Living With God Book Read

It was not until I wrote this series of books that it fully dawned on me that perhaps life and God were one and the same. The only difference is the interpretation or spin we put around God, whether he is some great power, being, energy, creative force, huge universal power, great soul, or just the God we all know from our religions and scholared texts.

It seems pretty obvious in some ways that all life is God, dependent on God and is God. Without this great power nothing could ever come into existence. However the mind has a very difficult time accepting that life really is just God and not some product of its own thoughts and actions, instigated by mind, with God demoted to a casual observer. All the chaos, fretting, regretting and planning are the whirings of the mind which deceive us into thinking we rule life, blinding us to the real facts of true life.

This book haphazardly follows a trail through my life, coloured with some of my experiences along the way. It tries to chart how living life, following intuition, unwittingly changed to following life knowingly, knowing that there was a guiding force which I could feel, my own intuition or inner knowing. It was as this developed I began to be aware of a faint inner voice. As time passed, so the voice and feelings overtook the judgment of my own mind, until eventually an idea was hatched, to try a great experiment. This experiment was to live from intuition alone, by placing mind in the back seat of life, where it has reluctantly remained ever since.

By looking back on past experiences I have drawn all I know together to try to reason and solve the puzzle of life, by learning to distinguish Life and God, Mind and Heart, inner promptings from outer chatter, foolish whim from inner guidance. Throughout this time, my experiences have been ever changing and progressing. There has never been a solid piece of ground from which to look back and truly know. All that I have come to know is to constantly apply ‘reason’ to all that I have felt and heard, to try and make sense of the path once mind is left behind. The process has been on going and I have been constantly learning. Even though I think I have come a long way, there is nothing about living with God that I can say or teach with any great certainty. It is a vague, fluid concept, hard to pin down, like following a path in total darkness. You can only feel the edge of the path, where you are, to act as guidance, but as hard as you try to think, you cannot be certain about the direction ahead. You can plan and speculate and extrapolate the old path in your mind to project what you think is the future path, but you can never be sure. It all comes down to feeling tempered by constant reasoning. I have met many spiritually advanced people along the way and even those with heightened perception still suffer the same folly of not quite knowing, although they know a lot they still don’t know it all.

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Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing. Where does it come from and where does it go?

It is there all the time. It’s just that we cannot always access it. It comes and it goes as we connect to it in uplifting, exciting surges of energy, words, sounds and feelings. Once you have felt the surge you find it hard to live without it and thirst for more. You spend every moment trying to recapture that illusive moment when you last saw it. Writing, composing or painting without it, is dry, dull and plain hard work. It sucks! You are left with the resultant task of arduously filling time or cramming the waste bin.

Throughout my life I have had many loving bouts of this inspiration directed at various projects, as diverse as running a mobile catering van to building a cutting edge management training centre for blue chip firms.

Inspiration, as I knew it, was at its peak in the early nineties when I had a furniture business. It was by the River Ouse in York, England. Every morning I would walk into the workshop and inspiration would await at the work bench, nearly every day. It was as if a channel would open above my head and a surging river of the stuff would flow in, and then out again through my feet and arms. This was perhaps one of the most constant sources of inspiration I ever had. It wasn’t that making furniture for me was particularly exciting, nor was the business very dynamic. The inspiration just flowed, and I would later learn that it was this which made the business so much fun, not what I made.

This business, I had begun earlier in the year, having never made any furniture ever before. I had had no experience in wood or business, no tools nor money and no house or income. I rather foolishly took on the rent of a lovely workshop, blinded by my inner trust. It was not until some 2 years

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later when the source of inspiration and trust suddenly gave up on me, I realized what a mug I must have been to follow my inner whim so blindly. .

It was just after winning the Young Business of the year award that the source of inspiration dried up, and it was on this note we made a timely exit We had decided that the prize money would be best spent surfing in Mexico for the winter rather than expanding the successful business. This as you can guess also meant the end of that particular enterprise which had served me very well.

It would be another year later before inspiration finally empowered me again, to begin yet another business, with yet again a frighteningly familiar lack of experience, cash and knowledge. This pattern seems to have repeated itself throughout my life.

Looking back on past events I began to draw similarities from the inspiring patterns that I had been following. It was as if I was chasing the inspiration not the business. The business was always subservient to the inspiration and inspiration led the way not business common sense.

In my sensible moments I looked on this way of doing business as a pretty crazy idea. All I wanted to do was to make a success of life, earn shed loads of money and retire to the Caribbean. It annoyed me that so many times I had been so reckless, and cast off really great businesses once I had made a success of them. I was then left to start blind again, hopelessly at the bottom of the pile, beginning a new scheme, I knew nothing about. I was determined not to let this happen again, but I seemed powerless to prevent it. This inspiration was a powerful driving force and once it left me I simply could not carry on even if a business was obviously successful.

It is here that I am going to diverge the story onto another track. This inspiration I had begun to parallel with another feeling. In between my ventures into business I had travelled extensively around the globe, usually on a shoe string budget hopping from hovel to hovel. The freedom I felt while travelling was wonderful and was very similar to the inspiration I unwittingly chased in my business ventures. While one side of me chased money, or so I thought , the other side chased the inspiration. The only problem with traveling is that just like inspiration, it doesn’t last. Eventually you reach a point where lying placidly on a tropical beach, plied with cheap Asian cuisine, starts to become pointless. The time this takes seems to vary from months to years.

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As I lie weakened by the easy life, the next idea slowly shuffles into my mind until it overtakes my common sense and I am forced to leave the comfort and ease of life in Asia and India, to throw myself yet again into the unwelcoming jaws of the harsh business world, again driven by fateful inspiration.

Later in life is where I eventually started to draw these parts of my life together. I had acquired the depth of meaning which allowed me to start making sense of these patterns I so haplessly followed. The surprise was, this understanding, far from allowing me to gain more control over my life, and seek the life I thought I wanted, it undermined any lasting control I thought I had, and swept the rug away from under my feet. Just how could that happen? I had sought to understand this part of my life, but the trail had only taken me yet further away from asserting any sort of control or gaining anymore understanding of my life. How could this be? Was it Murphy’s law dominating events or was I just unlucky?

Here is what happened

A lot of my life I had spent searching in my usual vague way, through the new age movement and eastern spiritual history, to try to find the depth of life. It is this search that was to eventually bring everything together. I had encountered many spiritual experiences on my travels, primarily in Asia where it seemed I felt most at home in the world. Maybe it was the cheap food and beer, but I could not deny it, the apparent chaos of India and the allure of Asia had left its indelible mark on my psyche. The most profound experience I had received had been on the banks of the Ganges in India and then surprisingly in an old dilapidated palm thatch beach hut at Bottle Beach in Thailand. Bottle Beach was a great and hip haunt of the backpackers in the 80’s, cheap, laid back and chilled out.

You could only get there by boat, electricity was sparse, the weather hot, very hot. The sea was clear, the sand pure, all surrounded by pure unspoilt wilderness, and best of all, the beach was patrolled by beautiful bodies, clothing optional. You couldn’t really ask for more. The food was pretty good, but out of the extensive menu, there were only usually one or two items they had the ingredients for! You basically ate what they had no matter

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what you ordered. The funny thing was, they always ran out of fish and coconuts, the only two things in copious, free abundance on a wild tropical island.

My newly acquired yoga practices from India and Nepal were exercised under the heat of the rising sun, on a flimsy balcony high above the rocks, adjoining the ocean. I would finish this all off with a splash of Thai chi I had picked up from a book in Bangkok. I felt fabulous, it just couldn’t get any better. I could eat the wonderful breakfast of condensed milk, coconut porridge, feeling like I had earned it. The ocean would glimmer and glisten in the mornings, an irresistible temptation for the first splash of the day, diving straight off the restaurant deck, to swim the hundred or so metres for a laze on the beach. Much of the day was spent oscillating back and forth, sun, food, snooze, swim, drink, and back all over again. The yoga progressed nicely, I could bend further one way, then the other, it felt like I was really achieving something. I could even stand on my head. Next I thought flying would be on the agenda or some other amazing feats. It was here that life changed. Up until then the yoga had brought calmness, a sense of achievement, much needed exercise, but it was all about to change, as I walked down the suspended palm wood walkways to the restaurant.

Our Robinson Crusoe type hut was perched high on the headland, the furthest one out, only just habitable. The owner had given us a good discount on account of the holey floor. It was a friendly hut, the best of the lot, and even had a steady stream of ants climbing up the bed to reach the ceiling, together with cockroaches, mosquitoes and a few birds and snakes. It was like a zoo, but luckily the bugs kept off the bed most of the time. Outside were iguanas and even more snakes, it was pretty wild. In the evenings, as the sun lowered it was like a jumbo jet taking off. The noise was deafening, the scrub and jungle were full of cicadas. I have not heard any noise like it since. The huts were on stilts, with raised wooden walkways precariously balanced leading to the toilets and restaurant. It was on this walkway, while I was making my way to the restaurant, I came upon a strange experience. Well call it a restaurant, there wasn’t much on the menu, just two giggling and smiling Thais who would serve you what ever they had. They seemed to find me absolutely hilarious, I’ve no idea why, but at least they were enjoying themselves. They had perfected the service of healthy junk food. All of the meals were from fresh veg, but were as morish as candy and sweets, but without the sugar hangover. Every meal had been tailored to the pleasure of your taste buds. It sounds great and it was, why I am not still there I often ask myself, but then with a brain as dysfunctional as mine it really is no wonder.

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Back to the walk. The walkway bounced a bit as you strolled, and it at first felt as if this had become a little exaggerated. I reassessed the situation and nope, all was still the same on the outside, but I was still having trouble rationalizing the situation. As seconds passed the experience deepened, it seemed like my yoga had at last succeeded, appearing to suspended me above the ground by the crown of my head by a force so strong and yet more gentle than was possible, lighter than the sun yet darker than the night. It seemed like an eternity but was probably only seconds. Its effect was profound, insignificant at first, but as time passed the significance would deepen. It was like I was suspended from the crown, gravity was absent and I was light with no weight on my feet, a feeling of bliss filled and encased my entire body and mind. It was wonderful, pure and clean, nothing like I had felt before. Then, probably only a few seconds later I arrived at the restaurant and the enticements on offer soon made me forget all about what had happened.

Over time it was this feeling which I looked back on, which I began to know more and more. Thoughts about the walkway experience knocked around my head. It was this pure and powerful feeling I had encountered, that I began to compare with the inspiration I would later chase in my business life. It was when we first began to think about moving to Spain, many years later, that I finally began to piece together the puzzle. This inspiration and the feelings I had while travelling were drawing together, and seemed like one and the same. I was coming closer to the mystery of the inspiration and hopefully this might give me more control over my life and wayward business ventures. The underlying nature of all the feelings from inspiration and travelling were spiritual in nature, they were the connection with God. The inspirational feelings which drew me unwittingly into business and travel were the draw of the spiritual path.

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Doing Nothing.

Before I engrossed and fascinated myself in the mystical East, I would often hear of spiritual people such as gurus and monks. It seemed such a waste of time for them to sit so still all day and do nothing. So pointless. It seemed so unfair on the rest of the world busy making clothes, cars, and food to sustain us. I could not entertain the idea that these spiritual people were doing anything in the slightest bit constructive. What interest could any of the world have in people doing less? It was such an alien concept.

Only later in life I would discover that I did indeed have quite an affinity for doing nothing, staring at the skies and gazing towards the oceans. What added even more to the task was that many people found this quite a distressing occupation, which I did find all too amusing. But at the back of it, these same people had a secret wish to be still, to retire and swan around the world doing nothing but travelling. Many reserved this for the end of their life, a card of achievement, a reason to work so hard, be so sensible, and earn so much money. The only problem for most of them was that this was simply impossible, a task too far. This was not for the lack of money which we all would think, but that doing nothing as they had dreamed and strived for was a task in itself, a vast achievement that most of them were simply incapable of achieving, or certainly not in the next million years.

As I became more and more practiced in the art of doing nothing, men of achievement began to take notice. Some would be violently annoyed by my utter disregard for achievement in life. Then to my surprise, I met more and more people who despite being high achievers themselves were secretly trying, quite hard to match my efforts of not doing and my apparent hap hazard approach to life. Little snippets of comments would inadvertently slip into the conversation, briefly hinting at their dream. This did come as a bit of a surprise when people I respected as achievers, and doers were secretly trying to emulate this lack of doing. Maybe it was cool? Had it been mentioned in Vogue and now becoming a status symbol? I had no idea but it did puzzle me why anyone would want to do nothing.

As I practiced the doing nothing concept, I began to find out what a hard job I had indeed chosen. Even one of the simple exercises I gave myself was proving quite a challenge. Quite to my surprise I was wondering if I had bitten off more than I could chew.

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When I began to study it in depth there seemed a lot more to the task than I had first assumed. I had amassed a mountain of learning on the subject. I think that if I had had the support of my fellow comrades this would have made the task a little easier. Somewhat annoyingly, despite my companion’s quiet inner wanting to learn this feat, outwardly they would cast scorn, and rebuke me for my apparent laziness. They would splutter and fume as I lay on the bench in front of our house practicing my afternoon “nap task”, despite having had a full and plentiful night of wonderful restful sleep.

Snoozing away in the nap task was probably my most favourite part of the day. As with all new ventures there were constant setbacks. This task did require some pleasant amounts of heat which were only provided in England during the brief summer, and for only a short spell of time. The frequent clouds crossing the sky would prove a constant source of difficulty as they obscured the sun. This had the worrying effect of lowering the body temperature resulting in the need to move location or retrieve a blanket, destroying the whole philosophy of the practice.

Wind rain and the cold winters were proving a challenge to the system despite having a good quality south facing bench against the South wall of the house. To make matters worse, as the summer warmed up to the optimum temperature this provoked a hive of disturbing external activity around the village.

The geographic positioning of the bench was indeed a major problem which would lead to catastrophic results. The south side of our house faced the village road, and my arm, when outstretched could reach the boundary fence with the road. As the weather continued to warm you would have expected progress to be swift as the warm weather should have provided a lulling effect on the afternoon nap.

Disaster struck. Passing villagers began to notice my efforts at the task in hand and it was as if subconsciously they tried to divert me from success. Thinking I was laying on the bench because I had nothing better to do, they would all stop and ask how the weather was? what I was doing today? when was I going to get a job? Telling them, “absolutely nothing”, just didn’t seem to wash. Had I not said it loud enough? Or did the concept just not ring home to them?

I would repeat it again, but still they would persist with their infernal chatter of this and that. Had I not been deeply involved in my task of immense achievement, then I would have been only too pleased to have interrupted

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the boredom of the day with trivial conversation and tit bits of local gossip, such as who had died, who was ill, and the weather, which I was only too aware of. Eventually my lack of response would begin to come to their notice and most would move onto more fertile ground, leaving me to re focus on my task.

As time passed so more obstacles to progress appeared. Had I mistakenly taken on too much? I had worked hard all summer on my bench, and did not seem to be any closer to the nothing I had been aiming for.

As I studied the literature available, I was beginning to get a little worried. There seemed far more to this task than I had originally assumed. It became apparent that the job description was much longer than my employer had let on. The first task I had tried to achieve was to do nothing all day. This was a hard task in the village where I lived, and I had resigned myself to trekking to a remote part of India where the ambient temperature was more conducive, and the natives would not wish to trouble a white man with trivial conversation in a foreign language.

This was all very well, but as I began to probe below the surface, I found that what I had been trying to achieve was only the tip of the iceberg, and the trip to India would still prove an arduous adventure. To reach the top of the promotion tree you had to achieve the true and full complete doing nothing, which had an infinitely long list of tasks. To cut this short doing nothing did not just involve laying around on the bench and lazing in bed. This had just been the introduction, the freshers week, the temptation, the carrot on the stick. It had as little to do with doing nothing as doing everything. I was floored, I had been coaxed into a job by a faulty description and gross misrepresentation by my cheating boss. I wondered about legal redress, but the only problem was, it was my own mind that had played the trick, and misled me all the time.

The task was quite specific. Doing nothing really meant what it said. Sleep was something, it had a name and a concept and so even this was not part of the job. It all began to revolve around the mind. The mind was the driving force behind this obsessive doing which seemed to infiltrate all of life. Even people lazing around were doing something, so were not as lazy as they thought. They were not achieving the nothing they thought they were. How did I achieve this nothing?

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The mind kept whirring round and round, throwing out ideas concepts, lists, jobs, needs and wants on a constant basis, faster and slower. It seemed like all of life was subject to this relentless force. No one ever seemed to question this machine. They just followed its constant demands. It was as if they were its slave. Each person had a justification for relentlessly following the mind’s demands, the children, the mortgage, missing out on opportunities, the list went on. If one reason wasn’t given, another would do. People with seeming plenty of money, food or possessions would still hungrily want more. In fact in my life I had found the more money I had, the more I wanted ‘more’. We were all subject to this force, some more than others. It wasn’t as if it was greed, it was more an inability to combat the problem, a lack of realization about the situation, a lack of perspective. Above all it seemed like the mind drove people to be busy, so they had little time left to do nothing.

This seemed like a conspiracy. It was as if the mind was hiding the nothing from view, obscuring it with excessive tasks, well above what was required for pure survival and the pleasant enjoyment of life. At least this went some way to satisfying my guilt. Because there were so many people doing so much in life and to such an excessive amount, I need not feel so guilty about lazing around, doing nothing and leaching off the rest of society, skimming off some of the froth of produce for myself as I lay comfortably on my bench. There was a surplus of doing which frankly needed to be balanced out.

It took some time to come round to the idea that the real doing nothing that I was trying to achieve had to begin with the mind. It was this that was the foe. I had to begin to identify the two sides of myself. On one side I had a part that sought peace solitude, bliss and love. The other was out to wreck my bliss and provided a smoke screen to this, throwing endless projects, tasks, demands, emotions and problems in the way. As time passed I slowly learnt to separate the two, but it was a vague boundary. It did not seem to have a definite definition like I thought it should. This made the task even harder, as I could not identify the problem with any certainty, and without this identification it would be hard going to silence the mind. The deeper I looked into my course of study, the bigger the task seemed to get. Doing everything again suddenly seemed like a much better idea, it was simpler, much easier, but once the challenge had been laid in front of me I was unable to let go.

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Living in the now.

Worry, fear, anxiety were certain key emotions which I was becoming increasingly aware of. They were being played to me at ever greater intensity until finally I cracked up, sat up and took notice. It was a few years prior to the stock market crash of early 2000 and I was using the perfect vehicle, investing in highly volatile small high tech shares. God had a field day with my emotions loosing thousands one day and gaining it all back the next. When I won I was immensely pleased but not as pleased as I thought I should be, especially with one share up 96 times in a couple of weeks. When I lost, I was overwhelmed by a crushing sense of loss, far more than I thought I ought. I could feel my mind tighten around my skull as it sought desperately for a way out of the loss, numbing all sense of reason, panicking at having lost so much money. While I had indeed lost a lot of money at certain points, compared to what I had made in the year I was still well in profit. What was going on? This panic was getting in the way and causing me to sell when I should be buying and buying when I should be selling. My emotions were playing havoc. If I had been devoid of these interfering emotions, a rough calculation on my profits, would have been bigger by a factor of ten. I would have made a million not a few 10’s of thousands so I was mighty disappointed with these emotions. With money set as the goal I was determined to get to the bottom of this and sort out these emotions. Vast profits lay ahead.

It was at this very point, after a crushing loss on Pace electronics, diving only a day after I bought them that I began the task. To separate emotion, worry, fear and anxiety from the physical event. These emotions were patterns in my being, deeply rooted and frankly were getting in the way of making some serious money. They exhibited themselves by attaching themselves to physical events, to exert themselves over the individual. This continual reinforcement, by attaching to real physical events is what made these emotions so powerful. In this case it was the sense or fear of loss attached to money. We all hate to loose and loosing money, watching it slip through your fingers on the screen of the computer was particularly poignant. Through all of the chatter I could hear my inner voice guiding the purchase and sale of shares, contradicting the emotions prevalent and my mind. Emotions told me to buy when the going was good when the share was higher and sell when the going was bad when the share was lower. Intuition was guiding too, but during the direst moments when the cumulative fear of the market was at its zenith, to buy when you thought you should sell was a hard act to follow. Providing you picked the right

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shares then this was an amazing strategy. But during the dark moments of a crashing share price and profit warnings, my nerve undermined by emotions running amok, gave way and bowed to emotional turmoil wrecking the intuitive guidance and loosing potential profits.

It was when I looked back in my notes at all the shares that intuition had recommended that I really sat up and took notice. Had I followed intuition’s guidance and not been shaken out of the market by my mind’s lack of nerve, had I kept the shares I was supposed to, and bought the recommended amount of each share instead of a more conservative amount, dictated by the mind. Then prior to the big tech stock crash I had lost out to the tune of 1 million pounds by following mind, not intuition. Intuition had however been running a bit of a scam, testing my trust at every opportunity. It wasn’t as easy as just buying the share with intuition’s guidance and seeing instant profits. Under intuition’s guidance, I would often have to buy a share just before it temporarily plummeted in value, forcing my mind to panic me into selling, but then to my horror, some months later, the share I no longer owned would sail away up and up into the distant sunset, defying both logic and gravity. Many shares went up by 100 times in a couple of years. So when I invested an average of £5,000 in each share you can see my disappointment.

Over the years of trading, sat alone at my computer in my little village, I had found the start of the trail, to begin to separate emotions from events, and it was here that I was given the opportunity to see that they were two totally independent parts, not one as I had thought.

This whole period of life was not about the money, although to me this was the carrot on the end of the stick. It was all about learning to separate emotion from events. The stock market was a cold, cool environment to practice in, where events happened on a daily basis, triggering fear where no one could get harmed. It was just my bank balance which either went up or down. And it was this relationship with the chief stockbroker which led to a growing trust that he did in fact know better than I did, if he wanted to. My mind reading the Financial Times and churning through facts and figures was no match for his divine insider knowledge and intervention. He after all knew it all, present, past and future.

I had learnt that an event was independent of the emotion and could go one way or another, independent of the emotion which was trying to attach itself to the event. In fact the paranoia from the emotion attaching to the event

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could even bring the feared event into action. Worrying or fearing an event certainly was not a way of event prevention. Inner knowing on the other hand could be a more likely indicator of which way an event would go, as this was based in the now. Whereas the pattern of emotions attaching to events was based on past experiences laid over today’s events.

Through dabbling through stocks and shares, the mind through research of old data and patterns tried to interpret the future, but it was pretty blind as everything it knew was based on the past. Emotion, fear, greed and worry were totally independent of the present event, but instead relied on attachment to the present event for its very existence. Without this attachment in the physical world the emotion could not exist and would become powerless. But this emotion was clever and when unseated from one event would soon find another event it could, unknown to you, attach itself to.

In my case I had an overriding sense of fear of financial loss. Every time the fear appeared, I would check and calculate my financial position in my head and check all was okay, and then try and continue. This emotion was indeed powerful, but over time, and by constantly being aware of it, in this artificial situation of profits and losses on the stock market, I began to see through this trick. I had begun to separate the physical event from the emotion and in doing so knocked the wind out of that emotion. This I began to repeat across many of my patterns. This wasn’t so that I could become emotionless and cold, but quite the contrary, so I could be more aware and helpful in life. It was to prevent these old patterns ruling and ruining life. I did not want to be ruled and entrapped into old patterns of my past reflected into the present. I wanted to live my life now, not then.

I thought I had conquered this emotion of fear of financial loss but it was a tough nut to crack. It was some time later when it reared it’s head again. I had to my benefit, a good level of understanding of the problem and it’s effect was obvious in my energy field so I was compelled into physical action as before. It all started when we sold our business and house. We became income-less, but we were still pretty well off and our outgoings were very modest. There was nothing to worry about, but I felt poor, nearly bankrupt yet at our present rate of expenditure it would have taken nearly 50 years to exhaust our cash supplies. So you can see how stupid these emotions are and the patterns they re- enforce in our life. These patterns can create war, hatred, murder, passion, and success, they can react positively or

negatively in your life, but all the same they control your life.

It is always harder to break a positive pattern because who wants to stop being successful, there isn’t much incentive. So on the practical side, the physical reality, I was wealthy yet the old pattern was triggering a sense of loss and poverty. It was so convincing, even when I sat and looked at all the bank account balances I could not shake off this sense of impending financial doom. I did eventually crack this particular event and now feel like it is more or less gone but the final way to shake this off was through an energy shift in my body accomplished over another year. The cause had been an old life pattern, which had risen to the surface, causing all this havoc. The events of the following year were brought about to help dissolve this pattern.

The Great Experiment

It all began when we decided on the big move, to sell up everything, to change and at that time, move lock stock and barrel to Mallorca. It was on this small Spanish island, an area which I had grown very fond of, that we decided upon a grand experiment. Foolishly or not, it was decided, we would try and live for as long as we could stomach it, just relying on intuition, inner knowing or God’s wish. This was to be the great experiment of life.

The mind was to be taken from the lead and placed into second place behind intuition. It would still be there functioning, but decisions would rest mostly with intuition. The mind would still inject all the normal thoughts of hope and failure, wishes, wants and hopefully a bit of common sense to the proceedings. The mind would still be present in life, but the last say would be by the intuition. I had inherited from my mother an inner voice, a form of clairaudience and clairvoyance which I had until now paid scant attention to. My life however had seemed to follow, more and more, an increasingly, erratic and illogical path, and as hard as I tried, I could not maintain a rational and normal life. It simply did not work. Time and time again I was thrown into situations which the mind was not able to cope with. It seemed that if I could master the other side of decision making, the intuition, I would be onto a good thing. The intuition is the truth behind a venture that sees the potential, with no regard to the logics, or the maths, of the business deal.

We had on and off been following a path of the intuition, mostly unconsciously, but the mind had often had the upper hand. We had flitted between intuition and mind to rule our life for several years, and sometimes intuition, sometimes mind, would gain the upper hand. Looking back intuition, or chance had unwittingly been a guiding force, and had stepped in at all the crucial moments in life without us realizing. It’s a bit like a car accident, at some point, time slows down and you are either inexplicably drawn towards the accident or away and you have very little control in those few seconds where fate plays it’s hand, but the resultant impact on life is vastly disproportionate.

Committing to this path was a bold and unsettling move. The commitment was backed up by a physical reality. We had committed to selling our business and house, and were moving to an unknown area with 3 separate languages to learn and no idea how we would make a living. I always liked to think that I could commit to this task 100%, but as hard as you try you can never get rid of the mind and old patterns standing in the way. It was always there, nagging and influencing. If intuition said jump off this cliff, I think my mind might have some strong words to say to it. I’m not sure of the outcome, who would win, you never know, it always depends on circumstance and the feelings in place at the time.

To save an argument we were committed to the test in hand as far as we possibly could go. Most of the problems seemed to revolve around money, as they do for most people. My mind had all sorts of grand ideas how to make a fast buck, but the intuition had just one idea, art! Art, the intuitive scheme, becoming a painter, with no experience certainly did not figure in the grand list of money making ideas. Looking at most of the artists I had met, it was a dull existence and a pretty lame way to make money. Most were lucky if they could afford the rent, let alone make a profit.

Following my commitment I duly followed lead after lead from intuition, in an apparent path to become an artist. Each lead was accompanied by the enticement of promised success in monetary terms. Try this. Try That. My mind at these instances would always butt in with,” hopeless”, “no chance” and sadly dispute my inner comforts of trust, and for most of the year my mind was spot on. Despite my mind being annoyingly ever right, we followed intuition regardless, egged on all the time by new twists to the tale and new promises of fortune. We just hoped the lack of short term success would be replaced by long term financial reward. The whole process

reminded me of the projects I had followed in my more youthful and naive days. But this time however, I did not have the benefit of naivety, just an irritating, banging common sense of 15years of business experience, which to be honest was rather getting in the way.

After university we had travelled the world on a shoestring budget. It was so bare a thread that it barely supported us. Even in India the paupers regarded us as poor. Street children would harass me, trying desperately to repair the growing holes in my trousers and trainers, while fellow passengers would try and fatten us up with wholesome milk and snacks. Finally to swell the coffers, at the Taj Mahal we coined a get rich scheme. The Indian tourists seemed to love us, as a young English couple, despite us being in rags. My girlfriend’s blond hair was a real seller. We were a scarce commodity. The first gulf war meant that there was an absence of white skinned westerners, leaving us with a near monopoly on trade. A lot of flights to India had been cancelled and marauding mobs of young Muslim men were becoming a troublesome hazard, sending tourists packing.

The scheme was to charge a few rupees to courting Indian couples who wished to have their photo taken with the seemingly handsome white western couple. No doubt they would later claim us to be their affluent white friends as was the fashion at the time, just as we would seek a photo with a film star. Just as we in the west were seeking to get browner with tanning products, they were seeking to get whiter by selective breeding, and white skin was the top of the tree. The world was moving together at least in the colour of skin.

Unfortunately for us, even with such a captive market there was a fundamental flaw in the plan. Most of the Indians just didn’t get it. They could not comprehend that two westerners could possibly need any of their money. After all, according to Eastern propaganda we were all rich beyond their wildest dreams. They simply smiled and creased up with polite laughter, not quite sure what to do, and carefully shuffled away, so as not to cause the faux-pas of offending us. I had to up the hard sell, and was having to become quite forceful to even extract just a few rupees. It was just too much effort in the end, and we resorted to the old tactic of conserving our resources, chilling out and doing next to nothing, watching the world go buy.

Back to the West. We returned from our travels a little overdrawn and bombed out from a year of constant chilling out and subsisting on meager

supplies. My mother was quite concerned, we were a bit on the slim side. Our minds had been transformed. She suspected a mind bending drug bonanza but it was just the liberating effects of travelling like a pauper.

Short of cash I set off for the nearest dole office on foot, some 6 miles away. My father thoroughly perplexed called after me from the kitchen door, “don’t you think you should take the car?”. It took a while to settle in, it was as if my mind had been wiped clean. The car would be useful, but it was just that we weren’t used to such luxuries after the trip. I gladly accepted. We had been so long without the western practicalities that it was going to take some time to acclimatise. Walking and hitch hiking had become normal. TV became a further and interesting experience. We had not watched it for a long time, it seemed alien and could not draw us into its web of intrigue, it was just a series of irrelevant flickering images. It would take another year before we could sit down and watch TV again.

It was in this period of space, of ungrounded bliss that I decided to start a furniture business. This period of travel and its after effects, is the period I remember most fondly in life. Care and thought were mostly absent. The trip to a large extent had obliterated my mind for a period of some twelve months.

My mother was quite concerned by the new venture, recognising I really wasn’t quite with it in the world of business, still floating around on my own personal cloud of bliss. She realised that not only had I no money, income or home, but I had no idea of business, and worse I had no idea at all about making furniture. One thing led to another. I took a few loans, bought a car and some machinery all on the advice of the shop keeper. A book provided the basic instruction on making furniture which I thought was now becoming a necessity.

I plunged in further, taking on the rent of a large workshop and conned the bank into giving us a mortgage to buy a house whilst still on social security. We filled the large house with students to pay the bills and I set to work in my workshop in York.. As the days passed glimmers of the reality of earthly life would pass by. Mildly I would comprehend that I may have blundered. The task I had taken on with no funds, experience or customers was becoming quite a challenge, occasionally, nearly venturing into the territory of a worry.

Luckily for me the feelings of bliss and pure contentment from the trip still

shone through, and I relished in them again and again. I was slowly learning to make things, but standards were low and corners were cut to the extent they were non existent, virtually round. Kind friends provided a few orders to keep me afloat for a few weeks. Then as my rebelling circle of friends grew ever smaller, I began to realise I might have a problem. Where would I sell the items I was now making? Orders were fast drying up. Resources were rapidly vaporising and new tools were needed and worse still, the bulk supplies of rice lentils and chick peas we were surviving on was fast running out. We were fasting vegetarians, not from any moral or spiritual standpoint, but only for the pure lack of funds.

We had been egged on by our inner confidence of imminent success, but we were now staring into an empty hole with not even lentils to eat. It was just at this point we were rescued. The piece de resistance came into the game. I was busy in the workshop perfecting my trade, with a YTS trainee assisting to bring in the extra funds. A man walked in and began to ask if we would be interested in a shop in York City centre. We took a step back, this would be expensive and we were about to eject what we thought was a pushy salesman. I looked at him with resignation, as if he had dropped in from Mars. Just as I was about to unleash a list of superlatives, he added it’s a special deal. Knowing that the special deals never turn out to be special deals, I readied the list of superlatives once again for action. Then the bombshell came as he quickly explained the deal.

The property crash of the 80’s had left a new shopping arcade in the centre of York, mostly empty and the developers desperately needed the shops filling. All we had to pay was a £10 administration fee to satisfy the legalities of the lease. I began to glow inside, at last. This was a prestigious location, the yearly rent was far more than our house was worth. He went on to explain we had to stock the shop with our work and man it for 6 days. The owners would even pay for the shop fitting, lighting and bills. I could not have dreamed for a better outcome.

That’s how I was eventually rescued that time from my foolish ventures, following what I now know to be intuition. Needless to say we did very well out of the shop and sold our work internationally, eventually winning ‘Young Business of the Year’. Well you would think that I had learnt my lesson and I would happily continue to run my successful business. But no, 2 years later just after we won the Young Business prize money we unwittingly invested the sumptuous prize money into flights to Mexico. This, quite by chance led us to sell up the successful business and travel once again, only to repeat the same pattern again, and again but that’s another story.

Discerning the Path

The move to Mallorca was the beginning of the great experiment. We were trying to live by intuition alone, using the rational mind to referee the process, to apply an element of discernment. If intuition was pure enough, if you had a clear connection to God, unpolluted by your own mind, then no discernment would be needed. But being human, the intuition was warped and distorted as it was translated by and passed through the mind or ego, so it always needed an element of discernment to iron out the bumps and sort the pure from the impure.

This discernment in theory appears contradictory as it is the mind judging intuition, and yet to use intuition we are trying to silence the mind. This discernment is like a higher mind, or a sort of clearer intelligence detached from the normal patterns of the mind and emotions. From an energetic point of view it seems to reside in the crown area.

Feeling, not thinking, using the intuition, in my experience led to less not more. Sometimes life would be quiet, sometimes busy, it ebbed and flowed, it was not a constant stream of business, unlike many mind centered lives. It seemed like the intuition could cherry pick the best opportunities without having to trawl through every opportunity available.

When life is quiet, it feels like nothing is happening and time is being wasted, but think this – Busy lives are not always productive, sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. If one move in life is very effective but all the other moves are not, then why run around chasing all the leads in life, diluting the effect of the one good one which works.

Life sometimes doesn’t happen like you think, but evolves into a slightly different end product, via a route you never knew existed. The familiar routes and patterns of the mind are the subject of past knowledge, projected into the apparent future and appear rationally based, but they are merely the past projected into the future. Intuition makes new ways based on true understanding and correct knowledge, not a future projection of the past laid over current events. Potentially intuition could be a far greater source of success than the mind, but it needed further investigation through experimentation, and that is what we were embarking on.

Hearing God ?

If I say to most people that I hear God they really would get quite offended, turn away from me in disgust or place me quite rightly in the loony bin. Even though I hear God, I too would have the same reaction to someone else if they told me that they heard God. I would be immensely mistrusting and skeptical. What a hypocrite I am, while I quietly think I can hear God, at the same time I don’t think anyone else can! Is it a human failing of not wanting to accept a common ability to hear God, or our ego selfishly not wanting to share our connection to God with anyone else.

I guess it is a bit like when a prophet from God has appeared in our midst, Krishna, Christ, Buddha, etc. We have always been more than sceptical about claims of such a nature. These guys didn’t just hear God, they virtually were God. As to what degree they were God or not depends on your upbringing, and religious, or non religious background. During their lives they were pretty much persecuted, and their claims dismissed. Once they have left the body and been gone a few hundred years, then everyone suddenly proclaims them to have been God or messengers of God, with only a few tattered remains of writings as evidence, which anyone could have forged, doctored, altered and amended through the ages past.

It’s a bit like artists. They always seem to be recognized after they have died, and art critics suddenly rally round to proclaim how great the artist was, while they denounced the same art while the artist was alive. Maybe it is that dead people are less of a threat to the ego than live ones!

Getting back to hearing God. I think everyone can hear God to some degree or another, or feel his presence at times. It is just that we find it hard to distinguish him, from the chaos and wants of our everyday life. I don’t know when I first started hearing God but I do know when I started distinguishing him from everyday life.

This of course raises another question. Before I started distinguishing his voice from my mind, was I haphazardly following his voice subconsciously. Had I put the spanner in the works by bringing his voice to the notice of my conscious mind so it could trick, interpret and add confusion and deception to the voice of God, polluting my inner knowing intuition.

From as long as I can remember I had felt which decision, or way was right, which is called intuition, way of the soul, or following the inner light. I think of all these new age concepts are just more ways to God. I think all are God’s guidance coming out in some form or another, whichever we are most receptive to. It is from this that I assume in some way or another we all hear God. No one can deny that they have not had an intuitive moment, when the mind has stopped, briefly moving out of the way, to allow another force to guide action through the heart, soul, inspiration, intuition or whatever you call it.

It was when I began to move from feeling which way was right, to hearing which way was right, that life got terribly difficult. At times I wished I had never entered this phase of life, of consciously listening to God. The problem was, once the concept had entered into my head, it just wouldn’t go away. It sat there right in front of my eyes, all the time, immovable. It would always find a way to get through to me, one way or another, tempting me with wonderful fleeting moments of inner contentment, bliss, and an inner glowing that was just wonderful.

I began to realize over a number of years, that not only was I following my intuition, sometimes unknowingly, but I was beginning to discover my inner voice of intuition. It took a while to become a permanent reality. I would realize I could hear my inner voice on one level, and then that knowing would slip away and I would forget it for a while and then the thought would slip back, the next time, a little bigger, more present, more real.

Well this happened on and off for a number of years as a bit of a piecemeal project, a DIY project that just hung around, half finished, with other parts not yet started. I had started knocking a hole in the wall of my mind and returned to dabble every now and then, but never getting round to tidying up or making good the damage. It made life a bit messy.

After a few years I took most of the wall down and started to tidy up the rubble left behind. It was a bit of a cowboy job, rough around the edges and unstable once the props had been removed.

Unknown to me the hole in the mind was to get a lot bigger. Once the props of our old life of home and business were removed, the wall collapsed in on us. Following intuition as we had set out to, turned everything on its head. Instead of transferring our old life’s patterns across to a new house on the Spanish island, Intuition played its ace card and stopped the whole project in

its tracks. Obstacles appeared to block the path and the excitement and longing turned to clouds of despair. Following intuition, in the hope of getting out of the homeless predicament we found ourselves in, turned life on its head. In the resulting confusion we found ourselves unwittingly catapulted around the world under unnerving inner guidance on the pretense of finding a new home, somewhere else.

Travelling is a wonderful compliment to the life of the soul, rootless, aimless and free. As we travelled around the world, after the initial shock, it turned into a joyous trip, but it was not like the one undertaken 15years previously.

Some of the rubble from our previous life still lay around disturbing the peace, and as hard as I tried I could not blank off my mind and the past. For me what was difficult was my mind could not fix on any point in the future as we really had no idea where we were going or what we would do. So with no future the mind could only focus in the now or the past, and with the past mostly gone this only left the illusive now.

At the same time as clearing the rubble of my previous interpretation of life, I had begun tidying up the opening, plastering and tidying up. It all was happening in a kind of simultaneous way. Old patterns were disappearing, while at the same time new ones were being assimilated, even before some of the old ones had fully left.

I had begun a project like no other, I had begun, not a physical project yet, it was a whole concept, behind a project, the project of life, yet to materialize. The concept was forming, but it never seemed complete, there was never enough visible at any one time to be able to grasp what on earth was going on. The physical reality was forming following the incomplete concept. Because I never got a full picture of the whole concept, my mind was unable to work, as it had no idea what was going on. It was the blind leading the blind, intuition leading mind. It was a rather disconcerting.

The voice I had begun to hear, I believed was the voice of God, direct from the source, not from any book or priest. When I mean God I do not mean a clairvoyant spirit guide from other planes, nor do I mean some man sitting on a fanciful cloud in the sky looking down on me or the God portrayed by religions. It is a much broader concept, a force, a presence, a power and energy, all pervading , everywhere, in every place, all at the same time, expansive. This God is not restrictive like the concepts of the mind, he is not containerized nor restricted in any way. He is only restricted by our thoughts as he enters our body from the universal source.

The minute we conceptualize, analyze, judge, think, or want the voice of God is the point at which it enters into the domain of the mind and becomes impure. The flow is impaired and interpreted by the mind and is no longer God. Because our mind is nearly always working, the voice is nearly always impure in some way or another, so a constant discernment must be used to try to distinguish mind from God.

I had begun to hear God, so I believed, and I was curious and determined to find out more. We had decided to live life fully according to the inner guidance of this inner voice. This was no blind project born from stupidity or ignorance. While I had no way of knowing if this was God or not, I had made many attempts to verify this inner voice, and made many attempts to verify and analyze my spiritual experiences. Over many years I had worked with many clairvoyant people and I had sought independent corroboration for events and information.

This whole process was not made easy though. In fact it was a minefield of obstacles and blind alleys. First there was the matter of interpretation. Each person could loosely confirm what the gist of the inner guidance was, but there was of course a variance down to the individual body interpreting the information.

The irony of all this information about the future, was the information was often correct, but it was too vague to be put into practical physical use. It was not until after the event had happened when you looked back at what had been said, and then it all made perfect sense. As if to add insult to injury, you would always find all the crucial bits to utilize the information on the physical level had been conveniently filtered out. Sod’s law or what?

To make this process more complicated, I would sometimes hear something time and time again, yet I could not get confirmation from other people about certain types of information. So there was a sort of filter in place as to what different people could receive. Different clairvoyants received different types of information. There was little consistency.

Don’t think that I was jumping on the phone every time I heard something to verify it. These opportunities of confirmation often happened quite by chance and were rarely planned. If I was making a very large choice I would sometimes check the information out, but only once a year or less. I did however have a very interesting time in York with a family who were prominent investment bankers in London. They used a clairvoyant in their

monthly meetings to help predict the future movements of the stock market. I never hung around long enough to find out how successful they were but it was certainly an interesting concept and they certainly weren’t short of money.

The irony of all this for me was of course that I don’t think it made any difference at all checking with these clairvoyants, it was merely another diversion. It did help me develop faith that I could hear my inner voice, but as for helping with life’s events in the future, it was a fruitless task. It was progress along the path which was important, not the answers and results along the way. So as I explained before, each question on the future would be met by a cryptic type of answer, to the question I was stupid enough to ask. This answer of course only became deciphered when I looked back in time, not when I looked forward.

If you knew the answer to the future then the path where the lessons were to be learnt would be worthless.

It was much later, after working with many clairvoyants I learnt a valuable lesson which put all the psychic work into a useful perspective for me. I learnt practically the essential difference between using the third eye and crown chakra to guide life.

The third eye took you into another psychic world, another realm and left you rather flighty and ungrounded. This psychic world was yet another venture in life, but in a less physical life, and encountered the same problems as physical life but without the cumbersome gross body. God on the other hand was the ultimate guide and was in my case accessed through the crown chakra. The third eye, I learnt was just another playground and obstacle on the way to God. You could sometimes partly see, but not reach God through the third eye. He had to be accessed through the crown chakra. The third eye was another distraction in the way of God and focus should be redirected from all the sensory areas of the body to the crown to hear God truly.

All this distraction I had with inquisitiveness about the future was met with a clear answer –

“Don’t try and learn the answers of the future today”.

“Live for today and forget the future and past. Live the now.”

It was always tempting to find out about the future, trying to find a good use for this inner voice, to make some easy cash. After all this would be the ultimate cheat in life, to know the future. You could gamble with utter financial impunity, play the stock market like a God. Well you guessed it, I couldn’t resist experimenting with gambling on the predictions of future events with some clairvoyant friends.

The only time I ever did know the future is when I was explicitly told by God, for my own good or his good without my asking. This is the only time the future prediction would mostly turn out correct.

My constant nagging and questioning, to try and establish some sort of certainty of the future ended in nothing but frustration and a merry go round of deceit until my mind finally gave up its grip of wanting. You have to give up seeking knowledge of future events to be able to live in the ever present now, not past nor future. To remain in the present you must trust that what is going to happen will always happen, in one way or another, and what has happened, has happened and you cannot change it. Knowing the past or thinking you know the future should have little bearing on the now. Be free of your past as much as your future. It is often past events projected into the future which prevent you living in the now.

How do you hear God–The Inner voice

When people used to tell me that they had an inner voice I used to either think that it was amazing, or that they were a bit crackers. Being a man I also used to think that there was too much of a verbal element to life and another voice inside just wasn’t necessary, something to be definitely avoided.

I thought these people who could hear their inner voice were a bit unique and could hear it just like a normal voice, loud and clear.

There are many aspects to the inner voice which make it a potentially deceptive tool for life. I at first thought that this inner voice could relay the future and help with life by consulting clairvoyants. I had a very good friend in York who was clairvoyant and we had experimented with horse racing and clairvoyance to try to determine the winners of the races. Sadly this didn’t really turn out any concrete results so the project was later abandoned. Along with other friends of mine at various confusing points in life I had consulted clairvoyants, to try to clear a path through the confusion of life’s opportunities. While the sessions were clearly very helpful, and these people had some knowledge, which could only be obtained from an inner voice, the information was not really much use. It was only when I looked back on life’s happenings with the information I had been given that it all made sense. For instance my father was told by a clairvoyant that he was about to enter employment in a particular building in Cardiff, which was clearly described. At the time he was retired and had no intention of returning to work, so the information while it was interesting was utterly useless.

The reason why the information is so little use is that it is interpreted by the mind. The mind builds a picture of life from patterns of the past. So if this information does not fit with the patterns of the past, then the mind draws a blank or misinterprets it. Within a year my father had applied for a job as a planning inspector in Cardiff, and the building was just as the clairvoyant described and much to his surprise he was no longer retired. There were many other instances like this where specific advice was later perfectly collaborated, confirming that there was something in this inner voice.

My experience with hearing my inner voice had been a bit hit and miss, to say the least. It has been a project in the making for several years. I had made it a task to learn to hear it, when and where I could in everyday life.

What had become a particular problem was distinguishing the inner voice from the ramblings of my mind. Everyone has an inner voice of some sort. It can come in many ways and patterns, through feelings, sight, smell and sound.

My early ventures in life were mainly governed by the feeling of what felt right, and no attention was paid to any inner voice. I followed the feeling like a pathway even where they followed no rhyme or reason. I had been doing this unwittingly most of my life, and it was only after my first foolish

business venture, that I had begun to consciously notice the feelings I followed. The feeling is a bit like when you buy a house. You walk in and it just feels right, there is no logical explanation for it, it may not even be financially justified, you just know it. Then afterwards the mind kicks in and adds all the problems, and financial implications of logical thinking, either helping or hindering the initial intuition.

Another example would be the gut feeling you get whether a property development or a business venture will make money. There is no logical analysis and you may have little experience, but inside you just know that it’ll make money. Some people follow their gut feelings automatically and can be very successful. Others follow their minds and tend to be more consistent and sensible, but aren’t always as successful as they could be, because they miss the golden cherries in the cake. What I was trying to do was to distil this inner voice of intuition and use it more effectively in my life, so that I could just cherry pick the best opportunities.

Just like everything else, my mind was tempted into the project by the promise of potential financial success. Over the years I began to notice that the feelings I followed were backed up by a faint inner voice. It was the beginning of a confusing time. The feelings I had followed up to now had been pretty reliable in the end, and had been easy to follow, they needed little thought. The addition of the voice added the potential for a clearer pathway and more information, but along with that came added confusion and difficulty. I had to find a way of distinguishing the mind from my inner voice. They both sounded the same at times, but subtle differences could help to distinguish the two. The problem next to arise, was that the mind learnt quickly, and it did not like the voice of intuition taking the lead. The mind would mimic the inner voice so another method of recognition, to distinguish the two, had to be developed, it was never ending.

The first sure way I developed was in the quiet space, of a peaceful room.

The voice would become clear when this peace in the room was added to by another superfluous, over riding feeling of peace and tranquility, a subtle form of inner bliss. The feeling could be strong or weak and could come at other times in other places once recognized. This sensation was also later linked with a tingly or light sensation from the crown chakra. It is this extra sense of peace that gives me the best clue as to what I’m hearing. This the mind cannot replicate. As time has passed I have had many techniques that I have used such as writing down what I hear, seeing the words spelled out letter by letter inside my head. Specific words would sometimes be used which my mind doesn’t use. These words however would later become absorbed into the mind and would then become ineffective as the mind learned to use them.

The inner voice is quite subtle and vague, it is not as bold and brash as the physical voice and is not heard through the physical ears, but it is there, it just needs focus and learning. It requires constant discernment. Its a bit like learning to paint. When you first start all the blues look similar, but after a few years the blues have obvious difference and you can clearly distinguish cobalt from ultramarine blue, from Cerulean blue.

For all the different methods of discerning your mind from God, it is the feeling of inner peace which remains mostly foolproof. If you can’t get inner peace well that’s probably stage one to achieve through yoga or Thai Chi, de-stressing and de-cluttering life of unnecessary tasks, thoughts and needs. Don’t expect to get clarity with a life running at 100 mph, but I do know people who run an intuitive life who do, but it has to come easily and naturally. Just like everything that’s right in life, it must be natural. Writing what you hear comes a close second in discerning mind from intuition.

The Voice of God

If I were to say that I hear God you would think that I was pretty arrogant, and possibly insane. If I were to say that I am God we would move past a judgment of insanity into unknown territory. Yet, most religious texts at some point or other lead us to the fact that we are God, we just don’t know it. We follow the spiritual path to enlightenment, to become one, the one at the end of the trail. This oneness we are all seeking consciously or unconsciously, is the oneness of God. God is the one and all, the end point. So when you find God you must then consciously know yourself as God, not think you are God. Your body will not have changed, only your perception of the world of individuality and duality will have passed by. To see God you must see only one oneness and you must see yourself as God. So it is not that we are not all God but that we all don’t yet know we are God. Nothing has to change, only the knowing. Perception has to explode to be able to incorporate all, oneness and infinity consistently, automatically, knowingly, continually.

I don’t know that I am God , but I have read and experienced enough to think that there is a possibility that I and everyone else may be God.

Understanding God, who God is, and who God isn’t, helps us to hear God. If all that stands in between us and God is perception, then it must be pretty easy to hear God, because it is like listening to yourself. To follow God would be like following your own whim. When our individual whim is lost and we can see it as nothing, we see God’s whim. In my life I have tried various experiments and tests to see if I do hear God. I do think in some way or another, in some form, I do hear God. Problem is, because I have only myself to compare myself with, I cannot tell if I am mad, insane, or if I really am hearing God.

When I think of doubting that I can hear God, I take a converse stance, to balance the argument. Why wouldn’t you be able to hear God? If He is so powerful and all encompassing then why wouldn’t he make it so that we could hear him and follow his whim? He might make it so he doesn’t have to listen to our eternal chatter and noise, but he would certainly want us to hear him so he could issue his orders direct to us if necessary.

If God has the power to create universes then making us hear him would be child’s play. Apparently he goes to all this trouble to send down messengers,

saints, sons of God and prophets. Don’t you think he would also make it possible for us all to hear him as well. When you think of it in this vein of thought, you begin to think that it is a pretty narrow minded point of view, that anyone would think, that somehow we can hear the TV, the radio, our neighbours, the traffic, music, and yet God had been missed off the list, blocked out. It would be bonkers to think this, unless there was a good reason to think this! It is only arrogance and ignorance which could say that you cannot hear God, unless of course you know something everyone else doesn’t.

This brings up an interesting point. Who the heck is God? I was brought up in a loosely Christian home, with a dose of other spiritual interests. I had thought of God as a bit of a softy. All I associated with him was the church and this seemed a pretty lame institution in which to pass time. Any mention of God would send me running for cover and still does. Why I am writing a book on such a dull subject I have yet to come to terms with, but words are flying off the keypad without much thought so I’ll leave it at that.

When I think that I hear God, I always think I must be a bit nuts so I try to think just who or what is it that I hear. I try to distance myself from the lame interpretation of God from my Christian upbringing. God is a fascinating phenomenon. He has no more to do with religion than anything else in this world. He is so huge as to fill more than the universe, so infinite he contains himself and everything else, even his own name, leaving him nameless, as nothing can exist outside of him. He is all that is within and all that is without. This is a massive concept, mind blowing, more radical than you can imagine. He allows wars and violence, peace and love. All are contained within. He is no soft touch, desperately ruthless, undeniably loving, in his one aim for you to be him.

When I think of his true form, his voice takes on a new concept and it becomes dynamic, expansive and all pervading. It is infinite and reaches everyone. It is in all forms, thought, vision, feeling, action and interaction. It is on all levels.

I do believe that I hear God, and with that I also believe that everyone else hears God also. All that differs is the volume or the amount of attention paid to him and how much we interpret, colour and restrict his words with our own mind. Some of us consciously hear and try to follow him, some do it blindly or automatically, each way has its merits. As long as you are living a life it is impossible not to follow God in some way or another.

If you could quieten your mind 100% you would hear God one hundred percent clear, but with a totally quiet mind, mind would not exist and you would become God. It is the mind which clouds the real, inbetween us and God.

Hearing God could be a very dangerous time. You could hear him tell you to do something you might not want to, that was dangerous, financially damaging or illegal.

When you do hear him, how do you know it is him and when it is him how can you be sure you heard him clearly? Then if you hear him clearly how do you know you have interpreted his words correctly in the right context? For example, in interpretation, if I told you that you were going to be rich, you would think maybe millionaire rich, but I might mean rich in Love or only slightly richer than now. All words are interpreted according to our past experience and understanding that we place on words, which differ vastly from person to person. Even straightforward death, a common occurrence we take to be the physical end to life, but to God it may mean a death of a part of you or your personality or an old pattern.

These problems of hearing God can sometimes make life very difficult if you only hear him . Feelings rely more on the now, whereas hearing is interpreted more from the past, and thats why feelings are often a good back up for hearing God. From my experience I have found it more reliable to feel the right solution, or to combine hearing with feeling and vision. When I say that you can hear God, this does not have to be the way we think of hearing normally. Hearing God, could mean you hear him, but inside your head like thoughts, dreams and visions. Feeling God’s words is like feeling the right way along a corridor with your eyes shut, but in your imagination. It is not the same as hearing through the physical ears or feeling with your physical hands.

Let’s say we overcome the first two hurdles to hearing God. We know it is him and his voice is clear. This is a herculean task, close to impossible, but not quite. One day he may tell you to do something for definite, and this

will happen tomorrow. Tomorrow comes, and the promised event does not materialize and all has changed again. What we seem to get from God is only relevant at the exact time you hear him. Sometimes what he says is valid in the future sometimes not, sometimes it’s just a carrot on the end of a stick to promote a particular course of action by you in a particular manner. Sometimes the event happens but much later. Remember God in his pure form, if you hear him clearly, is without time and non linear, and this

sometimes does not translate well into our linear, rigid world governed by mind.

If God did give us truly accurate information on the past, present and future, all the time, it would delude us more. We would take more interest in the material world than of him. The reason why we need to know happenings in the future or be reassured of past events is because we are so attached to the events and outcomes in this world. We are materialistic and desire an end result to our actions or wishes today. To God only the now is important.

Because we are God’s servant, we are acting for his benefit, not ours. And because he knows us so well, he will say to us what will prompt the outcome now, which he so desires, not the one we expect in the future. So God may tell a white lie to prompt the action he desires, and once the action is performed he may move on, whereas we are expecting a conclusion, waiting for the result of our activities, which he is not. He may provide a hidden motive to prompt our action, so we may perform the work wholeheartedly, like inferring financial gain.

It is not what we do, or what happened, but how we do it that is important. There need be no verifiable outcome or attainment. It is in the moment that is important, and the way we stay in the moment and act in the moment without thought of the past or future. To work for work’s sake, when it is there to be done, to do it without recourse to past or future, to act without wishing for any specific outcome. This is God living in the moment. Don’t rely on the information you receive, don’t thirst for more just live in the now and thirst and rely only on God. That way the information and the world it affects is irrelevant, leaving you to only rely on God, who becomes the only importance instead of the end result of your task.

God Love me

peace come here

you and I

treasure my moment

of you and me

entwined into one

two knows only oneness If only my words

conveyed my vision of yours and I into oneness

of death of form

into you

a light would glow

Future

I kept asking God what would happen in the future? I was always curious. I planned far ahead and often wanted to know the outcome before an event even began. I wanted to know what I should do at some future point in time. I was seeking comfort and satisfaction by trying to know the future, to secure the achievement of my wants, not just in the present but at some future point in time.

Sometimes God would tell me the future without even asking. More often than not I would ask him to tell me the outcome of my present actions in the future. God would sometimes tell me, sometimes not, and sometimes he would tell me a little white lie. You would think that knowing the future would be pretty helpful, but with every bit of information about the future there was always another twist, another bit of information you needed. God being God, perfect in every way, not only did he know all of the future and all of the past, but he was also the perfect deceiver. Time after time when I sought reassurance about the future, he would settle my thoughts by giving me such information, so that I would feel confident that everything in the future would turn out just as I expected and wanted.

As the future unfolded it appeared as if interruptions or diversions would intervene in the hoped, smooth flow of the present to the future. This would leave me in a state of confusion as the promised plan to bring about my betterment would not appear as expected, delayed, interrupted or totally lost at sea. Occasionally my trust in God would be vindicated and all would turn out as promised, but more often than not the future event would not appear, or it would appear eventually, after many new twists and turns, testing me to the limit of endurance, until eventually we would arrive at the required destination, somewhat later than expected. He would then smugly look at me, with that knowing twinkle, “so what was the problem you made all the fuss about, hasn’t it turned out just like I told you?”.

The problem was I never knew if it was God or my mind telling me about the future? And if it was God, was he just pulling my leg when events turned to the unexpected? Did he really know the future? Was he just telling me something so I would react in a manner he wanted to achieve his required end, not mine?

All this banter between myself and God led me to the only answer and that

was to rely on him, rather than the outcome of another event, to think of him, not the future or past, to think only of that specific moment, that minute section in time, so small it does not exist, but which when found is, the eternal now which is God.

God took me on a trip once when my real lessons began. Go to Spain he said, to Mallorca. Excited at the prospect of this adventure I took several trips to find a school for my daughter, a house for my wife and work for us both. All seemed guided by him. At every difficulty he would provide a reassuring piece of information, which could be verified, on the physical ground, so I knew I was following him and not my mind.

This went on for some time, following his instructions, selling our house and business, and buying a new house in Spain. Up until this point there had been severe reservations from my mind, but each was met by God’s assistance and reassurance, and so I trusted that, despite the mounting obstacles all would be okay. On the final trip I took, to examine the papers, transfer the money and complete the paperwork, for the house and the residence permits, it all changed. Every simple task was met with unending problems and clouds of darkness gathered over my mind. Paradise turned into a sea of worry. Seeds of doubt and a feeling of wrong grew all week without a respite. I persevered and pushed to finalise the property deal with the Spanish solicitors and agents who were in their own loving way being absolutely no help whatsoever. Well it felt like I was being split in two. My mind was continuing the struggle, the fight to resolve everything in time, in accordance with the laid out plans.

My head was so full of dark clouds that I could not find a clear space to listen to God. Then finally I reached the point of no return and like a flash in came God, “forget it all, leave the island and do not return ever again.” I was amazed to say the least. Everything was in place, money, permits and thousands of pounds in fees and a beautiful property.

I knew I could not live with the clouds that had gathered, so I had no choice but to follow his whim and abort. What a fool I felt, and so disappointed to loose all that sunshine and sea. No sooner had I reneged on the deal, the clouds began to clear and my soul sang a light sweet song once again. Debts were duly paid and friendships duly broken. A huge hole was left in life. I had no business, no home, no new home and no plans. For my mind this was a mess but for my heart a lovely release, but so abrupt was the change that the two feelings clashed for some time

This was the first lesson and most severe lesson from God which was to be the beginning of the great experiment. I had to learn that God had a different concept of money, agreements and the path of life, and these were at times in stark contrast to the concepts my mind so treasured. He wasn’t seeking an end to an event, just spiritual growth, work and love for him. The end was no more relevant than the beginning.

The fact that I had not moved to Spain was a deep blow to me and a source of immense confusion. But to God he had lightened my load and freed my mind from the constraints we place around life. For him the importance is in the doing, the moment, enlightening the spirit, not in the end result of a physical outcome. The now is all that is important, with no reference or comparison to the future or past. With no past or future the move to Spain was just a process and whether the move happened or not was irrelevant. Paths were to be lived in the moment. Living for the end result is a human concept, not one of God, except to find God. We build a house because of the end result of the pleasure in living in the house. But it is the process of building and how we approach it that is important to God not the house.

I returned to England a little dazed, and was troubled for some time. Had I let him down, questioned him too much, resisted too many times? Had my lack of commitment been the cause of the failure? I thought of going back on God, of returning to sign the contracts for the house, all that wasted

work and such a beautiful house, I missed it. But as much as I tried it was impossible. My path was set and it only went one way despite my best wishes to change ships. I was beginning to realize that I had been on the same ship all my life, following the trail mostly unwittingly. It was now that I had to learn to follow the trail consciously and like it or lump it, I had no option, he was my one and only guide.

This ending of the Mallorca saga brought my first major conflict between God and myself. What had gone wrong? What had gone wrong, according to God, was nothing at all, all was right not wrong. The problem lay in my reliance on the mind centred approach to life. Mind always wished to achieve. It needed a quantifiable end result, a form, a base from which to carve out an existence, a presence, to gain money, pride and achievement. It was not enough for mind to simply be told by God, this was my wish and all is completed. Mind needed more. It was not a complete process according to mind unless finished, preferably successfully. And so mind pursued its case, to find the fault in the actions and failure of the move to Spain despite reassurance from God that all was as planned

.36

Despite my mind’s disappointment with the outcome, my heart was singing a golden song of joy and freedom. Owning property and the accumulation of wealth only weighs on the heart, and this path to re establish life in Spain had begun to weigh on the freedom we were about to obtain.

In my early years I had followed God quite obliviously, and it was in my mid-twenties that I had begun to feel God’s influence and had followed his wishes for my life, through feeling which way I was to turn. It was after this time, during the move to Mallorca that I was learning to work with God’s voice, not feelings, and this took some assimilation. It opened a Pandora’s box of confusion.

I had played lightly with this concept over several years but now it was beginning to be a full course of action. Here is the problem I had been having. If you can hear God’s voice, then you expect it to be 100% correct all the time. So when it turns out wrong you always question where the error has lain. This is the hard bit. God knows what he wants, you to be him, this is all that matters. His voice is there only to lead you to him. It is not for honesty or truth or to give you the correct information, to lead an easier more knowledgeable life. It is this life he wishes to encourage you to depart. To give you more knowledge of this material life, you so seek would only further embed you in this material life, the very one you are seeking God’s help to leave.

So what’s in it for me? That’s the stupid thing. Nothing at all but God. Why would you do it? It’s a bit like getting drunk. You take your first drink. You aren’t sure why, your elders even encourage you, even though it is financially costly, a toxic poison and leads to all sorts of problems. But once we experience getting drunk we let go of our inhibitions, we become silly and have a laugh. The draw of God is a little like this but more pure and constant. The hangover is when you come back into reality and the addiction leads you to want to experience it again and again. Once tasted, God is more addictive than cocaine, you simply cannot escape.

Living with God

I had learnt and experienced more than I had wished for in my escapade to Mallorca. Part of life was great. I was free of business, ties and commitments, home and house. We were set to travel the world again or so we thought. The other part of me was sore, shocked and bruised. We had lost our house, home, business and income for an unknown future and outcome. We were in a void. Nothing could be relied upon. My mind was desperate to know, to grasp the next part of life, to plot, to plan, to aspire. It needed desperately some taste of the future. But even if I was given a taste, how could I be sure it was not another empty lure.

What were we to do, should we still follow God’s weird and unreliable ways or go back to the pen and paper and work out a new life, with the mind in control. It was a difficult choice. Problem was if my mind chose, what would it choose, I had no idea and no aspirations. That side of me had died a few years previously and had not seemed to come back to life. So, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I could expend little effort and get by, or follow God and expend effort maybe fortuitously or maybe abortively.

On one hand I was a good businessman, I had foresight, knowledge and skill and could see the gross movements in the markets. I had made some serious money in the past in property and shares. I knew I could still make money. But as far as I tried to push myself down this more assured road, it seemed like a dead end choice. Following God, despite its drawbacks, opened up a whole new opportunity. It was exciting and challenging Anything could happen. It was more dynamic and more inspirational than the life of the mind, which was more linear.

The choice for me was a bit like the choice between windsurfing and water skiing. I had windsurfed and water skied a lot in the past, but I had enjoyed the windsurfing much more than the water skiing. Windsurfing I had found more exciting because of the unpredictability of the wind and the freedom from the fuel and the fixed trail of the boat, to go with the wind wherever it took you.

Life after Mallorca reminded me of my past, when I had followed my inner instincts somewhat blindly. I had plunged into crazy business ventures with no money, knowledge or skills and somehow always came out smelling of roses. People around me had pulled their hair out at the stupidity of my

actions, which at the time appeared to be the makings of a fool. But somehow, somewhere after the passing of time, my trust and faith would always be rewarded, and looking back, the crazy, random, blind events had somehow turned into a cohesive and successful strategy. The amusing thing was when I as usual gave up these ventures, the very people who had shaken their heads in disgust at the beginning of my foolish venture, would later utter similar disbelief at giving up the success that had been created. I could only hope that the successful pattern of the past could be repeated, and flinging myself headlong, eyes shut into the unknown would again provide an outcome which would make me smile.

This was the beginning of the great experiment. We had consciously decided to follow only Gods word. Every event had to be checked with him to see if we should continue or not. This was the first committal to this path, but not the last. My faith lay there to be tested and at every stage I laid the same question out – should I follow him or my mind? After much deliberation the same answer, reluctantly, hesitantly would always come forward.

This was the logic that always came out in answer to the question of who to follow. If life was governed by karma , by chance and by God, there was little you could do to change events. You had very little power, despite thinking you had. God could send you his way whether you liked it or not, one way or another, so it seemed better to co-operate and get it over with.

Take everything you have, intelligence, family and wealth. You think that you have created it with your own free will. I don’t think this has anything to do with free will. Take day one, your conception, two cells come together in your mother’s womb, and somehow you spring in there. Where from I don’t know, but all the same you appear in that body, not some other body. You had no choice over that did you, this was chance, karma or whatever choosing for you. From this you gain an inheritance of wealth, intelligence, looks, education, upbringing place of birth and circumstance and language,but to name just a few. All this effects your life on every level. It is inescapable. From this point on, everything you do is determined by your inheritance from parents and your genetic make up. If you have the ability to work hard and be successful, it all came from here. It’s a bit like walking, if you weren’t born with legs how can you walk? If you had no brain how could you think?

Since all we have and do is governed by God, then it either interacts with us on a subconscious level or a conscious level. Either way we seem to always

get what is coming to us, through fate or karma. Most of life seems to be unavoidable, so to make this whole process easier, why not follow the whole process consciously with God and speed it all up? When I imagine this consciousness, and remove my mind out of the way, it is as if living through God is a sort of dynamic life. While our mind can only function with one thing at a time, God can work in a multi dimensional way simultaneously to bring the correct outcome by the most direct route.

The mind tends to think in a linear fashion and projects our experiences of the past in front of us. The mind can often hinder, as it holds back change, because it compares everything now, to what happened in the past. It wants to hold the present within the framework of the past. If God has a point he wants you to reach he will bring circumstance in front of you, to help you to that point by a more direct path. So if you are meant to be successful, you could be more successful this way, by following God consciously, via a more efficient, quicker route.

The problem is you never know quite where he wants you to go or where the destination is. You have to follow him blind. Within this blindness is an intense excitement and a feeling of bliss, security and contentment. You can rest in his assurance of whatever should be, will be. It is only when the mind gets in the way, that these feelings of bliss are broken, usually by emotions of worry, pride and fear. Instead of your mind having to work things out step by step, he does that for you instantaneously. Following God should be easy, as you can just sit back and follow. The mind however makes it difficult, because it constantly rebels and mistrusts, especially if the path is unfamiliar and does not match up with the mind’s old map of the past. I have found that trust and faith, when mastered are a lot easier than continually having to work out things all the time on your own. It’s a lazy way out but by no means easy.

Three years passed by of the great experiment, with little fodder of success for the mind. It was a difficult time. On a regular basis, I challenged my choice and sought another way to go, but every time I was drawn back to following God. Deal after deal had passed me by. I had only dabbled lightly in the stock market and had missed out on some useful profits. Life had been tame while I learnt my new skills and adapted to a new way of life which I was still discovering. I had become an artist and moved to Devon. Three years later I had not sold a single painting, or made a single penny. But my task was still to continue painting. I had also set up a business selling flower essences with my mother under God’s infinite guidance, utilizing my creative and business skills. This too seemed to be very slow, only a few

hundred pounds of income, against thousands of hours of work and expenditure. Still I was to persist. In an inspired moment I had bought an old stables near the coast to use as an art studio, but planning permission had temporarily been refused. It had great potential as a development site for houses and business, so I was told. Was this to be my source of success?

Love is not what

you think it is

God is not who

you believe him

to be

Life is not

what you are thinking All is a nothing

and nothing

is everything

God is neither

good nor bad

he is not

here or there

but everywhere

in every form

in all that is

and is not

If you think you

know who he is

think no more

and you will

find him to be

who you think

you at first thought

Following God

Following God in the great experiment was not what I thought. I had expected answers, answers to everything, future, past and present, and each to be 100% correct. I expected certain goals to be reached, mainly of success and more specifically financial. These expectations had been set by my mind with its rigid boundaries, thinking the right and wrongs of answers. Every task had to be achieved and completed and rewarded in some way, by status or finance.

God knew only the pathway to him, no matter how hard or difficult. He was unrelenting at drawing you along the path. There is no right and wrong on the road, only a single direction to one place. Accumulation of wealth, status, respect, honor and pride were all a zero in the new rule book. Only one rule exists, God, merciless, crooked, lying and deceitful. All justified by the ultimate in truth and honesty, in ultimate compassion. The over riding aim of life, to receive him is his only true compassion, his true love. For this and this alone he would drag you through life – toils and troubles, wars and droughts, terror and tyranny, just to obtain him. Despite his lack of honesty, however he is total truth. Despite his cruelty he is total compassion. He always wants the true truth, anything else would only further compound the problems of life. Every earthly gift has its consequence, every new acquisition a burden we have yet to discover. By seeing the overall picture he may keep you totally poor, with his perfect generosity, to make you truly rich.

If you could feel it and know it. What he gives is utter compassion and love, but only to those who can see it. It appears to our mind of material persuasion, foolish, weak, confused, dangerous and deceitful. Mistrust develops in people and rightly so. Only a few people can see through the haze of apparent madness, to the greater strength, devoid of material safety or logical reason. Looking at and following God is indeed frightening, with everything to loose and what seems like very little to gain. It is indeed a fools road which time and time again I have tried to turn off. But I know too much, connections have been made too deep, a fruitless task to change now.

Comprehension of a vision or voice.

At last we had settled in Devon, rather tentatively, in a rented house on a farm, very nice but not quite what we had expected. It had taken a lot of searching even to find this slim morsel of accommodation. A year passed, I worked on my new art project, hundreds of paintings, a book and a few web sites. I had worked hard, kept busy but not managed to earn even one penny for my endeavours, just procured more and more expenditure. This was not the way I liked to do business. The art business had been a hard nut to crack, and following God meant I had even less success than I should have had. Every opening seemed to be thwarted with his wise ideas. Every suitable contact was not suitable, every unsuitable contact was seemingly of the greatest importance.

The businessman in me was constantly skeptical. How could I ever make a living out of this? Even a meager living seemed impossible. I had given up a very prosperous business to follow this path and it wasn’t going to plan. I constantly thought that if I used my own mind I could make a better go of it and start to achieve profits, stemming the wasteful expenditure. I reassured myself with the past. I had always been surprised how apparent previous dead ends and crazy schemes had somehow unwittingly blossomed into some amazing businesses, achieving the seemingly impossible, once even winning Young Business of the Year.

Ever reluctant, I kept faith, keeping my usual opt out strategy, as usual, close to hand, “Two more months of this and if I didn’t make money I would give up.” The two months would always pass, to no avail, but a new twist in the tail would develop to keep me in tow for another two months and so on and on. The pattern was ever repeating, an ongoing test of faith, or stupidity, I was never sure which. The deadline passed again and I would again foolishly bargain with God, just two more months and then I want some quantifiable results to reassure my doubting mind. As before I was always promised the earth’s riches, within weeks, in just the way my mind would like, and I would be smitten again, full of faith. It was a bit like falling in love, lovers bickering, and then falling out. Then that magnetic attraction would overwhelm the differences, and the lovers would entwine once more, to a life of conflict and attrition, woven with the irresistible attraction of the loving sexes destined to attraction, to extinguish the attracting fire of love, on the path to perfection in entwinement, that is forever sighted, trapped in the future.

Over the long English winter, always a dark time for me, my life was again lightened with a hint of a move to the South of France. The vision came and went several times until eventually I was given the go ahead from my inner senses to visit. My mind thought we would be moving to the lovely warm climate and buoyant art scene of the South of France permanently, but God had other plans. I thought my visit was to look for a basic rural plot on which to place a caravan for us to live. In my mind’s eye I had seen a caravan on a plot of land and assumed this was the one to buy.

However, unknown to me it turned out a friend of mine had a caravan in the area which needed some repairs and a clean. Well here was yet another lesson in comprehension. My vision had been correct seeing the caravan, but my mind had interpreted this as a permanent move to France. God had seen it differently, as a “permanent”, temporary working trip for me in the spring to warm me up before continuing my work in England. I had seen the caravan in my inner vision but my mind thought I would be buying one, not cleaning and repairing one. What was strange was that while I was there it did feel like I was living there because I was working every day, so in a way I did live there permanently for that week.

If you really knew yourself

you would realize that

you were not

who you thought

you were

but are who

you know

yourself

to be

Doubt

Throughout all my life I can say there have only been the rarest and smallest fractions of time when doubt did not form a major part of my concept of God. When I think about God I like to think that I am not a doubter and fully believe in the presence of God. But when I think a bit deeper I don’t think this is possible. In reality very few people are confident of the existence of God. I thought long and deep about this and as far as thinking goes, I am 99% a doubter about the presence of God. It is not that I don’t believe there is some sort of power, but regarding its form, presence and meaning, I am 99% and sometimes 100% a doubter. As hard as I try I cannot convince my mind of this concept. A friend of mine once said, she emphatically knew of God’s existence, she didn’t think, she just knew. I was a bit doubtful and questioned her further on the matter. So if God said to you spend all of your money and put yourself in debt, give up your home, would you do it? The friend thought a while and could see the dilemma. On one hand she was pretty sure God existed, but she would be doubtful of her faith in God if she was asked to do something outside of her normal boundaries of life.

I think God keeps us on the cusp of continual doubting. He presents situations to us that are just nearing the edge of our normal comfort zone and once we accomplish the task in hand and become comfortable with this position, God seeks to push us further again. Following God can never be said to be a comfortable experience, you are never allowed a place of refuge, the task is of continual development. He may push us temporarily and marginally past our boundaries only to back track again until we thankfully retreat back inside, to the edge of our safety zone.

When we all doubt to such a large degree, what is it that allows us to still believe and follow God. This is where the truth is. Whilst our mind is the constant doubter, it is the feeling, the inner trust that keeps us on the path of learning about God. The mind cannot comprehend God and so naturally mistrusts and disbelieves God. It is the intuition, the life force which draws us to God, like a fly to the light, it is irresistible. We are all sensitive to the feeling of inner strength, bliss and beauty which we receive. These feelings come from the source we follow, that we naturally, largely unknowingly seek, despite it being such an illogical and vague concept.

You may still think that you are not a doubter, but what I am trying to get at is you may not doubt that God exists, and you may be 100% confident of his existence through the rules, scriptures and stories of religions, but these are just a very limited concept of God, not even 1%. Not even a million books could describe him. He cannot be fixed within any book, into any point in time, name or place. It is our very attempts to contain God that have made him sound so boring.

He is dimensionless, more than multifaceted, both the good and the evil. He has no rules applied to him, nor does he apply rules to us. His very existence is to break our rules and unfix us from our limited lives. To live the life of God is like a fluid movement, never ending, never stopping, like a river winding its way to the sea, fluidly moving over the obstacles.

Sticks, like our mind, as they flow down the river get caught up on the rocks, beaching and fixing themselves for a while, trapping themselves on the obstacles. The water meanwhile, like intuition flows round, over and under. It doesn’t form a static collection of mass like a stick, but forms a mass in the river due to the collective oneness of the movement of the river. But when the water meets an obstacle, it separates instantaneously into separate bits again, with no sense of past or future and reforms seamlessly again afterwards.

So it is not that we do think God exists, or does not exist, but it is the faith and knowing we have of his true existence which we doubt. If we followed him, and knew his existence, we would not have a thought of ourselves at all, we would not know our own identity like the water in the river. This is the doubt I am talking about. We gain a sense of security by knowing God through books, because the concept is so limited by the book. We can analyze him and place him in a box in our mind, where we can then rationalize him. But God is too big for our mind to contain, and following him must be done only through trust or a fluid mind which continually changes the perception of God every millisecond, according to God’s demands. For the mind, he has to be something solid and fixed, but every millisecond he changes to something else, as our perception of him grows and this challenges the mind.

You have to feel to follow him not think

to find him because

when you

think

you have

found him

he is

no longer

there.

Following God is a bit like painting. When I show someone the small colourless and still photographs I do most of my paintings from, they ask how do I get from the photo to the colourful dynamic painting. Well the answer is I don’t know. When I paint, it is a process of feeling, of following the painting, not thinking. I could not think the painting out at the start because I have no idea how it will end up in the finish. The colours are put together by a feeling, not through thought. It would be too hard to put all the colours together, as I have no idea of the end result, and the colours used are not representational of the painting. They represent the feelings of the scene. It’s all done in the moment, each step comes after the preceding one and that is as far as my thoughts can get, if they can at all.

When I sit and look at a painting I have started and think, I just sit and keep thinking, I have no idea what to do at all and have to leave it there. Then a break in the thoughts, and the feelings come through, allowing me to splash them onto the canvas, quickly and intensely, working and working. Once I start to think again, then it all stops again, and the flow of inspiration dries up.

Focus of Life

The concept of life we have is very fixed. It is as if there is always a simple focal point, somewhere we can aim our life at, a focus in the future or the past. This is the mind’s way of running life which is pretty good until you discover another way. This fixed point is not birth and it is not usually death. There are no other fixed points in life so the point we are aiming at can never exist, can never be achieved.

We aim to achieve this or that in the future, or we relish or regret this and that of the past. We assume that life for us will be complete when we achieve this point in life, a predetermined accumulation of wealth, property or fame. Once we arrive at the imaginary station of achievement, then we find that life has moved on, and we again focus on a new fixed point in the future or past.

Very few of us can keep our life in line with these constant changes. We are all the subject of a limited point of view, which may or may not bring success. By aiming at this fixed point in life we dry and perish, chasing an unobtainable dream, restricting our life unnecessarily. God plays endless tricks on us, to try and break our plans and dreams, of fixations of the mind, which he seeks to destroy, to leave a space that he may inhabit.

We need to look at life much more fluidly and not solidify it into set events, times and achievements. By living more fluidly, following our heart creates a much happier, and fulfilling life.

Knowing God

We all know God, we all hear and all speak to God at some time. There is no one on earth who hasn’t spoken to, felt or heard him. It is impossible. What confuses the matter is we hear and feel him through our own minds. It is this which places the obstacle between us and him. Our conscious mind and karma, personal nature, upbringing, culture, influence, aspirations, worries and fears are all obstacles to seeing and hearing God.

Even evil people can hear God, in his negative aspect, the devil, as Christians call him. They may hear him better than a good person. Good or bad are no criteria for this. Just like everything else there is more to God than positive and negative, he is beyond this in his true form of oneness, past our concepts of right and wrong. This idea of God always being good is one of the biggest obstacles to understanding God. We largely imagine him as the good guy, but when a war breaks out we suddenly think it is nothing to do with God. He could not possibly do this to us. He is the single power, the creator, there is no-one else, he is where the buck stops. Wars are just our collective selfishness and desires venting themselves into a physical format and that is all part of the path. We all have a selfish individual nature and this is one of the ways it gets destroyed so we can move closer to God. God as a good guy is just our concept of him, nothing more. There are no rules or limits about God, just the ones we make up for our own benefit.

If there was no evil in the world how would we know what was good. This is the world of duality we live in. Without one the other cannot exist. So without bad and evil, good cannot exist because we would not be able to identify it. So evil serves good, by allowing it to come into existence, which is the main path to God. It is very hard to find God through evil, but not impossible.

If evil did not exist, good would just re balance itself, unless we were all identical. If you took all the people who you regard as evil and removed them, then someone who is more good than you might regard you as the new evil, because you have evaded your taxes, left the toilet seat up or raised your voice in the Library.

Lets take a cynical look at you. You sit in your home with plenty of food and spend money on unnecessary luxuries when funds allow. While you dream

of luxuries many people starve to death in Africa, yet you do not send them your surplus funds, inadvertently causing them suffering and death. At times you have hateful or angry thoughts of another person and you steal money from the government by evading taxes. So in a way, you along with me could be thought of as evil, if we slightly altered its rules and boundaries, or changed the concept a little.

Now take what we perceive as good. Much apparent goodness comes from accumulating material pleasure and helping others avoid suffering. But this material pleasure can become self absorbing and take our focus from God.

You may be alleviating suffering from people who might benefit from suffering which would promote their own spiritual growth. Your angelic doing good may be worse than bad. Without bad we could accumulate our wealth and pleasures unchecked, which would allow us to indulge in material wealth without question.

When something evil happens to someone it creates a break, a shock in the normal pattern of things which upsets the mind’s manufacture of patterns. It is in this short break in mind’s patterns when we turn to our intuition, feelings and God, for help and reassurance, as the mind is made powerless by this sudden shock. We briefly catch glimpses of the true values in life, albeit temporarily.

Without evil, good would have no meaning. Everything would just work perfectly. Without the negative aspect of life we would have nothing to strive for or improve. There are some truly horrific things in life which it is indeed very difficult to attribute to God. The whole point of this is, God is beyond good and evil. What we see when we think of God is usually a fixed concept of the mind, created by religion, ethics or morals; just as this book is creating a concept in your mind which ultimately becomes fixed and tainted, unless you can begin to work and learn with God directly.

Many of us know God through religious texts and teachings. This concept of God created by religion is not God, it is the gnome in the garden which our mind has made, no more God than anything else. God is so large and infinite you cannot conceptualize him. He is without concept as concepts are of the mind. His rules are more flexible than air. He is all that we can conceive and all that we can’t. He can be reached and spoken to in infinite ways. There is no right or wrong way to find him. He favours no-one, he only favours you finding him. You cannot describe God but you can begin to know him. He is ruthless. He will use any weapon in his armoury for you

to find him, war or peace. It is the end result which is important, not the goal. Meeting God is a bit like being hit by a train bathed in life. You inner soul is ignited while your body is shattered with great force, like two planets colliding over an endless time. It is not a soft airy-fairy praying church-like experience. It is pure violence and peace combined, love and hate, it is unforgettable. The realisation comes slowly, through many twists and turns so the impact of the change is barely noticed. It begins like a trickle, a fine ray of light and a gentle push and shove, to point you in the right direction, culminating after many, many times in ultimate violence and ultimate peace combined to find the place in between.

Only Fools find God

I’ve always regretted finding God and yet at the same time I am unable to turn my back on him.

It cannot be over stated how much I cannot recommend finding God. He can cause you innumerable troubles, dilemmas and untold hardships. For those with a comfy life and enjoyable times, do not make the mistake of chasing God. It is not to be recommended.

Do not seek him out. He will send a whirlwind and a freight train through your life, shatter your dreams to dust, uproot your home, smash your ideals, dreams and morals, and lead you on a merry dance of blind man’s folly. He’ll

lead you here and then there for no apparent reason except to loose all traces of reason. He’ll loose all you have and then give it all back only to loose it again. That peace you derived from having everything in place, a

careful routine, knowing all around, all will be gone, never to return, vandalised. Your mind rests not at home or in routine, or in a mass of possessions, work or play, but its only place will be in Him, in foolish total utter faith or at least its beginning.

Once found you become an addict. That feeling of bliss and harmony descends, devoid of circumstance or material links, just pure and true, its only form.

What’s it like?

Take your loveliest day

you have ever had

and take away

the outer chaos

and the niggling imperfections then look inside

to the little nugget

of joy and pleasure

now distill this

so all that is left

is the bliss you felt

that very day

no wants

no needs

disappointments gone

then multiply

it by one

sweeten it with

nectar and smooth

it to a calm sea

then soften it’s colour

and remove the edges

so it stretches

beyond the shores

It starts within

comes from above

expanding outwards

consuming it all

Leaving everything

where nothing once was

Wandering mind or will of God? Who am I following?

When you are living with God, one of the traits of the path is you never know if you really are following his will or just the vague ramblings of your mind. You never know whether to sit and wait for him to give you the next task or whether you should be out searching for the next adventure. When your path is thwarted, is it because it was a necessary excursion, or was it a product of your wanting mind, thwarted by God, to bring you back on track? At the end of the day it all comes down to feelings, governed by reasoned thought which provides the answer, of which you can never be 100% sure.

He took me here, there and everywhere, through many twists and turns. I was never sure if I just sat and waited whether the correct destination would unfold on its own or not. Needless to say like most of us I didn’t wait, and nearly went to Malllorca to live, with only my signature on the contract holding up the move. God quickly turned me about in no uncertain terms and sent me packing back to England, homeless, business-less and direction less. Next we were off travelling round the world, supposedly looking for a new home, in India, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Samoa and then Los Angeles. After looking under nearly every stone and finding nothing which felt right, we were dumped back, reluctantly, in England.

Our final destination was a fairly mundane town, Barnstaple, on an estuary in Devon, England, not my first choice at all, which was probably Australia then Thailand, Somoa, and then LA. This place didn’t even make the list. But this was apparently the place. It had little going for it other than the ocean but it felt right. We were cautious of testing out yet another place to live, having had so many false starts. However we needed a house desperately, as living with parents was, for all, lasting longer than expected. We didn’t manage to buy a house in Barnstaple, despite an extensive search, but we did manage to buy a lovely block of stables with some land, which had no apparent use at all. We had no interest in horses and no any intention of obtaining any either. Still desperate for a house, having bought a seemingly useless stables block, we searched again, but turned up nothing and so we resorted to renting a house, on a farm near Barnstaple, in the middle of yet another stable complex. Was there some divine hint we were not getting in this horse thing or not?

The question I always had in mind was, had all this tooing and froing to Mallorca and searching around the world been necessary, or was it my mind taking me off on a tangent again and again, only to be reined in again and again at the last moment by God. Or were these escapades a part of the plan of acting and letting go, loosening the bindings of the material world and living in the moment, without end results or certainty. I like to think the latter and my inner voice tells me it is the latter, but then again you know what a perfect liar he is, so I shall probably never know for sure. I just try and do my best and leave the rest to him for ever more.

How to stop the mind thinking

If the mind’s constant chatter stops us hearing God, then to hear God we have to stop the mind thinking. The first step is to notice just how much we think, mostly unnecessarily. The second is to use constant discrimination to distinguish mind from God. Every second you will notice the mind is hooked quite unnecessarily on one pattern or another, it is constantly active. The physical focus of one’s mind tends to be towards the front of the head or sometimes can be felt in a band around the head. To avoid thoughts you must move your inner focus to the crown of your head. This is a technique which is used automatically in deep meditation, which works to still the brain and mind by moving focus to another area inside or outside the body.

To move your focus to the crown first you have to have a desire to find peace, to rest from mind’s chatter. If you have no desire there will be no focus to help in the task and you will still be torn between conflicting wants.

So assuming there is a desire for peace and oneness, or at least a desire to find out, you can begin to find out what is happening.

First we look at the root chakras around the abdomen area which help us to become grounded and live a stronger earthly life. Some people are naturally more grounded than others, but all of us can affect our individual grounding. The control of this root area can be accomplished through breathing either through Yogic or Taoist breathing, practised in Yoga and Tai Chi. Just use one. You breathe through using the diaphragm just below your lungs, to inhale and expel air, rather than using the movement of the chest or upper chest. As you breath in you move the abdomen out and use the lower diaphragm, not the chest. If you cannot get enough air then use some of the lower chest but eventually you should just use the abdomen area to breath with. The upper chest should never be used except as a reserve for breathing during heavy exercise. This movement of the diaphragm below the lungs to expand and contract the lungs grounds and centres the energetic body.

As you breathe, focus on your breathing only, and then move your thoughts and mental focus onto your navel area. You can do this by first looking at your navel. Then after a few practices, try shutting your eyes as you focus on this area and see if you can still focus on the same area, without using your eyes. In this way you can learn to move your inner focus around the body, to notice what is happening inside. With much practice of this, with yoga and

Thai Chi, you find you can manually effect you heartbeat and breathing, and begin to move energy and inner focus around your body. This helps gain a control over your body and then the mind which you can then develop.

For the next stage, let’s take the chest area. Here is where most of us engage with the other people in the world. You engage emotionally with people through this centre. A great way to become aware of what is happening in this area is :

Try and become calm through meditation and still your mind. Then focus on your chest area or heart and see that it too is still and calm. Now start to think through an emotional conflict you are having with someone or an argument you have recently had. Then watch this centre suddenly become active. It is recreating an emotional feeling that was present in the argument, replaying an old pattern. This area tries to link with the other party, or any other suitable person through this centre, to create the balance it seeks between victim and aggressor.

Pow, from peace to trauma in seconds. This is how patterns assert themselves in your body. As well as the heart being an area of love, it also acts in the opposite arena, of conflict and hate. It seeks to exert these emotions through entangling with others who are receptive to this pattern in love or conflict or both, engaging with whatever is your current pattern. This is quite a lesson in seeing how the conflict can be separated from the physical event. You can begin to learn how this is a pattern set in your body, which seeks to exert itself through physical attachment to the appropriate person, or event, to fulfill itself.

Now moving up the body, around the head we have the throat, mind, third eye and crown. Each have their own part of life for exerting themselves. Each enable you to dabble in another part of life;

The throat in communication, the mind in thinking and the third eye in the psychic world.

Above them all is the crown chakra, which leads most clearly to God. Through this chakra comes the purest guidance, and above the crown are levels of ever increasing purity and if you want to live with God this is where he can be found most easily.

Back to the mind. By knowing the centres of your body known as chakras you begin to see what is happening in the body. By keeping your focus or

energy out of a particular area, you can avoid entanglement in that particular aspect of life. In my experience, I maintain my focus on my crown, to avoid being hassled by the mind. You do have to be careful though to keep your base centre around the navel active and connected to the earth, at the same time, to keep you grounded and not too flighty.

So by maintaining your focus on the crown it denies the mind its focus to enable it to operate properly. This simple explanation is, you guessed it, much harder than just the simple words I have used. The mind has a million tricks up its sleeve to keep it fully operational despite your best efforts.

Conflict

Conflict is the sandpaper of God, it is his tool for wearing down our egos until they are so small he can rub them out. It would seem that conflict is a necessary evil of everyday life and no matter how hard you try, you are not going to avoid conflict in some form or other, every day.

Conflict is probably one of the most upsetting events that we meet in life. Some people seem to thrive on it, others wilt at the thought of it. It acts through the heart chakra, person to person and is spiritually damaging. It occurs when two individuals come into conflict over the same point, space or time. Each tries to assert their individual identity over the others whom they assume should be submissive to theirs. It is a battle of dominance. When this happens between groups or nations then it turns to war, and the psychological conflict solidifies into the physical. We all have a national identity. Like it or not an identity is pretty unavoidable even with our best intentions. You might think you are immune from conflict, but unless you are dead to the world, you will always be subject to the opposites of love and hate to varying degrees, and with this always comes conflict, large and small.

I have long sought to avoid conflict, but to do this would mean doing nothing. It seems like I have a path in life to follow, one of which seems to be as a property developer which for me involves unavoidable conflict. Like anything in life if you want to do something, because of the limited resources in the world, it brings you into conflict with others, whether you are aware of it or not. Just by occupying your space on earth brings you into conflict with all the other inhabitants of earth.

The road is the classic example of conflict. It is unavoidable to by-pass the conflict, and impossible not to get annoyed on some level with people’s

inconsiderate driving, the road layout or the traffic lights. What do we do about conflict? It has a habit of trying every door until it finds one it can get into. I thought about being totally passive and always allow others to obtain the upper hand, but I wasn’t sure that this was correct either. This was a sort of negative conflict. It allowed the other person to become even more dominant and in his next encounter with someone else would cause more conflict.

I always think of Gandhi in this matter. He developed the non violent reaction to conflict with a dispute over salt in India which eventually lead to Britain ceding control of India to India. Gandhi led protests against the English and the protests were to be persistent but never violent. This worked very well and the British finally gave into Ghandi’s demand for Indian sovereignty, but there was a sting in the tail. As the English left they gave the Muslims and Hindus different parts of the country to avoid religious conflict, to form India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the transitional period of moving to their separate parts of the country there was one of the biggest conflicts in Indian history, as Hindus slaughtered Muslims and vica versa. The non violent victory had resulted in a violent end conflict, with thousands slaughtered and a further 3 wars between India and Pakistan. This was perhaps one of the most classic acts of attempted conflict avoidance of the century.

How do we avoid conflict, is a dream that many hold. It is not a case of avoiding conflict, but a need for right action. Every situation in life has a right action for the response. It may be violent or non violent, but the direction for the response should come from God, not from our personal reaction, point of view or any tradition or religion. The danger in conflict comes when we react from our emotional centres. It is this area that causes our problems in life, it feeds on interaction between this centre and the other person’s emotional centre, and this exacerbates conflict, argument, hate, and fear, further fueling the conflict. The point of correct response is above the emotional centre and mind, in the crown and this is where your reaction should be directed from, if you truly want to avoid conflict. This way the best reaction for each situation can be discerned to minimise any future problems.

This is a discipline which takes endless learning and some sensitivity of the chakras needs to be developed first. You will feel when you interact with other people, how your point of focus is always drawn down to your heart area, and this area feels active or hotter. Contrast this with when you

meditate, or are on your own in nature, and energy moves up towards the crown chakra and the heart chakra slows, when peace is found. To see conflict in action when you meditate, first become at peace, then think of a conflict situation or a problem you are having and then imagine it. You will feel the heart chakra fire up and start spinning, bringing in the emotions concurrent with that thought. You can see how the emotional reaction can happen for no reason, it is an embedded pattern which needs to be displaced, or at the least understood. Now try and move your focus back up to the crown chakra and see everything become peaceful again. This is something you can practice on your own and can then use to prevent a conflict pattern from initiating in real life. It is always the same pattern exerting itself, it is just the intensity and physical situation which is different.

When you have practiced this on your own you are ready to practice it in company. This technique is for conflict, but it also helps you to remain aloof from a situation, so that you can follow the right action to the situation. The reaction comes from your intuition and sense of intelligent reason rather than an emotional response. Emotions feed on conflict and people get addicted to this pattern. This technique is a way of breaking your own addiction by seeing what is happening in the body. You also find that by acting from your crown you do not interact with the other person on the lower level which can allow conflict to proceed. Conflict needs the emotional area of both people to interact. If only one does there is rarely any conflict. You are not being submissive, but are using intelligent reason and intuition to help the other person to move out of the point of conflict, rather than exasperating it. After trying this a few times you will find people will not try the conflict trick on you any more, because you aren’t providing the emotional food they seek. People of conflict need the emotional boost of conflict to satisfy their craving. It is a pattern they are caught in and are helpless to move out of it, but it is not necessary for you to be in it as well. This pattern doesn’t just affect individuals , it affects groups, teams, businesses, and countries due to the collective consciousness of each particular identity. It requires constant discernment in life to check points of conflict and re-examine our individual and collective identity to ensure that we are not also a source of conflict creation. This is the hardest part of the battle, as in our individual identity we will nearly always see ourselves as the correct person in any conflict that arises. So as well as removing ourselves from the emotion draw, we must also examine the source of conflict, to check that we are not the problem. Again the crown can help to examine the conflict from a point of oneness, to take an overall view and assess everyone’s point of view equally.

Conflict

In my mind’s eye

grows a separation

of distance

from two points

pushed apart by

individual assertion

in between

the fire of

true truth grows

consuming all that

we hold so dear

in order to maintain

we are still two

not the one

we truly are

with all consumed

what was two

unavoidably

overwhelmed by attraction

Cosmic force of Love

as each is powered toward

the other

within infinite speed

to smash it to

the nothing it is

inseparable total

oneness

All

Gone Now

Is

As hands spin

another nail embeds in the coffin

of our decaying body

eroding mind

grinding bodies

on the beach

that is life

only a spec

relentlessly smashed

by indiscriminate waves

of overwhelming power

to indistinguishable powder

softness concealed

by sweetness of love

millennia past

from time’s domain

to shatter from

bindings fragmented

to origins

timelessness

existing always

everywhere

thoughtless in oneness

Time.

Our concept of life is all governed by time. If it did not exist the day could not function in the ways of the mind, it would be hard to live. Let’s imagine a loss of measurement of time. First imagine that we were all devoid of watches and time measuring devices. We could no longer make accurate sections of time in which to divide life and construct a logical and reasoned way of forming the day’s events. This would leave a more looser form of time measuring by the seasons and the movements of the sun, day to day, and planets year to year. This too is a measurement of time, old fashioned yes but still a measurement so this too would have to go also.

Many people think that at some time in the past we were more spiritual, more advanced, had a better grasp of life. This I do not hold to be true, we were more in touch with the seasons and nature just because that was the way we functioned, how we measured time, but this is a different concept to the spiritual.

The hands of time

like spinning worlds upon your head

to hold you down

upon this earth

hiding you from heaven

razor hands

splice time and space from enormity

to bite size chunks to feed the mind

first too much

and then too little

life of mind

of time

blind love and trust

with feeling hands

mold the fragments

into one

to see

like life

it had us fooled

for all of time.

With measurements of time gone, life would be open to haphazardness and chance. All would exist in the now. With no measurement of time, it would be hard to work in the future or the past. We would have no idea of when something should happen or did happen. I guess this would be a little like the aboriginal people with little concept of time, although they would have at least known the seasons and the movements of the sun and moon which they could use to see time.

Without our mind constructing a framework of time around us, we would operate more in the time of now. Our focus would not be in the future or past, but on the present and everlasting now in which all events would happen.

But even with time measurement gone, we would still know if something had happened before or had not yet happened, because of the way our mind lays out events in front of us. Our mind works sequentially, and it is this sequential, linear operation which allows the mind to construct time, even without any measuring devices. Events are sequenced in a linear trail we call time, usually the future and the past. This is duality, the duals of time, past and future, operating from the one eternal now. It is a rare moment that we consciously operate in the now without reference to past or future. Even an event supposedly happening now, in this immediate second, we find that we are still behind or in front of this part of time, called now. We are either anticipating the end result, or the next stage in the process, or regretting what we started, cursing the mistake we made or are about to make, wishing we had never started, or dreaming how good the finished product will be. Just try it and see how much of the time if any, you are actually here and now.

Your mind can only deal with one thought at once no matter how clever we think we are, or how multi tasked we think we have become, one at a time is its limit. If you are thinking of anything in the past or future, even one thousandth of a second either way, then you are not present. If you are making something and comparing it with what you made before, or thinking of the next stage, even a fraction of a second away, this is not now. Just try it and see that it is virtually impossible to stay correctly and properly in the absolute present now, with no reference to past or future.

Loosing time is not just about loosing time measuring devices it is about loosing the concept of time, altogether. It is the very basis of the mind’s operation which makes time exist, so it is this which must also be changed

or lost. Time and the mind are all of the same entity and one cannot go without the other. If time were to be removed, then all time would compress or expand into one time, it would then no longer act on us. Time would become one, and along with this then inevitably the mind would also be destroyed because all would merge into oneness. Past lives, future lives, all of creation, the expansion and contraction of the universes etc, birth and death – and the illusion of life would be gone as there would be no time left for it to exist in.

So the culmination of all of this is that for God time does not exist, he must be independent of time. He can act in the future and the past at the same time, he is not governed by time. We all take time to be such a fixed rule that cannot be moved, changed or lost. Why on earth would that be true? Just like gravity, light and other factors, time is subject to the universe, it is part of it, and it is a variable entity like everything else. It is just because we are within time and cannot see out of this vessel that we are so trapped by it. If we could get out of the vessel of time and look from outside in, we would see what a huge joke it is.

Take a dog, and you see it going round sniffing other dog’s bottoms and dog shit and you wonder why it does it? It is just because it is a dog, it knows no difference and so behaves like a dog. Its mind is trapped within the constraints of being a dog. We can see this as a lame pastime because we are out of the concept of being a dog, we are humans. Just like the dog, we are humans and know no different so we act like humans and act within the constraints of human time, following our watches round like dogs sniffing pooh, never having known anything else. We are constrained in the same way but as humans. If we could see outside of time we would see it differently. Just like when America was discovered, the earth assumed to be definitely flat, and then after this expansion of knowledge, the earth became round in our concept. We changed to conceive the entire globe as one sphere. Now picture yourself going back in time and telling Christians the earth was flat and the Aztecs that the sun would still come out the next day, even if they stopped sacrificing people. The Aztecs would think you were nuts and if the church got to hear of your ideas it would probably leave you headless. Just as we were unable to conceive the whole earth as a sphere, we are still seeing only a part of the concept of time.

Learning to Live through a dying death

If ever there was a greater irony in life, it has to be the great surprise we get when someone dies. Do we not live in frail bodies made mostly of water so easy to puncture? Are our lives not limited every time, for each and everyone, by the length of time we can survive. It is not that death should be such a surprise but the fact that our bodies are still alive in the morning after we nod off to sleep. We should be amazed when we wake up again. Where on earth have we been all night and who kept the fire of life burning while we absented ourselves during slumber? Death should be taken as just mundane, expected, trivial and just another event in life. After all when a child is born you can only guarantee that child one thing absolutely in life. Only one, and that is you’ll definitely be dead at some point in your life, usually the end. Have we got it all wrong? Was some blunder made in human history? Did we at some point not used to die, leading to this horror and shock about this event?

The door of death has been tainted with an ugly black paint for far too long, slandered, misrepresented and sent into disrepute. In my short time before my death I have seen a few old people close to death and a few people die. It was these events that revolutionized my attitude to death. Don’t get me wrong though I don’t fancy dying yet either, and certainly not if it involves any pain, a little is ok but any more, no thanks.

My first experience of death came during a training event. A businessman in his fifties collapsed on the fells, a totally natural death. Fortunately I was not in any way responsible for his death, nor did I know him. This provided a wonderful opportunity that I was about to discover. As he lay on the ground I stood near him directing the events. Colleagues were attempting to resuscitate him with no success and the doctor and ambulance were on their way. I was totally unprepared for the feelings I had. It was an electrifying experience, joyful, full of laughter and happiness, very much like the birth of my daughter. Had I known the man personally or been in some way responsible for his death I expect my feelings would have been different. I could not deny these feelings as the soul released from the body and I worked hard to conceal them from his friends, who were understandably upset. So there it was my first experience of death, overwhelmingly happy and joyful, not what I had expected at all, quite shocking.

The second experiences with death came with a few old people I knew, who were quite near to death. They were old and frail and would often say how they longed to die. They apparently had little to live for. Every so often it was as if they were offered the gift of death to pass away from this life. It always came as a surprise to me how these frail bodies would spark into life, to fight off the foe of death as it loomed, disguised within illness. The doctor would be summoned and all the wishful thinking they had about dying was thrown to the wind. Desperation showed as they clung to life. Health temporarily regained, they would again wistfully ponder with me in our conversations how they wished to die, not wanting to live anymore. Eventually however the body always had to give up its fight and the mind could not maintain its grip on the body any longer. The mind was overcome, defeated and death moved in.

It was this toing and froing from wanting to die, to fighting death that made me wonder what it was that was holding death back. Would it be any different if we had another attitude to death? Would we look on it with awe, respect and longing, truly with acceptance of this wonderful time, when it was first offered to us.

An interesting puzzle came to mind, another concept and outlook on the situation.

Wrong Way round

It seems to me that we have got the whole world upside down. We think that birth is good and sweet, and death is suffering and sour. This on the face of it is a perfectly sound outlook on life. But a little logical probing soon undermines our comfortable outlook. Lets look at birth and death again.

From a purely selfish point of view birth means bindings, while death means temporary freedom. Take a young passionate couple in love, free to play and roam. Then along comes a wonderful beautiful baby —BANG !!!! What a surprise when the attractive packaging is unwrapped and inside they find a lifetime of responsibility, commitment, ties, restrictions, unending financial cost and the rapid curtailment of all that fun and freedom – resulting in a confusing triangle of love – with a baby biologically programmed to drive a wedge through their blissful love. For the baby, there are years of confusion, learning lots of pointless things, years at boring school, and unreasonable discipline and rules from their bullying parents, before eventually being cast out into the unfair, harsh world, penniless and homeless, only to follow their parents haplessly into the same trap. Don’t get me wrong I love children and have loved having my daughter, but I am being devil’s advocate, analysing the situation in a dry, cold and logical manner.

Now let’s take death. Your child has now become the aged parent whom you are now burdened with looking after. You have many of the same responsibilities as the baby but the packaging is not as deceptive and has seen better days. The aged parent feels their age and immobility, and is frustrated at being so old. They have aches and pains and want a cure for this illness of age. They often want to die but cannot find the right way to do it. They can’t quite let go yet, life is still holding them. Then death knocks on the door and all the burden suddenly disappears. The body is jettisoned and the soul left to fly free again, until it finds a new fresh body. All those aches and pains are gone and a brand new body still in the wrapper is provided. For the burdened carers they are suddenly free again and what’s more have a nice lump sum of cash left to spend in their new found freedom.

Looking at life and death in this way it seems odd that we regard birth and death in the way we do. Once our body gets old you think we would be rushing into death so that we can get a new body, especially if we lacked a good pension or health care. It’s just like trading in an old clapped out car for a brand new faster model, for free.

This outlook is a bit like the spiritual life, in that endless births are the cause of the burden of life and it is the everlasting death, when the round of births and deaths are finished, that we all seek, the everlasting death into oneness, enlightenment, to save us from the suffering of life.

In this reasoning on death I am not seeking to celebrate death nor to dread birth. It is just to provoke thought and to loosen up life’s perspective, which falls neatly in between birth and death. By looking at these two points in life we can learn more about life than we think. These are two important times in life which we all share and all have to endure in some form. We are all guaranteed to have been born and all will eventually die.

When we can perceive the whole of life as falling inside these two points it can help us to conceive more of the oneness that is life. By realising that all we really have to live for is death allows life to free up. This is not a macabre outlook as many would rightly think. You would naturally assume that by thinking all the time that you were going to die, that you would be horribly depressed and a thoroughly dull person.

The reality of this is that if this fact is taken in the correct light, then it actually has the opposite effect. We all know we are going to die and by accepting death, we don’t fear loss, or our own death. We don’t strive to accumulate so much wealth. This realisation that all of the material life we have will definitely come to an end moves the focus from our outer bindings to our inner wealth. The accumulation of outer wealth and success which causes so much distress and conflict brings little real, true happiness. However the attaining of inner wealth unfolds a natural inner joy and naturally prevalent, constant happiness.

With the focus and fear removed from the outer life you can follow your inner voice and guidance, or the song of the heart, which when free from fear and worry is a joy to live with, far more than anything money can ever bring.

Who’s Living with Who?

The more I have explored the aspect of living with God, the more lost I have become. It is not something that you can easily identify. It isn’t something you can easily see in yourself or others. It has only become more obvious through a retrospective view, piecing the bits together like a jigsaw. It has required extensive detective work. There was no flash of light and no flurry of angels, but a slow, gentle, persistent guidance, like a veil over all of life, clouding outer vision of the obvious, to see below the clouds, to the less obvious but more rewarding pathway laid out for you to follow by your soul.

I don’t think I have become any better at life, any more honest, truthful, or more good. I do not seem to have gained any traits you would consider preferable from a religious or spiritual point of view. On the throw of the dice of chance I seem to have become richer, holidayed more, worked less and enjoyed what I do more and more. Above all I have seen an ever growing inner trust and feeling of subtle bliss begin as a tiny dormant seed and grow, slowly, very slowly, nearly so slowly as to be imperceptible. But it is there all the same, all the time, in varying strengths, it ebbs and flows. Sometimes outer events and chaos cloud out my tiny nugget of inner joy and peace and at other times it moves in to provide beautiful bliss in the most absurd situations.

From a traditional, spiritual outlook I thought I would retreat from the world, to find God and relinquish the use of money. Conversely, in reality I have become more involved with certain parts of the world and dealt with money and other vices more. It makes no sense, but then is it meant to?

One thing

for sure

God knows

no reason

he makes

no sense

in telling lies

he tells all truth

thinking and searching

never conceiving

but knowing

being is

after all

finding

him.

Whatever

you do

don’t believe

what you read

a book of nonsense

trust is all

you have

to find

what you seek

not in me

but in you

the only one.

Intuition – Mind – Emotions. Which should I listen to?

Emotions are the result of patterns of the mind, karma or body exerting themselves in our world. Mind is the construction of life using the dual nature of comparison of opposites. Karma is the energetic imbalances between the duality of existence in life, attracting opposites to achieve equilibrium. Intuition and the feeling of inspiration is a connection with the universal nature of the universe, the source of all, the creator.

If God is intuition in its pure form then it would be best to rely on only intuition. But this intuition we have, has to pass through our karmic and emotional body and mind to act in the realm of duality we live in.

These layers pollute the intuition, clouding its meaning to some degree. So to obtain the best solution, reason must be continually applied to intuition, to form a sort of super consciousness. This continually unfolds as we strive to continually exercise constant discernment, to separate intuition from the pollutants.

Everyone is capable of perfect intuition or seeing god, but it is the layers of our emotional desires, our mind and our karma (or sanskaras) which are the clouds or veils which shroud the true Love and light from the source. And it is through constant discernment of our emotions, intuition, mind and actions that we can eventually see through mind and emotions to begin to find the light of intuitive inspiration, which leads to the source of life, the creator.

When you

no longer

think you

are looking

when you

don’t think

you have

found God

when you

know nothing

think nothing

do nothing

you have

found him

If you

think

you have

you have

not.

Help

I never cease to surprise myself how
often I forget to ask God for help. He is
there every day all day, permanently, but
we seem to permanently forget to listen
to him and ask for help. He may not
provide the help you particularly wish for
and the help may not come quite as soon
as expected, or in the form your mind
wished for, but it does always come, every
time. The problem is that we continually
forget God and because of this,
continually forget to ask for his help. If
we remembered God continually, to ask
for his help continually, then we would
become God. The continual thought of
God would obliterate all other thoughts,
so the life of the mind could no longer
exist. You would think that this is a pretty
easy task on the way to enlightenment,
and it would be were it not for our
human failings. The first problem would
be sleep. When we fall asleep it is
impossible to think of God when we are
not fully conscious. Second problem is, it
is just really hard to achieve. Just try it
now and see how long you can constantly
say for instance in though, “God”,
repeatedly, without break and without
interruption by any other thought, even
thoughts like “ I must keep saying God”,
or “why am I doing this?”, “should I carry
on etc ?” The third and final problem
would be intention. If you were thinking
of God for the only reason that you may
become God then you would have two
thoughts and not the one you thought,
one of God and one of hoping to be
God. With two thoughts you would fail
the task along with the analogy of the
chicken and the egg.

This is
probably all
I can say
whatever it is
you think
might happen
God
will always
make sure
it never does
quite
as you might
have thought
to
help you
rely on him
and
not your
lustrous thoughts
So
if you want
the life
you thought
whatever you do
do not Ask
for
help

Photographs, Design and writing by Pete Caswell

Printed in USA and Europe by Pete Caswell

For permission to use extracts of this book or images please contact Pete Caswell pete@petecaswell.co.uk

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

Contents

About Life About God.

Inspiration

Here is what happened

Doing Nothing.

Living in the now.

The Great Experiment

Discerning the Path

Hearing God ?

How do you hear God–The Inner voice

The Voice of God

Future

Living with God

Following God

Comprehension of a vision or voice.

Doubt

Focus of Life

Knowing God

Only Fools find God

What’s it like?

Wandering mind or will of God? Who am I following?

How to stop the mind thinking

Conflict

All

Gone Now

Is

Time.

Learning to Live through a dying death

Wrong Way round

Who’s Living with Who?

Intuition – Mind – Emotions. Which should I listen to?

Help