wisdom

The secret ingredient

kung-fu-panda

This evening I watched Kung Fu Panda for the first time.  There was nothing else on and I was bored; bored enough to sit through a movie I didn’t want to watch but sitting through it was better than sitting here in silence.  Y’know, that kind of bored..?

Without going through the whole plot which is probably a waste of time because I’m likely to be the only person in the known universe who hasn’t seen it, there was a bit in the movie where he had to qualify to get a sacred scroll.  Anyway, he got the scroll and his kung fu master said it contained the secret ingredient to him becoming a true master.  When Panda opened the scroll it was blank; there was nothing on it at all.

It took him a while to get the point that there is no secret ingredient in life; that the secret ingredient is you.  You are what you need for ultimate success.  Belief in yourself is the secret ingredient.  Once he realised this, he was bound to beat the bad guy.

This got me thinking (I do sometimes) about how hard we all look for the secret ‘something’ that will make us more successful and our lives better in whatever way we feel they should be better.  We tend to put all the responsibility for our future happiness onto this abstract ‘something’ and blame our inability to find it or God’s refusal to bring it to us, or other people for keeping it from us or holding us back, or our unhappy childhood, our shit job or our spouse’s recent affair or our kid’s drug habit for the fact that we’re going nowhere.  Anything will do so long as there is something to blame for us not finding ‘it’.

‘It’ is you, me, us.  We are the secret ingredient to our future happiness and success and all we need to do is use it the right way.  For me it means taking responsibility for mistakes and making the choice to induce change.  It means breaking out of whatever cycle we’re stuck in; whether it be a cycle of abuse or social pressures from our peers, emotional baggage or lack of skills.  Break out of that cycle and make changes and start to use your secret ingredient – you, your mind, your innate intelligence and creativity.  Be brave as you turn your life into chaos to break those bad emotional habits and kick the negative influences from your life.  Take a deep breath and head out into the wilderness to see where that road leads, up where the river bends and the mist shrouds the hills.

All it takes is you.  Life won’t bring you that secret something.  Meditating won’t bend the universe and unlock the door for you (although it will calm you tremendously) and following the same old routine because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” won’t show you what’s up where the river bends into the mist.  You have to get off your ass and make the choice to go and see for yourself.

It’s scary, it’s exhilerating, it’s witheringly frightening and mind blowingly liberating.  You’ll be worried, you’ll be anxious and you’ll be fearful but most of all you’ll be so glad you did.

I’m going to do it.  Come on, let’s go see what’s up there, up where the river bends and the mists shroud the hills.

The Power of Positive Thinking

There is a trendy new buzzword flying around the internet. One that claims to change your life for the better and help you to realise all your wildest fantasises while not having to actually work to bring them into being. There have been many books published on this subject, websites galore and even a dvd telling you how to do it. All you have to do is think differently, then sit back and wait for the money to come rolling in. What this new treasure? Positive thinking.

It goes by many names, The Secret and Cosmic Ordering being two of the latest but at the bottom line it’s just positive thinking dressed up in the latest fashionable garb. Like an ageing actress past her prime trying to cover her wrinkles with the latest new face cream, positive thinking has been given a makeover to bring it into the 21st century and make it desirable for today’s troubled young and trendy.

When I was a girl our grannies used to tell us to keep smiling and to remember that every cloud has a silver lining and to believe that everything will be all right in the end. That sort of home grown wisdom just doesn’t cut it in today’s hi tech, fast paced, action packed, new age world though. In order for a new idea to take a hold today, it needs to be offered in a glossy, full colour package with fancy typeface, icons and plenty of airy fairy language. Even better if it comes with additional extras like double disc dvd sets, cd’s, flashcards, workshops in swanky Covent Garden shops, mousemats, baseball hats and mugs. All at additional cost of course!

The basic priniciple of this new modern version of positive thinking is that in order for it to work, you must totally believe it. Any shred of doubt and those dollars won’t come rolling in, that Ferrari will stay in the showroom and that hot guy won’t be calling you up. And that’s the rub; the most basic rule for the whole thing to work, is the most difficult to achieve. Of course there’s always the additional workshops you can attend to help you get the hang of it – at additional cost of course. You could also buy several more books to help you understand where you went wrong.

Why is it no longer okay to believe that what happens in your life is what is supposed to happen? Why is it no longer okay to struggle a little for an achievement? Why are we all expected to be filthy rich and drive sports cars in order to be seen as successful and why does it take money and ‘stuff’ to make us happy? Why do we turn to these new age ideas like positive thinking with the sole purpose of getting rich and famous anyway? So many of the rich and famous end up ruining their lives that I wonder if the pursuit of fame and riches isn’t more like a negative thing than a positive. I can name so many household names – actors, singers etc who have problems of various kinds all due to those very things we admire most in them – their fame and wealth. Some are luckier than others and get through their lives with just a few anxiety issues, panic attacks and zero self esteem. Others aren’t so lucky.

Take the actor who doesn’t become a genuine household name until his mid forties for instance. Up until he becomes really famous, he is driven and hard working although broke. He has his goal and he works tirelessly to achieve it and his best works are those he created during those early years of striving. Then he suddenly becomes world famous and gets rich and then his problems start. He has no experience of coping with fame or large quantities of money and because he’s been broke most of his life, he goes a little wild. Women fall at his feet and he sees no reason to say no or be discerning and he ends up with several kids by different women, none of whom he is a proper father to. Facing middle age and the ever present tide of younger, firmer, tight assed guys coming up bhind him, he starts to worry. He doesn’t know how much longer he can be the main attraction. He’s never seen the need to settle down and get married, there’s been too much fun to be had to shackle himself to one woman and now the only women that want his company are brainless teenagers who think that bedding an actor will help their careers. He trawls the seedier nightclubs of eastern Europe with his ever present entourage of enabling hangers-on who all help him ruin his life because he pays them well, and picks up teenage art sudents who then sell their stories to the papers and upload videos of their interviews to youtube. Their budding careers get a temporary but welcome boost and they get their fifteen minutes of fame for having met ‘so and so’. This actor really exists by the way and he is lonely and suffers anxiety attacks. He’s middle aged but still tries to act like a seventeen year old. He was so much happier before he got famous, when he was struggling to be noticed. Once he found fame, he couldn’t handle it.

Others find fame and money ruin them in different ways. Some are ruined by drugs, alcohol, gambling or even crime. There are also a few who find the sudden abundance of money and fame enables them to live out their innermost desires and bring the stranger of their perversions into a living reality. Again the entourage of hangers-on all eager to help their master or mistress to achieve whatever they want, so long as they continue to pay well, ensure that they never have to listen to reason. It’s a downward spiral that ends either in their suicide, early death from alcohol or drugs or they end up broke and lonely and still refusing to realise that they’re not still the hottest, latest thing. Unfortunately stories like these are ten a penny today and the actor/entertainer who uses his money wisely and still works hard and creates a genuinely good product and adapts his work as he ages and matures, is in the minority. The famous person who doesn’t find themselves the subject of shameful tabloid stories of drug taking or seedy sexual endeavours is becoming harder and harder to find.

Why does no one use the power of positive thinking to bring themselves better powers of discernment, more patience and understanding of others, better decision making or more insight into people and their needs? All of these things are useful tools in the drive to succeed and can help ensure that when we do achieve our goals, we have learned the necessary skills to help us handle the results properly when we do achieve them. We are such a money driven society now that anyone who doesn’t have it is a nobody, a loser. You can be the nicest guy on the block, the one whom everyone loves the most because of your kindness and generosity but if you’re broke and not famous, you’re essentially a loser. Those whom you’ve helped to achieve their own goals with your wisdom and inight will turn their backs on you without a thought, for the chance to spend the night with an ageing actor with a good body and get a video of themselves telling all the sordid details on youtube.

The power of positive thinking is just that, a power and one that should be used wisely and with insight into what the ramifications of getting what you want might be. If people put as much effort into believing that their life is worthy even if they’re broke, as they do in spending time and money on shiny dvd’s that promise them wealth and fancy cars, then the world would be a happier place for everyone. Positive thinking requires that you have an insight into what is missing from your life and focus on this rather than on what you already have in abundance. The people that make these programmes and write these books know that everyone wants to be rich and many want to be famous and so they focus their ‘package’ on these materialistic pursuits. By spending so much time focussing on what is missing, you’re actually being negative rather than positive.

Wouldn’t it be more positive to spend some energy and time focussing on the abundance of experience you have that can be used to help others in similar situations? Wouldn’t it be more positive to use these self development programmes to ask for more opportunities to grow in self awareness? At the end of the day, the only ones getting rich by using these so call development programmes are the ones selling them to you! I would love to have more money and I know that a lot of good could be done for many people if I had it but I’ve had many years of experience being broke and having nothing. I’m old enough and wise enough to know that sex, drugs and rock-n-roll wouldn’t enhance my life one little bit and that if I came into a lot of money, I have the self awareness to use it wisely for my own good and that of many others.

All that, and I haven’t spent any money on positive thinking books or dvd’s!

I’ll never join the screaming hoard.

My mother is staying with me at the moment.  She lives in Cornwall and I’m in Hampshire, so we don’t get to see each other that often.  A chance conversation just now has sparked a train of thought that is interesting – to me anyway, as someone who’s ‘into’ people and what makes them tick.

I’m a huge fan of Vin Diesel and more accurately, his character Riddick.  Mother knows this and humours me, although she loves the Fast & Furious series herself.  Anyway, Vin and ‘the crew’ are over here in London at the moment, filming the latest in the FF series – number 6.  One of my facebook contacts lives and works in London and he commented that the set is besieged by hoards of screaming females and this sparked a conversation between mother and I.

Much as I love the big guy, I would never travel to join a throng of a thousand screaming females, be stuck at the back and only see him from half a mile away, not be noticed by him anyway and never get to meet and chat with him at the end of it.  Why?  There are several reasons.  Firstly there’s no point if I can’t get near enough to have a chat, get an autograph or a photo and the slim possibility of seeing my hero as big as a pin head from the back of a crowd of screaming women, really doesn’t blow my skirt up.  Secondly, the fact that I would never get anywhere near would disappoint me if I’d made all the effort to get there and who wants to go and see their hero, only to return feeling disappointment?  Third, and most pertinent of all, I worry that meeting him for real would entail me finding out he’s not worthy of my admiration after all.

Over the time I’ve been a fan, there have been times when Vin’s well publicised behaviour has annoyed and disappointed me and back when facebook pages allowed comments and threads and he interacted with us there, when he behaved like a dick, I told him so.  I have already had my admiration for another male actor smashed to pieces by his own behaviour and I don’t want to lose my love for Riddick by seeing Vin ignoring those of his fans who aren’t seventeen and scantily clad and generally behaving like a arrogant prick.

I’ll stick with my photos and dvd’s and my own vivid imagination – the place where everyone does as I want them to, where I am beautiful and loved.

Bespoke blog post

As a writer, I feel it’s very important to strive to better my writing and I’m always trying to figure out ways to do that.  I hit on the brilliant idea of asking someone else to give me a subject to blog about and this is what I was given.

“Your opinions on your life where you life; the physical conditions and how you feel about them.  How do they affect you?”

Okay, let me illustrate the environment in which I live.  I live on the outskirts of a large town, which itself is a suburb of a huge city on the south coast of England.  My home is a rented two bedroomed flat on the first floor in a small cul-de-sac.  My front windows look out across a wide green verge with trees, to a busy main road.  A housing estate is situated on the other side of this road, with a forest beyond.  Although I live on the first floor, the first floor is the top floor, so I have just one downstairs neighbour and one at the side; my flat is on the end of the block so no neighbour one side.

My flat is actually not bad as far as rented accommodation goes; I’ve lived in far worse places.  I rent from the local housing association and although the rent is high, I get housing benefit which pays it all.  I have my own little patch of garden at the front to keep as I please, whereas the rear is all communal grass and washing lines.  Being on the top floor means I get the loft space, which is useful for storing some of my lesser needed crap that I can’t yet bear to part with, but as I’m the opposite of a hoarder, I doubt it will ever get filled.  My front door is painted black and I have a gooseberry bush growing in the garden which gave me its first ever crop this summer.  I enjoyed gooseberry crumble a few weeks ago and can’t wait for next summer to have it again.

It’s all very nice here.  It’s relatively crime free apart from occasional smashed wing mirrors and sometimes the wheelie bins take a stroll down the road overnight.  It could be so much worse and I count my blessings every day.  The trouble is it’s boring and bland and oh so middle class.  The same elderly ladies walk the same little dogs along the path every day and the same health conscious joggers jog along the main road.  The ice cream van turns up at six thirty every summer evening and the bins are emptied every Monday.  Life in surburia is boring and although it’s safe here, I do find myself wondering about maybe getting an exchange and moving somewhere else.

The people here are friendly, kind of.  Not the always in your place for coffee type of friendly but the smile and hello when you pass in the street kind.  I’m glad about this actually; I hate it when neighbours spend more time around your home than at their own so that you can never get anything done and they always want to know your business.  I like a little detachment from neighbours but not to the point of being anti social or unfriendly.  I do find myself wondering about them though; what they do in the privacy of their own homes and what their secrets might be.  I guess everyone does this but being a writer and therefore creatively developed, my imaginings can be quite complex, serious, funny and strange.

Within two miles we have a good shopping centre, a railway station, a bus station and an airport, which means from here you can get to anywhere in the world.  It’s a useful place to live despite its blandness.  There’s even countryside within a few miles if you want to escape any time.  Despite all of the benefits of living here, it’s not the first place I’d choose if I could.  I have all sorts of daydreams about where and how I’d like to live if I won the lottery and they range from deep in the countryside with no neighbours for five miles in every direction, to a one thousand year old haunted manor house, to a swanky pad on the outskirts of Los Angeles or an upmarket area of Florida, depending on my mood.

I’m one of those people who forms an emotional attachment to the building in which I live.  It’s a part of me, an expression of me and a representation of what I’m all about.  I’m autistic and a bit agoraphobic and I live alone so I spend all my time that I’m not at work, here at home alone so it’s important to me that I feel safe and relaxed here.  It’s my safe place, my panic room and my rubber cell all rolled into one and as I change, it changes.  I can’t change it as much or as often as I’d like; I’m destitute (hey I’m a writer) so I can’t bring all my imaginings into being, but I do okay.  If all else fails, I move the furniture around to make the place feel different.

My home has become a sort of living being.  It has my energy within its walls.  It’s experienced my joys and despairs alongside me and when I’m away from it, I look forward to returning to it.  At the same time though, it’s lonely here and I’m very aware of how alone I am and I often imagine how it would feel to have a ‘significant other’ around the place.  These four walls have been with me through some of the toughest times of my life.  I’ve had many christmases and birthdays here alone with my walls; they know me better than anyone else and if walls could talk, I’d be worried.

Perhaps I’m setting the seeds for my own future haunting of the place by putting so much of myself emotionally and mentally into this flat.  Perhaps this connection will bring me back for hundreds of years on the anniversary of my death, to walk the hallway in the dead of night and maybe, in a hundred years from now, the resident will often hear the faint tap, tap, tap as if some invisible writer were sat at a keyboard..!

Having said all that though, if I won the lottery I’d move without hesitation.

Writing as a vehicle for higher wisdom

The Lilean Chronicles may seem like just another science fiction series, with the usual hunky hero and gorgeous heroine racing around the galaxy, fighting evil aliens and just surviving and getting out of danger in the nick of time. It is all of those things of course, but it is so much more besides. It is a vehicle for much spiritual wisdom that has been passed to me by the universal consciousness, spirit guides, creator, call it what you feel comfortable with. This higher consciousness decided that the best way to get this wisdom across would be within a vehicle that people find comfortable and easy to absorb. To run this important spiritual thread throughout an exciting science fiction story would, they decided, help the reader to absorb the ideas and wisdom naturally and easily. This would then encourage thinking at a greater depth, that might help to expand horizons a little, which might then enhance their path through their own lives.

It seems to be working too, as the feedback I’m getting from readers suggests that it’s the spiritual aspect of the stories that stay with readers, touch them somewhere inside and make them think. One man who confessed to always having hated science fiction, told me that after he read the first in the series, the spiritual aspects resonated with him so deeply that he was looking forward to reading the next in the series. For me that is the most awesome validation that the trust I have with my higher guidance is not misplaced and that what we’re doing together is the right thing.

So what are these spiritual wisdoms? Well it’s simple really; the universe is a complete being and it knows best how to regulate itself and keep itself in the right balance, but it can only achieve that balance if we stop interfering and let it get on with it. That love in its pure, unconditional form is the most powerful energy in creation. That thoughts are a living energy that once created, go out and reach their destination and have an effect. That we are all connected, with each other and with those that have gone before and those that will come after us. That we each have a destiny towards which we are moving and which cannot be avoided. That sometimes our greatest learning comes from the greatest suffering and that the gifts that such suffering bestows upon us, are the greatest the universal consciousness can give.

The Lilean Chronicles touches upon many subjects that we all face in our lives; loss, despair, betrayal, fear, death, suicide, murder, love, commitment, strength of character, choices and many others. By seeing how the characters deal with these issues and understanding the spiritual wisdom behind them, there is the opportunity to make these things easier to deal with when we face them in our own lives.