Carrying on from my previous blog…
Around the middle of April, this year, some two months after my awakening in February, I could sense that the exquisite peace I had been experiencing was beginning to deteriorate. Something was going wrong.
Now, talking about a period of a couple of months as defining a sea change of life may seem premature or overly hopeful, but it was my 36th birthday on April 8th, and in all my years, those two months were, without doubt, the happiest I’d ever known.
It was my longest episode of sustained happiness – even though I was working for minimum wage, washing dishes… something I traditionally detested, but tended to gravitate towards because I felt I had limited options in other realms of employment.
Over those two months, every day had been filled with wonder and euphoria, heightened by a sense of certainty that – at last – I’d turned the corner and my life was going to be something that actually seemed worth living for.
Because of all this, when the cracks in my peace started to appear, they were all the more threatening…
I guess I lured myself into a false sense of security on a number of issues – one of the (almost literally) most fatal being that I thought I could drink again, when throughout my life, alcohol had always been my fuel for fuckuppery.
The village I lived and worked in was six miles over a mountain pass from a main road, then another 24 miles to general civilisation, so there wasn’t much else to do of an evening except go to the pub. I didn’t even feel I was succumbing to temptation when I drank, because my life seemed so utterly different.
I didn’t drink heavily and because I rarely drank in the years before, I’d be stumbling merrily home after three or four pints and fall into bed.
But – not that I recognised it, or a lot of other things, at the time – it was veiling the light that had come so suddenly in February. Instead of a clear mind, I felt myself being drawn back to critical thinking and over-thinking. Where things had been reset and I’d been given freedom, I began to create the same old patterns of thinking that I believed so dearly that I’d left behind, and the more I sank into these thoughts, the louder and less escapable the turmoil in my head became.
I was oversteering… trying so hard to make things right again, but in doing so, I was also becoming arrogant and selfish – focussing only on myself and what I needed to repair the constant damage I was doing to myself.
It felt like sliding down the edge of a pit, scrambling and trying to grab hold of anything to keep me from falling in. I quit my job because I thought it was that that was making me unhappy, but the mental kicking I gave myself for that decision – for taking myself away from that place of perfect peace up on the mountain – became devastating.
Unseasonably snowballing through the Summer, drinking heavily, making mistake after mistake and losing the friendship of one of the greatest and most beautiful people in my life, I was standing in the ruins of the memories of the shiny life that was, and it was unbearable.
I’d experienced Heaven on Earth, and there I was in the complete opposite. When I woke, I didn’t think I’d make it through to the next sleep. I didn’t want to. I wanted silence, but not in the way I’d experienced it at Scout Rock.
Yet, in the depth of this enveloping emotional darkness, there were flashes… like something or someone wasn’t going to give up on me, and what had happened earlier in the year was trying to break through the shadow again.
It was like a personal Armageddon… like in Superman III when he battles his evil alter-ego. I realised the fight that was happening inside me, and that I had to make a conscious choice to back one of those sides in that internal struggle.
I could either give energy to the maudlin darkness that wanted depression and, inevitably, oblivion, or to the light that wanted peace and happiness.
I also remembered some words from my friend – the British TV celeb – back in April, who had advised me after a particularly arrogant Twitter tirade that I should read back my words because they were ‘all ego’.
Before then, she had told me about a book called The Power of Now, by a guy called Eckhart Tolle. She said that I’d had a similar experience to him, but – at the time – I barely took any notice, except from a brief check on Wikipedia.
At the end of August, I downloaded The Power of Now on audio book…
Here’s a brief excerpt from Eckhart’s Wikipedia entry:
The awakenings we both went through were almost identical, but back in April I really didn’t give much thought to the rumination of ‘I and myself’, so I didn’t understand the value of this excerpt. I was too clouded by arrogance.
The Power of Now gave me the revelation I needed to recognise where I went wrong earlier in the year…
Around the middle of April, this year, some two months after my awakening in February, I could sense that the exquisite peace I had been experiencing was beginning to deteriorate. Something was going wrong.
Now, talking about a period of a couple of months as defining a sea change of life may seem premature or overly hopeful, but it was my 36th birthday on April 8th, and in all my years, those two months were, without doubt, the happiest I’d ever known.
It was my longest episode of sustained happiness – even though I was working for minimum wage, washing dishes… something I traditionally detested, but tended to gravitate towards because I felt I had limited options in other realms of employment.
Over those two months, every day had been filled with wonder and euphoria, heightened by a sense of certainty that – at last – I’d turned the corner and my life was going to be something that actually seemed worth living for.
Because of all this, when the cracks in my peace started to appear, they were all the more threatening…
I guess I lured myself into a false sense of security on a number of issues – one of the (almost literally) most fatal being that I thought I could drink again, when throughout my life, alcohol had always been my fuel for fuckuppery.
The village I lived and worked in was six miles over a mountain pass from a main road, then another 24 miles to general civilisation, so there wasn’t much else to do of an evening except go to the pub. I didn’t even feel I was succumbing to temptation when I drank, because my life seemed so utterly different.
I didn’t drink heavily and because I rarely drank in the years before, I’d be stumbling merrily home after three or four pints and fall into bed.
But – not that I recognised it, or a lot of other things, at the time – it was veiling the light that had come so suddenly in February. Instead of a clear mind, I felt myself being drawn back to critical thinking and over-thinking. Where things had been reset and I’d been given freedom, I began to create the same old patterns of thinking that I believed so dearly that I’d left behind, and the more I sank into these thoughts, the louder and less escapable the turmoil in my head became.
I was oversteering… trying so hard to make things right again, but in doing so, I was also becoming arrogant and selfish – focussing only on myself and what I needed to repair the constant damage I was doing to myself.
It felt like sliding down the edge of a pit, scrambling and trying to grab hold of anything to keep me from falling in. I quit my job because I thought it was that that was making me unhappy, but the mental kicking I gave myself for that decision – for taking myself away from that place of perfect peace up on the mountain – became devastating.
Unseasonably snowballing through the Summer, drinking heavily, making mistake after mistake and losing the friendship of one of the greatest and most beautiful people in my life, I was standing in the ruins of the memories of the shiny life that was, and it was unbearable.
I’d experienced Heaven on Earth, and there I was in the complete opposite. When I woke, I didn’t think I’d make it through to the next sleep. I didn’t want to. I wanted silence, but not in the way I’d experienced it at Scout Rock.
Yet, in the depth of this enveloping emotional darkness, there were flashes… like something or someone wasn’t going to give up on me, and what had happened earlier in the year was trying to break through the shadow again.
It was like a personal Armageddon… like in Superman III when he battles his evil alter-ego. I realised the fight that was happening inside me, and that I had to make a conscious choice to back one of those sides in that internal struggle.
I could either give energy to the maudlin darkness that wanted depression and, inevitably, oblivion, or to the light that wanted peace and happiness.
I also remembered some words from my friend – the British TV celeb – back in April, who had advised me after a particularly arrogant Twitter tirade that I should read back my words because they were ‘all ego’.
Before then, she had told me about a book called The Power of Now, by a guy called Eckhart Tolle. She said that I’d had a similar experience to him, but – at the time – I barely took any notice, except from a brief check on Wikipedia.
At the end of August, I downloaded The Power of Now on audio book…
Here’s a brief excerpt from Eckhart’s Wikipedia entry:
In 1977, at the age of 29, after having suffered from long periods of suicidal depression, Tolle says he experienced an "inner transformation". He woke up in the middle of the night, suffering from feelings of depression that were "almost unbearable". Tolle says of the experience:
“I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void. I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful.”
The awakenings we both went through were almost identical, but back in April I really didn’t give much thought to the rumination of ‘I and myself’, so I didn’t understand the value of this excerpt. I was too clouded by arrogance.
The Power of Now gave me the revelation I needed to recognise where I went wrong earlier in the year…
However hocus-pocus it may sound… in everyone, including you, there are two ‘beings’ vying for control.
There is the pure, human spirit of you, who wants nothing but peace and happiness and love – real love. This is where the best of humanity comes from. All the truly great things in this world are the product of this pure essence of us.
… then there is the mind, or the Ego.
Your Ego is a very powerful, but very false sense of consciousness. It tries to make you believe that you are it, when it is actually nothing more than a state of malfunctioned thought which enslaves you to it.
Paradoxically, while the Ego doesn’t actually exist, it dominates almost the entirety of human society and civilisation, causing untold pain and suffering to billions of people across the planet.
It will control your life, this… phantom… and in all likelihood, you won’t even know, because you just accept it, and society accepts it as the normal state of being.
The Ego pulls your consciousness to the past and future, but there is no true life in either illusion.
The only place that life exists is right now.
There was a phrase I used to say to myself, usually with a smile on my face, when I was up at Scout Rock. I would look at the world and declare: “My reality!”
It was a statement that affirmed my presence in the present moment; where I recognised the now – and I always said it when I felt that perfect peace that I hadn’t known existed until it was ‘gifted’ to me.
Before I knew anything of The Power of Now, I was living it.
Eckhart Tolle said: "Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life."
Christ said: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself."
The Buddha said: “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”
Les Floyd said: “My reality!”
Weird, eh?
How could it be possible that I would spontaneously come to the same conclusions that these great people did… unless I share the same greatness?
I do believe I share that same greatness, and I believe there are close to seven billion people on this planet who share it… though many remain unaware, for the moment.
All across the world, people are waking up. It seems that every other person I meet, now, has some element of spiritual belief, and if you are doubtful of my words– ask around your close friends and family and you will very likely find someone close to you who is aware of this change that has gone beyond just beginning.
You may be experiencing it yourself, but the recognition isn’t there, yet.
Have you ever said that someone was your soulmate?
If you put that concept into the realm of science and fact, and subject it to the test of physical senses, it is absurd.
Yet, in their arms, there’s an elusive knowing that goes deeper than thought.
And this ‘greatness’ isn’t religion… it’s the timeless foundational energy which religion rose from, as a way of trying to explain.
One of my best friends is an atheist, but he lives and treats people like a Zen master would. He’s probably the most in-tune spiritualist that I know, yet he doesn’t believe in it.
I’m not religious. This is about being human and the awareness of real life, and there are too few people in the world who truly know that experience.
Anyway…
I could blather for an age, but from now, in this blog, I’m going to move away from theory and start documenting the practice of living in the moment, and the benefits that come from it.
I feel I’m going to be able to teach people, but I’ve learnt the lesson that I can’t break through brick walls – and nor should I be able to.
If you have any questions, then email me at:
LesFloyd@gmail.com
If you want to laugh at or insult me, or suggest good psychiatric care, the address is:
mailer-daemon@yahoo.com
Tee-hee.
Happy New Year to you all! 2011 is going to be pretty special! ;-)
