My Dad is 88 and hasn't got much memory left. He spends a lot of his time trying to work out what he's supposed to be doing. I reassure him that he doesn't have to do anything: that he is safe in the home for the elderly where he lives, where they see to his needs and cook all his meals for him. But he can't seem to quite understand this. 'Are you sure I don't have to go out to work?' he asks. 'Yes, quite sure,' I tell him. He looks unconvinced and peers down at the book in front of him, where we write down the things that we do on my visits, searching for 'the answer'.
Perhaps, after all, there is one thing that my Dad still has to do, and I suspect he has been doing it all his life: to teach me. He has always been a worrier, and in him I see my own worries amplified. For I, too, have been searching for 'an answer' - and feeling very frustrated not to find it.
It seems to me it is a Christian idea - though doubtless shared by others - that we all have certain God-given gifts which it is our obligation to discover and make use of. More recently, this idea of finding a life's purpose has also appeared in self-development books. I have always found the concept appealing, though I have started to believe that it can also be a trap.
I used to think it was writing, this thing that I had to do. I have been driven to write since an early age and used to berate myself for writing for fanzines instead of buckling down and writing that novel. So eventually, I buckled down and wrote that novel. And another. And another. I wrote two adult fantasy novels, of a type which turned out to be out of fashion, and a children's fantasy novel which was described by an editor as being 'original but too weird to publish'. I regard having written a fantasy novel that is 'too weird' to be a certain kind of success, but unfortunately it is not the kind of success which makes money or gets readers.
What I found very difficult about all this was that I very much liked what I had written. Clearly, I needed to do better to get published, but how would I know when I was writing something better if I liked the stuff I had written which wasn't good enough? I obviously needed to upgrade my internal critic, but I wasn't sure how to do that.
So, I decided I would write something else entirely. I wrote a spirituality book. And I did what I always did: I gave it to a few likely victims people to read, listened to their feedback, and revised the book accordingly. All of which took me a year or so, by which time my ideas about spirituality had moved on so far that it didn't feel like my book any longer. I had intended to self-publish it and market it online, but I no longer had the heart to do that. I still liked a lot of what I had written but the book's angle was all wrong. It just wasn't the book I would have written if I'd written it today. I could revise it of course, but that would take me a while. By which time...
I should have been pleased, of course, that my spiritual development was moving so quickly that my writing couldn't keep pace with it, but all I felt was frustrated. Here was I with this amazing natural God-given talent for writing (ironic smiley inserted here) and not making proper use of it! What is more, if I didn't find a way to use my writing, I would feel I had failed in my life's purpose, that I had let myself - and the universe - down in some way. And yet what could I find to write? I could no longer think of anything that would 'work'. I was already writing this blog, of course, but my readership here is not exactly vast. (You are reading it, of course, which is what is really important, but we'll get to that a bit later...)
And yet, if I didn't write, what else should I do? My current state of health dictates that everything I do has to be done in short bursts punctuated by rest/meditation breaks, which kind of cuts down the available options.
I couldn't see any way out of my state of frustration.
Or could I?
A week or so ago, I decided to take a look at some of the helpful stuff which I and others write on this blog and came across a quote by Helen about asking for help. So I decided that is what I would do.
But I didn't sit down and explicitly ask for help in finding my purpose in life. I remembered what Joe Vitale had said in The Missing Secret about the importance of aligning your will with that of your higher self, something which is also implicit in a lot of what I've written here myself at The Secret Of Life.
So I asked for guidance to align my will in that way: to put aside my ego-driven desires and declare myself open to whatever the will of the universe might be, to whatever my higher self might have in mind for me.
And the wonderful thing is that I got some assistance in this.
I held various suggestions in my mind one by one and waited to see if I got a reaction. I'll explain exactly how I did this later. One thing came over very strongly: that I should be with my wife Chris. And something else which came up is that I should carry on doing this blog. The idea of writing another book did not get a reaction, and nor did another creative project which I had in mind.
Humph.
Naturally, I queried this reaction. The idea of being with Chris was all very well, but it wasn't very 'grand'. It didn't seem to involve any fame and fortune, for instance. This was me, Simon, we were talking about here, and I had always kind of thought that I had some sort of well, you know, 'destiny'. Was the universe sure that it hadn't got me muddled up with somebody else?
But the universe seemed very sure that it hadn't made a mistake. Being with Chris and writing the blog: that's what I was to do. That was my 'destiny', for the time being at least.
Hmm...
I might have been rather more disgruntled if it hadn't have been for the other things which happened during this process:
1) I experienced a feeling of overwhelming love and compassion.
2) I received healing for my neck, a long-standing problem which had been giving me a great deal of trouble in recent weeks. Since that time, it has been a lot better. I have been lucky enough to receive a great deal of healing energy over the years, but I have never previously experienced anything quite so directly 'hitting the spot' as this.
So overall, I was very happy with the outcome, thank you very much, and any misgivings I had began to fade away as a clear picture began to emerge of what I had discovered.
It seemed to me that the idea that I had some 'grand destiny' to fulfill had been a weight around my neck. Was it any wonder that I had such pain and discomfort in that part of my body? What I was being told was that I didn't have to succeed in these 'great achievements' after all. It was my ego that had laid them upon me, not the universe or God or my higher self or anything else. There were other things which were more important than these grand designs, like simply being a good husband to Chris.
It also seemed to me that the emphasis on 1) my marriage and 2) this blog was telling me something else. It was encouraging me to focus on my spiritual development. Relationships are a great way to work on self realization, because what they are about - ultimately - is recognizing the divine in each other, and so helping us to find it in ourselves. This blog, too, is a guiding hand in this process: hopefully, in some small way, for some of you, but certainly for me, for it allows me to develop my understanding of such things and to maintain my focus on the spiritual part of my life.
It also came to me that I no longer have to think so much about how many readers I get. If people are meant to find this blog, they will find it. It is as simple as that. You have found it after all, and as I have said, that is what is really important. If I only speak to one person, that is enough. Thank you for being here to read this.
Perhaps, too, at some stage, I will find a larger audience. Perhaps I will return to my books and find a way to get them 'out there'. Or perhaps I will write others. But now is not the time, and I think I will only return to such things when I have learned to get my ego out of the way, when I have found my way back to sitting down to write them because that is the thing to do, not because I have some grand vision of a 'me' that I have to become.
To be like that would only to be like my Dad, vainly searching for the thing that I have to do. He and I must both find a way to peace.
There is more I would like to say here, to discuss the feeling of compassion and healing I received for instance, but this is already a long post, so it will have to wait for another time - or perhaps for the comments section.
But one thing I do want to add as a postscript here - as promised - is to say a bit more about the way in which I communicated with the universe or my higher self or whatever it was that gave me all that useful information. This is particularly important because it is something which you may like to try for yourself. I have certainly found it useful, even liberating. Perhaps it will open a similar doorway you.
So, when I held each of those ideas in my mind (my relationship, the books, the blog etc.) and waited for a reaction, how did that come exactly? Did I hear a disembodied voice? You may be relieved to learn that I didn't. What I used was a process I developed some years before, after reading some material by a guy called Bob Scheinfeld.
What Bob suggested was to develop a process of communication with your intuition by simply asking for this to be done: to ask for some kind of physical sign meaning 'yes'. So what you do is sit down and ask your intuition (or your higher self or the universe or the quantum field or God or whatever you think the source of deep inner knowing within you may be) for a sign meaning 'yes' to allow it to share its wisdom with you. Then you sit there and wait for the sign to come.
(It's a long time since I read that book of Bob Scheinfeld's, so apologies to him if I've got his teaching here all scrambled, but I hope I've captured the gist of it.)
I seem to remember that when I first tried this, it took a few weeks for my sign to emerge, but when it eventually came it was a kind of vibration around the eyes. My eyes are very sensitive, so perhaps it is not surprising that this should have happened. Nowadays, the sign is a rather more general vibration or energy, sometimes with flashes of color. So when I put forward each of those ideas, I waited to see if that energy would come. If it did, it meant a positive reaction. If not, then negative.
I'm not claiming that this process is 100% reliable, and it's as well to test any ideas a number of times to see if you get a consistent reaction. I still feel rather surprised that I usually do...
I hope that this doesn't seem too weird. If so, then I'll just trot out the usual mantra: give it a try and see if it works for you. It's really rather similar to the idea of kinesiology, as promoted by Dr David Hawkins and others, which gives you a strong muscle reaction for 'yes' and a weak one for 'no'. The idea is that you are tapping into some deep well of truth within you. It is allowing you to partake in a part of that truth.
These may also be of interest:
How Much Do We Really Know?
To Simply Be
, has assembled a
scientific advisory body of leaders in consciousness research, to devise a
strict protocol and measure violence levels before and after the intention is
sent to see if there is any effect.
Recent Comments