A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment

by Tim Shields

I heard Dharamsala is a great place for artists, creatives, and expats to do their thing.” “Where’s that?” I said as I popped the cap off a perspiring beer. “It’s in the Himalayas. It’s where the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government are in exile.”

It was only through this exploration that I believed I could uncover the source of what I had come to know as my “soul ache.”

While I am aware that everyone suffers from bouts of loneliness, what I’m describing is not your everyday, run-of-the-mill, generic loneliness. I’m talking high-end, designer, haute-couture loneliness. And I can tell you this: It’s been with me since my first moment of awareness when I found myself standing in my crib, screaming out into the void, wanting so desperately to be heard.

As my thirty-sixth birthday drew near, I was scared—scared that the loneliness, this soul ache, was going to consume me. Although I knew not the source of the loneliness, and although at times I thought I had outrun it, I was still aware of its presence. I sensed that it lingered just beyond the “veil.”

Today I intend and create: 1. To be of service while traveling. 2. A windfall of money and a new MacBook Air. 3. A quiet mind and a peaceful heart. 4. The right people to show up to get me where I need to go. 5. To surrender fear, move into trust, and see beyond the veil.

“Ah yes, the hero’s journey,” she said. “Excuse me?” “You are leaving home, setting out on a quest for something. Do you know what it is you are seeking?”

Pave your road with intention, surrender expectations, stay awake, and let the path take you where it will.”

a child who was afraid to express the fact that he was afraid.

There is a light within you, the same light that is within all of us, and if you serve that light you can’t go wrong. Just use your feelings as a guidance system. Move toward that which brings you joy and expansion, and leave behind that which causes you friction and contraction.

“If I may give you one more bit of unsolicited advice, remember that if you focus on nothing, it is nothing you will receive. Pave your path with intention and gratitude. Then get out of the way and let goodness happen.”

“It’s Hindu philosophy found in the Upanishads, which are ancient Sanskrit texts. The body is not our real essence. Atman is our real essence. Atman is the soul, the true essence of each living thing. Brahman is the world, or cosmic soul. You and I, we’re both Atman and Brahman. It’s like this. Imagine you and I are molecules of water in the ocean. For a moment, as waves crash together, we splash through the air. That moment is our life here on earth. But then that molecule returns to the whole, the ocean, to Brahman.”

“You see, most of us are locked into one story of our lives. Maybe it’s a story we learned on the playground or from our parents, but if we can’t transcend that story, we get stuck. When we realize that the story doesn’t characterize our lifestyles or our adult selves, we’re free, free to be the architects of our own lives, using our thoughts as the building blocks of our external experiences. But the powers that be try to mold and brainwash those thoughts into conformity. It’s bullshit.”

“Your consciousness will create the story and send out the signal. Your feelings will be like an antenna that pulls a story toward you, and your body will carry you to that new reality. Then one day, after you’ve been putting that thought into the field over and over, new realities will show up in ways you never could have imagined. And you say to yourself, ‘Holy shit! I’m not just the writer of my life, I’m the motherfucking action hero!’”

But when you’re traveling, become open to possibility, and you surrender your human instinct to manufacture and control your experiences, these types of encounters are magnified.

I want you to write down five things you’re grateful for and five things you want to create and bring into your life. Do it every day. Be specific, be playful, be creative, and have no attachment to what you write. Simply write it down, close your notebook, then keep your eyes open as you go about your day. This exercise is going to land you in new places you could never have otherwise dreamed. There’s a certain power to writing out your intentions.”

“You’re going to find that the things you want to create are going to become the things you’re grateful for in the future. Remember—and this is the most important part—surrender the how. If you try to predict how your intentions will come to fruition, you’re limiting the creative power of the universe. You’re not making room for the unknown. Just create and get out of the way. Let the greater intelligence organize it in a way that’s best for you.”

I imagined myself falling more deeply into the protective folds of the great mystery so that when either the grandest or most mundane ideas took form, I would be equally amazed and surprised. I focused my attention on opening my heart to let more possibility, gratitude, and love seep into my being. It meant surrendering any fear that stood in the way of having an extraordinary life. I needed to start thinking bigger, creating bigger, and removing all fear-based limitations—the requirements to truly test my experiment in surrender and creation.

Sitting on the mountain, it occurred to me that traveling was a lot like writing. When you sit down to write, you have no idea where you’ll be when you get to the end.

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I remember standing there for some time looking at the reflection before me because I had no idea who the person staring back at me was. Who was this stranger, and what was going to become of him? Would I ever know him completely? Would he ever be able to shed the soul ache—that unnameable, unknowable inner sadness that seemed to have no source? Would he ever be able to shed the heavy weight of existence that was dense, physical, yet intangible? Was that inner sadness something that was a product of his nature? Or was it something born of nurture, passed on to a highly sensitive kid through the DNA strands of his parents and ancestors? Perhaps the soul ache was engendered in that first moment of self-awareness, when consciousness determined it was separate from all that is. Would this person in the mirror ever know what was behind the curtain, the veil?

“You are a guitarist, no? It’s like using an electric tuner for your guitar. You make adjustments until the needle, which operates on vibration and frequency, comes to center—not too flat, not too sharp. That is the place from which music, harmony, and rhythm become ordered into song. This internal vibration, or energy, is unique for everyone, like a fingerprint. It is the key to life. When you align your inner self to this energy, you are brought into alignment with your soul’s purpose, and the universe organizes itself around you.”

Most of our thoughts are unconscious programs subject to the laws of attraction. Like attracts like. What we send out is returned to us in form and matter. The secret they don’t teach you in school is that our thoughts are powerful forces that can at once be incredibly creative or destructive. This is why the ancient masters and saints said that developing the mind and controlling the ego should be our highest aims.”

The more I tuned into this universal energy, the more I let it flow through me unobstructed, the more I believed it was making me magnetic. This function of the magnetism was to attract the experiences I wanted to create.

In the darkness of the Indian night, I felt their light supporting me, holding me in perfect alignment to where I was supposed to be. I looked up at the stars, felt tears of joy welling up within me, and for an hour spoke aloud each one’s name (at least as many as I could envision), offering them a prayer of gratitude and prosperity.

I was coming to know my place in the mystery through the experiential discoveries of the heart, not through the intellect. Living, being, loving…that was the mystery. I was not separate from the mystery but an indelible part of it. Whatever the mystery was, perhaps my role was to let it experience itself through me.

It is the law that all beings must go through periods of uncertainty and disorder to create space for transformation. It’s inevitable that somewhere along the journey of life, everything we know shatters and we’re forced to figure out how to put the pieces back together.

If only someone had explicitly told me that it is the nature of nature to organize chaos and complex s...

In my lowest moments, if I could have just tuned my senses to a higher frequency, I could have avoided a lot of pain by realizing that the most challenging times of my life coincided with guidance toward a new path.

“Can I ask you something, Pranav? What do you ask for when you pray?” “Why would I ask for anything? I already have all I need, and whatever else I do want or need, Shiva already knows. So mostly I just say hello and ask how Shiva is doing. I really don’t need to ask for anything because I know Shiva is working for my highest good. Instead I try to find tranquility within me because that is the place from where the voice speaks. All of life’s answers can be found in the silence.” Just like JD’s message of stillness.

“A man came by and saw her on the ground outside her house. He offered to help her find the needle, so they looked all over the grounds outside the house. Alas, it was nowhere to be found. ‘Where did you lose it?’ he finally asked her. ‘In the house,’ she replied. ‘Well, then why are you searching for your needle out here?’ he said. ‘Because it’s dark in my house and I’m scared.’” Pranav paused as I looked on in curiosity. “You see, Thomas, the point of the story is that we all know where to look for the answers, but most of us are afraid to go there.”

“The search for self and the exploration into the self is the journey each of us should be undertaking. Life happens from here to here,” he explained, pointing from his left temple to his right. “It all exists in the mind, then it is brought forth into existence through language. The world occurs to us through the marriage of language and images. Anyway, I want to hear more about this grateful intention journal you spoke of last night.”

“What’s that all about?” “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I guess like anyone I just want to know that my life means something, that I didn’t just waste my time walking the earth searching for something or killing time.”

Unfortunately, we keep learning the same lessons until we get it right. Only then can we graduate to the next level. Every time we don’t get the lesson, we repeat the grade, and every time we repeat the grade, learning the lesson gets that much harder. Eventually the lesson becomes so painful we have no choice but to get it.

You know how you have compassion for that young boy you just spoke of? And you know how this experience of travel is bringing all these new revelations and expansions? Remember these joyful feelings and meditate on them when you are in your sad places. Meditate on them in silence as if you are searching for your sewing needle. Move into those spaces of joy and liberation. And you have to forgive yourself for your mistakes and your feelings from when you were younger. A boy can never possess the knowledge of a man. It’s a law of nature and time. You are here right now, right where you’re supposed to be.”

“Well then, Thomas, let us raise our glasses. To the love she created and her love that endures,” he said.

All great, successful people have three things in common. One, they find time for themselves as a ritual. Two, they have a good core, whether it’s from family, parents, a foundation in God, or a handful of key supports. And three, they always have a sense of purpose and a vision. They look within to define themselves instead of looking outside.

Happiness has nothing to do with riches, wealth, or fame. Happiness is peace of mind. If you don’t have peace of mind, everything else in your life is out of balance. Achieving our goals is great, but it’s a lie, a dirty, filthy lie bought and sold to us through media.

“The climbing, the going, the doing, the experiences, the struggle…all that in the name of making the dream happen, that’s where true freedom exists. When you have a big dream, Thomas, somehow you never get tired because the dream is so big it keeps you going. That’s

When I stopped directing my attention outward—when I stopped searching, struggling, and fighting—a new potential was born. In the act of surrender and trust, what I needed to flourish appeared.

He wanted to teach them the art of fighting, which not only required skill but discipline and improvisation. “Like any art, you learn the foundation, and when you have mastered the forms, you throw away all the rules and make it your own,” he said.

I’ve always had an inner vision, this feeling that I have to get it out of me and into existence on the canvas. If I don’t get it out, it just eats me up and I sink into a depression.

Being an artist was not just a way of being; it was a way of action. You can’t call yourself an artist if you’re not actually practicing your art.

Today I intend and create: 1. To fall more deeply into the mystery. 2. To continue to surrender the parts of myself that no longer serve me. 3. To trust the creative process and to trust that when the time is right, the story will reveal itself. 4. To have spiritual experiences. 5. To feel the love, presence, and guidance of my parents.

Being a solo traveler with unlimited time and without an itinerary, I didn’t always know where I would find myself the following day. When I did decide on a direction, it was a rare event if I did any research about where I was going. This meant that each time I arrived in a new city, the same conversation went through my head: Oh my God. What have I gotten myself into? What am I doing here? When I arrived in Hanoi, it was no different. All I wanted to do was camp out in my hotel room for two days and feel good about the decision, but inevitably the guilt of being on the other side of the world, compounded with the undeniable desire for connection, found me wandering the city’s avenues, alleyways, promenades, and eateries.

Intention had pulled me into my future, into the present moment. I was no longer in transit toward my dream; I was living my dream, the dream of that seventeen-year-old self.

I celebrated a victory for the seventeen-year-old who dared to dream bigger than his provincial New Jersey life, the kid who dreamed of getting paid to travel the world, to feel the grit and dust of foreign soil on his face, to lie upon the sandy beaches of other continents, to taste the planet’s briny oceans, to experience the mystery through the point of his pen.

In my imagination, I pulled these harmful questions of uncertainty, insecurity, and distrust from my heart, closed them in the palm of my hand, and threw them off the port side of the vessel. The questions no longer held any purpose in my process of becoming, so I surrendered them to the peaceful bay and said a prayer of gratitude for the propellants they had been. I gave thanks for the shape they had given the current iteration of myself as an adult, a traveler, a human, a seeker, a spirit, an artist, and a writer.

With this new information, and in light of how successful my experiment in surrender and creation had been so far, I was coming to an empowering and terrifying realization: I am more powerful than I ever imagined, and my ability to create—or lack thereof—has always come from my thoughts.

The more deeply I surrendered to the mystery, the more I moved from a state of solid to liquid, from force to acceptance, from struggle to surrender, and from resistance to flow. I thought of Minna and how she said it took her most of her life to l...

I realized I was in the midst of transformation. This is what it felt like in the chrysalis. I was beginning to not only believe but also feel in the core of my being that something else was in control of my life, that I was being taken care of and guided. Even though the path or the answers wouldn’t necessarily a...