mindfulness

[Introduction to the book WELL]

This book must come with a warning.

It is a warning based on what people embarking on courses or conversations or books about the nature of the self can find themselves saying: 

‘I came here to feel better. But actually I feel worse: my sleep is terrible / my anxiety is increasing / I’m more depressed than ever / my physical complaint is intensifying / the suffering is worsening.’

And that, of course, looks like a failure of the course provider or author. The …

[excerpt from WELL]

This is an invitation to the absolute and infinite.

Maybe you are old enough to remember a time when television was something that began and ended.

Programmes stopped at midnight. And began again at 9am the next day. And sometimes there was no television in the afternoons. When there was no television, the screen displayed the test card or lines or static.

Not only was it tightly limited in time, television was of course also limited in scope.

In the UK, for example, unt…

The public speaking phobia continued through different jobs and roles. I scraped through the presentations I had to do feeling absolutely sick. 

At the same time, I continued exploring what the mind is, what reality is, what the idea of ourselves is. 

One day, I knew I was going to do a talk in my house for a small group of friends. The thought came in with dreadful inevitability. I felt sick at the idea of it and yet I knew it was going to happen. The same tensions aro…

[excerpt from GAME]

Now to make The Game ultra-interesting, there are at least seven billion other games going on at the same time.

Each of these games has a main character. We’ll call these other games ‘Their Game’. The other characters are the stars of Their Game. The whole appearance of Their Game is created by their settings. Nothing to do with anyone else.

These other games might intersect with The Only Game That Matters, which is of course the Game of Self. How it looks to us. We’ll cal…

[Excerpt from SANE]

The body exists in a swirling maelstrom of data. Data is gathered and transmitted through sense organs. 

My son had a friend to sleep over. At 1am they woke me up saying that the friend was feeling anxious and wanted to go home. They told me this happens often on sleepovers and that he wakes up, feels frightened and the host of the sleepover drives him home or his parents come to collect him. He said, ‘I’m too anxious Clare, will you take me home?’

Fear.

Sometimes I look at my image in zoom meetings and see a reflection that is so ugly I can barely look at it. The thought of people seeing this is…

You know how when things get started and it’s amazing and it carries on and it is even more amazing and you’re thinking ‘keep going’ and then suddenly it stops and you’re a bit, ‘…???’

You know that?

That’s what we’re talking about today.

And we’re talking about it in relation to thought, free will and reality.

Ah. Sorry. 

If you’re still with me … here’s the thing:  once we get started looking into the nature of thought and what it means about who we are, we can’t stop until we go right on…

[Excerpt from SANE, getting real with reality]

The screenwriting expert Robert McKee, who has contributed to over 30 Oscar-winning films, talks of naive writers, who, knowing nothing about the category in which they are attempting to write, stumble blindly around in it, inadvertently trampling on the unspoken conventions that hold consistency and meaning for the viewer.

He compares them to the nervous writers, on the other hand, who are so scared of doing something wrong that they obey, withou…

Getting REAL with the play of life [excerpt from GAME] 

This book is saying who you think you are is not real, that ‘self’ is only a made-up character in a made-up game. 

And it is saying that apparent reality is only ever a game resulting from the settings of that character. 

That is quite some statement to make. 

It sounds a bit insulting actually. A bit dismissive. Well actually seriously, rudely, uncaringly dismissive. 

Because we might, at this moment, be thinking of who we are, all th…

In 1964, Abraham Maslow published a book called ‘Religions, values and peak-experiences’. 

It was his attempt to take these “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality” out of the domain of the exclusively religious and into the realm of the universally human. 

That was his focus in 1964 when religion held a far greater prominence in Western Society. 

Now, almost 60 years later there is a different entanglem…