It is worth us bearing in mind that just because everyone else is doing a particular thing, it doesn't mean to say it is 'right' - or sensible. Perhaps we should look at our lives and see if there is anything we are doing in which we are blindly following others, ignoring our own innate wisdom in order to follow the crowd. And if so, then perhaps we should consider if we really want to continue.

We all do have an innate wisdom. There is a useful Sanskrit word 'buddhi', meaning 'intuitive intelligence'. It is a wisdom we have inside us, deriving perhaps from collective consciousness or universal mind, from our Oneness with all that is. Techniques such as kinesiology, in which our bodies seem to tap into some invisible source of knowledge, suggest its existence, and - I believe - we instinctively know it is present. Perhaps we should trust it more, this buddhi, instead of blindly following the nearest sheep.

P.S. Some readers have recently reported problems in leaving comments on this blog. I've reported the problem to Typepad, who I hope will sort it out. In the meantime, if you  have problems leaving comments, please email them to me instead and I will post them on your behalf. You'll find the link to my email address near the top of the left hand sidebar. I value your thoughts greatly - and I don't want to miss out on hearing them!

 

This may also be of interest:

Global Financial Crisis - A Blueprint for Transformation?

Towards A Miracle In The Middle East

Do take a look at this wonderful blog post by Marianne Williamson. It is a moving but also very practical post. She shows us how - in only five minutes a day - we can all work to create peace, to bring an end to the suffering of war once and for all. This is something we should all take the time to bring into being...