For some reason a question began to form in my mind as I woke up this morning and consciousness began to return. The question is: “What am I most thankful for as I look at my life?”

Just for fun, here’s my answer.

I am thankful for the meaninglessness I felt as a young man

While I wasn’t thankful for it at the time, God knows, I am very thankful now for the profound sense of meaninglessness and alienation that I felt as a young man.

I had a sense that something hugely important was missing from my life — and from the world around me too, come to that — but what was it?

After all, I had nothing to complain about in an outer sense. I was healthy. I had loving parents. I had a good job as a reporter on a big London daily newspaper. I even had a small sailboat, and a nice girlfriend.

Something huge and unknown was calling to me

But something huge and unknown and unprecedented was calling to me and I had to make a decision. Was I going to follow this inner urge even though I didn’t know what it was or where it would lead? Even though I might never find it or it might destroy me?

Or was I going to push it down out of sight and out of mind and live a “normal” life like my parents expected, pretending to myself I never heard this inner call coming from I knew not where?

It was my own true Self calling to me

I know now that it was my own true Self calling to me and it had its own agenda and intentions for me. It was the truth of my own being calling to me, and its message was: “Be free.”

I was a confused, naïve young man grappling with feelings and compulsions I could hardly begin to understand and I was being called to the greatest gift that life has to offer any of us — the gift of true freedom.

So I gave up my familiar life — my parents and my girlfriend too — and traveled to a far off country called British Columbia where I didn’t know a soul and had no particular prospects at all that I knew of.

But what joy I felt as I honored the impulse of my own spirit and boarded a ship called the ss Homeric, which took me from Southamption to Quebec, after which I rode a train across Canada to BC.

Life in a “new world” hasn’t always been comfortable, of course. But I have found that life is trustworthy.

I have discovered that if you trust the truth at the core of your own being,  in its own way and in its own time it will reveal to you a new world of true meaning and happiness that I believe is our true destiny in this world.

As you look at your own life what are you most thankful for?

If you wish why not try answering this question for yourself? Perhaps it would help open new possibilities for you. I’d love to share any thoughts you may have on this theme.

You can create a new life at any age

In a way this post ties in with the online course I’m working on, entitled “How to look (and feel) 10 years younger in four weeks: The true promise and potential of aging.” 

Because the truth is you can create a new life for yourself at any age – whether you are 21 or 91 as my friend Steven Aitchison put it in a recent email.

I’m happy to say I’m coming along very well with this course and expect to offer it in just a few weeks. 

Meanwhile what are your thoughts or concerns about aging? What questions would you ask a loving deity if you had the chance? I’d love to hear from you on this theme and your input would be most helpful to me. Bye for now and blesssings to you.

Picture credit:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4026/4399140037_92dc54372d.jpg

What are you most thankful for when you look at your life? is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age

“The eye must be something like the sun, otherwise no sunlight could be seen; God’s own power must be inside us, how else could godly things delight us?” — Goethe

I love these words of the great German philosopher, Wolfgang Goethe. They stir my body and my soul. I lived for 34 years in a spiritual community in the interior of British Columbia, and I have never forgotten one of the things my mentor said during a presentation: “There is no god external to ourselves.”

Everything changes when we begin to listen to our own divine presence.

This presence is very practical. “What is the right thing in this situation?” It is concerned with what is useful and creative in the present moment just as it is. It’s not lost in communion with the Angels –though there may be some of that going on, I’m sure.

This morning, as I was eating breakfast, I happened to look out the window and saw our neighbors across the street loading up their SUV, obviously getting ready for a trip.

“You need to go over right now and let them know about our coming move to Denver,” truth said. I put down my knife and fork, called JoAnn and we went over together to tell them.

I was a young man of 23 working as a reporter on a large daily newspaper in London, when one day — out of nowhere, it seemed — the notion came to me: “You want to find the meaning of life – leave everything and go to British Columbia.”

What? Give up a promising career, say goodbye to my girlfriend, and abandon my family simply because a vague compulsion rose within me to go to Canada?

But how thankful I am that I followed that whisper within.

Sometimes people are frightened of stillness, or they think, “Why, stillness isn’t anything. God preserve me from such emptiness and boredom.”

But unless we are still we will probably miss the impulse of that divine presence that alone knows what is truly wise, what will truly bless our own life or the lives of others.

The belief that God, or Being is separate from us is a myth deeply entrenched in all of us. Perhaps it was inevitable back along the way. But truth is crying out in a loud voice these days for the myth to be ended.

Listened to your inner voice lately? is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age

Many years ago, when I was a young reporter on the Daily Colonist in Victoria, British Columbia, I went for a maiden cruise on a small sailing boat I had just bought. Because I was a very spiritual person, or thought I was, I had named my boat “Vision.”

The little sloop was 21 feet long, and had a cabin and a valiant but unreliable 4hp inboard engine. Being so spiritual, and also a poet, I tended to look down on material things. Not boats, mind you. I loved boats with a passion. But I looked down on engines, certainly, and being quite ignorant about anything mechanical, it was always a moot point whether the engine would come through for me in a pinch or not.

The first day of my sail proved to be quite intense. It was my own fault, but late in the afternoon, because of poor planning and zero knowledge of navigation, I found myself trying to negotiate a narrow pass between two islands just as the tide was turning against me. A strong wind blew up, just to add to the fun, and I felt a twinge of trepidation as I looked at the chaos of choppy water and swirling eddies to which I had committed myself.

I was concerned whether my little engine would keep going, and I was concerned whether it had enough power to get me through the pass. I kept looking anxiously at a fixed point on shore to see if I was making any progress. Often it seemed to me I was standing still – if not going backwards.

But eventually I did get through the pass, and as evening was falling, through no foresight on my part, I reached the safety of a beautiful little cove.

There was no other boat in sight as I left the open sea behind and ghosted across the velvet surface of the cove. It was like being in a cathedral. There was but a whisper of a breeze, and as I looked around me at the tree-lined shores and at the stars I felt enveloped in a cocoon of peace unlike anything I had ever known.

It was an experience that seared into me like a burning flame and I knew in every fiber of my soul that my quest for a deeper meaning and purpose in life was not foolish.

I knew I must keep going no matter what others thought, or what the world said. And I knew, most glorious of all, that I really could trust the truth. I would be provided for. No matter what happened, the hand of peace I had touched in an unknown cove in British Columbia would be with me always.

Touching the hand of God one quiet night is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age

Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet of India, who died in Calcutta in 1941 at age 80, has been a constant companion and inspiration ever since I first visited India many years ago. A new friend gave me a copy of one of Tagore’s best-known works, Gitanjali, “Song offerings to the creator.”

One of the poems I love best opens in this manner: “The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.

“We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by.”

The poem describes how after a while the traveler grows weary and lies down to rest, while his companions laugh at him in scorn and hurry on their way, crossing “many meadows and hills” and passing through “strange, faraway countries .“

“All honor to you, heroic host of the interminable path,” the poem continues. It ends with this glorious verse: “At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile. How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!”

What I love here is the simple but eloquent reminder that the bliss of eternal love, the bliss of God, the bliss of being is not something for which we have to struggle, nor is it something that takes a long time to reach. Not at all. We can touch it and know it in a moment.

This moment. Any moment.

I have been having a few troubled feelings the last day or two. “Is my blog really going to work? Will enough people be interested in what I have to say so that it will succeed?”

I thank God that somehow, during the past two or three years of a rather unusual, but blessed life, I began to realize, as the traveler in Tagore’s poem realized, that what I had been seeking all my life is already present with me. It is the truth of my own true nature. It is the stillness of my own being, already perfect, already free, “standing by me, flooding my sleep with its smile.”

This stillness that I can feel in my physical flesh is my own stillness. It is my own true presence, not affected by time, and not worried by any troubled thoughts and feelings that are part of our present human experience.

The idea that it is hard and difficult to find “enlightenment,” whatever that might mean to us, is deep-seated, but it is a delusion. It condemns us to the “interminable path” that Tagore described. Of course, those who chase material comfort and well-being also tend to find themselves on a search that never ends.

Being is timeless. Being is endless.  It is who we are, and it is with us through all the tribulations of our lives. As the warrior-poet David wrote in Psalm 23, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”

In her lovely book, The Diamond in your Pocket, the American-born teacher Gangaji, http://www.gangaji.org, puts it this way, “The ever-present possibility in any moment is to wake up to the truth of yourself as consciousness. That waking up occurs in the mind’s surrender to silence.”

Get off “the endless path” — and be free is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age

There is a gracious hand on our lives that is in no way interested in destroying us, but in leading us step-by-step to freedom. To serenity. To truth, and peace, and the fulfillment of our mission in this earth.

There is one key requirement though, I have found, for this process to work as it should. I must be willing to keep on keeping on even when it seems obvious something or someone is trying to destroy me.

I spent 36 years of my life at a spiritual community in the interior of British Columbia. I thought my life in this community was going to last forever. The leader, whose example of true character, divine character, in action drew me and others to the community in the first place and held me there, almost despite myself, warned of “drastic changes” coming. But I guess it just seemed rather theoretical.

Well, guess what. It wasn’t theoretical at all. Drastic change did come. The leader died, as people tend to do. My own wife died, too. And at the same time somehow, the money and effort and sense of purpose that had supported the community — and caused it to flourish — began to dissipate.

I found myself with no alternative but to leave, one cold, fall morning, drive to Vancouver and start a new life. I had no material resources. The community had been run on a cooperative model, so there were no savings in my pocket. I had been a reporter and editor, later an author of sorts — but I was now 63. What did I have to offer the world I had left as an idealistic young man bound and determined to find the truth? Not too much, it seemed to me.

My despair was very real, very profound. The best I could do, on a rainy, miserable day in Vancouver, was walk through Chinatown and buy a Chinese wooden sword as a symbol I was not going to suffer defeat without a fight.

What have I learned, from that and other trials and tribulations? I have learned that the timeless words of William Cowper, “God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform,” are true, and very beautiful. And I have learned that instead of judging the events and people that show up in my life, it is much better to stay open to the possibility there is magic just waiting to be revealed.

Just the other day, I received a comment to one of my posts that at first I wasn’t quite sure of. It seemed a little off the subject. But then I realized it wasn’t off the subject at all, but was simply offering a different perspective — a valuable perspective.

I have learned, most of all, that this gracious hand of which I speak has but one purpose, to lead us step by step to an ever increasing experience of freedom — the freedom of our own immortal reality that already exists at the core of our being.

I have learned that there will always be new dimensions of joy and purpose and peace to be discovered that might have remained unknown and untouched if change had not broken down the habit-forming walls of my previous existence.

Let us rejoice in that gracious hand of love and truth that rests upon each one of us. As long as we are willing to stay in the game — it will never let us down.

There is a gracious hand on our lives is a post from: The Happy Seeker - Living with grace at any age