Once again, I have let eons slip by between updates.  Let’s see, I’m in Korea with 2 months to go before heading home.  Keith and I have released The Unshow International 2 (and currently working on number 3).  Oh yeah, and I’m engaged.

Yes!  Engaged!  Can you believe it?

At the top of Mt. Bukhan, I popped the question and made her cry again, but this time the good kind of crying.  We are planning to head back to Australia together in early September.

But actually this has been a plan more than a year in the making.  When I arrived in China, I knew I had left something precious behind in Korea, and no matter how fun and awesome living in Shanghai was, I couldn’t escape that feeling.

All I can really say about the matter is, man do the years fly by.  Here I am on the verge of 30.  Me.  30.  How did that happen?  I have come a long way from 20.  Then, if you asked me about marriage I would’ve said that I didn’t plan on getting married.  I always wonder what would happen if I talked to my 20-year-old self.  Would I teach me all the valuable lessons or would the younger me lecture the current me about my lack of idealism?

Stepping toward 30 reframes your life, like it or not.  The equation changes, the factors change and shift their weights.  Things which weren’t important are important.  Things which were, aren’t any more.  Youthful idealism turns into mature pragmatism before you even really notice.  Yet the equation balances itself.  We find a higher plane on which to dwell.  We color our worlds with shades of nuance we were unable to see before.  I heard it said once that our eyes yellow as we age turning our world a different shade.  Is there also a yellowing of our intellects?  Of our sense of certainty?  Of our own perception of the meaning of life?

The trick is to perceive 30 as though you were really 40, looking back.  What lessons may I learn from that future me?  My thought is that the answer would be the same as my message to 20-me:  Be true to yourself.  It has worked well for you so far.

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I have always had a keen interest in psychology.  Motivation is a curious psychological phenomena.  A person may struggle to get off the couch and exercise, yet that same person will jump up for a piece of cake.  The expense of energy to get off the couch is the same in both cases, but the perceived reward determines whether the action will happen or not.

It’s like money.  Some people will hesitate to spend money on a new pair of shoes, whereas they will happily sink their money into a gadget they could probably live without.  Marketing is based on creating a desire and making it appear like a need.  After envisioning an enriched life with the new product, we feel loss when we go back to the real world.  That loss creates a buying urge.  That buying urge lasts momentarily, but it’s why telemarketing and infomercials do such great business.  They create motivation by promoting a reward.

I am motivated by dissatisfaction.  I may have a streat of obsessive compulsive running through me.  It’s controllable, but I can definitely feel it’s pull.  Once I am aware of something better, I am consumed by the desire to get it and implement it in my life.  This is useful and a huge burden, for I spend a great deal of time being intensely dissatisfied with the way things are.  For the things that are easily changeable, like my hairstyle or clothes, it’s a useful way to motivate that next haircut or shopping trip.  On the other hand, when it involves the superfluous, like my desktop wallpaper or defraging my computer hard disk, it just wastes time.  But when it really hurts is when I confront things which are nearly impossible to change, for that is dissatisfaction with no payoff and no viable chance of resolution.  It’s an emotion only inches from despair and feelings like these things can make life miserable.

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

This is the mantra for Alcoholics Anonymous and it’s wisdom can’t be overlooked.  Yet it’s the last part, the wisdom to know the difference which stumps me.  Some things are impossible and we can easily know they are impossible.  But life is filled with people who accept too many things as being impossible, when in fact they are possible.  Often, we can’t know what’s possible or impossible until we try.  Edison had 1000 failed attempts at making the light bulb, Churchill lost every election for public office until he was 62, Sigmund Freud was booed off stage when he first presented his ideas, Michael Jordan was kicked off his high school basketball team, Henry Ford went broke five times before he succeeded and history is filled with scores of other such tales.  Click here if you’d like some more examples.

Van Gogh sold only one painting during his life. And this to the sister of one of his friends for 400 francs (approximately $50). This didn't stop him from completing over 800 paintings.

I have lived by the saying:

EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE

because I would rather attempt the impossible and fail than to resign myself to accepting that some things just can’t be done.  It’s an exciting outlook and it’s the only way to achieve the impossible.

So, I feel motivated to change the things which I feel could be improved because I believe that everything is possible to change and make better.  I am motivated to do so by my strong feelings of dissatisfaction.  Seems good?

Then why am I not in the gym?  Why am I not well-versed in the Korean language?  Why don’t I keep my bike, room or shoes neatly cleaned and polished every day?  Because the dissatisfaction I use as a motivator is not motivation enough in small doses.  Eventually that dissatisfaction may grow until I force myself to really do something about it, but then I’ll only do it until the feeling subsides and stops bothering me.

If we motivate ourselves through negativity, we are creating a place for negativity in our lives.  The things which we want to get done rely upon emotions of guilt or sadness which we seek to avoid.  It goes without saying that this is a less than ideal state in which to live.

If we spend our lives backing away from negativity, we are facing the wrong direction and have no hope of finding and catching our dreams.

The solution then, is to transform those negative thoughts into a positive vision of the future.

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I recently discovered a personality flaw I have and I’m wondering if anyone else has it. I wouldn’t consider it a huge problem, only that it may well manifest itself in other ways as it did last Thursday on the bus.

The queue for the bus outside the Namdaemun market

I was heading home from school. I’d taken the bus at Gwanghwamun and there had been no people on it at the time, so I secured a good seat. The bus traveled past Seoul Station and Namdaemun Market before heading up the hill towards my place. At the market, the bus always fills up with old people. Namdaemun seems to be a market aimed at old people exclusively, as there is nothing there that anyone under 50 would be caught dead wearing. The curious thing is, most of the old people who board the bus there aren’t carrying anything. Perhaps it’s just a place to go to hook up with other old people. Who knows, but for the sake of the story let’s just take it that there were a good deal of old people on the bus this day.

Normally, in polite social circles, a young man should get up and let an older person sit down. This much is common knowledge. But there is a certain amount of leeway here. For age is such a relative thing. Someone may look sixty or seventy, but could actually be much younger, or a much younger person may have difficulty standing for some reason of health or circumstance. You have to make a quick decision as to their relative age and need. So here I was, enjoying my seat, but weighing up the woman who had shuffled into my vicinity, who seemed about 50, give or take a decade. I must have pondered this for a minute or so because I noticed we had already ascended the hill and were about three stops from mine.

Now here is where I feel my defect in personality shows itself. I call it a defect, maybe it’s too strong. Perhaps it’s an advantage, a knack for slicing through the bullshit. However it may seem, I’ll admit to feeling a little guilty when I caught myself thinking it. For up to this point, I had purely honorable intentions. I assumed that my desire was to help this old lady sit down and take a load off. Wasn’t that my desire?

I started to get up when another thought hit me. If I was to get up now, I would naturally move toward the door. The woman who took my place would assume that I had vacated my seat due to the fact that I was getting off. She would not notice until later, maybe never at all, that I had in fact got up early on her behalf. I would be giving up my seat and not getting any recognition for this fact.

Ok let me stop you right there. I know, I’m a monster. Giving up your seat to a person older than you is not something you should seek praise for. But think about it. When you do give it up you do it in an obvious way don’t you? A little bow, a gesture, maybe you add “please, sit down” and smile. Why did you do that? It’s not necessary. Except that it makes you look good. If you were truly selfless you would get up, pretending that you had somewhere else to be and let the seat speak for itself.

The typical everyday scene inside the 402 bus

That was my dilemma. On the one hand she was old, on the other hand not really that old. She had just got on, I was soon to get off. I’d give my seat, but would not get credit even if I did the song and dance because too much time had passed already. I was in the no-man’s land of etiquette. Life isn’t always clear cut. Sometimes you have to make a choice you’re not proud of later. In the choice between getting up with no credit and enjoying my seat, I chose the latter.

Feel free to tell me what a bad person I am. I can’t help but agree. But next time you’re giving up your seat for someone older, giving your little bow, smiling your sympathetic smile, ask yourself how much of that was really necessary and how much was just for that little rush of self-indulgent pride you got when they thanked you. Just how selfless are you really?

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I’ve always had a series of nagging questions lining up in my brain, such as “Why aren’t you a good runner?” or “Why don’t you have a regular job?”. I’ve wanted to change in the past, but somehow never got around to it. Well, “Why don’t you blog regularly?” is another one which is right up there. You may have noticed that sentiment running through this blog since its inception in 2004. I’ll get there, I really will.

Nevertheless, it seems headway is being made on other fronts. I’m running fairly regularly and am feeling fitter. I have gone from almost dying running up a hill, to running 5.5km in 37 minutes, to running the same course in 25. It’s still pretty slow, but I don’t stop and walk any more and progress like that is a great feeling.

I’m also rising earlier and more consistently than I have ever done before. Of course, these are normal things that normal people in normal jobs do, but for me, having lived a life of 11am awakenings, brunch at 1-ish followed by a few hours of glorified babysitting as an English teacher, followed by a dinner at 10 and eventual sleep at 3am, it’s quite a shift. I teach and get respect, I work legally with a visa and I even spend time preparing for classes.

It’s also been a little thorn in my side that I can’t speak Korean. At first it was understandable, I knew a little, enough to get by, enough even to joke around. But now it’s no joke. Having spent a good 4 years in this country and still be unable to put a sentence together is really getting embarrassing. So, of late I have dusted off the various books I had previously bought in various fits of studiousness and cracked them open for a peek. When I find some time, I may even enroll in something.

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Talking about the nature of God first makes sense because to understand God we have to first understand ourselves and our place in the universe. Now, the word God invokes many different ideas. Quite often we think of the Christian God who is like a grumpy old man who doesn’t like to be bothered and who rules with an iron fist. There is a slightly different version of this God in the New Testament compared to the Old Testament though either way he assumes the identity of a wise, old, occasionally wrathful man. I think this idea is rubbish. I also think that any variation on the God-is-a-man concept is rubbish. Not only that, the idea that he is watching over our every move is also rubbish. Finally, the idea that he is in fact a he is, um, how do I put this? Ah yes, rubbish.

Okay now that I have made every major religion my enemy I will continue and discuss what I feel is the true nature of God. To be honest it’s really hard not to use phrases like “God is infinite”, “God is everywhere” or other such clichd lines. This is what many religions currently say. I do imagine that if you sat down with a random holy book you might see lines to this effect. Why then, if God is infinite as they profess, do they limit the concept by giving him a finite identity. To see the truths in current religion, you ignore the fictionalized stories that happen in all of them and see their common thread. People have limited God in order to understand it which has anthropomorphized God into an all-knowing and controlling father figure. However our spirituality deserves more than just stories about an imaginary man in the sky.

We all long for a spiritual connection of some kind. While we can feel that spiritual connection through friendship, love, parenthood or art, we also feel a need to define our own place in the universe. We long for a spiritual connection which illuminates our role in existence. It’s not self-aggrandizement where you feel everything you do is vital to the function of the universe. Nor is it a feeling of resignation where you wait out your short life for an impending doom. Rather, your understanding of God helps you enjoy this moment you have and all that exists alongside you. My religion is about taking joy from your existence and being completely comfortable with your amazing (albeit, short) journey through this world.

God is the energy of the universe. We are all balls of energy interacting and acting of our own accord. We are on a planet which contains a million forms of life all doing their own thing trying to survive long enough to replicate and nurture their young into another life cycle. We are all driven by the life force. We do what we do to continue this life force. All the emotions, all the fears and desires are manifestations of this force, propelling us through our lives. You can look back on all of history, all those thousands and thousands of generations of people before you. Each one of them felt like you feel right now. Each one of them felt like they were the most advanced thing on the Earth. But where are they now? What did they do to help you? Will we really remember them?

Our ancestors, despite their feelings of grandeur, ultimately died. However they all died completing their mission which was to replicate, to breed new life to replace their own. We are all here for that one simple reason. And yes, we feel that we are the most advanced things to ever hit this planet as will our children feel and as will those earthlings thousands and thousands of years into the future. We are a flash in the pan. For a brief moment in time we will shine our lights brightly into existence and then we’ll be gone. All of those ancestors that went before us finally learned that one ultimate truth. Once you are able to accept your place in time, only then will you be able to fully savor every last moment of it. We remember our ancestors in the way that we remember the steps and rungs on a ladder we are climbing. They got us this far and we appreciate that. We are not really sure where we are climbing or why we want to climb so badly, however we have have the desire deep within our souls that we should just keep going up. Why we are doing this nobody can know, nor should they lose any sleep wondering about it. We will play our part in whatever purpose it is, allowing the universal plan to continue. If we exist according to our programming, we will get pleasure for fulfilling our part. No pleasure in life can replace the joys of courtship, love, sex, raising a family, working productively and seeing our children grow to do the same, for the undertaking of these acts is the true purpose of your life.

Enjoy this gift and savor each stage of your journey without guilt or regret. This is the central tenet of my religion, the name for which I will give Etheism, the belief of God as a universal force of energy.

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I just found God. No kidding. Im a believer now. After all those years of eschewing the idea of a divine presence, I have finally seen the universal light of truth. What would cause such a transformation, you wonder? Well, exposure to the universal light of truth, pretty much. What is this universal light? How does one see it? Have I gone completely bonkers? These questions will be answered in the following few paragraphs, blog entries and random drunken mumblings.

Firstly I will state from the get-go that I am starting my own religion. I dont want you to misconstrue my newfound faith as to be in any way related to any major religion existing today. I suppose elements of all of them are true in some way, but I think they completely misconstrue the truth and build so much bullshit around it, that you cant really see it anymore. Maybe people wanted more out of their religion, more meaning out of their existence, so religions grew to fulfill this need. Maybe they lusted for more power. Either way, they have been distorted so as to make the truth impossible to see.

The honest truth is that the actions of your life dont particularly matter. From the perspective of the universal consciousness, your life matters an amount which is infinitesimally close to zero. You can be good and bad, the UC pretty much doesnt give a crap. To kill someone, for example, is against the universal plan, but matters so incredibly little as to be almost insignificant. In fact, it may even be a part of the plan. As human beings, it makes no sense to be terribly concerned with the details of the universal plan, as you have been programmed to enjoy your life and in so doing, play your role in the UP. However, being human you have a consciousness that demands to be aware of whats happening to it, so humans have longed for this spiritual meaning to life, to be aware of the plan that exists for us. We have in the past turned to religion to satisfy this need, but as these religions were so full of hogwash and illogicality they stood opposed to the truth we had learned with our own eyes. Religion, in its role of tour guide to Eternity, has failed miserably. Instead of helping us to observe our own place in the universe and of the meaning to our futile lives, they elevated their own status to be much higher than it should be, to control people to behave as they wished them to. Power made them greedy, those religions, as they longed for more and more control. Whatever truth started out in them, by the time religions had taken over peoples lives, there was little truth to be found at all. This is why I must start my own religion.

To be honest, criticizing todays religions is almost a waste of time. There is so little to believe about them that people need to study it in order to see how it might be true, go to church every week and recite prayers to enforce it. If you really need to reinforce truth, then maybe its not so true to begin with. Truth is a light which shines upon us. Yes, finding real truth requires a search, but once found it should make itself forever known, imprinted on your brain. Truths as elemental as 1+1=2 or the difference between hot and cold are, once learned, never forgotten. In the same way, the Universal Truth is something that, once learned, is not easily forgotten.

The plan is something I need to talk about. The plan is the goal that our lives contribute a part to. All of us are helping it along. I want you to imagine you are God for a moment. You look out over Creation and see all the different life-forms blossoming, burgeoning their existence into the universe. As it all grows, you feel that the winner will grow to benefit further your plan. Right now, the humans are showing promise, but will the dominant species be the virii, which eternally replicate and never destroy each other, as the humans are prone to do? You feel no special longing for either side to win, just to watch as it unfolds before you. You are happy to let the creatures develop, all along playing their Darwinian games of natural selection until they have the capacity to join the communication of the UC.

No doubt there are other civilizations out there also competing their way to universal significance. Some may just be starting out, others may be far more advanced than ours. Looked at from Gods perspective, we see them as eternally engaging in the battle of survival. There are many species which are not even nearly going to come close to winning. One of the branches of life forked out and made a bird called a dodo. That branch had hoped to be the ultimate species, fighting for domination of the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, but alas, it turned out to be a really stupid bird. As a result, its line ended. As humans, we are living out our lives and we think we are developing quite well, but this may not always be the case. Another life form may swallow us in pursuit of their own destiny and that will be our end. However, as we advance, we will be open to broader and broader forms of communication, using methods previously undreamt of. Eventually, we will discover other species. Of course, they may be a species of giant walking plants, who communicate through molecular emission and transmission. In which case, well think twice before making the movies about cross-species romance. Species are out there, its just a matter of finding them.

Imagine a caveman. He is living in a cave on the outskirts of the city. He has never ventured far out of his cave and the town locals have never risked getting close to him. The caveman is unaware of the world. There is, of course a wireless internet signal running through the air around his cave. The humans in the town send this wireless signal out. Theres also a cell phone network in the area. If the caveman had a computer or a mobile phone, hed be able to contact the humans and access all their knowledge. However until the caveman builds the computer and mobile technology, he will be unable to bridge that gap. You may ask, what about more traditional forms of communication, such as smoke signals, mirror flashes or plain old-fashioned shouting. From a universal perspective this amounts to asking, why dont the aliens send us information through more traditional means, in ways we could understand? The answer is the same for the townspeople and the caveman as it is for the aliens and us. That is, they cant communicate with us for the same reason we cant run computer networks on a system of smoke signals: the mechanism for communication is simply inadequate. What seems like an impossible task for our imaginary caveman, that task of hooking in to the wireless signal of the town, remains our very real task of finding out how to plug into the universal network of truth. Its almost an impossible feat, but its one we must never give up on. A major part of my religion is learning how to connect to truth and be open to receive it.

to be continued…

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