Baggage

In your house, you have all your comforts. You are surrounded by stuff.

You take ownership of it and, in strong and subtle ways, you carry it with you. In fact, you are possessed by it.

In owning, you are owned. With baggage, you are not free.

When you go on holiday, you cannot take your whole house and all your belongings with you. So you simplify. You select and then carry only what you regard as essentials.

As a seasoned traveler, those perceived necessities are far fewer than for a less secure or experienced adventurer. You can get by with very little. Even as an indulgent person, you accept relative frugality when you go on holiday.

While away, when you go to the beach, you select from your already distilled possessions just what you feel you need for the day. Now you are down to a small bag, to minimal baggage. You are wearing very little, carrying very little, needing very little, and feeling quite free.

Then when you go for a swim in the sea, you leave almost everything behind. Your shelter, car, gadgets and money are not needed. They are a hindrance. All you have on you is perhaps some skimpy clothing, which is really just for your walk to and from the water. Inside the sea, you need nothing.

In the ocean, you need only to breathe. You are reduced to your most basic. It is like being back in the womb. You can remove even your swimming costume and enjoy total freedom. Your baggage has been dropped, left behind. Step by step, you have shed the burdens that bind you, and found nakedness.

Floating on your back with you eyes closed, you hear only your breath coming in and going out.

Here, you are clear. Even your thoughts leave you eventually and you become true.

As a drop in the ocean, you start to see that you are one with it. Looking up, you sense that you are the sky as well.

Suspended, you are the whole of existence. Breathing, you are infinitely blessed.

Without baggage, you are yourself.

Update

Dear readers of my blog

This is a quick update so that you do not think that I have disappeared or stopped writing.

I was away on holiday recently and I have taken a break from what has been my usual style of writing for the last few years. Hence, no blog posts for a while.

I am actively not writing the way I was doing, as I feel like a change. Who knows where that will lead, but it will be for the better. Whatever happens next will be new.

My energies have, as a result, been invested into other areas of my overall endeavour, including my new book, DEEPER INSIGHTS, which will be out in October 2010. Certain posts from this blog appear in it, with a whole lot more. So look out for that ...

The first book in the series, INSIGHTS, will be re-issued at the same time with a new cover to fit with the other two, so look out for that, too.

And look out for something new here soon. I will be back.

Robin :-)

Payback

Just try to reimburse the universe for all you feel blessed about ...

It is a hopeless endeavour. The more grateful you are, the more you get bestowed with, and the more priceless it all is.

Any gesture to try to express your appreciation results in such generosity from existence that you are powerless to contain yourself!

Try to say thank you from your heart and you will burst with love. Try to reciprocate for what you have received and you will have to evaporate just to cope with the influx of affection.

The old you will have to dissolve into the flood of the new. You will have to give way until there is just joy.

Trying to repay life will cost you your self.

Relationships

When you find yourself centred, and find the knack for staying so, and are able more consistently to return to being so whenever there's drift, your relationships change. You and how you relate both change.

When you are connected consciously to the centre of all things, you cannot lose yourself in the realms of ego.

You can have ego and work with it - which is simply to be present - like you have a body, but you are beyond it. You are watching.

Ego is a psychological body, and you are watching.

So when two egos collide, when you have relationships, you watch. You engage while you watch.

You sometimes lose yourself in the engaging and then rediscover the watcher, and that's how you grow. You grow into yourself, into your centre, which is the centre of all things. There is only one centre. And from here, you grow in relationship.

When you are lost in identification with ego and, in relationship, you are locked in a dynamic, you will usually spiral further out of control until you disengage.

Then you wrestle and wrangle in ego for ages before it runs its course and calms down. Then you start to see. Back in a centred space, you re-encounter grace.

When you live in grace, when you are increasingly centred, you relate as yourself, not the self lost in relationship.

The centre takes the circumference new places.

Enriching

Is it enriching to know you?

Do people skip your status updates on social networking websites or are they drawn to them?

Is your brand magnetic? Is there something of the ultimate coming through you from the beyond?

The way to be really enriching is, of course, to be yourself. There can be nothing lacking in who you are. That’s how you were created; unique and entirely required as such.

Great effort since has gone into standardising you, but your spirit endures and your individuality prevails. Getting past your conditioning, being creative, following your inner knowing, and being present bring your wealth to the world.

With awareness, you can distinguish between the constructed you and the real one, and choose the wiser.

Through creativity, you express, clear, give and contribute. You also keep up with life and find the moment.

Learning to listen to the voice within you, the powerful whisper of truth, leads you into the mystery and lets it speak through you.

Another way to be enriching is to grow. Always be growing, passively. Allow it to happen.

Nothing you could conjure as a separate self, as an ego, will compare to the realms of awakened consciousness. This surrendering is active, though, a great growing, a logarithmic learning. It’s a trip! It is love.

Grow in love. Grow deeper and higher. Stay centred.

Lose it and rediscover it anew. Go off the rails and realise that you cannot do so.

Live! Be yourself for a living. Explore your talents. Immerse yourself in what seduces you. Romance life in return.

Don’t settle for even the very best if it isn’t good enough for you. Travel the world out there and within. And, wherever that takes you, go in the now.

To be enriching, be enriched.

Fixating

What are you fixating on?

Is it something negative and stuck, a perceived problem?

Of course it is! Preoccupation and problems go together. Struggles are little illusions endeavouring always to come between you and the vast vista of freedom.

Watch yourself. We are so often either engrossed in troubled pursuits or at least distracted by the temptation to invest in them.

Tensions present themselves continuously, trying to take us away from a sense of well being. They cannot exist, though, without our attention. And we cannot be ourselves while fixating on them.

You are not a troubled state of consciousness. You are the boundless sky, the infinite.

So if you are feeling uptight, even in the slightest way, you are identified with something that is not you. You think you are the clouds, the thoughts, because you have lost touch with your freedom.

It is the mind that fixates, and you are not your mind. You are what watches, unfazed yet infinitely enthused. You are openness.

One of the ways to get unstuck is to find your fixation. What are you fixating on? What are you chewing over and over?

When you climb into the shower, are you consumed by your mind or are you relaxed and alert, in the moment? Can you celebrate the water and let life love you? Or are you gnawing on some nonsense in your head at the expense of what’s real?

Your mind will always be occupied with problems. In the absence of problems, mind falls away. In the absence of mind, problems fall away. You are either pedalling to keep your mind moving or you are watching.

Whenever you find yourself fixated, let the clouds go and restore the sky.

Frustration

Frustration is a function of modern life.

Corporations create a need with their marketing, sell you something manufactured for profit not purpose, and when you try to deal with their after sales service, you may as well run repeatedly into a brick wall.

They are everywhere, behind everything, giving us all the same experience. They say one thing and live another. It’s insane and so frustrating.

Their basic services do not work properly and are enormously over priced. Their systems are geared to keep their customers powerless. Just think of your mobile phone network, their profits and their call centres.

Their branding gives you one impression and behind the scenes things are very different. Just think of the logos and marketing messages for petroleum companies and then consider their earth-ravaging methods.

Things are made to go one way and the holistic implications are ignored and denied. So-called leaders fight off the consequences for a while and, in no time, everyone is swept again in the spiralling wave of further frustration.

Then there are the media, the traffic, and the noise levels we live with. Add to that the challenges of relationships, raising children, earning a living and finding time for yourself.

It’s miraculous that we maintain a modicum of anything other than molten madness.

Frustration is a function of modern life, but it is also a habit and a choice. It is a consequence and cause of unconsciousness. It is a form of ego, a negative emotion. It is an opportunity to wake up.

No matter who is doing what, no matter how you are bombarded or coerced, no matter how schizophrenic the scenario, you can be cool.

Catch yourself feeling frustrated and bring yourself back to well being.

Branding

I am using the word ‘branding’ in the same way as one would use the word ‘being’.

Your branding is like your being: It’s a living thing. It thrives in the present. It is organic and it lives alongside you, through you, with you.

It has a consciousness. It works with the collective consciousness. It has a business value but it is beyond that.

It is what you love and what you have built, a momentum you have helped generate. It is energy. It is relationship. It is service.

It is responsibility. It is creativity. Your branding is your vehicle in the world, the link between who you are and what you do. It is a bridge. It is your business.

Your branding lives and can die any moment. It will eventually die, nothing lives forever.

It is as fragile as a breath yet as robust as the present moment. It is, therefore, pointless if you want permanence but perfect if you choose life.

Your branding is the business form your being takes. All your equity is contained, and all your energy hovers and moves in it. It is the most wondrous experience when you come to terms with that.

Your branding is your ultimate creative expression and your ultimate contribution to humanity. It forms your legacy.

When you come to terms with your branding, you give it your best in your most sober and insightful way. And, your best keeps growing through your branding and your developing relationship with your business.

Branding is poetry in motion. It is power. If lived well, it is wealth.

It is where the ethereal meets the practical. It is how you be yourself for a living.

Brand in hand, engage the land.

Opportunities

I often get wrong number calls on my landline. There’s a convent up the road that shares my digits except for one, which, in my case, occurs twice more in the number.

So, for that reason, I assume, people call me instead of the nunnery. Unless there’s another reason, like the sense of humour life has.

Sometimes people recognise, as they work things out, that I have helped them by giving them the right number, and they thank me and even apologise for the inconvenience.

Other times, they just put the phone down or thank me without acknowledging my side of the encounter. Occasionally, they are open and accessible, and a short conversation ensues. It’s nice to meet nice strangers!

Sometimes I am in a good space and other times I am less so. So my approach varies. But, to a large degree, the person on the other end determines my feelings.

Someone I have a momentary and anonymous encounter with determines my behaviour. Well, that’s no good! It’s normal and human, I know, but I can make more of it than treating it like an irritating occurrence.

I don’t mind the calls, let me just say that. They are hardly an issue, but they do happen often, and they do draw my attention to my state of consciousness. So I can use them as an opportunity to awaken.

What state am I in when the world encounters me? What is my inner being like regardless of the outside?

What energies am I enjoying and bringing to bear? How much space in myself am I providing for happiness and presence?

The story of your life circumstance can run away with you, or you can take each opportunity to be who you are.

Answers

The answer to everything is to live.

How do you succeed in business? You provide people with something they need and want and benefit from, by doing what you love. You do well in life by being of service, and, to do that, you need to live.

You need to experience and actualise for yourself so that you can relate to others and help them. Helping people in your unique way is what makes you come alive. So you need to live to give, and giving becomes your living.

How do you provide optimally for your children so that they get the very best in life? You do whatever you wish for them, for yourself.

Just wishing it for them won’t help, it is more likely to hinder. And trying to give it to them without living it will also be destructive because you will be preaching but not practicing.

Kick open the door and live your ideal life to the full, that will automatically give your kids what you wish for them. They learn from who you are, not what you say, so be yourself for a living.

How do you achieve sustained happiness? You live! Then happiness finds you because you are not resisting or avoiding life. You and the moment are always in communion, so happiness is unhindered.

How do you solve life’s problems? If you are truly living, there are no problems. Life is everything in itself.

Problems exist only in the mind, and you don’t live in the mind, you live on all levels, in the now. There can be no problems in the now. There is living mystery and no linearity.

How do you die? The same way that you live. How do you find answers? How do realise that there are no questions?

Living is what you are here for.

Relaxing

If you're really tense or upset, get it out first. Exaggerate it, swing to the extreme. Express the feeling: cry, scream, punch (the air or a pillow!).

Then, or if you're not too tense, find the tension in yourself, hold it for a second, and let it go. Get in tune with your body, find any strain, feel it for a moment, then let it go. Keep letting go.

Don't interpret the story happening around you and don’t identify yourself with it, just let it be what it is. Watch. Stay alert but relaxed and act from there.

Find the tension and let it go. It keeps coming back. It is creative energy. It is love! Release it and do not resist life.

Find the tension, feel it for a moment and let it go. Keep relaxing as you express yourself. Be creative with the flow.

Keep relaxing into the flow. Allow yourself to dissolve. Let the river of life take you where it wants to go. You are not separate from it! You just think you are. You just think. Thinking is not the river. Letting go is.

Now, when something happens, you have your wits about you. You are present, relaxed and alert. You do what you have to, what comes to you spontaneously, and keep relaxing.

What's really going on reveals itself to you. You see things as they are. You become yourself.

Excitement is energy: find it, feel it, and release it. Creativity takes over. The flow fills you. Act from here, act with it.

Fear is energy: find it, feel it, and release it. Creativity takes over. Act with it. Trust life. Enjoy it! Have fun.

Fear is blocked excitement. Pain is resistance or blocked energy. Life is coming all the time.

Relax into it, you'll love it.

Understanding

Understanding is everything. It is life itself.

You are inseparable from your understanding. The two are constantly becoming one.

The intensity of your growth and actualisation is in this moment, and it all happens in the furnace of understanding.

It does not come cheap, it requires totality. You must feel fully. You must be here now. You must weep and rejoice in a single sentiment. In that crescendo, realisation and love burn you away and leave just purity.

The rest is just thinking about life. Understanding is living it.

Yes, understanding can sometimes drift into sentimentality, which is, of course, no longer understanding but indulgence. It’s understandable because understanding is so scarce the way we live, but sooner or later it swells into prominence and overcomes the over compensation it brings in its early days.

Feeling is its foundation and we have to swing this way and that to settle into the continuous soaring of nothingness. Understanding is a state of nothingness.

You are no longer, just completeness remains. Separation has come home and oneness has welcomed it. The prodigal has become the unpolluted. The self has come and gone and awareness rings into the heavens, silently. Innocence is restored.

Tears can sting and tears can sing. Patience can be forever. Love can take over. Love can burst from all seams and sides and overwhelm. Love can break all bounds.

Love is understanding.

Have you travelled far? Have the roads been rocky? Has your burden been too big to bear? Have the shackles of your ‘self’ brought you to your knees?

Has the sweetness of surrender shown you the way? Are you standing alone on a cliff with arms outstretched, crucified and elevated on the wings of love?

I understand.

Reserved

Remain reserved. Keep what's meaningful and magical to yourself, close to your chest.

Keep it in your chest, in your heart. Bury your beauty there. Plant what's special about you, what you hold dear, in a private place deep in your centre. Let it integrate and grow there. Let it permeate your person.

Reach deeply into yourself. Invest your energies internally, as a process of self-discovery and as a form of self expression.

It's paradoxical but you express the most by keeping it to yourself. If you put it out there, it dissipates, like seeds scattered on barren ground.

When you keep it in, it grows inwards and fills you, plus it then surrounds you as an aura. On the outside, you seem quite commonplace, nothing special or outstanding, because you are not building up an ego, but inside you are very wealthy.

That wealth, everyone wants. You cannot buy it, you cannot steal it, you cannot fake it, and you cannot escape it. That is what we are all here to find and to live and to bring.

But we bring it by being it, not boldly proclaiming it. Big displays simply mask inadequacy. Attempts to convince simply prove a need to compensate.

When you are truly wealthy, there is something supremely understated about it. A hungry eye might not see it but an open one cannot miss it.

You have arrived home. You have no need to try or pretend. You are as you are. Everything takes care of itself.

Remain reserved. Keep yourself to yourself. Enjoy who you are in the greatest love affair possible, the one with you know who.

The romance will radiate around and pull people towards you. Yet they will always remain mesmerised by the mystery.

Your love for life will inspire other seeds to grow.

Scared

My aunt is dying. We are all dying but she is in the frail care section of a hospital just over the hill from where she grew up in the nineteen forties and fifties.

As I looked out of the window of her little ward, I saw a storm over the suburbs in the valley below. Inside the room, my aunt’s energy, her whole life as she lived it, was in the air.

Her choices, still being made, were in her circumstance. The taste of them lingers with me as I write.

I went to be with her as she approaches death. I thought, hoped, that there might be some connection.

“I’m scared,” she said.

My ears pricked up. I looked her in the eye. Hers were clear and light blue. Was she taking the opportunity to speak things through, to open up, to connect as she goes to die? “Why are you scared?” I asked.

“I need the nurses to change my clothes and I’m going to get into big trouble,” she said. “Everything in here is computerised.”

She was not there. She was mad. She was not talking about being scared of death. We couldn’t get onto the level.

She was still obsessed with trivialities. Her feelings were still projected onto trivialities. Death, even, is not going to change her. Death will come when she is not looking. She will not be there when it happens.

I walked around the ward. Not pretty. Nearly dead bodies in beds at dusk. Silhouetted humps in a place to die. Crumpled frames talking to themselves in wheelchairs down dark corridors. Television sitcoms illuminating some rooms. What a place to die. What a place not to be dead yet.

Is she really scared of dying, yet unaware that she is dying, and so scared of just anything, something made up, like the rest of us? Or can she look at life straight on?

Can we turn in to the truth?

Wheels

I am re-inventing the wheel, with my unique spin.

I starting from the beginning, doing what everyone ever has done, and I am doing it my way. I am bringing my uniqueness to the world through the medium of human being.

I am just like you and everyone and, just like you and everyone, I am incomparable.

What matters in life, what’s real, you have to discover for yourself. Nothing of any value can be given, you must ascertain it. And you must live it, not think or fantasise about it but experience it.

Only then can you encounter it, only then can you grow.

I am re-inventing the wheel. I am digging down under the surface into the earth. I am ploughing and planting, I am right in my roots.

I am leaving no stone unturned and I am finding the first invention for myself. That is my companionship with all souls who have walked the earth. That is my solidarity with you. Our respective solitudes bring us together.

We all have to invent our own wheels in our own way.

Procrastinating

I am putting things off, strategically. Intuitively. Physically.

When events are significant in magnitude and momentum, any action to address them can feel inadequate. The right movement will happen in the right way at the right time, and action will be taken in the inspired moment.

For now, this is preparation. And in preparation, action can be inappropriate.

Action in the last stages of preparation will waste energy. It will be a haemorrhaging of your power. You will arrive at the occasion scattered and depleted.

Keep your energy focused, not in a concentrated, mind-made way, but through intense centredness and presence.

What can be more important than your togetherness? The rest are details and the details, with your alert participation, will take care of themselves.

Everything you have lived has brought you to this moment. You are this moment. Everything is here now.

I am putting off here and now what is not yet here and now. I am deliberately procrastinating.

I am working with tension by not succumbing to it. I am in the eye of the storm. I have found the calm at the core of everything. I take that with me into the world.

All groundwork has been done, the time is here to be.

Blankets

I’ve been watching people. I’ve been watching myself.

We get wrapped up in heavy layers of insulation, chosen for comfort and warmth but dark and burdensome, keeping us from life. And, it isn’t even cold outside!

We are trudging through the perceived wilderness, weary and weighed down, enveloped in illusions while the most wondrous scene surrounds us.

We can’t even see. We haven’t even looked. If someone or some occasion were to draw our eyes upward, we would glance patronisingly at the starlit sky and, melodramatically, say, “Yes, but I have more important things to worry about.”

We choose our blankets for ourselves. We do so daily, moment by moment. We want to be asleep.

Dreaminess has its charms. It’s a drug, a little escape that turns out to be lifelong. It’s full of fine feelings, although they are fuzzy and dopey.

We choose our blankets for ourselves and we put them around other people. We console and cover them instead of choosing to see reality.

We pull on one another to dance in our dramas. We are like somnambulists groping in the dark, living a shared nightmare while lost in separate dreams. Even in the face of death, we cling to the comfort that kept us from living.

Each day, each moment, you need to feel the blankets creeping up to cover you.

Sometimes they are from habits, sometimes from semi-conscious choices. They are unconsciousness. Sometimes they stem from others, sometimes from ourselves. Whatever the case, they are dropped through awareness.

Feel and see the blankets wrapped around you. Be the awareness watching them. Feel and see them coming from others. Be the awareness. Wake up.

It’s a beautiful day!

Curiosity

Follow your natural interest. Follow your intuition.

Go into that energy, that pull, that seductive sense that redeems you from the mundane.

Life is meaningless on the surface and most people hack along hopping from hope to false hope. Then suddenly you feel a connection with the mystery, a oneness with the whole.

You feel that you belong, you are meant to be here, and that life holds infinite wonder. The magic of your being opens up. Your intense inquisitiveness is engaged.

Go into it.

Kids are curious, inherently wonderstruck. They are not looking for answers, they are enjoying a state of constant amazement. They are innocent and alive.

Adults are sold on the superficial and very unhappy with their purchase. It was not a fair trade, they lost all that matters for a little luxury.

Curiosity is a return to innocence, a shift from the dead illusion of accumulated knowledge to the vital reality of permanent freshness.

What makes you feel new again? It’s always here, but you are not. Be here and you will reconnect with it. Or follow it and you will find the now.

What is your natural curiosity? It contains the treasures of the universe. The doors of perception open all around you all the time.

Sometimes they may feel small but they are always significant. Sometimes they are immense and swallow you whole. And sometimes they are suitably seductive to simply show you the way. The steps are yours to take.

Your curiosity is uniquely yours. Your romance with life is your personal affair with the universe. What beguiles you from the beyond is beckoning to you to bring it into being by experiencing it.

Life explodes where you and your curiosity meet.

Statistics

Of all the people who think of a good business idea, only one percent of them will turn that into words.

Only a tenth of a tenth will be brave enough to speak out their inner creativity. Only a rare one will risk it.

Of the one percent who are inspired and mad enough to speak, only one percent will take further action to bring their ideas about. And then only one percent of those will keep going.

It is extremely occasional that someone invests totally in his or her own truth, trusts the intuition that it will work, defies logic, survives recurring personal doubt (and debt), persists through communal indifference, puts his or her self-based art into business form, promotes it publically, grows spiritually, emerges cleansed from hardship, gives and teaches willingly, thrives, and keeps opening more and more.

Only one percent of people enter the doorway of the one percent within themselves. One percent of those will take the journey.

I’m not quoting statistics, I’m saying, “Go!”

Angst

Why the angst?

This question has answers but, more important, it is rhetorical. The answers may bring understanding, which will leave us with what the rhetorical question is saying.

The angst is the result of resisting the flow of life. It comes from fighting with the whole, with the way things are. It creates a sense separation and feeds off it.

It is a form of madness. We are responsible for our own sanity and the angst can teach us this. When we have had enough of living with it, or when we see that our life is rushing past, we can let go of the angst.

We can surrender to oneness, be accepting of life as it is, and the anguish will disappear.

The angst is also a function of society. It keeps people unnerved, uprooted, living in fear.

It severs us from ourselves and makes us easier to manage. Much easier. We do insanely stupid and childish things to avoid who we are and do what we are told.

We believe all sorts of nonsense and build walls around ourselves that become our source of torment.

It is as an individual that you wake up and become aware. The collective follows. The solution to the angst is inner calm through awakened consciousness, brought to bear on outer encounters.

The angst is for the lack of a better knowing of who we are. When we know, there is no cause for anxiety of any kind.

The angst is all an extension of the single basic fear of death. Death is more life than life is! It is inevitable, happening every moment, happening right now. It makes being alive possible.

Die while you are still alive and you are free.

Find the fear and surrender it. Accept life as it is. The angst subsides. There is no need for it. It is a fiction. Die to the moment and create with love.

Why the angst?

Depth

To write well, you need depth. Unless you reach into yourself and bring it to the page, there will be little to speak to the reader.

Rambling on from head to head is dry, you must connect heart to heart for colour, flavour and emotion.

To thrive in business, you need depth. You can find out what people want and keep devising profitable ways of giving it to them, focusing on price, but for long term brand integrity, personal satisfaction and sustainability, you need to bring yourself to what you do.

Your business must breathe the meaning of life for you and your community.

To market yourself well, you need depth. Publicity and promotion are simply authentic connection done with industry insight. You are not marketing, you are being yourself for a living.

Something singular needs to come through and reach out to people. This is your soul singing, your brand differentiating, your relationships building.

Depth is our true nature. There is more mystery within us than in the outer universe. The answers are found on the voyage into our inner depths.

Artists and mystics, and business people with wisdom, have determined the course of human history and understanding.

The path of depth is not easy. The growth is not an accumulation of knowledge but a transformation of self. It is not an incremental acquisition but a quantum transmutation.

Being yourself for a living is a metamorphosis.

You shed the old and rise from its ashes. The journey is an ongoing rebirth. Spirited substance arises not from the known but the beyond.

To live well, you need depth.

Live deeply.