I have just spent 4 days amongst Israelis, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists breaking bread, conversing, playing music and singing together in harmonious peace under the magnificent sky of the Sinai desert in Egypt on the borders of Israel and Jordan.
Being surrounded by silence, peace and all of nature’s elements, sleeping under the moon and starlight, it was once again reaffirmed to me the very nature of my work and the roads I have travelled and hells I have endured to get me where I am today.Being away from technology and living amongst people from varying cultures and religions has indeed taught me much and enforced the truth that technology unfortunately clouds us, constantly distracting us from our higher selves bombarding us with materialism and feeding the ego a constant buffet of lies.
I believe Mother Teresa said it best when she said:
“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.”
Though I am by far not religious or faithful to any one faction, I do believe that spirituality is universal and less limiting, more accepting and carries a greater understanding of the collective-centric. I do not personally believe in personifying God as God is energy, the very energy of life and love and not a judge or jury or great commandeer of our lives…
I have personally stopped watching television in 2005 after my first divorce. TV was nothing more than a haven from the truth, from real life and from connection with other our and other souls… we now live in a world where thinking, analyzing and questioning is becoming taboo whether hidden in the wise brainwashing of marketing and media in first world countries or blatantly in your face corruption in third world countries but make no mistake about it, it is there whether cleverly disguised and sold and bought by the public or forced down our throats.
I have a close friend who as soon as he wakes up in the morning has his radio on, television on and computer on before lighting his first cigarette. And he falls asleep the same way… the constant distractions keep him from having to face his mundane life of robotically working from 9 to 5 for someone else, contributing nothing of value to himself or anyone else in the grand scheme of things for that matter and all his hard work is going into making someone else rich while he does make a decent salary… the problem is, he is working 50 weeks a year in a lifeless job in order to be able to escape that reality he created for 2 or 3 weeks of sunshine and relaxation on some beach outside his chosen country. Then it is right back to the mundane torture of everyday living a meaningless existence filled with "stuff".
I personally know successful actors, actresses, rich businessmen, etc. and I watch them self destruct at the deepest of levels while fighting and literally arguing for their painful realities. A few of these particular people wake up in the morning with a glass of vodka orange juice and a cigarette for breakfast yet by all intents and purposes, they seem or believe or are believed to ‘have it all’… wealth, fame, material possessions beyond most means… yet you look inside their eyes, their souls, and you find a vast abyss of emptiness. An emptiness they constantly try and fulfil with yet more technology, more material goods, bigger, better ‘things’… and there is where the ego’s biggest lie resides… in the false belief that the more
1 has, the more
1 gains, the better off
1 is… notice the lonely number
1… some of these people live in multimillion dollar homes. Homes of which they’ve never even visited half the rooms of in months or years perhaps… yet they are there… filled with every possible gadget and latest technology and most, admittedly so, are surrounded by false friends who no longer would be around were they to all of a sudden lose these fortunes…
Another friend of mine unfortunately cannot even comfortably hang around with a group of friends he introduced me too when the conversation goes beyond stand up comics, quoting movies and songs or the latest technological piece of equipment he can purchase and add to his collection… when the conversations begin to reach greater depths, he is the first to turn his back and bury his face into the internet and YouTube living vicariously through other people’s successes. The minute the conversation in the room silences for a second or two, he literally jumps at the opportunity to show us another stand up comedian on YouTube. Yes it is funny stuff, yes I do enjoy laughing as laughing is one of the greatest healers and soul cleansers but to use it to hide from our higher self is in my most humble of opinions, a crying shame.
Another good friend of mine who is in his early 40’s wants to get himself a motorcycle and has been urging me to join him in this venture… though the thought of owning and riding a Harley is definitely ‘inviting’, I can think of much better and more fulfilling things to do with my money and time at this stage of my life than to boost my ego with a Harley Davidson bike. Not that there is anything wrong with owning a Harley, not at all, but as long as these things are not compensating for our higher purpose.
It’s unfortunate that most need material objects, styles, and the like to define who they are as indeed it does to a certain extent define
1, it defines
1 to a large extent as insecure (as without these things
1 would feel a lesser man/woman), and as empty (as these things artificially and temporarily fill a void) and do not; as
1 would believe or have the ego make us believe, that we are indeed “better, happier people” with these things.
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara said:
"The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this."
I couldn’t agree more. And one needs to look deeper than the socio-political-economical side of it.
The black and white truth of the matter is humanity literally only needs 5 things to survive more than happily on this earth and these things are as follows:
1. Love.
2. Shelter.
3. Food
4. Air
5. Water
Period. That’s it. That’s all we need. And I stress the word “need”… as everything else anyone can ever think of is no longer a need but becomes a desire… as needs are necessary for survival and fulfill the higher self and desires are necessary for the ego.
Does this mean all should live in poverty along the lines and life of Mother Teresa? Perhaps. Perhaps not. That is a personal choice but divine, pure and unadulterated fulfilment comes from the bettering and improving of another life. As the good mother Teresa once said, unless love is among us, we can kill ourselves with work and it will only be work, not love. Work without real love is slavery.
“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.” ~ Mother Teresa
And unfortunately the belief is that the more we have, the more we will be loved and unfortunately, many have subscribed to this false truth and are out there collecting and working to collect more and more ‘things’ in the hope of finding that love, that acceptance but the artificialness of it all still leaves them with a void inside, a bitterness of sorts and an underlining anger which more often than not result in some form of violence and abuse weather to themselves or towards others around them, weather they are aware of it or not.
I know this because I have lived this. I lived it for a long and painful time and I couldn’t fathom that the pain was self induced, was indeed, my doing and not the world’s, not the powers that be, not those that I believed spited me in whatever form I deemed… and now that I have lived through it, made my realizations, came to terms and became fully accountable for my own choices, my own life and all of my mistakes, failures as well as successes and fulfilments, I have found myself again, I have found myself amongst the rest of us, humanity… a whole… and sadly, those that are still stuck where I was cannot see this reality yet, perhaps some never will and I fully understand it because I too once was them and fought it tooth and nail.
But the truth now is, I am no longer enslaved by my anger and my anger no longer permeates hatred for I once hated venomously many a folk and many a things… and this hatred no longer exists inside of me, I can honestly say that now and feel it with every fibre of my being. And since this shift was made, which is still an everyday battle, make no mistake about it, but one that I am winning much more often than not for we are human and we will forever be plagued by a duality of right and wrong, light and dark, higher self and ego…. It is the ones we feed that will thrive and govern our lives, there will always be a choice and we will always make this choice.
The Sinai desert has reinforced much of this for me, the elements of water, wind, sun and earth surrounding me was replenishing beyond belief and one cannot fathom just how much the everyday rat race of the city truly damages the soul… it is the yin and the yang of life and the balance must be maintained. Thank you Sinai, nature and universe...
Peace out folks… for now… ;`)
