Category: Living With God Book

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

page 4

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.

page 5

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

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

page 2

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.

Page 3

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?

It was not until I wrote this book 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.

It is a very rare person, so rare as to be unfindable, that is not deceived into thinking that they really do think they know what they truly can’t