Today’s topic. “Your one true being your soul is grateful for what is.”
As it is with all of life, the best way to understand anything is by breaking it down to one bite at a time. Then step back and observe the finished jig saw puzzle.
So, “Your one true being your soul is grateful for what is.” let’s break it down to:
- “Your one true being”
- Your soul
- is grateful
- for what is.
Your one true being… that’s a beautiful thought. A one true me. I love that idea. My one true me. But then, what about the other me’s. The physical me, isn’t that real too. Or the super coach me? Aren’t they real, true, beings?
When I played footy, I loved the feeling of running out on the field for the start of the game. Clean boots, clean sox, newly washed club jumper, the smell of eucalyptus oil on my skin, mouthguard ready, ball in hand and the crowd going nuts. I felt like a million bucks running out onto the field. We’d kick the ball around, sprint as a group and warm up. I felt so great, like a champion. Powerful. And then the opposition would come on the field, and I’d start to see the size of some of those apes, and they’d shout things, and suddenly my feelings fluctuated between doubt and fear and champion and hero and ambition. I guess you could say, my one true being lasted right up until just after we ran onto the field. Running out on the field, was great, the rest was a battle.
I guess that’s what my one true being is. The me I am when I see or feel so much joy that I forget to be me. In those beautiful moments when I look up at Sagamatha (Mt Everest) – a thousand times a day it always makes me forget myself. Or when I look into my partner’s eyes and feel so connected, or watch the kids playing with lego. The storm outside our home today and all night has been wild and standing on my balcony I forgot myself for a moment just feeling the turmoil of it. I admit that when, in the pouring rain and wild wind a woman walked past in thigh high black boots, a black g-string pants, topless and with a leather jacket over her shoulders, I was not being my one true being, but it soon, or she soon, passed. And the wind took back my true being.
I wish my dad had taught me what my one true being is because those are the moments I searched for in all the wrong places and really, forgetting myself in moments, ironically, is how I found myself. Surfing a wave, sitting by a camp fire, delivering a keynote, working with a beaten woman in Canada, all the travel, all the hotels and all the study and rehearsals, just led me to moments of purity. If I’d known that sooner I might have celebrated more of the moments and worried less about the bits in between.
I learnt something too, about these moments, something spooky. Are you sitting down? Best to be sitting down. I’m robot man doing this transcription for Chris, I’m even sitting down for it…
At the end of our life, when we are in that last breath arena of time, if someone asked us to remember our life, that memory would add up to minutes at best. Those minutes would be a collection of those moments in time when we ironically, forgot ourselves. The moment the baby crowned, the moment the perfect wave, the ski slope, the first kiss. We operate each side of a constant line, and each time we cross that line, between order and chaos, we turn up, 100% turn up, and for a second, forget ourselves and time and space disappear and we are in that one true being moment.
So much of life can be wasted hunting for excitement either side of truth. Seeking adrenaline, chasing rainbows, worried about money or approval or being nice or doing what makes pleasure. But those hours and days are wasted, we forget them, they are emotional moments that we think are real but the only real is our one true being experiencing the space between order and chaos. Love.
For the first 35 years of my life I chased love, I chased those moments and accidentally found many just through collisions with life. Then, I learnt the secret of designing and constructing those moments so I had more and more of them. Instead of wasting time running this way and that, I learnt how to arrive on the line by choice. My life has been a mirror of those moments ever since and I have very little ambition to waste it chasing the emotional highs and their correlate lows, worried or chasing rainbows. That’s one of the most important things I teach, innerwealth it this.
Turning up in life is arriving at these moments 1,000 times a day. It’s not a myth. The myth is that you can sustain the moments. If you could string a day of turning up 100% together, you’d be dead. Growth, evolution happens at the border of order and chaos. And just like the ocean tide we ebb and flow either side of the line, the only question is what we celebrate. If we are stuck in narcissism self obsessed and keen to be at high tide, or wanting life to be exactly as we expect and living at low tide, then, every time we pass across that equator of presence, we hardly notice it.
Turning up is actually life and the thing most of us (at least until I was half way to here in years) think is life is the opposite, chasing rainbows, looking to live at high tide or wishing life was always at low tide, all calm and exactly meeting our narcissism of expectations. Life is neither high or low tide and wishing it so is the equivalent of wishing the ocean to be without tides and that would kill every fish, every human who walks the earth. We move from high to low tide, vacillate between high and low but our objective would be better placed, if we wished to cross the median more often, turning up, at the border of order and chaos, is actually where we arrive at what I call, our one true being, the rest is noise.
PART 2 of 4. Your soul
On the front cover of my book, Innerwealth, is written the byline, Putting the heart and soul back into work and life. I was discouraged from using this. The publisher, Wiley, argued that it’ll compartmentalise the reading audience, but I argued that it’s better to do that because the content of the book is even more confronting. The whole idea of the book for me, was to stamp a stamp on the world that read, NO BULLSHIT.
That No Bullshit was a reaction I admit, but the process of writing that book which took thousands of hours over 3-4 years, cut the reaction out of me and turned the whole experience into a time of complete presence. I loved every hour I wrote, and equally loved the tens of thousands of pages I wrote and dumped in the rubbish. Through Zen and Sport I’d learnt how to sit and type and let something extraordinary happen. I call it soul, but it might be delusion. Who knows?
I learnt that nothing worth repeating comes from me. It only comes through me. I don’t take credit for example of these words now flowing on this blog. I let my mouth move and dictate or my fingers move and just watch it happen. I get out of my own way. The same thing happens in coaching sessions where people are shocked to realise that there’s something extraordinary going on far greater than two people having a chat. Something comes through me and my job, I believe at an ego level at least, is to get out of the way so it can happen.
If nothing worth repeating comes from me, then my purpose and work and love and life comes through me. And if that is the case, what do I call the origin of what comes through me? I can call it the universe, but the universe is big and I am small so I can’t conceptualise an ocean being passed through a tiny funnel. But I can imagine a soul. I can imagine a place I am connected to that is outside the orbit of earth, somewhere where 24 hours are not a day, and 365 days are not a year, somewhere beyond that time space. Somewhere like the edge of our solar system. Our solar system, the sun is the centre of it, has earth and other planets going in orbit. But there are billions of solar systems out in space and they all go around their own sun. They rarely collide and the suns stay a fixed distance away from each other. There’s a magnificent order in the apparent chaos of the stars. I see my soul sitting on the magnetosphere of our solar system, just like we watch a child on a merry go round. The child is going around and around in their own world, their own solar system of orbit, subject to the g forces of the merry go round while we, the temporary soul, stand back and watch.
The soul has no time space measure. And therefore has no emotion. And that is what I connect with when I say “nothing comes from me, only through me.” It’s the music of the spheres. My soul speak.
But it could be all wank. Who can tell? But it’s not wank to me.
3. Is GRATEFUL
is there is one word my soul and I have argued about since time began for me is gratitude. I have considered so many variables in understanding what gratitude means that I nearly went nuts. What? Gratitude for whales dying, gratitude for the world trade Centre coming down? This word gratitude argues between my humanity and my soul.
at first I shied away from the definition of gratitude from my soul and preferred to define gratitude by my humanity. If somebody stopped a crime I would be grateful. If somebody committed a crime I would be ungrateful. That’s understandable because if I get grateful for crimes maybe I’ll attract one. It’s a very complicated word although we throw it around. Oprah Winfrey seems to think it’s the easiest thing on earth but she defines gratitude as being thankful for the good things. But at a soul level can we be grateful for things that defy our humanity? And why would we do so?
well, if you’re going to tune into the idea that nothing good comes from you only through you, then you have to clear the pipe between your soul and your mouth. What blocks good things coming through you and makes things start to come only from you is your ability to be grateful for the things that defy your humanity. And those things are called your judgements, your emotions that follow from your judgement, which, in summary is called your ego.
so there is a potential conflict between your ego which is designed to make your physical and emotional life enjoyable, and your appetite to have some form of contribution on this earth that is not from this earth. So you can see when I wrote the Innerwealth book there was a conflict between marketing of the book and getting people to pick it up and buy it, and the message.
I understood that the Bible has many layers. To the desperate poverty stricken individual it becomes an instruction book similar to a kindergarten child’s book that tells us not to throw stones at glasshouses. There was also a deeply embedded message that was only available to those who were privileged enough to have the decoding formula. Tom Hanks played the lead in the Da Vinci Code. If you search Wikipedia they are really really careful how they describe the movie like this – “The Da Vinci Code” is the fictional story of a conspiracy — perpetrated by the Catholic Church and ongoing for 2,000 years — to hide the truth about Jesus.
Note the strong and highlighted emphasis on FICTIONAL STORY. And it is in essence a fictional story but underneath that fictional story is an element of truth.
when I started writing Innerwealth it was my goal to create this layered wisdom. The first 12 months of my writing in this way was a waste of time and in the end I just decided to let the information come through me not from me and let it go. I still think to this day this book will stand the test of time and it’s still being sold. The whole book could be condensed into one single topic and that is how to bypass your ego and connect to the true meaning of gratitude. At a soul level, gratitude has no Boundry and no limit based on our humanity. That separates those who are bound by religion and cultural Memes from those who want to get past that and deliver what is called a sense of purpose in their life.
the belief that nothing comes from us that is worthy of us taking credit for leads us to the question of how to deal with the difference between gratitude from the ego for what we think is good and right, and gratitude from the soul which is beyond that and beyond human comprehension. The same argument goes for love itself. There is love that is deserved and worthy of the judgements of the ego, and there is an unconditional love which is way beyond what the ego can comprehend. To reach the state of unconditional love which is in fact total presence, we must be able to understand and respect the difference between ego, our humanity, and the soul. Most people don’t have the appetite.
to create a temporary bridge between the ego, our humanity, and the soul by transcribed the universal laws by which the soul can be known into the universal laws of nature. This is an attempt to create a bridge. On the one hand we know humanity, our emotions and our appetite for pleasure and righteousness, on the other hand we cannot witness the soul but we can observe nature. And this is why I share universal laws of nature rather than universal laws of the soul. At least we can observe nature and nature, is not affected, by human emotion, ego, humanity or any other such expectation. For me this was a temple of truth placed right in front of our nose.
environmentalist enter the picture and start to accuse humanity of destroying nature which is just another way of saying, humanity governs nature. Which, at a cosmetic level, is true. But, at a deeper level, humanity and nature are inseparable. We, humans are nature. We are all subject to the same universal laws.
LASTLY, 4. for what is.
There are three key layers to the ego. The past the present and the future. The past can be measured and if necessary, and if a person is willing, changed. It is just a matter of storytelling and perspective to see the past as we wish it and as would be best for us and our humanity. The present, is here right now can’t be changed, it’s happening. The future has not arrived yet and we can construct the future that we are inspired to live, and through the manifestation process create it.
because we have memories of the past and ambitions for the future there arrives emotion. We have guilt about the past in that it has not always been as we would have liked it to be and therefore we arrive in this moment carrying dirty laundry and baggage from the past (judgement) and we have fear of the future. So what happens in the present moment is really hard to experience for exactly what it is.
for example I might burn my finger on the toaster. If I’ve done that before and taken precautions not to let it happen again and I do it again I have both a memory of having done it, and a promise I made myself not to do it again that will affect how I talk to myself as I find ice to temper the pain. I might also have a game of golf or tennis or squash to play and now this toaster burning hand experience will bring up anxiety as to whether the burn will affect my performance. This is called fear. So it is really hard to experience life as it is. Our baggage impacts how we interpret the present.
there have been many books written about the power of the present moment and this is complicated by the fact that we must also hold a vision of the future. The power of the present moment is how we heal ourselves and turn up in a meeting. The power of the present moment is how we be narcissistic as well. The power of the present moment will make us obsessed with pleasure if we are not careful. The power of the present moment can make us disrespect the long-term impact of short-term behaviour. So although these books written about the power of the present moment are fantastic they also carry with them potential problems.
in order to respect all this it is necessary to create a rather simplified version of this complex infrastructure about living. The best way I have found, using nature as a guide, is to be thankful for the present as well as ambitious about the future, and recognise the stories of the past can only be grateful ones.
But it all hinges on the now. The present. If we are not grateful for life as it is, we are always running away from it. Running toward something, trying to be somewhere else, trying to fix things and therefore, by rational awareness, ungrateful for what is.
If we don’t appreciate things the way that we have them we will never get them the way that we want them. Or spoken in more positive language “if we appreciate things as we’ve got them, we will get them the way that we want them.”
Taming the ego
Appreciating things as they are, is the ego taming statement of life. Wanting the weather to be different, wanting not to be sick, wanting not to be stressed, wanting not to have problems or wanting not to be sad, this is the ego in full flight. Again, remembering that what blocks the pipe that needs to be clean in order to live the purposeful life, of nothing comes from me only through me, is the ego.
So, the motivation to find gratitude for what is, as it is, is never self satisfaction, never fulfilling expectations, never pleasure, never being right, it’s always purpose and wanting to do something that stands the test of time. Something that has soul embedded in it. Something that is on the line rather than high tide or low tide obsessed with adrenalin or peace.
With Spirit
Chris
That is the end of this episode.
