Lately, I’ve taken to leaning against trees.

Not just any trees – but old gnarly trees.
Tall magnificent trees.
Trees that look like they’ve been there forever.

Trees with spirits.

I lean against these trees to get my spine as close as possible to the trunk of the trees – to get the energy of the tree, the spirits in the tree, into my chakras.

I’ve finally gone totally woo woo, right?
Maybe I have.

I would like to clarify – I’m not a tree hugger, I’m a tree leaner.

I look at some of these trees and I just know there are spirits within. Spirits with wisdom, spirits that can heal, spirits that can speak to me, if I listen.

Why not?

It’s something many indigenous peoples believe. They believe there are spirits in the rocks, and mountains and rivers and seas, too. That the earth is alive with spirits.

And spirit. 

This is what I believe too.

So most days I walk. And where I live, in Mudgee, it’s a three minute walk to a magnificent park by a river – the park is full of old wise trees – and then it’s a ten minute walk before I’m out in amongst the vineyards, and the bush, where there are some glorious stands of very old white River Gums.

Often I see kangaroos, always I see flocks of beautiful native cockatoos and other birdlife. It fills me up, each time I go out for a walk.

Most days I walk at least 10kms, some days 15kms, and on Sunday’s 20kms. This kind of mileage takes time, and so being a person who doesn’t like to waste time, I listen to audiobooks. In this way I’ve “read” many of the classics – Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Herman Melville, the Bronte sisters, and so on – as well as Graham Greene, Hemingway, John le Carre, Ray Bradbury – and most of the Booker prize winners.

But my taste in literature is wide. I also try to read what’s in culture, so I’ve “read” all of the Twilight books, the Hunger Game books, and I managed to get through the first of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books. That was enough for me. I got it…

I read the Game of Thrones series though in book form. George RR Martin’s writing can’t be fully appreciated in audio form. His use of language is so delicious to read off the page, and the storytelling is too complex. Same with JK Rowling and the Harry Potter series.

I digress.
What has this got to do with me leaning against trees?

Books carry a vibrational energy – from the energetic Creative Will of the author, which, if written in truth, comes from the Creative Source. A book really sings to you when that energy is in harmony with your own energy at that time.

A while ago I shifted from fiction to non fiction – both in what I read read, and what I listened-to read. In particular I’ve been doing a big catch-up on esoteric literature. There is so much for me to learn. It’s a whole new field of study.

But now and then I still like to read a good work of fiction.

I was about to go out on a walk the other day and I had to choose a new book to listen to. I’d just finished The Heart of the Soul, by Gary Zukav, and I wanted a break from this kind of stuff. I decided I would start the second book in a recent Stephen King crime series – the book was called Finders Keepers. 

A lot of people deride Stephen King. They’re snobs. He’s a great storyteller, and a great writer. And I’ve read most of his books. But as I got into Finders Keepers I found myself getting more and more agitated. It just didn’t sit right with me, even though I’d enjoyed the first of the series, Mr. Mercedes. It’s terrific crime fiction.

I realised that my agitation came from the fact that the book, whilst well written and a gripping story, was vibrating at a low energy point. And I was needing something of a higher vibration. I wanted fiction though, and so on a whim I chose John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown. 

Steinbeck is a Nobel Prize winner. He’s best known for Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath. I’d read most of Steinbeck in my early 20s, and he became a huge influence on my own writing. Journal of a Novel, his daily account of his writing of East of Eden, tells you more about the writing process than any college Creative Writing course.

I’d read To a God Unknown more than 30 years ago, and remembered that it had a big impact on me at the time, but I’d forgotten it. And now the book called to me. It was asking me to read it again.

I couldn’t understand why, but I’ve learned now to listen to that voice, and so yesterday I started to read the book again, on Audiobook, as I walked out into the bush.

It’s set in the early 1900s, and it’s about a young man who settles in the Salinas Valley in Northern California – and he comes to believe that the spirit of his father, who has recently passed, has come to inhabit a huge oak tree near his house.

So I’m reading this book – or listening to it – and the synchronicity of it hits me hard. At this point in my life where I am seriously beginning to embrace the notion of spirits in trees, this book comes along, written by one of literature’s great minds, and in a sense Steinbeck validates what I’m thinking about.

I love my life.

I’m posting this from a New York Times article I just put up on Facebook.

For those of you who follow this blog but don’t follow me on Facebook or Twitter, I thought I should post it here too, because the sentiments expressed are worth considering –

The piece is titled: The Power of Altruism – 

*****

Western society is built on the assumption that people are fundamentally selfish. Machiavelli and Hobbes gave us influential philosophies built on human selfishness. Sigmund Freud gave us a psychology of selfishness. Children, he wrote, “are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.”

Classical economics adopts a model that says people are primarily driven by material self-interest. Political science assumes that people are driven to maximize their power.

But this worldview is clearly wrong. In real life, the push of selfishness is matched by the pull of empathy and altruism. This is not Hallmark card sentimentalism but scientific fact: As babies our neural connections are built by love and care. We have evolved to be really good at cooperation and empathy. We are strongly motivated to teach and help others.

As Matthieu Ricard notes in his rigorous book “Altruism,” if an 18-month-old sees a man drop a clothespin she will move to pick it up and hand it back to him within five seconds, about the same amount of time it takes an adult to offer assistance. If you reward a baby with a gift for being kind, the propensity to help will decrease, in some studies by up to 40 percent.

When we build academic disciplines and social institutions upon suppositions of selfishness we’re missing the motivations that drive people much of the time.

Worse, if you expect people to be selfish, you can actually crush their tendency to be good.

Samuel Bowles provides a slew of examples in his book “The Moral Economy.” For example, six day care centers in Haifa, Israel, imposed a fine on parents who were late in picking up their kids at the end of the day. The share of parents who arrived late doubled. Before the fine, picking up their kids on time was an act of being considerate to the teachers. But after the fine, showing up to pick up their kids became an economic transaction. They felt less compunction to be kind.

In 2001, the Boston fire commissioner ended his department’s policy of unlimited sick days and imposed a limit of 15 per year. Those who exceeded the limit had their pay docked. Suddenly what had been an ethic to serve the city was replaced by a utilitarian paid arrangement. The number of firefighters who called in sick on Christmas and New Year’s increased by tenfold over the previous year.

To simplify, there are two lenses people can use to see any situation: the economic lens or the moral lens.

When you introduce a financial incentive you prompt people to see their situation through an economic lens. Instead of following their natural bias toward reciprocity, service and cooperation, you encourage people to do a selfish cost-benefit calculation. They begin to ask, “What’s in this for me?”

By evoking an economic motivation, you often get worse outcomes. Imagine what would happen to a marriage if both people went in saying, “I want to get more out of this than I put in.” The prospects of such a marriage would not be good.

Many of our commitments, professional or civic, are like that. To be a good citizen, to be a good worker, you often have to make an altruistic commitment to some group or ideal, which will see you through those times when your job of citizenship is hard and frustrating. Whether you are a teacher serving students or a soldier serving your country or a clerk who likes your office mates, the moral motivation is much more powerful than the financial motivations. Arrangements that arouse the financial lens alone are just messing everything up.

In 1776, Adam Smith defined capitalism as a machine that takes private self-interest and organizes it to produce general prosperity. A few years later America’s founders created a democracy structured to take private factional competition and, through checks and balances, turn it into deliberative democracy. Both rely on a low but steady view of human nature and try to turn private vice into public virtue.

But back then, there were plenty of institutions that promoted the moral lens to balance the economic lens: churches, guilds, community organizations, military service and honor codes.

Since then, the institutions that arouse the moral lens have withered while the institutions that manipulate incentives — the market and the state — have expanded. Now economic, utilitarian thinking has become the normal way we do social analysis and see the world. We’ve wound up with a society that is less cooperative, less trusting, less effective and less lovely.

By assuming that people are selfish, by prioritizing arrangements based on selfishness, we have encouraged selfish frames of mind. Maybe it’s time to upend classical economics and political science. Maybe it’s time to build institutions that harness people’s natural longing to do good.

Sorry for the mess up with the previous post.

I was trying to get this text from Kindle to Evernote to Word Press.

Not a happy marriage.

Anyway, here is what I’m currently reading, in preparation for doing an interview with the author, Amanda Guggenheimer, early next week in Victoria.

Thought some of you might find it interesting – the following of a spiritual path…

******

“When individuals work to create a stable foundation they build a home life and/ or working life, social life and activities so as to keep passion and interest in living. If they have a family, they work to ensure the financial security of the family and endeavour to be helpful and useful in the extended family and community.

For the most part, this is considered a happy life. Why then, do so many people seem unhappy with such a plan? Others, seeing the result of the plan, believe they can safeguard against unhappiness and try to make changes such as earning more money, not having children, travelling overseas, educating themselves or living alternatively in some way.

Regardless of the alterations to the formula, the individual comes to the point where they have established their framework for life but feel unfulfilled as though there must be something more. For some, the awareness of being unfulfilled does not come quite so easily and may follow a personal crisis or trauma. Whether it is a smooth transition into this level of awareness or a painful one, it is here that the individual may choose the spiritual path.

They realise that finding happiness may not be solely based on making changes to external things. A faint urge or calling emerges from within and grows louder and stronger by the day. Those that listen to this calling and allow it to guide their next move find the doorway of spiritual awakening.

Although they may experience fear, they long to walk through that door. There is a level of nervous apprehension mixed with excitement. They can feel that the key to happiness and fulfilment is close. They crave every bit of information they can get their hands on as a way of speeding up the awakening procedure.

Messages may start to come in dreams or through interesting people who cross their path. Where they used to walk around with eyes closed, now they insist on having them open. As a result, they begin to notice the many signs the universe sends them every day. These signs contribute to awakening, connecting, reminding and teaching the initiate.

Their Higher Self gently makes its presence known and the initiate begins to realise that there is more to them than their external measure. The initiate is in fact a spiritual being in a human body, awakening to his/ her true nature.”

From “The Light-Workers Companion” by Amanda Guggenheimer

We get tested every day.

I know I do. Now that I see what’s going on.
And most of the time, I fail these tests.

It might be a test of generosity.
Or kindness.
Or anger.
Or compassion.

What happens is that you are confronted with a situation that tests your reaction.
Your response.

Will you act out of love, or out of fear?
Which often manifests in anger or contraction.
Greed is contraction.
Selfishness is contraction.

Someone cuts in front of you while you’re driving. Do you yell and honk your horn and curse? Or do you react with calmness, and wonder what sort of a horrible day that driver must be having. Or why they might be so impatient. And you hope their day improves.

That’s a test.

Someone in a shop treats you rudely. You’re Asian. Or an ethnic minority. You immediately feel that they’re treating you disrespectfully. They’re being tacitly racist.

You raise your voice.
They raise their voice.
Soon you are both shouting.

You failed the test.

Instead, perhaps you could have responded with understanding and kindness. Perhaps the shopkeeper wasn’t being racist at all, but was just having a bad day. Perhaps they have personal problems. Perhaps he or she is feeling enormous pressure from their bank, or maybe their child is sick, or their landlord is forcing them out of the building.

If you’d responded with a smile, and with understanding, you might have made their day a little better for them.

If you look at these everyday incidents and situations as tests, put in front of you to give you an opportunity to grow, then suddenly the world becomes a lot more interesting.

And a lot more interactive!

Here’s the thing – if you fail the test, they will test you again. And again. And again. You will be given many more other opportunities to grow. Because that’s why you were incarnated into this lifetime. That’s your purpose here. You think it’s to pay off your mortgage and ride around in a nice car and have dinner parties where you trot out your vintage wines and tell everyone about your last trip to Venice?

It’s more than that.
Much more.

Some of us go through our lives continually failing our tests.
Some of us gradually “get it,” and pass the test, or tests.

I had a situation last week where I was tested. I only realised later, after I failed.

I got a phone call from a young lady asking me to take wedding photos. I don’t usually do wedding photos – only for friends, which I do for free – but I have a website saying that I’m available for this kind of work, and a lot of people get married in the town where I live – Mudgee – and so it’s something I do on the side, if I’m in the country.

My rate starts at $2K. This young lady told me that she and her fiancé were on a tight budget, and that she had contacted another photographer who had told her he would do it for $800. She had contacted me though, she said, because she loved my portfolio.

She said that they were so short of money that they would pay me week by week, because her fiancé was on unemployment benefits.

I told her I would do it for $1K – half my normal rate, but still $200 more than she was hoping to pay. But she seemed happy with my quote, and said she’d get back to me.

I never heard from her again.

I should have done it for her for free.

If they were doing it that tough, I really should have done it for free. It’s no big deal for me. And they would have had great wedding pics. It was only later that I realised it was a test of my generosity of spirit, and I had failed.

But in a sense, I’d also passed.

Because in realising it was a test, and realising I’d failed, I’d taken the first step towards passing the next time I’m tested.

That’s the thing about these tests. They will keep coming at you until you realise, and in realising, you hope that you will be more self-aware next time around, and you will pass.

And then you will be given another new test!

Caroline Myss features in the film I’m currently making on intuition.

If you don’t know who Caroline Myss is, or rather, Dr. Caroline Myss – well, she’s probably the most famous medical intuitive in the world. Her books on healing, sacred contracts, and archetypes have become best selling classics.

Her workshops all around the world are immediately sold out as soon as they’re announced. She is a fiercely intelligent, eminently scholastic and highly articulate woman.

She is a genuine mystic.
And I’m very proud to have her as part of my film.

I was checking out her blog today and thought I would post her piece on the massacre at Orlando. Here it is:

*****

I’ve been guided to a very important book, and I know it’s for me right now because I answer an emphatic “yes” to all the questions it poses in its preface –

Do –

• Topics such as philosophy, metaphysics, religion and spirituality call you now more so than ever before?

• You crave reading material and in depth discussion on the above issues?

• You have thought-provoking, insightful, futuristic or even disturbing dreams?

• You experience a strange lethargy at unusual times of the day as though someone has unplugged and then plugged you in again?

• Some friendships seem no longer compatible?

• You have a lack of interest in pushing forward to keep up with the Joneses?

• You have a desire to be in nature?

• People and literature keep appearing that relate to personal and spiritual discovery?

• You crave time alone or with genuine and loving people only?

• You find that communication is becoming increasingly more important to you, yet at the same time recognise challenges in truly connecting with others?

• You find that your body is going through shifts that are hard to explain?

• You talk to a higher power, or guiding spirit more frequently now than before?

The preface goes on to state:

If you answer yes to most of these ‘symptoms’, welcome, you are awakening to your true destiny… As a Light-Worker you have agreed to awaken earlier than many, to pave the way, to clear debris from the path. This handbook has been designed to aid you in your task.

The book is written by an Australian channeller named Amanda Guggenheimer, and the book is called The Light-Workers Companion. 

It’s a technical book – and fascinating. And I’m learning so much.

I called Amanda yesterday to say hello, and she said to me: They’re here with me now. Do you want me to channel? 

How could I refuse?

And so for the next half hour she channeled my guides, and told me stuff that was very very helpful – particularly concerning my film. It was amazing. Later she sent me an email with a link to a recording she made of the channeling.

I  offered to pay her but she resolutely refused.

Here below is her book. If you say “yes” to the majority of those questions above, I suggest you buy it.

Here is the book’s web page:
http://lightworkerscompanion.com

Here is the Amazon link –

According to my Fitbit I walked 458.57kms in the month of May – along the Portuguese Camino and thereabouts, and then later in France and Hungary.

Why does this make the news?
Or at least this blog?

Because I walked those kms on a knee that doctors told me needs replacement.

As some of you who follow this blog might know, I have bad knee issues. On my first Camino I walked in extreme pain, and only completed the pilgrimage on painkillers.

Later, after an MRI, I was told I was bono-a-bono; that is, bone on bone – and that a knee replacement wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when. 

I was told to get an elaborate knee brace, which I then dutifully wore on all my training walks, and on the 2014 Portuguese Camino, then last year’s Via Di Francesco Camino.

Let me be quite clear –
I don’t like doctors.
I don’t like medicines.
I don’t like knee braces.
And I particularly don’t like invasive surgery.

I have the odd and quaint belief that if you listen to your body, and you’re not silly about it, you can heal yourself.

Late last year, on my training walks, I began to walk without the brace. Short distances at first, and slowly. My knee railed against it. I got pain, and swelling. And I thought this would be a short lived experiment.

But I rested the knee, then began again. And gradually the knee settled down. And gradually I increased the distances, and the pace.

In preparation for this year’s Portuguese Camino I increased the intensity of my training so that I ended up doing about 100kms a week at about 6km/hr pace.

And my knee, surprisingly, held up.
So I decided to head off to Portugal without the brace.

It was a risk on my part. I really didn’t know how the knee was going to go. My training had been on relatively flat stretches of road. No hills, no uneven surfaces, no cobblestones. On the rocky and stony climbs of the Camino, would it give way?

As it turned out I only had a few days where my knee spat the dummy and pretended it wasn’t going to play anymore. But once again it settled down, and I think there was only one occasion where I took painkillers to get me through.

According to my surgeon I have no cartilage in my knee joint.
Zero.
Zilch.
So what happened?
How can I walk these distances then, largely pain free?

I really don’t know. Other than I’ve been determined not to get a knee replacement, which is what the doctors say I should have.

I can’t explain it, in the same way I can’t explain how my eyesight returned after I walked my first Camino. I’d had glasses for fifteen years.

I haven’t worn any since.

It’s so easy to accept what the doctors, the nurses, the western medical professionals tell you. If you walk the Camino and you get a bad blister and you go to a doctor, what are they going to say?

It’s their duty to tell you not to walk. And in some instances they’ll tell you your Camino is over and you should go home. And in some instances that’s exactly what you should do.

But in a lot of cases instead of racing off to a doctor, why not simply rest up, listen to what your body is telling you, and trust in the healing power that’s innate within you.

I have settled back into home life in Mudgee.

Taken a week to get over jet lag, not helped by my internet which went down for two days. Don’t ask me about the correlation between jet lag and my internet not working, because I can’t explain it, other than I know it exists.

It’s cold here. Jennifer and I came back to minus -3C mornings – yes that’s minus three degrees Celsius. After balmy Portugal and Spain, it was a shock to the system.

I’ve been working on the script for my intuition film, which has been very difficult to crack. Man o man it’s a complex subject. How do you find a simple accessible line through it all without dumbing it down? That’s been one of my difficulties.

And whether it should be a personal film or a didactic film.

These are fundamental decisions which you think should come easily – and in fact they did when I began to realise that what was messing me up was my intellect. As soon as I let go that, and began to base my decisions on my intuition, then everything became so much easier, and I began to see it with clarity again. Doh, you might say, and rightly so!

Play by the rules Bill, play by the rules… you dummy.

I’ve come back wanting to keep walking, even though it’s cold and rainy here. I’ll do about 95kms this week. I have such a sedentary job, writing, so it’s important I allow a certain amount of time each day to exercise.

I listen to audio books as I walk. At the moment I’m re-reading, or rather listening to, Autobiography of a Yogi. This is my third reading of the book, and I’m getting more from it than from the past readings. As you learn more, you become receptive to more.

I’m also though listening to podcasts from Kryon, which is an entity channelled by Lee Carroll, perhaps the most famous and respected of all the current channellers. Lee features in my film – and his contribution will be significant. He’s a brilliant man, and his channellings are extraordinary in their wisdom and compassion.

Jennifer by the way put me onto Kryon originally. She’s been reading his channellings, and listening to them, for the past fifteen years.

His channellings are free. Just go to http://www.kryon.com and go to the Free Audio section and you can listen to literally hundreds of his channellings since 2002.

I thought I would post an excerpt of one here, because it relates to intuition, and synchronicity.

Trust and follow your first instincts. This rule is to trust and follow your first intuitions. How many times have you had a situation where you said, “Oh, if I had only done what I had first thought?” This is actually part of the system, and that’s the way it occurs to you. It is often the very first instinct you will have about a situation. Some call it intuition, but it’s much more than that.

Synchronicity is defined as energies that align with purpose. These situations look like accidents, but they are not. Listen. This is the key. You have heard there are no accidents, but there are those outside of your belief system who say, “That’s crazy. That’s not right.” Synchronicity looks and appears like coincidence. It often looks like an accident, but it is not. It is you at the right time, at the right place, with the potentials aligned that you asked for. But if you’re going to have synchronicity and aligned potentials, you’ve got to be there to experience them, don’t you?

So you’ve got to take some action, and whether it’s a phone call, or it’s an electronic communication, or whether it’s you with your body, you’ve got to put yourself in places where the synchronicity and the system can work. And I say it for those in these rooms and those who are hearing and reading now. There are those of you who still will not do this, for you believe there’s some kind of sacredness in staying put and just praying. Instead, try to understand the balance of things. There is a time for asking, and a time for receiving. They are done in separate places! If you spend all your time in the asking place, no receiving will occur.

The first one, the most difficult for Human Beings, is timing. Yesterday we said that your clock is not God’s clock. We also told you that it’s impossible to apply a 3D time frame to an interdimensional potential. It’s frustrating to Humanity that God delivers things not when you ask for them, but only when you need them. You see, to us it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to give you an answer to put in your pocket. Because when you get to the place where you thought you’d need it, and pull it out of your pocket, it’s the wrong answer! Instead, it must meet the scenario of the synchronicity and the energy of the moment.

Here is the link to this channelling – http://www.kryon.com/k_chanelhandbook05.html

We’re mounting another Mother Ganga Indian tour this year, in September.

There are places still available.

Last year’s tour was a hoot.
Everyone had a great time.

This year’s tour will be the same, with highlights being:

• Visiting the Taj Mahal

• Visiting the magnificent Golden Temple in Amritsar –

• Visiting the Dalai Lama Temple in Dharamsala

• Staying at the best ashram on the Ganges in Rishikesh – including the incredible Aarti ceremony each night on the banks of the sacred river…

• Shopping – Jennifer and Bill know all the best places to get amazing fabrics, clothing, footwear and Indian souvenirs…

• Taking part in the incredible Ganpati ceremony on the beach of Mumbai

• Last day buffet lunch at the JW Marriott in Mumbai – the best buffet in India!

Accommodation is luxury – except for the ashram – but we do offer a view of the Ganges from your room!

And food is excellent!  You’ve never had Indian food until you’ve visited India, and Jennifer and I know the best places!

We make visiting India safe, healthy, and fun!
Here are some testimonials from the last tour…

Here are some details –

• Sept 3rd – 16th, 2016
• 13 nights / 14 days
• Cost: AU$4850 / US$3850 / €3450 (twin share, ground cost only)

For more info, go to the Gone Tours website:
Mother Ganga Indian Tour – 2016

If you wish to book, or want more information, please contact me, Bill Bennett –
bill@gonetours.com

Jennifer and I have been coming to India regularly for the past eight years. We know India, and we love it. Join us – it will be the experience of a lifetime!