Daniel Jeffries's Blog, page 3

To Live

I’ve watched a lot of Chinese movies as of late. As I dig deep into the second draft of my new novel, a Chinese epic war saga, I wanted to immerse myself in the arts and culture of the Middle Kingdom, so I can add as much of that flavor to the stew of my story.  Many of the great Han films of the past few decades are available for a song, a few bucks for a used DVD at most. Due to a loose concept of property values in China, you can even watch many of them for free on YouTube because nobody seems to own the distribution rights.  The price of these flicks is in no way equal to their worth.

Last night I watched To Live, which stands as one of my favorite movies of all time, in any language. I saw it back in college at the famous Angelika art house movie theater in NYC.  Watching it again I realized it hasn’t lost a single ounce of its power and sweep.  It’s a movie that as Roger Ebert said “contains an entire life.”

A quick warning: this review contains spoilers.

The story covers forty years in the life of a family who endures the madness of red China rising, as well as personal tragedy, the likes of which westerners have never even come close to experiencing.  One of the themes of my new book is that nobody does suffering like the Chinese.  That theme surges through the heart of this film.  The couple at the center of the story, Xu Fugui, a degenerate gambler and rich landlord, and his wife, Jiazhen, played by the gorgeous Gong Li, endure the loss of everything that people swear they can never lose and still survive: all their money and property; their children; their dignity; their livelihood.  And yet they find a way to endure it all and keep on going.  “You have to bare it all, no matter what,” is a line repeated by several characters in the film at different points in their life.

And yet this film is not all horror and grim determination.  Far from it.  More than anything, it’s a hopeful film.  In between loss and sadness they continually find a way to rekindle their joy.  One child dies, but another is born.  A friend is killed, but other friends remain.  A job is lost but another one is found.  Each tragedy is followed by a tiny triumph.  These aren’t the triumphs of the masters of industry, or generals or political elite, these are the triumphs of the everyday person.  No matter what happens to them, the couple find a way to not just survive, but to thrive.  They manage, in short, to live.

A subtle understanding of the workings of fate pervades the film.  In life, tragedy and triumph are often interchangeable.  What looks like a triumph can years later become tragedy and vice versa.  Early in the film, Xu Fugui loses his house to a corrupt casino owner.  The casino owner smugly moves into his mansion, glowing and crowing the whole time.  To pile on the hurt, Xu’s father suffers a heart attack as the property is sold and Xu’s wife leaves him.  Xu’s own words say it best when he stands in the middle of the street and cries “I have nothing left.”  As I said, nobody does suffering like the Chinese.  And yet, losing everything humbles him and turns out to be the best thing that ever happened.  He endures people mocking him and becomes a small time street salesman of trinkets.  He stops gambling.  When his wife, Jiazhen, realizes he changed his way, she returns to him with a baby son and a baby girl.

“What’s the boy’s name?” Xu asks.

“Don’t gamble,” says the wife.

“Good.  That’s good.”

Of course, the wife is joking with him.  The filmmakers are not afraid to hit you over the head with some of the themes, but they are subtle enough to leave it as a joke.  For writers out their who want to see tropes at work, this is a magnificent example. of lamp-shading, or hanging your theme out there for the audience.   The couple reunites and their life is simpler, but closer, more intimate.  They are working together as poor people.  They work hard and their family holds on.  They take pleasure in the simple joys of talking to each other, or taking pride in what they do, no matter how seemingly menial.

The film often includes some jarring political events.  The war with the communists breaks out and no one is spared.  A series of lucky breaks seems to save the husband. At first he is drafted to fight for the Nationalists, who ultimately lose the war.  The hero is not much of a soldier and he just wants to stay alive, as do most people.  In freezing cold, he and some friends loot jackets from the dead and fall asleep.  When they wake up, the entire brigade they were embedded with is killed, their bodies strewn across the field.  By falling asleep they managed to avoid the communist snipers.  When the Reds storm the camp and take them prisoner they are saved by one twist of fate.  Puppets.  Stay with me and I’ll explain, after just a little background.

Remember how we said that tragedies are often blessings in disguise?  Earlier in the film, Xu goes to the corrupt casino owner and asks to borrow money to start a shop.  Here the casino owner displays the depth of his character and says “I’m not much for lending money, but I’ll give you something better.”  He gifts Xu the puppets from his casino days, since he retired.  The puppet shows were like films and TV rolled into one.  They used a canvas screen with lights and people behind it.  The puppet troop uses the various queens and emperors and concubines and to put on a great show.  Even the seemingly most useless events of the film turn out as essential to the entire story.

In the beginning, drunk and rich, Xu complains that the puppets are terrible.  The casino owner says, if you can do better go up there.  So Xu goes up and plays, while singing a more ribald song about a man and wife wanting more time to frolic in their big bed, while the puppets caress each other.  It’s a funny scene, that in the hands of lesser writers would amount to little but character building.  I found myself thinking this is a good scene but ultimately pointless.  How delighted I was to see that the one job that saves him through many of his transformations is puppeteer.  It’s not just a throw away.  Without knowing that he can sing and entertain, even if he is just screwing around, it’s a lot less believable that he could just pick up a puppet troop and make a living.

And after they are captured, Xu realizes the Communists like entertainment too.  Who doesn’t?  So he survives by providing entertainment for the troops. That single gift saved his life.  And if he hadn’t treasured it, keeping the puppets with him, even in battle, he would have died.  If he’s listened to the people who said why don’t you just get rid of them he would have died.  The littlest things can make the biggest difference.

From here, the movie builds on its layers with incredible agility.  During the madness of the communists takeover, they consolidate power.  They arrest landowners and elite and try them as capitalist scum.  And in Xu’s hometown, who gets arrested?  The rich casino owner.  He is declared a traitor while the people chant and he is taken out and shot publicly.  Xu realizes that “if I still owned that house, that would have been me.”  His early tragedy becomes his greatest blessing.

I’ve always said that Chinese filmmakers have incredible subtly, something American filmmakers often lack, even in our best films.  There’s a reason for this though.  They have to be.  Their movies have to go through censors.  They can only tell stories about specific subjects.  The films can’t critique the party.  If the film falls foul of the party later, as To Live did, the filmmakers could end of up jail.  In To Live director Zhang Yimou‘s case he got lucky.  The communists only banned him from making films for two years.  His film got through the censors, but only later did the party realize how much of the film mocked them subtly, while purporting to portray the communist cause.  Yimou does this by really overplaying the communist scenes to make them seem absurd.  To the thick headed censors they saw themselves proudly in the Red Guards and the marching townspeople and the propaganda posts of Chairman Mao plastered all over everything.  They just didn’t realize everyone else would see them as baboons until after it came out and the critics spotted it.

The critique of communism roils just beneath the surface of the film.  The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were terrifying times in the life of China.  In essence, Mao went mad and built a cult around himself.  He tried massive social experiments to see if communism really was practical.  His posters plastered the walls of every house.  His young adherents, the Red Guards, who were mostly angry, disaffected youth stormed around the country accusing the elderly of being reactionaries or bourgeois or elitists or capitalists and killed them or abused them.  Millions of city people were “reducated” by being sent to subsistence communal farms to work.  The costs were dear, with millions of people dying just of starvation.  In one of the most devastating scenes in the film, the couple’s daughter dies because all the student nurses and doctors in the hospital have “overthrown” the real doctors as “reactionaries.”  When the girl starts to bleed out after giving birth, none of them know what to do.  Their vision of a utopian future falls apart in the moment.  You can’t kill all the doctors without heavy consequences for society.

The greatest error we can make as humans is to think that we can create some better future where all the people think the way we do.  Communism is a kind of faith.  And any faith taken to it’s extreme never goes well for the little people.  Always the utopia is somehow just around the corner but it never comes.  And so more people have to die.  More and more people have to be killed so that Utopia can finally take place.  But Utopia never comes.  That’s the mistake the communists and all messianic faiths miss.  Their dream never works out, because life is more complicated.

During the Great Leap Forward people were told to donate all their steel and iron, their pots, their pans everything.  They worked in communes, smelting that steel under insanely unsafe conditions, all for the war effort against Taiwan, which that ultimately the commies didn’t win.  Even worse, the smelted metal turned out to be largely worthless.  Its quality, made be inexperienced laborers, from broken down, poorly made tools never ended up in most cannons, as Mao intended.  It ended up in the landfill.  In one of my favorite scenes in the film, Jiazhen asks the village leader, a true believing communist idealist, “if you take all our pots, how will we cook?”  He smiles happily and says “We’re racing towards communism and you worry about food?”  Communal kitchens are being set up.  They’ll provide perfectly for all.  Except of course, in reality, it never worked out that way.  People staved or ate nothing but rancid vegetables.

The film also manages to mock Mao beautifully.  At one point the only gift that anyone seems to give are Chairman Mao portraits.  The walls of everyone’s houses are covered with them, because it’s the only safe gift to give, so people don’t get branded as counterrevolutionaries.  When Jiazhen refuses the gift of an old friend who’d wronged the family, her husband Xu says, you don’t want the gift?  Look, it’s Chairman Mao.  Yet another one.

The critique of Mao and his policies delivers one of the most striking scenes in the movie.  That same local party leader, the true believer, learns a lesson the hard way.  I read a military book recently, about fighting in Asia, and the author wrote “they say the only cadre who realizes Communism is a mistake, is the one who realizes it too late.”  Anyone can be accused of being false to the imagined ideals of the Communists.  The true believing cadre says to his friend Xu “I’m no longer village leader.  I’ve been charged as a capitalist.”  “You a capitalist?  What will happen to you?”  “Let’s not talk about that.”  We know what happens to him.  He’s killed.  That’s the madness of political ideals taken to an extreme.  Eventually, when you’re looking for snakes, all you see is snakes.  Even your most loyal members start looking like traitors.  The ever hopeful cadre says “don’t worry, I believe in the Party.”  Beliefs can kill.

Eventually though, the madness of Mao subsides.  Paintings of him are taken down.  An old painted mural on their walls is faded and corroded.  Mao is dead, his inner circle arrested.  The film ends with the dawn of the great awakening, when Deng Xiaoping, perhaps China’s greatest leader and a man who spent time in prison because of Mao’s purity purges, loosens up the concept of Communism to take advantage of the markets.  His reforms lead to what China is a today, a country defined by the Party as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” aka “fat cat capitalism.”  Crony capitalism.  Gangster capitalism, where the strong prey on the weak, and the divide between the haves and the have-nots is a chasm, not a gap.

And somehow, as humans, people manage to live through the madness of all our leaders and their great causes.  As the film shows, we all find a way to get back up and live again when things go wrong.  It’s not easy but it’s the only thing we can do.

The post To Live appeared first on Me Uploads.

My China Odyssey

For the past year I’ve immersed myself in Chinese culture, reading biographies, histories, novels and articles, even cramming a little Mandarin.  My next novel takes place in the Middle Kingdom and I wanted it to feel authentic.  Luckily, I live in the age of information.  Never before has it been so easy for someone to learn so much about other cultures.  Anything I want to know is a mouse click away.  Another book from Amazon, a Wikipedia article, or one of a million geo-tagged photos on Google Earth are all I need to illuminate an alien world.  If I’m writing a scene and wondering whether to make it rain in Shanghai in July I just can pull up a hundred years of temperatures and climate data.  And yet for all my reading, I knew to truly make the book what I wanted it to be, I needed to go there.  And so I did.

I spent the last three weeks leapfrogging around the country, letting it wash over me, piecing together a trillion little fragments of information floating around in the oceans of my unconscious.  I went to Beijing, Xi’An, Chengdu, Tibet, Chongqing, the Yangtze River and Shanghai and now I can share a little of the experience of that trip, punctuated with the best of the more than five thousand pictures I took while there.

During my studies I’ve come to love the country’s rich and twisting history that stretches back over three thousand years. My travels only solidified my fascination with the inner workings of the rising red dragon.

It’s safe to say that China might be the most interesting place in the world right now. It’s living through an accelerated industrial revolution that’s swept hundreds of millions of people into new-found wealth and opportunity. The average disposable income rocketed from $280 a year in the 1980′s to more than $3000 by 2010, a ten fold increase in a just two decades.  It’s developing so quickly that if you buy postcards that are even a few years old of the famous Bund skyline in Shanghai then the photos won’t contain even half the buildings. Just a decade ago the brilliantly colored skyline, glittering in the evening mist across the Huangpo river didn’t even exist.  Instead, across the river you’d see a wasteland of dilapidated houses and farms.  This is the type of change that we only read about in American history books.  There is not a person alive today who lived through our industrial revolution.

And yet because of the current political climate there it’s impossible for Chinese to freely tell their own story in one of the most incredible times in their history.  In the future that will likely change, as China has seen a constant cycle of autocrats and more liberal minded authorities in their storied timeline but for now that leaves it to outsiders like me or to Chinese ex-pats to chronicle this amazing time in their evolution.

I can tell you that for all tremendous progress the country has made, the fear-mongers in America that worry we’re losing to China have little to nothing to worry about, because they still have a long way to go.  Basic systems are still broken or don’t exist. The energy grid is developing slowly and sporadically.  Depending on who you ask the controversial Three Gorges Dam that displaced millions of mountain peoples was supposed to supply the country with 10% of its power needs over the next few decades and now it may only account for 2%.  Most of the country still runs on smog heavy coal.  There are already plans to create as many as twenty additional dams on the Yangtze, likely displacing millions more people and leading to more ecological nightmares.

The lack of consistent power showed up everywhere while I was there.  We saw the entire left side of one street in Lhasa with no power and all the businesses running off diesel generators.  In many of the most populous cities mandatory once a week shutdowns have people hauling their groceries up dozens of flights of stairs and scrambling to get to work on time.

Pollution and environmental damage may be the worst problem China faces.  Unlike America, which has more than 40% arable soil, China has only 10% and much of that is already destroyed.  It’s hard to feed a billion people when you have little to no farmland and your rivers are so toxic that several are not even designated safe for industrial use.  The water is undrinkable without double boiling and filtration.  Good hotels give their guests two bottles of water per day.

The rush of hundreds of millions of newly minted middle class people to buy cars and reap the rewards of an advanced society is making the problems much worse.  Our bus got stuck for thirty minutes on a tiny side street because it was packed with illegally parked cars.  The cities are so cramped that Beijing dictates certain days you can’t drive based on license plate numbers.  If you want a new car, there’s a wait list of more than a million people jockeying for only 20,000 permits to even buy a car.  All of that is an attempt by authorities to curb the poisonous smog that made it impossible for me to kick a sore throat and left my eyes and nose watering.

I woke up coughing wildly every night with crusties caked on my bloodshot eyes when I was in Beijing.  This is known as the notorious “Beijing cough.” I found myself living on Dayquil and Muscinex and hiding behind my N95 mask.  Everywhere you find people wearing masks in the big cities.  Unfortunately, they’re mostly useless, unable to filter out the deadly particulates because their tiny unseen holes are too big.  A good hospital-grade mask is tight, hot and uncomfortable and mine was certainly that but by day three I wore it almost constantly.  Zyrtec was virtually powerless against my raging allergies.  It was like taking a placebo.  It’s so bad that a safe level of pollution is 20 ppmv or parts-per-million by volume but an op-ed piece in China Daily said that their iPhone apps didn’t even bother alerting them before 200 ppmv.

Beyond the physical problems of the country, the Communist Party wastes a tremendous amount of resources trying to keep a tight lid on information and perceptions.  You may be used to pulling up Yelp and Google Maps whenever you want to find a restaurant or find your way home, but in China the internet is a horribly broken mess. With millions of censors employed to delete messages and control dissent and the Great Firewall of China blocking useful sites it makes the internet painful to use for consumers and businesses.  On one day you might sail right to Yahoo mail and then next day it might take five minutes.  Even worse the blocking is inconsistent.  I browsed several well known porn sites with little to no trouble and then found smaller ones cut off.

But it’s not just blocked sites that cause trouble.  When the Great Firewall blocks things like fonts.google.com that many, many sites use to standardize the fonts you see in your browser, you then have to wait for a minute or two for that part of a site to time-out before the page loads.  This is a complete waste of energy and resources and money for a growing society.  Other than providing jobs for the censors, it does little to nothing to control real perceptions.  And the young people know how to get around it all with Tor and VPNs, though I found many of my own VPNs blocked when I ran them on standard ports.  Standing in the way of VPNs blocks businesses and other legitimate traffic from getting work done and all for nothing.  It’s about as effective as the American war on drugs which has seen the US spend a few trillion dollars for a net uptick in drug use.

Repression goes beyond the media as well.  We were warned repeatedly not to take pictures of the intense military and riot police presence in Tibet.  We were told they were there to guard the borders of India and Pakistan.  They called it a ‘liberation” repeatedly but I know an occupation when I see one.  When you land in an airport and they check your passports and special Tibetan visas ten times when entering, something is off. When you see five Mig fighter jets take off in rapid succession in a commercial airport that doubles as a military base and military men strolling around the city and riot vehicles, all to hold a tiny backwater of the country, something is not above board.   And yet for the life I me I could not figure out why the Chinese even care about holding Tibet?  It has practically no industry and little to no growth possibilities.  It’s primary economy is subsistence farming.  Then someone on the tour figured it out: water.  The water flows from west to east and China and if the Tibetans wanted to dam up all the water in China, it wouldn’t be hard.  Other than a Chinese variation on manifest destiny I can’t see any other reason to hold a tiny former theocracy with a small population and little to no business.

But even as I watched what was wrong with China, its problems had my internal speculative fiction engine screaming with new ideas. I found myself dreaming of giant anti-pollution machines churning the air, mounted on the tops of the endless skyscrapers and tiny robotic mites unleashed into the lakes and rivers to gorge themselves on waste.  This is just one of the tiny ways that life influences fiction.  With any luck fiction may just influence life and future engineers will read my work and wonder if they can build such a machine and then do it.  China’s future may depend on it, as well as the rest of ours.

And yet the answer might be even simpler than more big technology. While the city planners in Beijing were struggling to plant trees everywhere, the young saplings perfectly spaced and held up by wooden slats, the southern cities of Chengdu and Chongqing seemed to have it under better control.  Unlike the capital, the greenery is an integral part of the landscape with gardens dotting nearly every terrace and balcony and roof.  Massive, rolling parks seething with bamboo and tea-houses, where old folks play Mahjong all day, seem to suck up the pollution and keep the air breathable, even when its blanketed with layers of soft fog.

China is a country of vast diversity. It’s about the size of the United States and its landscape is just as varied, from soaring mountains, to vast and surging rivers to sprawling cities.  You can tell a man’s temperament by the cities he falls in love with.  For me Shanghai, with its cosmopolitan mixture of French, English and Chinese culture, where no two buildings are alike and every building seems to compete with the next stood out as what one of our guides called the “future of China.”  I excited me that I’d chosen Shanghai as the center the power struggle in my novel and when I got there I knew it was the right choice.  I never thought I would call a city more beautiful than New York, but as soon as I saw its lights across the Bund I knew it was the greatest city on Earth.  A few fellow New Yorkers on my tour said the same, which surprised me a little.

Outside of Shanghai, the southern cities stood in stark contrast to the gray slab high-rises and pollution of Beijing.  With a climate like the southern United States, hot and humid, and rolling bamboo gardens and rivers slicing through the city center, it feels like a completely different country.  The local guides described it as more laid back and for a man who’s lived in San Diego for the past ten years it made sense to me.  Watching the old folks drinking tea and playing Mahjong and laughing or seeing the old ladies dancing in groups for exercise made me feel like I’d come home.  Even if I never see the country again, due to my writing controversial things, I could see myself living and retiring in Chengdu or Chongqing, drinking tea in the park and reading until the hour grew long and weary.

Today’s China is a study in contrasts, a constant clash of the old and the new.  It’s a two-tone pink and silver Lamborghini illegally parked on a street across from old Shanghai apartments with laundry hanging from the balconies and street vendors hawking lychee nearby, all while a meter-maid waits impatiently for the owner to return so she can deliver a ticket that probably won’t represent even a tiny fraction of the owner’s income.  And of course, everyone on the street is illegally parked since there seems to be nowhere to park anywhere in the major cities.  It’s as if an entire country forgot to make parking spaces and shoulder lanes.

The contrasts suffuse the entire culture.  You’ll find a thousand year old Buddhist temple, a smear of brilliant yellow light in the night, surrounded by towering skyscrapers and ads for high fashion.  On one street you’ll find top restaurants staffed with three star Michelin chefs and only a few streets away you’ll find a night market with locals gobbling street food next to a heap of trash and crippled homeless people jiggling a change cup. The age old sociological concept of “face” or prestige/respect drives them to light up the Bund with a billion colors so people can take pictures and yet in Xi’An we met a woman who told us one day a week the government randomly turns off the power with little to no notice.  At least its good exercise when she has to climb the nine stories to her apartment.

It’s a culture steeped in ancient traditions and superstitions and yet it’s desperately trying to modernize without losing its soul.  It has some tremendous advantages over democracies for rapid acceleration into the modern age.  The government owns all the land and so it can swoop in and bulldoze entire city blocks of old style apartments, where families live in two hundred square feet and share a bathroom with four neighbors and replace the whole grid with identical high-rises.  And yet that power often leads to tremendous corruption as families are given little to no compensation and can’t afford to move into the new apartments that are sprouting up where their old homes used to stand.  Many of the huge apartment complexes stood nearly completely empty in many of the cities, their windows bereft of plants, laundry and other signs of life.

This lack of property rights leads to some strange aberrations in Chinese society.  People “buy” a house or an apartment there, but they only own the rights to it for seventy years and you get the sense that the government could just rescind that if they felt like it.  The Chinese culture tends to focus on the whole instead of the individual and at times that means individual rights get swept under the rug for the good of the community or the local party boss.  Nobody knows what will happen in those seventy years other than they will have to go to some dingy gray government building and beg to keep what they “own” after paying some tax or bribe.  Even businesses don’t own anything but a lease for forty or so years and that leads to some ugly surprises. I found myself drinking tea in a beautifully maintained tea shop, with groups of locals eating and smoking happily and yet I went in the back and found a stinking bathroom with puddles on the floor and flies buzzing around the toilet.  My best guess is that, at some level, because nobody really owns anything there is no true pride of ownership and hence no real desire to get on your knees and scrub the toilet or the squatter hole.

This lack of property rights, like so many things in China, is a double edged sword.  On one hand it allows the country to sweep aside the old and squalid quickly and effectively.  On the other hand you can often smell the direction of bathrooms before you see them.  Few things in China are black and white.  It’s an economic miracle but an ecological disaster.  It’s steeped in wonderful history and yet its traditions often hold back its progress.  Everything is shades of grey.

Take something as simple as the notorious propensity for Chinese people to push and shove anyone in their way or cut a line that has thousands of people winding around a block.  At first I shrugged it off but on my more weary days after traveling on yet another plane ride followed by bouncing along on a bus I wanted to turn around and punch someone.  And yet I soon realized that not all pushes are created equal.  In a country of a billion people you don’t get very far without pushing and fighting for everything you can get.  While there are certainly people who just don’t care about anyone but themselves there, like the family that tried to steal my cab after I’d been trying to hail one for twenty minutes, I was surprised by the many subtleties of a simple push.  My favorite was a woman pushing aside someone in our group in a temple in Tibet, so she could kneel before a statue of the Buddha and pray.

Sometimes I would feel a shove and turn around in anger, only to see the delighted look on the face of some peasant as he gazed in wonder at some massive bridge or sweep of skyscrapers, a delight that echoed my own.  And then I couldn’t feel mad at all because he was so excited to see the changes of a country that went from the madness of the Cultural Revolution where people needed a voucher to buy a single pair of shoes in the only store in a tiny village, to the sweeping skylines of a runaway state capitalism that is putting up so many buildings so quickly that outsiders have joked that the national bird of China is the crane, after the ubiquitous giant cement cranes that dot every city landscape. There is a kind of sweet innocence to so many of the people.  You can see it on their faces.

And they saw all this change in a single lifetime.  In short China is one hell of a massive head trip for outsiders and insiders.

In the past writers like James Clavell, author of Shogun, had to spend years painstakingly researching Japan through incomplete texts written largely by westerners that did not include many native books to write his Asian Saga. But even with all that research, nothing substitutes going there and seeing it for yourself.  It’s a terrifying and exhilarating experience to find yourself in a distant land with few safety nets.  And yet for all the talk of the Party’s madness and repression, China itself feels incredibly safe and free for day to day affairs.  As long as you don’t raise your fist and shout “democracy now” you are incredibly safe there.  I never once felt like I was going to get robbed or attacked.  The police are often out in force, their cruiser lights flashing in the darkness, letting people know they are there and ready to swoop into action.

Like Clavell I find much to loath, love and admire in Asian culture.  Clavell spent three years in a prison camp during the war and yet still found himself in love with a faraway culture much different than his own.  In Japan, starving Samurai used to go around picking their teeth rather than admit they were starving, an image I find both beautiful and horrible at the same time.  And yet isn’t that true of so many things in life?  Everything exists on a continuum of good and bad.  Often it’s all of it rolled into one.  China is both beautiful and terrifying.  It’s running headlong into the future and yet it’s forever stuck in its past.  How could it not be?  Societies are the products of human beings with all the things that make us great and terrible reflected in every aspect of a country’s infrastructure, laws, customs and relationships. That’s true of my own civilization and every other one that ever existed or ever will exist.  For all our differences on the surfaces, humans are much the same underneath.  Cultures are products of all the people who have ever lived in them, the great and the small, the people who fluttered like ghosts through their lives as well as those who put the shadow of their hand over their kingdoms.

China is a land of emperors and peasants, a place of fantastic periods of technological development, followed by times of intense isolationism and superstition.  Right now the country is poised between two destinies.  It doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.  Will it stand up and become a massive world power, its influence throwing a shadow over the Earth the way America’s has the last century, or will it falter and slip back into insanity and isolation, never realizing its potential?  Nobody truly knows.  But speculating about it is tremendous fun and seeing it in person is an experience unlike any other on the Earth right now.  I’m so grateful that I got a chance to see it with my own eyes.  I hope everyone does in their lifetime.

You can find the rest of my photos from the trip here on my Flickr page.

 

 

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Unleashing the Creative Spirit

This is an early excerpt from my upcoming book on the spiritual aspects of writing:

This is a book for people who are tired of reading writing books. This is a book for people who want to know how the hell creativity really works and how you work with it and how it works with you. This is for people who want to write something that matters to them and with any luck to others. If you’re writing to make a quick buck then you’ve probably picked the wrong career. Most writers have to endure many years of little to no hope that anyone will notice their work or care about it in the least. The only one who can really care about it in the beginning is you. You are the one that is hunched over your laptop thumping the keys day after day after day. This book is for you.

To be very clear, I am not going to sugar coat anything for you here.  There are plenty of books that will do that for you and I’ve had enough of them.  The world is bloated with useless books that won’t teach you a goddamn thing, written by people who don’t know anything for people who don’t want to know anything.  I am going to give it to you straight, so it burns your throat.  This is fire water.

At first, many of the things I am going to say here may seem very simple, even simplistic, but most of us in life miss the most essential truths because they are so simple as to appear mundane. They are easy to miss. I missed them for 38 years. I still count myself lucky. I have a chance at a second life because I can see them now. Many people die without ever seeing what really matters. We gloss over the simplest things, we pass them by like a bum in the street. We read them and think there has got to be more, got to be something else, something more — complex. We keep looking when the answer was staring us in the face the entire time. The things you really need to understand in life are not flashy. They can’t be bought, bargained for or stolen. They are not standing on a stage shouting for you to hear. They don’t have a seminar or a monthly subscription. They are yours for the taking but the trick is, if you don’t know they’re yours, then you can go your whole life not knowing it and miss them. Becoming an artist is about opening your eyes and seeing what really is. Without these fundamental things I am talking about, you cannot hope to make the difficult transition to being a true artist.

Before I go further, it’s important to state who this book is not for. This is not for people looking to write a celebrity bio or a how-to book on the latest Yoga craze or a feel good novel that challenges no one and goes down easy like candied soda pop. If that is your goal, you already have everything you need and I have nothing to give you. All you need to do is lie and keep lying.  I have nothing to give you because you’re thinking about art in the same way as you think about a regular career, like being a lawyer or an engineer, as if the purpose is to make money or manipulate people to doing what you want or to deliver a product that a focus group told you they liked real well.  There is nothing wrong with making money, but if you want to write something that people remember, that they talk about long after bugs are eating your body in the ground, then you don’t start there.  You don’t even think about it. You start by letting go.  Not thinking about letting go, really letting go of the results of your writing.  You write and the rest takes care of itself.  Being an artist is very different from a normal career. Often the things that people find most valuable in corporate life have absolutely no value when it comes to artistic creations. And the things that you walk over on the way to the top in the regular world are the things that matter the most to the creative spirit.  These things you pass over are the alms you collect and lay at her feet if you are serious about this journey.

So what are we talking about? We’re talking about true writing, about being the absolute best at what you do. We are not phoning it in here. We want a true creative breakthrough. We’re talking about tearing open the wall of reality and plunging headlong into the absolute madness of pure creativity. We’re trying to get to something authentic, a unique artistic creation that has never existed before and that cannot exist without your sacrifice and guidance. We are talking about writing something that stands out from everything else ever written, ever. In short, we are not fucking around. This is a book for people who want to know just how deep the rabbit hole goes. We are stepping off the side of the building here and falling forever.

To do that, there are a few things that you need to get a handle on right away. The first is time. Ultimately, time is the only thing you have in life. I am going to say this again, because it needs repeating:

Time is all you have in life.

If you are not making as much time to write as possible, then you have nothing. You cannot build a house without bricks. You can’t write a book by thinking about it, talking about it, or wishing it would happen. You must physically fucking write. Move your fingers on a keyboard.  Grip that pen until your fingers go numb.  And you need to do it as often as possible. That means taking back your life. That means blowing things the hell out of your existence that don’t matter like you are Ripley blowing the fucking alien out of the goddamn airlock.  You have to take back your time however you can. Cancel extra-curricular activities, turn off the damn TV, stop jerking off five times a day, stop drinking so your brain is mush for your late night writing session. Take back YOUR TIME back by any means necessary. If that means lying, do it. If that means being an asshole, do it. Got to fight with the significant other? No problem. Kids need to find another ride to their friend’s house for movie night?  Here is the fucking cab money. If you have to sneak out the last hour of your job and plug some words into Evernote then do it. I am not kidding about any of this.

Writing has to become the focus of your life. Everything else is in your way. These things around you are distractions. They are eating up your time and remember what I said, time is all you have in life. You’ve got to take it back from all the goddamn time thieves that surround you with daggers and murderous intent. These things are fucking stealing the only precious thing you have.  These are the real demons of life. Demons are not here to defeat you. They are here to waste your time. They don’t have long horns and forked tongues. They are your friends and family, the TV, movies, late night drinking with co-workers. Demons are always in disguise. They don’t want to beat you. They want to tie you up just long enough to run out the clock. Again, they want to waste your time. Here’s the worst part: they think they are doing a good thing. A demon never thinks they’re a demon. They always think they’re on the side of the light. They believe that socializing and whiling away your time together and idle chit-chat about politics or the game last night is an actual honest-to-good use of your time. They believe it matters. They NEED to believe it matters. It doesn’t. There is a time for friends and family and drinking and fun. That time is after you’ve written today. If you haven’t written, there is no time for this bullshit and you need to cut it the fuck out of your life as quickly as possible. I am not kidding.  After you write comes everything else.  In this game, you get no credit for yesterday or what you did last week.  You start fresh, with a clean slate every day.  And what you did yesterday means nothing.  Today is the best day of your life.  Today is the day that writing needs to get done, above all else.

For some artists this may even have to go further. You may have to extricate yourself from a true demon: a nightmare of a job that saps your will to live or a partner who is not only unwilling to support you on your journey of creativity, but actively belittles you, tears you down, destroys you. You have to get out of there as soon as possible. The best way is the fastest way. Tear it off like a band-aid. Just slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. In short, get the fuck out. Now. This is of utmost importance to your art and your life. You cannot create in these circumstances. You cannot create when you are constantly at war. These horrors will serve you later, serve your art, because ultimately everything serves your art, but they cannot serve your art while you are under constant attack. You have to get in motion here and get out. Change.

You see many people are under the impression that spiritual progress and progress in the real world are different. They are not. They are exactly the same thing.

You probably don’t think so. You probably don’t see that progress in the real world is spiritual progress.  Note that I did not say success.  I said progress and they are very different things.  You can have much progress without success. But not matter what, you probably don’t see the physical world as part of the spiritual world.  I will say it again: they are exactly the same.  Your heaven and your hell are right here with you, all the time.  You’re walking around them.  You’ve been living in them your whole life and you just didn’t know it.

Maybe you’re pulling back now, doubting my words. That’s because you’ve been lulled to sleep by a chorus of false words and ideas from every direction your whole life.  Everyone and everything you’ve every known was in on it, from your teachers to your family and friends.  They are very convincing because they didn’t know they were in on it.  They want you to believe that spirituality is something you do once a week or that spirituality is something that you get by reciting words over and over again or by believing strongly or by bowing and scraping.  You’ve been fed a pile of sleep inducing nonsense about what life really is all about. You cannot stand still and expect to go anywhere. And yet people everywhere think that by sitting and visualizing some better future that it will somehow manifest. It manifests by you taking action in the real world. You can’t go through exercises to release negative emotions at some weekend seminar. You have to actually release them by doing something. You can’t change by standing in the same place that you are. You’ve got to actually change. You have to actually do something. For real. In the real world.  If you want to be a writer, then you have to be a writer.  Now.

Let me give you an example of real spiritual change. My friend, Nadia Aly, who I interviewed on my blog, was living a typical American life. She worked at big companies like Google and Microsoft. She made a great living but she hated it. She looked around and could not understand why everyone was so happy for her, because she was miserable.  Then her friend died and it woke her up. She quit and took off running to get as far away as she could. She spent a month figuring out her life and then realized she wanted to start a Scuba diving company and website. Now she travels the world going to exotic places that look like postcards that most people will never see. Interspersed between people’s useless crap on Facebook, their little ready made e-cards, their pictures of their dogs and family and nails are exotic places they’ll never see, that Nadia sees because she took up her camera and went there, herself, physically, in the real fucking world.  That is a creative life. That is spiritual progress. Spiritual progress is not a weekend retreat. This is real fucking life. There is no exit. All you have is your time and you better start doing something with it right now.

Once you start down the path of the artist, the things you value in your regular life: a career, aggressiveness, quick thinking, forcefulness, being on time, have very little place in the creative world. Well being on time still matters, but the rest of that other crap should be forgotten as quickly as possible.  Creativity is about surrender.  It is about letting go.  It is about the creative spirit working through you on its time, not yours.  You work for her, not the other way around.  Understanding how the creative spirit works will take some getting used to. The things you tend to value in everyday life, have no value in spiritual pursuits. The things you overlook are the most important in the spiritual realm. The most basic things are essential.  For instance, you better learn how to breathe.

Breathing is essential as you write and move through the world.  It’s probably something you’ll skip or gloss over.  It seems simple.  What could be more simple than breathing?  In regular life you don’t think about breathing.  In the creative life, make it your primary focus until you get it down perfectly.  Breathe from your stomach.  Do this all day.  You spent your whole life breathing little weak mousy breaths from your chest.  This is completely wrong.  Push your stomach out like you are 300 pound fat guy.  Keep doing it.  Every time you forget, remember it again.  If you find yourself breathing from your chest, stop it.  Breathe from your center, as you write, as you observe.  This will cleanse your mind of useless things like your schedule and bills to pay and yet another thing that came undone that needs doing.  You cannot focus on your art when you are scattered into a million shards, thinking about so many things.  You have to turn off your mind.  Your mind is another one of your enemies.  It is in your way.

You also need a place to write that is away from everything.  Coffee shops and other public places suck.  They will have to do if you have nothing else, but you need a quiet place with no people milling around and making noise to distract you.  You need to turn off the TV.  Invest in some noise canceling headphone, good ones, the kind that put out their own white noise and blot out the world around you.  Writing is an inward journey.  It has to be quiet.  I cannot stress this enough.  Any distractions need to be cut off.  Tell your family to fuck off.  Tell them to leave you alone.  Push them out the door if necessary.  Yell at them.  Plead with them.  Cajole them.  Bribe them.  Whatever.  Just get them the hell out of your writing space.

Carve out multiple hours to write, every day.  This builds on itself, a kind of headlong momentum that can’t be stopped.  The first hour of any writing session is usually a complete waste of time.  You have to settle your mind and let go of all the crap that had to be done that day.  I have to call Bob and do the dishes and pick up Jenny at daycare.  Your mind will cycle and spin and get in your way.  You have to stick around long enough to get to the real good part of writing, which comes after that hour, as you clear away the garbage and your fingers start typing on their own.  This is essential.  If you can’t set aside enough time then you aren’t trying hard enough.  Cut something out.  We are talking about sacrifice.  Something has to go.  Multiple things have to go.  Get them out now.  The faster the better.

After you’ve done all that: taken back your time, dismissed your distractors and demons, found the perfect writing spot and gotten past your mind’s useless prattle, then the real work starts and the real adventure of writing begins.  After you’ve crossed the wall of that first hour, things begin to come together.  Now is when you’ve crossed over into true creativity.  You are free.  And freedom is a terrifying thing.  The white page stares back at you.  What will you say?  Up is down here.  This is opposite world.  Beneath you is the Void.  You stand on nothing.  And then suddenly beneath you is the searing chaos of the creative spirit, a swirling abyss that all real art comes from.  Look into it.  Be afraid.  Be ripped apart.  Be slaughtered on the alter and above all: keep going.  This is where stories are made.  Down in the abyss is horror and joy.  Both are essential.  They are you.  They come from within.  They will set your writing on fire in a way that nothing else can.  All things come from this abyss, the psychopath stalking children in the night comes from the same abyss that makes your loyal dog who you cuddle in the darkness.  They are all down in this hole, as yet unmade and waiting for you to unleash them.  They are down in the fire, unborn, waiting for you and only you to free them so they can terrorize reader’s minds or make them weep with joy or teach them what real love is and how to find it.  All this is made from beyond the mind.  You have to peal away all the layers of your ego to become other things.  How can you think like a monster if you are a suburban house dad?  The suburban house dad is gone.  He dies in the fire of that first hour.  Out here in the whiteout, he is lost.  You are not you anymore.  Other people lurk down here and you will make them by embracing them, by becoming them and putting their thoughts and feelings on the page, not yours.  See through your characters eyes.  All this is made in the white hot center of the volcano.  And volcanoes do damage.  They erupt and melt the world.  Here is where you do your work, hovering above this madness, the sulfur and the flames.

You’ll be done suddenly.  You’ll run out of gas, complete a scene, run into a problem that you can’t fix today.  That’s all right.  That’s good.  You don’t live in the abyss, you just visit there.  When you come back, drink a little water.  Stretch.  Talk more deep breaths.  Walk a little.  Come back to Earth but understand that you are going to that place that is no place, that is nothingness, again.

Understand that meeting the creative spirit means showing up to meet her and then surrendering absolutely, it means surrendering to the chaos of creativity.  If you are refusing to change a scene because it is too hard or would require changing too many characters or make too many rewrites then you are not working with her.  She does not work for you.  You work for her.  You must surrender to her absolute will and trust that she knows better than you.  In your walks with the creative spirit she will tell you many things.  If you can become quiet enough, you can hear them clearly.  Listen.  Understand.  Let her tell you what to do.  Ride into the abyss on her winged back.  Soar over the flames and let her plunge you into them.  See will tell her story through you.

You may have been working under the impression that you are writing your story.  In fact, when you are doing this right, you have nothing to do with it.  You are not writing anything at all.  You are aligning yourself with something you cannot possibly hope to understand or put into words and you are letting it guide you, wherever it leads.  As the Tao Te Ching says, “the ideal artist artist follows his art wherever it goes.”  You may have made a common mistake and thought you were the director.  You are just in the way.  The spirit has the pen and your only job is to filter her as little as possible.  She has a plan that your tiny little monkey brain cannot understand.  This is not an insult to you, it is just a fact.  We are specks of dust in the universe and the creative spirit was around before time began.  It knows how to set things in motion that make no sense to you now, but make perfect sense later.

Let me give you an example from my own life.  When I starting writing my current book, I took the names of my characters from Chinese mythology.  I stole these names before I knew much about the plot of my book, much less the themes of the book and its broader implications.  Through the process of writing, the themes slowly began to emerge as they always do: things fall apart and come together and then fall apart again.  Life is cyclical.  It’s a year later and I am heading off on a trip overseas and I grabbed some books to read while I am there  Since I am going to China, I picked up Romance of the Three Kingdoms, an ancient Chinese masterpiece.  I didn’t think much about it.  Then I flipped to the back cover and saw that one of the places I took a main character’s name from just happened to be this very book.  I’d scanned Wikipedia for myths and didn’t think much about it once I had the names, if at all, over the course of the year.  I opened the book and read the first line.  It said “the empire united, divides, the empire divided, unites.”  In short, the very first line of a book I hadn’t read, that I took my character’s name from just because it sounded good at the time, turned out to be the central theme of my book before I even knew what the central theme of my book ever was.  That is when you know you are aligned with the creative spirit’s plan.  She sets things in motion for you to discover that are simply not coincidence.  The chances of my picking just that book, with just that theme are nearly impossible, if not completely impossible mathematically.  And yet it happened.  This is the creative spirit at work and she is not bound by the same rules you are.

I can’t explain that.  I don’t need to.  Nor do you.  You can ascribe some mystical aspect to it or call it coincidence or post-quantum mechanics.  It doesn’t matter.  All you need to know is that this is how the creative spirit works through you.  It has a plan that you cannot see or understand.  You just have to go with it.  I can give you a thousand other examples.  This happens to me in small ways nearly every time I write now.  I get the exact thing that I need at the exact time that I need it.  Whatever I saw that day, whatever emotion I felt, goes right into that character and scene that very day.  When you set aside all the crap in your life, you demonstrate your intent to the universe and it molds reality around you to help you.  You can’t wish for a fucking Ferrari or a big house like that bullshit the Secret tries to fob off on you like some used car salesman.  That is a baby’s way of understanding the power of intent.  That is for sales people and morons.  It’s no fucking secret.  It happens every day, all the time.  The power of intent is doing something, setting in motion the life of a true writer and the universe responds.  It wants to help.  This is the creative process at work.  And you can understand how it works with you and through you.  All you have to do is the hardest thing in the world and change your life.

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The Coming Revolution in Film: Future Tech Series

Like a tsunami silently gathering far out at sea, a revolution is coming to the movie business that will make the seismic changes experienced by the book and music industries in recent years look tiny by comparison. One technology will make this possible, one you might not expect: 3D game engines.

In the last few years the music and book industries experienced a radical shift in creation and distribution. Personal computers made it easy for any would-be recording star to compose music and upload it to Youtube for all the world to see. The Kindle made it easy for writers to bypass the publishing industry choke point and take their work right to the people. But even as these these industries struggled to adapt to the sudden changes thrust on them by technology the movie industry remained largely immune. While P2P threatened their distribution hegemony a bit, making movies still remains a prohibitively expensive and involved process. When it comes to special effects blockbusters like The Avengers and Avatar the minimum barrier to entry is at least 200 million dollars.  Even animated films like Tangled can cost a whopping 260 million dollars without a single set, costume or location scout.  In the near term those costs are only rising, making even one film a massive financial risk that can instantly kill a studio if it bombs with audiences. John Carter anyone?  Can you really blame the industry suits for having little to no imagination or appetite for risk?

In the next decade that all changes for good. Prices to make movies will drop drastically, breaking open the floodgates of creativity and allowing smaller teams to make movies on a epic scale.  Movies like Avatar will go from costing 237 million to 30 or 40 million if a studio uses big name actors or even down to 10 to 20 if they use little known actors as the voices.  All of this will happen as the game and film industries converge.  To understand why you have to understand a little bit about the evolution of 3D gaming technology.

If you’re been gaming since the early 1990′s then you’ve watched a steady evolution in gaming. Every five years or so gamers awaited the next leap in visual fidelity. Programmers like John Carmack changed the way we played.  I still remember early games like Doom keeping me glued to my computer monitor.  I knew I was addicted when my roommate and I were sitting in the hot girls room in our co-ed dorm at NYU and both of us were thinking “Doom, Doom, Doom,” after they’d babbled on for about ten minutes.  Each five year iteration brought drastic new leaps in how games looked and played.  Modern game engines like CryEngine 2 and Rage power games that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy.  But in the next decade we’ll reach the end for this cycle, as commodity hardware and engines advance to the point where they can render images in real time that are indistinguishable from reality.  Today, using massive render farms of servers, movie studios can power through strikingly realistic graphics for films but this is far from a real-time process.  For cutting edge films a single frame can take hours or days to render.   But the technology is developing exponentially.  Only a decade ago, graphics artists struggled to create images that could fool people into thinking they were real.  Movies like  2001′s Final Fantasy the Spirits Within, while representing a huge leap forward in realism, still fell headlong into the uncanny valley, causing revulsion in audiences.  In other words it came close enough to seem almost real, but not close enough to make people suspend disbelief and trust what they were seeing.  In particular rendering people realistically was nearly impossible.  Hair, eyes and skin all looked artificial.  In particular, the eyes, the windows to the soul, failed to convince people that what they were seeing was real.  Eyes looked like dead fish on ice.  But only 8 years later in 2009 Terminator Salvation turned back time and brought us a fully rendered young Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The pace of development is accelerating.

In the next decade game engines will reach the end of their evolution.  Instead of dozens of new engines crafted in-house by advanced programming teams to power the latest video games, only a few game engines will remain.  Once hardware and software reaches the point where it can render photo realistic images in real-time, everything changes.  Now programming teams will license or use open source versions of those engines and craft visual programming tools on top of it.  This will allow creative artists to utilize those tools to design any type of special effect rapidly and easily.  Small clusters of computers will replace massive farms of exotically cooled machines. Advances in Artificial Intelligence will allow animators to set actors in motion without ever having to waste time with actual people or people in funny looking motion capture suits.  Not long after that the technology will advance to the point where artists will only need a few local computers or time on the cloud to bring the movies in their mind into reality.

All these developments will enable new kinds of films to come to market.  It will create a flood of garbage but it will also bring us brand new masterworks from unexpected places.  Just as the changes in the book market have allowed for fictions that breaks out of strictly straightjacketed genre structures and arbitrarily imposed book lengths, movies will break out in similar ways.  We’ll see small serialized films only a half hour long and epic four or five hour masterworks that need to be taken in shorter sessions on people’s home media walls. Novels that were too expensive to adapt to films will finally come to the silver screen.  Smaller books that would never see the light of day will find a home with dedicated micro “studios” of people working in their spare time out of their houses.  Open source visual artifacts will allow people to drag and drop whole scenes without every understanding all the creative wizardry behind the scenes.  Dropping people into exotic locals will no longer actually traveling to those places.

George R.R. Martin, author of the Game of Thrones, once talked about why he wrote the series on such an incredibly epic scale.  He said that when he worked for the film industry budget always came into play.  He would write a massive battle sequence only to have creative execs ask him if he could scale down the finale fight to a tiny scene between the hero and the villain.  Oh and can you make it a knife fight instead of a giant tank battle?  Because he was a professional he would do it, but it left him wanting just as it leaves many audiences wanting.  When he set out to write Game of Thrones he was determined to make it “unfilmable” by throwing in everything he ever wanted to see from sweeping battles to multiple points of view.   Eventually the technology caught up with his vision.  In the near future nothing will be unfilmable.

I write my science fiction with all this in mind.  Today science fiction films can only go so far.  Aliens are usually nothing but people with a couple of extra ridges slapped on their brow because of budget and special effects limitations.  Far away worlds are rain forests or deserts with a few space ships rendered in and some glow effects. I write for the day when we can create outrageous aliens that look nothing like us as easily as we can create movie car crashes today.  I’m hungry for a movie industry that can render stunning other worlds that don’t look anything like the planet we live on.  In other words when we finally get to the point where we can render the world in real-time then the only limitations on our creativity will be what we imagine.

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Just Do the Work

So you want to be a writer?  Maybe you dreamed of people mobbing you at a book signing as you write “thanks for believing in me” over and over.  Perhaps you dreamed of a fan telling you that your story meant more to them than anything in the whole world.  You might think of your name in lights, as a writer for a feature film that takes best picture.  It can happen, but there is only one way to get there.

Do the work.

What does that mean?  Write all the time.  Write every day.  But it’s more than that.  It means understanding the work at each step of the journey.  The work changes on you at each step.  Work is funny that way.  The work at the rough draft stage, the re-write phase, the editing phase and polishing phase are all very different.  The resistance and fears shift and you need to become aware of them to break through and get past them.  Each step requires a different commitment from you.

Let’s say you finally commit to getting that first novel done.  You decide to sign up for nanowrimo and pound out that book in thirty days, surfing on a diet of caffeine and candy and the praise and affirmations of other writers in the forums.  Great.  But that’s not really doing the work.  That’s just doing the first part of the work.  And here’s the thing: it may be that you can write that fast and do your best work, but probably not.  Most people can’t write that fast and put anything that isn’t a total piece of shit down on the page.  There are exceptions.  There are always exceptions.  I’m betting many of you reading this have mastered thinking of yourself as an exception.  You’d be better off not thinking of yourself as an exception.  Most likely you are not.  Do the work first and when you actually find out you are an exception then you can skip that step and that step alone.  The key is finding out for yourself by doing something.  It’s great to get a first draft down on paper but that’s only one step.  It doesn’t help if you did the step wrong.  If you pounded out the novel just to finish it and you didn’t plan any of it, then all that work was pretty much worthless because now you have about ten re-writes on your hands.  Instead you need to figure out how fast you can actually produce something that saves you a few steps later.

What are those later steps?  Re-writing.  Taking feedback.  Re-writing again.  Rinse.  Repeat.  All of these are different skills.  Learning to listen to other people’s feedback is not easy.  It takes time and patience.  Initially you are filled with resistance.  They’re wrong.  They don’t get what I am trying to do.  Nope.  They get it.  You just wrote something that doesn’t really work and you wish it did, so you flip into denial mode and miss the whole point.  Instead of fixing what’s really wrong with the story, you change a few little things instead of the one thing that would actually make it better.  That one thing is often a lot of work.  That’s the real reason you don’t want to do it.  It might require a whole new scene or major surgery on an existing scene that eliminates two characters and adds a brand new one, while eviscerating the dialogue.  It may be a complete tear down of an entire section of a book or the whole damn thing.  Do it anyway.  Here’s the litmus test: if it scares you, it’s the right step. If it seems impossible, it’s the write step.  If it will “take too long” it’s the right step.

At every point in the writing process, there is a another temptation to cut corners and half-ass it.  I don’t need to get better at dialogue you think, it’s already pretty good.  I don’t need to learn about tropes or what other writers do, that’s just cheating and it makes my writing stale and formulaic.  I don’t need to plan anything about my novel or it won’t develop organically.  It’s as good at it can get, I don’t need another re-write here.  These are all lies we tell ourselves. These are all excuses to not do the work.  Michael Jordan did not get good at basketball by telling himself he was the world’s greatest free throw shooter and then never shooting a free throw.  He shot them over and over and over.  In fact, whatever you suck at the most is what you should be working on.

People will do anything to avoid doing the actual work necessary to achieve something that matters in this life.  Let me give you an example from my own life.  A few years back I found some extraordinary martial arts books.  I gave them to my friend, a fantastic and dedicated martial artist of more than a decade.  We both knew many of the esoteric secrets of the ancient martial arts were revealed there.  We sensed it.  And yet we couldn’t understand what they were, even though they were staring us right in the face.  It wasn’t until last year, when I made the internal shift with my writing, that I could see what was there all along.  The problem was my friend and I were looking for something magic.  Just like when people go to a writing conference, they are looking for a magical step that will allow them to write brilliantly without any effort whatsoever, in only ten minutes a day.  It doesn’t exist.  Just stop looking.  The magic of the books was their simplicity.  On one page, the author showed examples of Kung Fu masters tying rope to a bucket of water and doing turns.  That’s it.  Tie a rope around something heavy and do it over and over and over.  No tricks required.  In the old days, when people learned martial arts they spent their whole first year just standing in a horse stance and throwing a single punch.  Nowadays we want something faster.  What is the secret to throwing a great punch?  Throw it over and over.  That’s it.  Do it so many times that it is ingrained.  As the Kung Fu Panda found when he got the final secret scroll “there is no secret ingredient.”  There is no magic.  It’s just fucking practice.  That old Kung Fu master who moves through his set with effortless ease got that way because he did the damn thing a million times.  If you did it a million times you’d be that Kung Fu master.  If you write every day and drop all your delusions and fantasies about writing, you’ll be a writer.  That’s really all there is to it.

Writing is not a team sport.  It’s a wonderfully lonely exercise.  Find a quiet place and do it.  Forget talking to other writers. Forget conferences.  You see, writing shouldn’t require motivational speeches from an outside source, the support of your writing group or loved ones or friends.  Your love of writing has to come from within.  And here’s the truth: sometimes it won’t.  Sometimes when you tell everybody that writing is your true love and your passion and everything you dream about, it’s nothing but a fucking lie.  It’s a lie to others and yourself.  Sometimes you’ll hate it.  Sometimes it’s nothing but work.  But a true writer pushes through that.  They keep writing anyway.  Some of the writing I am most proud of does not come on the days when I cranked out three thousands words as if they were divinely inspired.  Instead it comes from the days when I stared at the page, browsed Facebook and Twitter, read the news and got distracted every other line, only to stay with it and fight through 500-700 words.  That’s doing the work.  That’s writing.

If you’re just starting out writing  maybe you think you can’t write everyday.  That’s a lie too.  The truth is you don’t want to write every day.  You know why?  Because writing is hard.  Eventually, if you’ve been at it long enough, you make an internal shift.  Once you make that internal shift everything changes.  Stephen Pressfield, author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, writes about this in the War of Art.  He was driving a cab, wanting to write and never doing it.  Finally one day, he’d had enough.  He came home, tired, worn out and he dug out his typewriter from under a pile of crap and he started writing.  It was ten years before he sold his first book, but from that day forward he knew he was a writer.  Nobody needs to tell you you’re a writer.  You either are one or you’re not.  Once you make the change, nobody can take it from you.  That does not mean you’re successful yet.  Time is a tricky thing.  It takes a good deal of it for your dreams to manifest and there is even a chance that you will fail but you have to keep writing even if there is little to no chance of it ever becoming a career.  You make the internal shift and that’s it.  It’s a sudden and complete change and you’ll know it when you’ve made it.  It can’t be faked.  It can’t be wished for.  You can’t find it by talking about, dreaming about it or thinking about it.  You can only find it when you do it.  It’s a commitment that can’t be taken back.  Once you’ve made it nobody can ever tell you you’re not a writer again.  You are.

Just to be clear, there are many writer like things that mascarade as “doing the work” but are really nothing but distractions meant to knock you off the path.  They include, but are not limited to, the following: Going to writing conventions, writing in groups, talking about writing, hanging out with other writers at a party, reading books on writing, researching, daydreaming, going to writing groups, watching TV/movies, discussing the process of being a writer, visualizing, meditating, exercising.  It’s not that there is no value in any of this, it’s just that none of it is actually writing.  And actually writing is the only thing that matters.  If I have a choice now between writing or going to a conference, I choose writing every time.  If I have a little extra time, then I might consider it.  But I accept it for what it is: a distraction.  I embrace the distraction.  Of course, when you really think about it, who the hell has any extra time, considering we are nothing but a tiny, laughable blip on the cosmic timeline, the equivalent of a picosecond to the universe, a flash of lighting and then we are gone.  So choose writing.  Most writers would rather spend their time going to conferences, reading about writing, watching movies or TV, talking about writing with other writing friends, all the while deluding themselves that they’re doing research or actually writing.  Of course, watching great movies and TV and reading are prerequisites for learning your craft, but eventually they just get in the way.  You have to let them go for real writing time.  Eventually you need to turn off the TV and sacrifice time with your loved ones and friends and do the work.  If all this sounds repetitive, that’s because it is.  I will say it over and over until you get.  It took me  bit myself, so I know how stubborn we can be as humans.  Apparently, we have this ridiculous trait of having to hear shit a hundred million times before we get it when it really could not be more simple.  Even writing on this damn blog is a distraction that is keeping me from working on my fiction right now.

This is why it’s hard for me to talk to many artists these days.  My tolerance for self delusion and nonsense is about zero.  At my artist co-work facility I have the place to myself on most Saturdays and Sundays.  Now and again, people show up and annoy me with talking.  It’s not that I don’t like talking, it’s just that when I sit down to write, I am there to write, not to talk and pretend that I am writing.  I see people show up there on Saturdays and they agitate me a little because I hate seeing other people when I write.  They move around and fidget and fuss and generally pretend to get shit down when they are actually just procrastinating.  But I just have to wait.  I wait like the sea as it hammers the shore.  I see a rock and I know it looks tough, but I also know I will outlast the rock.  Eventually I will hit it enough times to break it down into sand, no matter how hard it looks.  The same is true of my artist’s space.  I know I just have to wait a few months and they’ll be gone, off doing something else, distracted and pretending they’re artists.

Of all the advice you will ever get on writing, “write every day” is the most important.  If you can do that, everything else takes care of itself.  You will learn everything you need to know by taking it word by word. Making that commitment is hard.  I know, I know, you don’t have the time.  You’ve got commitments, job, family, kids, friends, whatever.  It’s all a lie.  If you want it, you will make the time.  You will clear the garden so new stuff can grow.  It may take awhile, but eventually you will do it, if this is really what you want to do with your life.  Write every day.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  Just write every day.  It really could not be simpler.

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The Hero’s Journey

Have you ever felt stuck in life?  You wake up one day and everything that was okay yesterday is not okay today.  Maybe your hate your job or your partner or your kids?  Maybe you had a great boss who got let go and the new one sucks?  Maybe your significant other is not being the warm, supportive person they usually are?  Or maybe your dog is sick and his plaintive moans are crushing your soul because you can’t help him?  Maybe your kids are driving you nuts with their constant childishness, unreasonableness and demands on your life?  Maybe they want more and more and you have nothing else to give?

Good.

Now you can do something about it.

There is only one thing to do.  Accept it.  Surrender completely.  And then go through it.  There is no other way.  This is not open to debate.  This is not speculation.  This is truth and truth is that which cannot be made simpler.  When you really get to the truth, you know it.  Nobody needs to tell you.  You don’t need confirmation from outside sources.  You simply know it.

Now of course, the mind is capable of all sorts of tricky delusions.  Often times you arrive at what you think is the “truth” when in fact it’s just your mind giving you an easy out.  Maybe it tells you things like you just have to put on a happy face, think positively, banish all negativity and good things will happen.  Or perhaps it tells you that you can paper over it by meeting up with that person you don’t like at work and coming to an understanding?  Nope.  This is false truth.  In the back of your mind, when you are just about to fall asleep, when your mind shuts up for a second, when your borders break down after too many glasses of wine, you know it’s wrong.  That’s how you know you haven’t gotten to the truth.  When you really get there it will be unshakeable.  Of course, there is even a trick where the mind can make you think you’ve come to an “unshakeable” truth when it is wrong as well.  This is the most dangerous kind of delusion.  It is the kind that keeps you locked on a course or a trajectory that is absolutely wrong for you.  It’s the type of delusion that keeps you trapped in a marriage you hate, a job you despise, maintaining a friendship that is now poison, and chasing more and more stuff that you don’t need.  It is the most sickening kind of delusion.  Would that I could reach into your mind and burn this hideous falsehood from your mind and heart, but I can’t.  I can barely do it in my own life much less help you with yours.

I can tell you that I am fighting through my own crap right now though.  I’m in the process of setting fire to all the things that are wrong for me in life.  Please do not take this line literally.  I am not starting any actual fires.  The fires I am starting are spiritual ones.  They’re ones that let me burn away long standing delusions and sadness.  I am burning away all that is not me.

Admittedly this often makes me a pretty uncomfortable person to be around.  I am at time seized with a self-righteous passion that declares war on all the is false and phony in the world, like some mad Holden Caufield or Ahab in Moby Dick.  I am obsessed with this transformation.  I will make it or I will die.  I will get past the false life I have created for myself and become the person I was meant to be.  This is the grand journey of life.  This is all our journeys, whether we know it or not.  It is true of the macrocosm and of the microcosm.  I have looked into the Void and seen the nature of God.  I have looked into my own heart and seen my own ugliness and my own beauty.  I have seen the straw reality of the people around me, running to and fro, wishing they were doing something more important and yet desperately clinging to the false choices they made because they are afraid.  I am afraid too.  I am terrified.  There is no fucking way out of this.

Except through it.

I will go through this fight.  I will accept the battle scars, the wounds, the sorrows, the losses, the joys and power that come from this journey.  I will slowly tear away all that is not me.  What is left is only one thing.

Me.

This is the true me.  This is the clear me.

I am a writer.  I am a motherfucking spiritual warrior.  I cannot be stopped.  I will come to the ultimate realizations or I will die trying.

Maybe you’ve heard this story before?  You have.  It’s your story too.

You see, all the stories you loved as a child or an adult, the great adventures and love stories, the great mystical journeys up the mountain are not someone else stories, they are yours.  You are the Buddha.  You are crucified.  You are the swashbuckling hero who swings in against impossible odds and saves the beautiful girl.  You loved these stories because at a level you could not see, they were you.  They were right there, all along, telling you how to live, how to grow up, how face life’s ups and downs, its joys and failures.

As a writer, I love these stories in a way you never can.  You love them and then leave them but they are my life.  They are all consuming.  As a writer, my job is to live my life in the open on the page.  This is incredibly fucking dangerous.  People are stupid.  They are delusional.  Worse, they think they are sane and that makes them the most dangerous kind of insane.  When I put my words out in the world like this, I am risking that some poorly realized soul will read my words and see exactly the opposite of what I mean.  This is possible because of the very tricks that illusion plays on our hearts.  This illusion is what drives Martin Luther King’s assassin to shoot him in a crowd or Nazi soldiers to burn a bunch of people alive that they don’t really know at all.  People can so easily misinterpret what I am saying it is terrifying.  As such every time I sit down to write to you I am taking a great risk.  But that is the risk of life. That is the risk of our true purpose.  If you are not terrified almost daily, you are doing the wrong thing.  This is not speculation.  It is undeniable fact.  And yet people will deny it with every single fiber of their being.

We deny it because we are in fact the least evolved creatures on the planet.  Our dogs and our cats are infinitely superior to us.  You are probably scoffing at this right now.  I understand.  I assure you if you don’t know this you are wrong in the worst kind of way.  Think of all the qualities that you prize in life: selflessness, instant forgiveness, self sacrifice, unconditional love, a sense of play and connectedness, loyalty.  Are these not the qualities of dogs or cats?  Perhaps you thought that the the funny joke you learned as a child, that God is just dog spelled backwards was nothing but a funny joke?  It’s not.  It’s a clue.  It’s truth.  Dogs are Buddhas.  Dogs are Christ.  Dogs are Vishnu and whatever other deity you pray to.  They don’t aspire to Buddha consciousness, they are fucking Buddha consciousness. If you want to understand what you are striving for in life, don’t read another book or attend another stupid seminar just get a pet.  Then take care of that pet.  Understand that pet.  Be with that pet and you will understand every thing you ever wanted to know about life and the nature of the universe.  If you don’t, I assure you, you are not looking closely enough.

Now sometimes when people read my words, they want to talk with me about their own life journey.  That’s fine.  I’ll tell you that you are better off writing to me instead of talking.  Then I can think about what needs to be said and say it clearly, when I am in a state of clarity.  There are exceptions to this.  You’ll know when they are without me needing to tell you.  Some problems are immediate.  I am not always in a state of clarity.  You see, I am of the lesser species known as humans and I am not always loyal or selfless or understanding.  As such that is not a good time for me to help you.  That’s why I am not always fun to be around.  I will help you when I can help myself again.  I am intense.  I am a goddamn wake up call when you are around me.  My fire forces you to look at your own life and most people can only take that in small doses.  I understand.  I can only take me in small doses too.  As a writer, I can only connect with you deeply through my words.  I need a little distance between us.  I cannot connect with you in life the way I connect with you here.  There are people who are meant to do that but writers are not those people.  We need a little distance to be real to allow our true selves to show through, our emotion and humanity and our ugliness and beauty.  The best writers expose what is true.  They sing about it.  They put our lives into fun, exciting stories that give us bitter pills in a cookie.  It’s kind of like the pill pockets I use for my cat.  It tastes like a treat, but its fucking medicine.  The worst stories are merely a distraction that sink us back into denial and delusion.  When I read these kind of stories, I am like Shiva the destroyer.  I am not kind.  I cannot accept them because stories are sacred to me and I will not have them defiled.  I cannot accept false stories and I cannot accept the writer because they are not trying to climb the mountain, they are trying to sit at the bottom of the mountain and pretend they can tell people what it is like to be at the top.  When you are climbing the mountain is it painfully fucking obvious who is not climbing at all.  I hate these stories and the writers who write them.  I cannot accept them.  They are dark matter to me.  I must destroy them or they will destroy me.  We cannot exist in the same world.  These stories must be fixed or they must be cast aside because they contribute only to delusion and not to understanding.  If you are writer this can make me not much fun to be around as I will not give you any room to squirm out of your falseness.  I will highlight what is false in your work and you will either hate me or fix it.  Personally I could care less which it is.  Know that I do hope that you fix it though.   I do like having friends.  It’s just that if you are a writer and we are talking about writing, writing comes first, before our friendship.  Stories are my medium, my understanding of the world, and I will not suffer writers who do not aspire to tell life like it is.  This does not mean that I need stories that are all Irish style slice of life.  It can be big romantic woman’s fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, slice of life, literary, urban fantasy, whatever.  I transcend genre.  I do not have likes and dislikes anymore.  I can only see what works and what does not.  There is no way back for me so I can only go forward.

What you saw in your favorite stories growing is the essence of life.  Think back and you will see their wisdom was working in your life all along.

Here are a few of the things I’ve learned from my favorite stories.  When things go wrong in life, we only have a few options.  Fight them or accept them.  Only after we have accepted what’s wrong can we fix it.  We cannot heal what we cannot acknowledge. When I am fixing people’s computers they often tell me “it was working yesterday.”  But it isn’t today is it?  And yesterday is not today.  In the simple case of the computer, the person I am helping must realize that their computer is broken and that wishing it was not so will not change it.  In life this is a bit messier.  Especially when our problems are big and seemingly insurmountable.  But the process of fixing a computer and fixing ourselves is the same.  First we accept, then we heal.  Unfortunately, what we usually do is the exact opposite of healing.  We fight first.

Fighting without awareness is madness.  It is flailing around.  It is useless.  It just makes everything worse.  It tangles you up further.

Right now perhaps what you have is a broken life?  That’s all right.  Realize that is in fact true.  It is not a myth to be covered over with TV, sex, drugs, friends, going out, food, dancing, playing, reading, movies, travel, games or any other of your favorite distractions.  You have a fucking problem.  It’s real.  That is what you need to see first.  Only then can you move.  Only then can you take action.

You feel like there is no way to go back, no way forward and no escape.  You are trapped and the walls are closing in on you.  You’re right.  But looks closer and you will see a light not far off, dim, far away.  The way out looks treacherous.  You have to crawl through a rat infested cave in the seething darkness, the filthy water choking you.  You can’t make it.  There is no way. And then all of a sudden something happens.  You wake up.  You realize that there is no way out but through.  You have to start crawling and you do.  You find a way to get through that murky, shit filled water.  And you will make it out or you won’t but you sure as hell better start crawling.  There is only one way to wake up from this nightmare and that is to realize there is no way to wake up.  You just have to go through the storm.

I am on a journey.  I am on the great journey that we all are on, but that most don’t realize they’re on.  My journey is one from falsehood to truth.  It is a journey is from the dream of childhood to the vivid daylight of adulthood.  You are on this journey too.

The hero with a thousand faces, that’s you.  The Buddha’s journey, Christ’s crucifixion, the Shaman hallucinating wildly in the desert to understand the Great Spirit, all of these are you.

There is no way to make it to the top of the mountain without climbing the mountain.  You can not wish yourself there.  You can’t teleport to the peak.  There is only one thing to do, put your head down and go through it. Just bring a rain coat, because it is stormy as hell on this fucking mountain.

I’ll see you at the top.

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What is Dead Can Never Die

Since my enlightenment, I can’t seem to stop writing like this. I suppose that’s fine. Perhaps, it is useful to someone. I have no idea really and I no longer care if it is. If my spiritual writings disappear into the darkness of the net and are never seen by anyone that is fine. My Buddha twitter handle has no followers. It follows no one. These writings are created because I have to. This is what I am wired to do and so I do it. These words come through me, but they are not of me. They do not have a purpose or a goal. They are not here to make money or perpetuate my legacy or help me in any way. Perhaps that is not totally true. They do help me in that they help me release these ideas from my mind. They are like a burden relieved.

I wanted enlightenment at a young age. I promised myself that I would always see what is true no matter what the cost. I generally failed at this over and over and then failed some more. I was prone to the most ridiculous delusions as is everyone. Maya is a powerful illusion weaver and she is stunning and frightening at once. She has many tricks to make you think you’ve opened the last door and then another one appears.

Somewhere around seven years old I began a search for truth. What is true? I quickly realized that what was around me was not. I sat in church with my parents and the whole thing felt like a puppet show. I sensed that the divine was near, but that this was only a shadow of it and a pale one at that. I would go to church sometimes when nobody was there and sit and talk with God. That was closer to the divine. In the silence of the church I could feel the true power of God speaking to me. I realized early that I did not need an interpreter to talk with the Big Guy. I could just open up about whatever. I could be mad at God or happy with him. He’d heard it all before. That was also the time that I started to realize that duality did not exist although I could not articulate it. I also realized that God is no man. And sorry ladies, he is not a woman either. I prefer to call God “It” because “It” is all things and nothing at the same time. To make “It” a man or woman is hopelessly reductionist and quiet frankly childish. To say that we know almost anything about the true nature of God is largely ridiculous. We are but tiny grains of sand in a massive desert. How can the grain of sand truly understand the desert from its limited perspective?

At times in my life I would wake up out of our collective dream state for a moment and see reality as it is for the briefest flicker of time. Then I would fall right back to sleep. This was a disconcerting feeling to say the least and left me isolated from my peers. It often left me bullied for reasons I could not understand. The reasons other children hated me seemed totally illogical and that’s because they were. I could not understand why everyone could not see the pain they caused other people. I did not understand that the pain inside me was inside everyone. Everyone is driven by it, propelled by it. Each deals with it in the their own way. Some people simply lash out at others hoping that seeing another person suffer will minimize their own pain. Of course it doesn’t and so they do it more. This creates a cycle that is never-ending as people struggle with the various stages of their own personal evolution. It’s also called childhood.

This early suffering caused me to develop skills; in particular I quickly learned the art of communication. I learned to see what people liked and disliked. I was able to see patterns that other people could not see. I can see why people want what they want and this is a powerful tool. I often used it to get what I wanted or to deflect attacks when I was young. I learned to manifest the reality that I wanted. Sometimes this required direct action such as me pushing a fat bully from behind in the school playground as he was running, causing him to stumble and crash to the ground, sliding across the gravel. This single action focused the derision of the other bullies on him. After that single move, they thought I was cool and even prevented the fat bully from retaliating; convincing him that it was funny. At other times I used the power of the whisper. A girl used to torment me. She called me, “chicken legs” and other things that stung because they were so illogical. My legs aren’t even that skinny. It was just something to pick on and her limited mind chose it. One day her family had to move. For a year I worked to change perceptions about me, make people my friends, get invited to parties that I never even wanted to go to in the first place. One day she returned to visit and I had completely turned the class against her. One of the kids put a sign on her back “bitch” and she sat in the center of the circle telling jokes as people laughed louder and louder. Then she found the sign and realized they were laughing at her. That’s when her eyes met mine and they were like a slaughtered lamb. I had simply returned to her what was unwanted by me. As a child I was lost in the delusion of my own dream state. I believed the drama was real and reacted to it. It is simply part of the process of waking up.

To say that I saw all of these outcomes ahead of time would be a lie. I simply saw what needed to be done, the math of the infinite variables happening in my unconscious. I saw only the next action. And the next action inevitably leads to all the other outcomes.

These days I don’t use my powers of perception and communication for such lowly goals. I am not interested in using it to hurt. There are times in life when violence may be necessary, but in general I avoid those times. I am like Yoda. I hide in the forest. Yoda was the greatest master not because he fought constantly but because he was so smart he didn’t even need to fight. After the battles of his youth he disappeared into the forest. When Luke Skywalker comes to see him he acts crazy. The young man dismisses him as a crazy old man. That is his fatal flaw. Yoda now completely controls the situation. At that point, if Yoda wished violence he could just clock Luke over the head and there would be no fight. Luke would just be dead. The crazy old man is an illusion that fools simpler minds. People see what they want to see.

After that I was free to go about my business. I had manifested a new reality; one where people left me alone and I could go about studying the universe privately and in peace. None of these states were forever, but I continually constructed my life to maximize my quiet and alone time.

You can pick an aspect of enlightenment to focus on once you have it. Some become teachers. Others wander the earth. Some go right back to what they were doing because they know that nothing else that they ever get or become will change even the smallest fragment of who they are or are not. I write. And I like the psychological aspects of enlightenment. I focus on the aspects of enlightenment that control unnecessary suffering. Make no mistake, there is real and terrifying suffering in the world but much of the suffering we face on a day-to-day basis is totally unnecessary. It is a burden that should be put down as quickly as possible and never picked up again. There is only one answer to the absolute absurdity of existence: do the work you’re supposed to do.

What is enlightenment like you wonder? Nobody can really tell you. You have to experience it for yourself. What I can tell you is what it is definitely not. It is not a state of constant eternal bliss and complete lacking of problems. That is for sure. I can also tell you a bit of how it manifests. It brings a kind of detached bemusement for much of your day. I can see the human drama play around me and I love it with all my heart and yet I cannot participate in it in the same way. When you see the machinery working underneath the matrix can you ever take the matrix seriously again?

I have a lot to say about other things that you would probably find fascinating but they won’t come out. Now I can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about writing or the sources of poetry and beauty and yet it is as if this knowledge is in another language, one that I sort of used to speak and kind of still understand and yet it feels alien to me, unnecessary. Life needs no explanation. It simply is. It exists forever and ever. It does not die. It does not live. It cannot be destroyed, not by the most ruthless dictator or the most ignorant racist. The people that prey on the weak and defenseless cannot destroy it. It is un-killable, even though it is relentlessly killed. Look upon my face and see the trillions of forms reflected back at you in infinite regression.

God makes the same things over and over and over. Its patterns are eternal and unbreakable. It makes things endlessly that are exactly the same and yet totally different. I can see the deep patterns in everything around me, spooling out like a never ending fractal. When someone is speaking to me I can see all the outcomes of the conversation. In their talk I see all of their hidden fears and desires, even the ones they are not aware of and yet people’s secrets are absolutely safe with me because I have no desire to use them. I am now constantly aware of the presence of death. It is like my silent companion. That’s part of the disease/affliction/hilarious after-effects of enlightenment. I can clarify a few things for you now. There is no “permanent” enlightenment. Enlightenment is the ongoing experience of life. I can tell you that if you are looking for it, you should stop. You will probably not want it when you get it. It is a ride that you will never be able to get off. Once you are enlightened you will never be able to be unenlightened. You carry it with you.

If I told you that nothing you ever believed or thought about was true what would that do to your mind? I can tell you what it did to mine. It destroyed it for a period of time. I was quite certainly insane for a time during the process. People want to escape this. It is not in the enlightenment literature. It’s bad press and for good reason. I saw the face of God and God is fucking terrifying. We are all just pimples on God’s ass. We’re tiny as hell and when you see just how tiny it scares the shit out of you. Only then are you free. After you come back, if you come back, you are free. You have died before you died. You have lost everything you ever cared about it and see that you will lose everything you ever care about. Still sound fun? It’s not. And yet, I had to do it. I was wired to go after this thing, just as a bird is wired to fly. Now that I got it, it’s pretty cool. And it sucks too. Pretty much like everything.

There is a reason that Eckhart Tolle went and sat on park benches for a period of time, lost in a state of bliss, before assuming a new external reality as a spiritual teacher. In other words, he was homeless. He lost everything: his relationship; family; friends; house; job; money; all his possessions. This is not something most people would want. I was terrified that I would face the same thing. As it happens I did not, I faced something in many ways worse. Each person’s hell is his or her own. I lost my mind for a time, the thing I considered most precious. I found it again swiftly by realizing insanity was simply another illusion to be set aside. I also realized that I did not need to go kick it with my bliss on a bench, at least not now. Right now I have other shit to do. I kept my life and in my life I found meaning again. I chose to participate in life again. I can see the energy of my cat that passed away in my new cat and I can see God laughing in her every movement. I can see how God recreates everything, how everything is born again. Nature is a Phoenix.

Do not seek enlightenment. Instead look to go more fully into your dream. By doing this you will wake up to what is false and the false will fall away. When the false falls away, violence ceases, struggle ceases, suffering ceases.

Be who you are supposed to be. Be that thing completely. Commit to it. Open yourself up and be exactly what you are intended to be. Do not wear another person’s life or wish you were someone else. Live your own life. Find out what is true for you and embrace it. There is nothing wrong with you that you need to fix except everything that is not you. Simply let what is not you fall away without fear. It is not needed. Perhaps you are a Christian; then be one. Maybe you are an atheist? So be it. Embrace that. Understand that. Buddha, Hindu, new-age dream-catcher or hedonist, they are all another face of the divine. No one has a final say on what the divine is. How can they, as it is still developing as we speak? The infinite play is still happening. Go out there and enjoy it.

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Hidden in Plain Sight – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha Part 7

It’s right there in front of you hidden in plain sight.  Everything you ever wanted to know.  What am I supposed to do?  What is the meaning of life?  Why am I here?  What am I supposed to be doing?  It’s been right there in front of you all along.  It’s quite ridiculous actually but the universe has a weird sense of humor.  It’s not funny ha-ha, it’s funny peculiar.

It could not be simpler. Listen closely to my words. Reduce all words down to their simplest form. Read exactly what they say. There is no second meaning.

Duality is false.

That phrase can set you free.  Read it again.  All duality is false.  Free your mind and spirit from the prison you have put it in without realizing that you did it.  The truth is in front of you, right here.  Words mean exactly what they mean.

To understand you must accept something that is ridiculous. What happens is you look around and see separate things and your mind is fooled.  Everything you see is divided.  It’s like the Matrix.  It sure as hell looks and feels real.  Your senses confirm this misinformation because they are a part of the disinformation system.  You see other people, the sun, the moon, the stars and sky, all split, all distinct and recognizable from each other.  All are divided.  All cannot exist without the other.  I know light by dark but one cannot exist without the other.

What would you think of a God that made everything look separate, but instead it is all the same damn thing underneath? Would you say that is weird?  Stupid?  Insane?  A bad joke?  You’d be right on all counts.  At the very least you would be pretty sure that whatever set this strange system in motion has a bizarre sense of fucking humor.  It hides the one thing that is true in a maze of other crap that is not true in the least.  God is a funny like that.

All things are one thing.  Think about that.  It means one man swings the sword and the other is killed but both are the in fact the same.

So how does this help you, you are wondering?  Maybe you are searching around and desperately trying to find what your purpose is?  There are a few ancient texts that actually contain the divine truth of the universe and they can tell you.  The Bhagavad Gita is one of them.  I warn you, there are not many.  Until you can see, you will not be able to pick these books out.  Instead they will remain needles in an endless haystack.  Most books on the divine are nothing but garbage written by people who don’t know and cannot see.  You will hear many that sound good or contain kernels of the truth and you will believe.  This is the way of delusion.  All belief systems are false.  Even when you can see you’ll realize that 99% of the words in them are worthless and they will not help you understand what is true.  And yet, every once in awhile, a single divine thought slips through, uncorrupted.  The Gita is the rare exception where much of it is true with only minor corruptions that you can see if you stay clear.  You can flip to practically any page and find something true, true as in absolutely true, beyond question true.  In other words absolutely true.  And yet, unfortunately, because you are still clouded by delusion you probably won’t be able to see it.  This is how it was for me.  I read the book as a young man and saw nothing but a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.  It made little sense to me.  I read the words but I did not hear.  It sounded cool and mystical, but sounding cool and mystical is not enlightenment or divine wisdom.

And please, whatever you do, for the love of God, do not read the introduction of any copy of the Gita.  Do not read the interpretations that you might find from chapter to chapter.  Rip those useless pages out.  Forget the stupid scholarly commentary.  Read the words alone.  The commentaries are worthless and will only cloud the message.  The message does not need interpretation not even from me or any of the great teachers wandering around out there.  When you can let go of all teachers, you have reached the end of all knowledge.  Hint: that’s a good thing.

From the Gita:

“The impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal. Those who have seen the boundary between these two have attained the end of all knowledge.  Realize that which pervades the universe and is indestructible; no power can affect this unchanging, imperishable reality.  The body is mortal, but that which dwells in the body is immortal and immeasurable. Therefore, fight in this battle.

One believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain.

You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. Realizing that which is indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging, how can you slay or cause another to slay?

As one abandons worn-out clothes and acquires new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within. The Self cannot be pierced by weapons or burned by fire; water cannot wet it, nor can the wind dry it.  The Self cannot be pierced or burned, made wet or dry. It is everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundations of eternity. The Self is unmanifested, beyond all thought, beyond all change.”

The Bhagavad Gita (Classics of Indian Spirituality) (Kindle Locations 895-908). Nilgiri Press. Kindle Edition

This is quite literal.  This is not a metaphor.

Unfortunately you cannot just read this and become clear.  You must know it.  The way to know it is to quiet the mind and listen.  Always when the mind is quiet you can recognize truth.  Truth is real.  There is truth, pure, undifferentiated, unchanging truth.

To see that truth forget all teachers.  Forget me.  I am nothing but a bright fire that might kindle your own fire.  I cannot show you the truth.  I cannot show the way, but there is a chance for a moment if you hear my words that you will wake up and understand if only for a moment.  Let my fire burn brightly in your mind and burn away all that is false and worthless, leaving only that which is pure and unchanging. When you listen to the silence and you hear these exact thoughts come back to you from no text or teacher whatsoever then you know they will be yours and then you will understand.

I realize that some of this may sound repetitive or strange but it is the only way I can explain it.

There are not multiple truths.  There are not multiple opinions.  All opinions are false, as are all things that are born of duality.  What I am saying here contains no speculation and it comes to you in unfiltered form.

You have a divine purpose.  What is it?  Only you can know.  God communicates with each of us individually and its message cannot be decoded by another person’s key.  You have the only private key to unlock that message.  Nobody can tell you what it is for you.  The universe will whisper it in your ear but you will not be able to share it however hard you try.  For how can you tell another what was crafted only for you, a secret pact between your maker and yourself?

You cannot truly deviate from your path, no matter how hard you try.  And oh man how you will try.  You a determined to screw it up.  You will literally try every single wrong path you can possibly find or conceive of just to avoid your true destiny.  In the state of delusion, everything but the right answer seems right.  This is our ridiculous plot in life.

“Those who follow this path, resolving deep within themselves to seek me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless.”

The Bhagavad Gita (Classics of Indian Spirituality) (p. 93). Nilgiri Press. Kindle Edition.

Again, this is to be taken quite literally.  Do not embellish or add to the words you are hearing.  Simply hear them.  Put aside your mind and you will know them to be true.  When you can see the truth, you’ll know it because you will have a single purpose.  When you are confused you are in a fallen state.  When your choices seem endless you are lost.  No matter where you are, no matter what you are doing, there is only ever one right answer.  If you cannot hear it you are lost in the entanglements of delusion.  You may resist it for as long as you like but it does not change this simple fact.

In other words you have a purpose and the universe will gladly just tell you what it is if you ask.  You will pay a price for this.  Everything that you though was you will be wrong.  It will fall away.  But once the fire has cleansed you, you will see clearly what the next step is at all times.

The universe communicates with you on a second by second basis.  It does not tell you the whole story at once.  That would be boring.  You get it piece by piece, in the moment. The universe is telling exactly what you need to do every single second of every single day, in every word you hear, though every passing car, every bird in flight, every cloud.  You can hear this message by being quiet.  Do everything completely and fully with total concentration and you will know.  The next step becomes clear always when you can silence the endless stupid chattering of your mind.

The illumed man has no need of spiritual texts because he sees the divine all around him.  When everything is the divine you cannot fail to hear the message and yet, quite absurdly, you always do.  This is because you are asleep in the dream of duality. The divine is always speaking, quite clearly, with a friggin’ megaphone actually, but you remain deaf.  That’s fine.  Since the universe is already perfect you cannot make a mistake.  No time is wasted.  Nothing is for nothing.  Everything is exactly as it needs to be.  Nothing is wrong.

“On this path effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure. Even a little effort toward spiritual awareness will protect you from the greatest fear.”

The Bhagavad Gita (Classics of Indian Spirituality) (p. 93). Nilgiri Press. Kindle Edition.

You labor under the delusion that something is wrong and that you can fix it.  You have a hole inside you that you want to fill.  You want to change jobs, or move, travel the world, do yoga, make money, waste money, fight, fuck, rule the world, control empires.  None of this changes anything.  What can you possibly add to that which is already perfect?  Your life is already perfect.  There is nothing wrong.  It is exactly as it should be at all times, always.  At your own time you will hear.

“There will never be a time when you and I do not exist, nor will there ever be a time when we cease to exist.” – The Gita,

Read these words carefully. What do they say?  They say time does not exist.  The present moment is eternal, echoing forever.  It is not changing.  It is like light.  It appears to move and yet it only moves in the context of something else moving.  This is quantum reality and it is the only reality that is really real.  It is unchanged.  Yet it is not enough to read that time does not exist.  It is not enough to believe it.  You must know it.  Again how do you know?  You listen.

You cannot hear your divine purpose because your mind is broken.  It is chattering constantly.  It won’t shut up.  You goal is to teach it to be quiet and then you can hear something in the silence.  The silence speaks and it has the answer.  In the silence is the voice of the universe.  If you think it strange that silence says anything at all, then you are right. It should not be, but it is.

It seems impossible but it’s not.

There literally is an answer key to the universe.  A cheat sheet.  If you can quite your mind and listen then every step of the way the universe will tell you what to do.  And what is that?  Exactly what you are supposed to do.  When it is time to break, break.  When it is time to speed up, speed up.  Walk when you are walking then walk, answer questions when you are asked, write when writing, take a shit when shitting.  Do nothing else and life becomes effortless.  There is nothing wrong.  There is nothing else you are supposed to be doing.  You are doing it.  Seriously.

When you realize exactly what you are supposed to do then the doors open by magic. This is not an invitation to get whatever the fuck you want like that idiotic corruption of the divine message “The Secret” tries to tell you.  This is not an invitation to start visualizing a Ferrari and a house in the hills. That might be part of your journey or not, but either we picturing them real hard won’t do shit for you.  Stop it.

You are wired to do something and something specific. Yield to it. Embrace it and life becomes largely effortless. You get what you really want and what you really want is probably not what you think you want. A warrior wants to fight. An artist wants to create. A mother wants to protect her child. A scholar studies. A teacher teaches.

Somewhere inside, you know what you really want. You just become poisoned by the disease of other peoples’ opinions and the ridiculous nonsense of the world and you become filled with false ideas that are not you. The mind corrupts essential truth. You have a divine mission. Know this.

I’ve talked about how the Gita is one of the oldest signals from the divine that we have on file in the very limited literature of enlightenment to which I am now adding my words that come through me but are not of me.  In the Gita, the divine speaks nearly unimpeded with only minor corruptions that you can see if you stay present, yeet the Gita also shows us how people fail to hear its message.  They listen with their minds and their minds corrupt the truth by adding garbage to it.  In Indian life this manifested as the cast system.  Indian society, under the delusion of the mind, created a bastardization of this divine truth of “everyone has a job” by creating the cast system. They created a prison where the true message is absolute freedom. The difference is God can see all the patterns ahead of time and gives you a road map but it gives that map only to you.  It does not under any fucking circumstances hand that over to someone else to interpret for you. It gives you the answer code and you alone.  It does this by giving you the best possible combination of steps to take at any moment but you still have to choose to follow them. Free choice is absolute.  Unfortunately, there is only one right choice.  The rest just hurt you and everyone else around you. The mind hears but it does not understand. It twists and changes. Everyone does have a purpose to play in the divine comedy it’s just that it is not to be imposed on you from the outside, from some human created system, from bureaucrats and laws and societal morals, it is only to be discovered by you alone.

Each person has a single song to play from the creator and all other notes are false.

You always have free will but all it ever gets you is off the path and pain.  It is wrong in the same way that taking a wrong turn in a video game is wrong.  When Pitfall Harry falls in a lava pit it is always wrong.  Right action is simple. It is not an external set of laws imposed on you that you can memorize.  The right action is handed to you on a need to know basis and the only thing you need to know is what to do right now.  You only need the next step. The rest takes care of itself.  Right action means take the best and most appropriate action in the moment. If you are crashing try to survive. If you are in a war then kill. If you are at home cooking then cook.

It is not more complicated than this it is just that your mind makes it so. It’s as if God said do whatever you want, play any game you want but this is the perfect game and all you have to do is be quiet and listen and I will reveal it to you step by step as needed.

The crazy bastard is trying to save us all and we just won’t listen.

Work at your purpose and the work practically does itself.

It could not be simpler.

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Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Damn Thing about Bitcoin

Bitcoin Magazine just posted my article Why Charles Stross Doesn’t Know a Thing about Bitcoin. It’s a response to one of my favorite SF authors, Charles Stross, who recently wrote a piece called Why I Want Bitcoin to Die in a Fire.  It got picked up by Reddit and Slashdot, as well as quoted by Paul Krugman in a piece for the NY Times blog called Bitcoin is Evil.  While I really admire his SF, his article is typical of a lot of popular posts on the subject that completely miss the point on why Bitcoin is a profound technological breakthrough and a revolutionary system of commerce.

#bitcoin, #cypherpunks, #tech, #SF, #sciencefiction

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Your Mind is a Survival Engine – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha Part 6

Most of the suffering people experience is completely and totally unnecessary. If I told you, you could be free of 90% of your suffering, would you listen? Does it seem impossible? It isn’t. You see, most of your pain is self-inflicted. There is real pain in this life, the pain of disease and death, but most of our day-to-day pain is a creation of our own minds and it is nothing but a figment of our imagination.

You don’t know that you’re the cause of your sadness because you were never given an instruction manual for your life. What is the basic dysfunction in our lives that leads us to create more and more trouble for ourselves and those around us? You were never shown what it is or taught how to fix it and so you go on creating more and more pain for yourself, like a spider getting deeply tangled in its own webs.

In order to understand the source of that suffering, it’s necessary to understand the nature of your mind. What is your mind? At its core, it is a survival engine. Everything that it does springs from this design.

It may be surprising to learn that thinking about texting your friend or taking a bath or watching TV is a survival function but it is. All of these things are designed to keep you from being destroyed or to ensure your continued existence into the indefinite future. You may think “good” and to a certain extent you’d be right. Survival is good and yet it’s the very things that the mind does to ensure your extended existence that also creates your suffering.

You function socially so that you have a support system for your emotions and spirit. You work so you won’t be hungry or thirsty and so you’ll have a roof over your head. You watch TV to relax or workout to give yourself extended longevity. When viewed through the lens of survival all of the mind’s actions begin to make more and more sense. And yet all of the actions your mind takes to keep you above ground have the side effect of keeping you constantly on the defensive, constantly reacting to the world around you. They keep you wound up in a state of anxiety and fear, even when that anxiety is beneath the surface for a time, it’s there, a constant companion.

The problem is that everything the mind does is ultimately a losing effort. Because everything around you is temporal, nothing you build will stand. Everything that the mind constructs comes to ruin. Everything the mind manifests into existence already has the build-in seeds of its own destruction. All things have their opposite embedded in them, like yin and yang. What gives you pleasure will ultimately create sorrow that manifests over time. Even the good things in your life like your children, the person you love and your pets will ultimately bring you suffering through their absence. This the nature of our lives and this transience is the ultimate nature of the universe. All things in the universe are constantly in flux, ceaselessly changing from one thing to another, some of them slowly, some of them quickly. Forms are created and forms are destroyed. Trillions of cells die on your body every day to become food for the tiny organisms that you can’t see, giving them energy and sustaining them on their mission, until they too die and feed something else. Civilizations rise and fall. All things crumble to dust. From ashes to ashes. It is only because we have such a limited window on time, since our lives are so short, that we cannot see that all things come to an end, great and small. No matter how tall a building we build, no matter how great an empire, no matter how profound a religious or political institution we craft, all of it will decay and pass away into the sands of time.

Now, while natural and easy for the universe, it is absolute agony for the mind. It’s terrifying and so the mind sets in motion a constant series of actions and events that consume all of your time on this Earth, all of them designed to ensure that you stay alive forever even though this is impossible. The mind survives by keeping the past alive and projecting what-if scenarios into the future. This is its power and its basic dysfunction. It simply cannot imagine a time when it does not exist and it cannot accept it. How can their be no me? It remembers past pain to keep you pushing forward. It plays movies to remind you of past events. It rehearses scenarios over and over and over, looking for a way to “win” the next argument that you’ve been having for years. It attacks and defends. It stores information, analyzes, and labels. It looks for ways to get an advantage, to climb another ladder socially, or to ensure that a friend continues to think highly of you or it looks to diminish the power of an opponent so it can win the business deal or get more money from a trade against another mind. The mind is obsessed with order and stability. It hoards, struggles, suffers and pushes forward to maintain this at all costs, even the cost of your happiness, which it sees as just another obstacle to be brought under control.

Over the course of human history, the mind’s desire to create a permanent existence and absolute stability for itself has accelerated. Minds worked together for larger problem solving, creating bigger and bigger institutions and more complex systems all around it. So it had to work faster and faster and faster. We’ve created systems that are so complex, so far reaching, so incessant, that the mind can never rest. It is constantly running, attacking and defending, analyzing, storing, labeling. Our mind has even invaded the ancient lands of our dreams where it is an unnatural and unwelcome alien life form. It now needs to run every single waking second of the day and most of the time you are asleep just to keep up, like a computer CPU burning away at 99% all the time. Today, almost our entire modern society is composed of constructs of our collective minds. Our institutions, our jobs, corporations, politics, organized religion, news media, economic systems, much of our entertainment, school, sports and games, all of these things are constructs of the mind and as such they have already built into them the seeds of more problems. These things are like games to the mind and yet now we can’t stop playing. For every problem we solve we create ten more and so we run ever faster to keep up, making ourselves sicker and sicker.

That constant stream of thoughts in your mind is not you. It is your mind gone berserk. It’s running a series of attack and defense blueprints. Your mind is a kind of game simulator, running through imaginary permutations of events with slight variations. This is a disease. Your mind is using you. It’s taken you over. Even worse, it’s gotten you to believe that this is necessary.

The mind tricks you into leaving it running with a clever trick. It makes you think that you are your mind. It tells you over and over, whether you can hear it consciously or not, that you can’t survive if it is not constantly on the alert, looking for danger in the short term and in the distant future. In this way, it tricks you into identifying with it. You think, what would I be without my thoughts? And yet, when you stop thinking for a moment, in the face of danger, or in some perfect moment when everything finally comes together for a brief few seconds, there you still are. When you meditate and your mind goes blank, there you still are. You have not disappeared. You are not your mind.

You probably don’t realize that you’re sick. When everyone around you has the same disease, the disease seems normal but unless you begin to recognize this basic dysfunction of your mind, you will get no rest until the day you die. You will constantly be battling the equivalent of a video game in your head. For example, when you are at a party and worried about something you said or did, or something going wrong, or the mole on your nose, it is not real. Nobody is thinking about you at all and if they are it is only for brief moments. In reality everyone else is trapped in the prison of their own minds as well, thinking about their own problems with money, children, work, school. This is true even for people who appear outwardly very confident and happy.

You mind is a tool that you can use, but it is not the core of who you are. In order to understand why the mind fails to build lasting happiness, you have to realize that the mind is not actually intelligent. It is cunning. When the mind is exposed to the light of your true consciousness it is shown to be but a tiny fragment of intelligence. True intelligence does not come from the mind. It comes from beyond the mind.

To see an example of how the mind fails to build things that actually work towards their ultimate purpose of making you happy, you need only look at television. Television sprang from the mind realizing that it’s working too hard and wearing down it’s host. Television is scheme to try to give you relaxation. Yet observe what happens when the mind creates a solution. It creates something that simply causes it more trouble. The mind designed television to help you “turn off” but in fact the mind does not turn off while watching television, it only goes into a kind of low level functioning mode, a kind of waking sleep. It continues to rev relentlessly, projecting endless scenarios and what-ifs again and again, leaving you exhausted even after you’ve “relaxed.” None of these things that mind built for us are inherently “bad” or “evil” they just cannot bring the true relief that you are looking for. Once you understand that, you begin to rely on them less. You might watch truly great shows on television, ones that uplift or teach you, but you will no longer watch TV just to watch TV.

Now, in order to free yourself from your sickness you need to begin to make gaps in that stream of thoughts. This is most urgent. It is absolutely essential that you begin immediately, with no delay. You should begin now, as quickly as possible and as often as possible. Make shutting off the mind the focus of your life in the near term. It’s only when you find the mind’s off button that you can begin to realize the true joy of being alive.

There are simple ways to turn off your mind. Start by focusing totally on the present moment. Accept completely the situation you are in right now. From there, resolve to go through it. Take appropriate action but create no more pain for yourself. Do not create new entanglements and obligations. Do not say the next sentence in the arguement chain with your lover. Do not dash around the highway madly, trying to get out of traffic faster. Be in traffic. When the cars stop, you stop. When they go, you go. Things become effortless. The next steps to take become obvious, as if the video game is playing itself. You know just when to turn the car, just what to say next.

The second method of increasing present moment awareness is meditation. Meditation is an essential life skill, even if you practice it for only short periods, like 15 minutes at a time. Set aside time. Answer no calls. Go away from friends and family. Sit quietly and rest your mind. Enjoy the silence. There is nothing to do or know or think about.

Another technique is to simply stop what you are doing right now and take a deep breath. In fact, whenever you begin any new activity, getting in the car, typing an email, washing the dishes, pause, take a deep inward breath and focus on this moment. This is what you are supposed to be doing. There is nothing else. The future is not here. The past it gone. As you do this more often, your mind will begin to let you breath. You’ll see that when you need a creative answer it will spring to life on its own and offer you help. It will tell you that it can’t help you if it’s off, but it is wrong. When your mind is at rest, there you still are. After it comes to life and helps you, lay it immediately to rest again, putting it down like you would put down scissors or any other tool.

As you learn to wrangle your mind and your emotions you stop creating problems for yourself. You will not schedule an activity every night of the week anymore. You will not volunteer for yet another party or get together that you don’t have the energy to deal with. You won’t care if you miss one episode of your favorite show. You won’t make a fourth or fifth phone call to a friend that day, knowing you are behind on twenty other things. You will not continue to debate the same points with your lover and think this time for sure they will understand me. The argument is endless. At any point you can put down your problems. They are ceaseless. They will be waiting for you again. You can pick them up again tomorrow but for now, be at rest.

Take a breath.

Embrace the silence.

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