I started my blog as a means to independently promote awareness of my upcoming fantasy novel, How to Become a God, something I’ve been working on for an embarrassingly long time, has been the subject of lots of rejection along the way, been ripped apart, scrutinised, rewritten, scrutinised some more, ripped apart again, restructured, deleted, added – anyway – could go on all day with that - I am where I am, stubbornly plodding away and ever closer to the next step. Anyone that has been following my blog for more than a month may have noticed ‘the mind’ cropping up as a common theme with the #freeyourmind in accompaniment. The reason for this is that, in my novel, (and admittedly this is born from a personal belief that's difficult to explain) becoming a god is synonymous to achieving the ultimate goal with the mind, akin to achieving enlightenment so to speak. Therefore, conclusively, in my world, belief system and novel, a god is akin to an enlightened individual and it is a connection with, let's call it a 'higher power' than can enable man to do great things - if Jesus did in fact perform miracles I'd suggest it was his connection to said power that allowed him to do so - and I don't care if you're Christian, Buddhist, Muslim or an Atheist, you must have, at some point, felt an undeniable, omnipresent energy. No? Yes. You know that rising feeling that fills you up when you witness something remarkable... The Sistine Chapel? The Niagara Falls? Love? Now take that feeling, with concentration you can increase it's intensity, then imagine you have the power to carry it with you always...
I had an interesting conversation with a girl recently about the theme of enlightenment in my book and she posed the question that, if this is a spiritual journey... is the use of the word supernatural correct when explaining the abilities achieved? Good question. What I've done is taken my belief, grossly exaggerated the abilities that come with enlightenment through the magnificent medium of fiction, I say exaggerated, but if someone presented me with an idea that in X years, humans will once again evolve, this time into ____[Insert made up word here]____ I would, in a likelihood, be drawn into this Darwin-esque theory. The Wachowski's touched on this with Sense8, homo sapiens evolving into homo sensorium, and for a more mainstream example, the X-Men franchise is built on the mutation of DNA. When I look at the future of mankind I see something so beautiful... I see limitless potential and so should you. Twelve thousand years ago it is estimated there were four million humans in existence, six thousand years ago it was seven million, two thousand years it was 170 million and today rounding 7.5 billion. what this tells me is that mankind's desire to live is greater than it has ever been. 7.5 billion minds working to build on what the previous billions of minds left us over the centuries... the millennia. I repeat. I feel mankind has unlimited potential - where potential can be measured as a product of time against belief and hard work. (Come to think of it, you could probably use this equation for any achievement. The invention of electricity was a product of time, belief and hard work. Usain Bolts 9.58 record, time x belief x hard work etc. etc.)
In the earlier days of my blog I often used the hashtag #sufferingiseverything – I initially got a bit of flak for this and with hindsight its as you would expect, there is an association that perhaps I was undermining other people's experiences and of course, not everyone overcomes their hardships leading to tragic ends. And so a natural question stems... namely, who am I to talk about enlightenment? I am, in short, a nobody who’s failed way more than he’s succeeded. My negatives in all likelihood outweigh my positives. I can be impulsive, unpredictable, explosive, brash, self-centered, self-absorbed and a bunch of other adjectives starting with the prefix 'sel'. So perhaps a good question is, how do we measure a person worth listening to? Money? Power? Heart? Experience? I guess depending on what we want will depend on who’s autobiography we are attracted to.
I’d say think of it like this, when your friend comes to you for relationship advice, no doubt we’ve all been there, you’re strangely a master at counselling the rational, measured approach rather than the all-out-guns-blazing-blame-game path your friend had been dying to go down ever since he/she brought the problem to you. Now flip the situation on its head and it will be your friend counselling you that very same advice. Conclusively, experience gives you, to an extent, knowledge on a subject, and we are good at giving advise whilst ignoring our own.
So #sufferingiseverything – what does this mean? And why do I think it is so important in training of the mind and reaching the ultimate goal? I'm sure this is self-explanatory. Whether we admit it or not, we learn more from losing then we do from winning. In fact, in winning weakness beckons, the fire dims, desire is replaced with contentment or arrogance and the drive to maintain and replicate what made you win in the first place mutates. Think about the victims of victory for a moment, fictional and non-fictional alike. Scarface - Jerry Maguire - The Egyptian empire, leaving such a mark on society that discoveries are still being made today, is conquered by the Romans, The Roman Empire is conquered by Germanic tribes. Spain rose and fell, Portugal, The British Empire, Hitler's Germany. Fun fact? At one point The Roman Empire stretched literally from, the western point of Spain, the southern point of Morocco, through Turkey, going as far as modern day Saudi Arabia before imploding. Mental. Over a millennium later and Europe is still stubbornly divided into 50 countries. The most important example here is Jerry Maguire, who overcame his spectaular fall to rise and find true happiness.
#sufferingiseverything because that is when the mind is challenged, that is when the mind is able to learn, overcome, then evolve. The Matrix touches on this concept beautifully when Agent Smith is trying to break Morpheus:
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your "perfect world". But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So, the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from."
[Insert sunglasses emoji here - I am no doubt a product of the Wachowski brothers, now Wachowski sisters. They explore themes like suffering, human connection, growth, reincarnation and enlightenment and I'm obsessed with them all, especially human connection]
I change of heart has literally just seized me. The tag #sufferingiseverything can be very misleading. Haha, that's funny since I spent so much time trying to explain it. It just needs to be tweaked... Suffering is not everything, it is the overcoming of suffering that matters. But suffering is also so dark a word. #beatfailure perhaps. Or #riseabovehardship ? Hmmm I'll have a think. Anyway I've leave you with some classic quotes from great people who lost until they won.
1. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” - Thomas Edison
2. “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill
3. “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.” - Henry Ford
4. “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.” - Confucious
5. “In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.” - Bill Cosby
6. “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” - Dale Carnegie
7. “Failure is success if we learn from it.” - Malcolm Forbes
8. “I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustrations were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.” - Tony Robbins
9. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.” - Colin Powell
10. “It is fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” - Bill Gates
11. “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of a greater or equal benefit.” - Napoleon Hill
12. “Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again.” - W. Clement Stone
13. “The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.” - Buddha
14. “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with failure.” - Abraham Lincoln
15. “Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It’s ok to fail. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing.” - H. Stanley Judd
16. “Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failing is another steppingstone to greatness.” - Oprah Winfrey
17. “Remember that failure is an event, not a person.” - Zig Ziglar
18. “Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” - George Eliot
19. “Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.” - J.K. Rowling
20. “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan