Blog

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

This is the saddest chapter of the book to write. Because Identity Wants are unrelated to current reality, because they are unfulfillable, because they look vital to survival they can result in a whole spectrum of harm to our own bodies, to other people, to animals, to nature.

There are no limits to the damage and devastation human behaviour can wreak in an attempt for the individual mind to find peace and wholeness. This is what we call having a lost mind: a mind th…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

I recently watched the streaming series Love is Blind. For those who haven’t seen it, the participants interact with one another from individual pods in which they can hear their date’s voice but not see them.

Lines like those above were said at some point by pretty much everyone in the pods. They ‘fall in love’ with each other never having met, never having worked through any real-life situations. As long as they make each other feel special, then bingo! They get e…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

It’s fashionable in coaching circles to focus on the ‘Why?’ inside the want. The ‘Why?’ relates to a personal, driving motivation. The motivation might be through the roof, but it is a survival motivation. The attention is not on the project. It is on trying to secure an individual Identity that doesn’t actually exist.

It’s a great idea to expose these personal ‘Whys’. It is not a good idea to take them seriously, as though they are something that can ever be achieve…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

The other day a client said to me, “I just want to understand myself. I just want to be true to myself.” It led to an interesting conversation about what the self really is and what it means to be true to it. What are we? Are we the beliefs about what we are? Are we the behaviours, actions and words? Are we our habits? Our values? Our opinions? Are we the experience of being us? Our tendencies and preferences? Our personality?

It is amazing how through this work eve…

In their book, Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal calculate that the industry of ‘shutting off the self' is worth $4 trillion a year. They include all the activities, substances, experiences and practices that ultimately have the result of shutting down – even if only momentarily the burden of self-focus.

As they pointed out, many of these are ‘impulsive, destructive and unintentional’. They include activities such as legal and illegal drug taking, pornography and gambling which can, o…

Nothing to be gained [excerpt from HOME]

The dilemma for the individual is not that the individual can't get what it wants - the dilemma is apparent individuality.

Tony Parsons

I was on a non-duality retreat and the teacher began by standing up and saying “There is no point in your being here……It doesn’t matter if you come to any of the talks. There is nothing whatsoever to be gained. You might as well be outside in the gardens or in your room.”

There is absolute honesty in this because it i…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

Unachievable. That sounds a contradictory title for a book about getting whatever we want.

We’ll hear it many times throughout this book. Unachievable Wants are a dead end. A brick wall. These wants prevent the experience of what is wanted from ever being achieved. Unachievable applies to any want that aims to secure or avoid a particular experience of being ourself. These wants are Unachievable because, no matter how much it looks like it, the separate entity that t…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

Have you ever stressed about getting enough sleep before a big next day and found yourself lying in bed wide awake?

If so, you understand the power of the mind to create worrisome projections, doom visions of the future, vulnerability and insecurity, imaginations of failure and negative opinions of others. You also have seen how these mental phenomena can make it temporarily impossible to experience what is there naturally and easily – the ability to fall asleep.

T…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

We all want to feel happy, peaceful, whole and secure. This book is saying those are Unachievable. Hang on. Don’t throw the book away. Unachievable does not mean the things we are looking for can never be experienced. In fact, it means the opposite. It means happiness, peace, wholeness and security are here already. They are what we are. Because they are what we are, because they are here already, constant and never-changing, they cannot be achieved.

The attempt t…