Tag Archives: The Golden Bridge

Perspective changes everything ~

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I’m currently reading a Sci-Fi trilogy called Three Body Problem, written by Chinese author Cixin Liu. The series is called Remembrance of Earth’s Past. The Netflix series starts on March 21st.

The trilogy has been hugely popular worldwide – the first book won the Hugo Award for Best Sci-Fi or Fantasy novel. I’m now partway through the third book, Death’s End. I was hoping to have read all three books by the time the series started, but I won’t finish this final 600+ page book in time.

These books are dense and complex, and huge in their ideas. I haven’t read anything like them. And what makes them so fascinating is that there is really no central character – the books are about humanity.

Civilisations.

This is not a spoiler – but one of the premises is: How would humanity respond if it knew it was going to be destroyed by an alien force in four hundred years?

Four hundred years.

In reading these books, what I’ve discovered is that perspective changes everything.
Time changes everything.
Distance – space – changes everything.

When you’re immediate and up front and personal, you have a different perspective to if you’re on another planet, for instance, and you’re dealing with something that’s not only light-years away, but millennia away.

I find these fascinating concepts.

And the reason I’m putting this in a blog is that in reading these books, I remember someone once telling me that they had an out of body experience where Lao Tzu came to this person and took her by the hand and took her out of her house, up, up, out of her street, up, up, out of her suburb, up, up, further up, out of her city, and then out into space so that she could look down on the planet, Planet Earth, and see her life, her problems, her dramas, from this cosmic perspective.

And Lao Tzu said to her: See? All your troubles and dramas don’t really matter when you see them from this perspective.

I’ve been remembering that while I read these books. Because goodness knows we have problems in the world right now – as indeed we always have. And yet seen from the Lao Tzu cosmic perspective, they’re really quite insignificant.

Now I know a lot of you are going pile on top of me and say: How’s what’s happening in Gaza insignificant? How’s what’s happening in Ukraine insignificant? How’s what’s happening with the coming US elections insignificant?

What I’m talking about – and I’ve had blowback from this before – is trying to find a perspective of neutrality. That’s what I aspire to – neutrality. Non-attachment, if you like.

There’s a new film opening in the US next month. It’s called Civil War, and it’s made by an acclaimed British filmmaker, Alex Garland. It’s just premiered at the SXSW Festival, and caused a stir. A good stir. Some have called it a masterpiece. It’s set in a near-dystopian future in which the US has broken out in civil war.

In a press conference after the screening, the filmmaker said: Why are we talking and not listening? Why are we shutting conversation down? Left and Right are ideological arguments, that’s all they are. They’re not right or wrong. They’re not good or bad. We have reached a point where we vilify the other side, we’ve ratcheted up the rhetoric into an ethical debate which makes it easier to see the other side as evil – and once someone is seen as morally wrong, as evil, then their opponents can justify all sorts of extreme measures to stop them.

Step up and away, is what I’m saying.
With perspective, you can see that ultimately it really doesn’t matter.
You think it does, you believe passionately it does, but with the cosmic perspective of Lao Tzu, it’s all really insignificant.

The Golden Bridge – genesis

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How my latest novel, The Golden Bridge, came into being is very strange – and I still don’t fully understand it.

It was in the middle of COVID, it was the middle of winter, and it was the middle of the night.

I woke up and there it was, right in front of me, fully formed.
I can’t explain it better than that.
The whole story was fully formed.
The character, the journey, the arc.
Everything I needed to start writing.

I hadn’t dreamt it.
This wasn’t the stuff of dreams.
But it woke me up.

I said no.

I didn’t want to write the story. I didn’t think there was a market for it. I didn’t want to spend 12 months of my life writing something that no one would ever get to read. It wasn’t the kind of story that I would normally write anyway. The whole thing just made no sense to me.

And so I said no.
I’m not going to write this.

They came back immediately and they said: Yes, you are going to write this!

Who were “they?”
I don’t know.
They were those that had delivered me the story, and they were insistent that I write this.

Again I said no.

I knew that to do the story justice, it would require a level of writing expertise that I didn’t think I possessed. I knew intuitively that it would be the hardest thing I would ever write.

I flat out said NO, this is not something I can do.
This is not something I want to do.
It will be a total waste of time.

(Here I am, in my bed in the middle of night, in the middle of winter, during the middle of the pandemic having this weird conversation in my mind with God knows what, or who. The whole thing was completely bizarre.)

They held firm.
They were not going to budge.
They told me I had to write it, and that was that.
No arguments.

So, a few days later I started.

I would get up at 4am or thereabouts, go downstairs and have a double espresso, and then in a half somnolent state I would begin to write. My job was to keep my mind clear so that I could allow an unfettered passage to whatever wished to come in.

I didn’t want to impose, I didn’t want to interfere.
I wrote with craft, of course, and with style.
To deny ego in a creative process is to deny your own unique voice.

I didn’t meditate.
I just tried to keep my mind clear.

I started out thinking it would be the hardest thing I would ever write.
It turned out to be the easiest.
And in fact now I look back at the manuscript and wonder how on earth did that happen?

I would write from about 4am-4:30am till about 9:30am. By that stage I would have written about 1,000 words, sometimes a little more. I didn’t take a day off until I’d finished. The book is approximately 75,000 words.

At times I would need to do research. The chapter The Dowser required research. I found myself reading a lot of Alice Bailey’s work, in particular The Soul and its Mechanism, and The Consciousness of the Atom. Also Saint Germain on Alchemy.

But most of the book just came to me.

When I finished the manuscript I did some revisions, and then I sought publication. I got an offer from a major New York publishing house and suddenly found myself with a publisher that had published the works of some incredibly famous people. Like, seriously famous authors.

But the fit wasn’t right.

I wasn’t happy with the commercial deal terms, and I wasn’t convinced that the publisher would really work my book. I worried that it could just get lost in amongst everything else he was doing. So I pulled away.

The book is now set up with a smaller imprint based in Melbourne. I know this publisher, James Terry at Arcadia Press, and I know James will work the book hard to get it into the best bookstores and outlets. The book will be formally launched by Arcadia early next year.

In the interim I have put the book out on Amazon –

The Golden Bridge on Amazon.com
The Golden Bridge on Amazon.com.au

Some people who’ve read it describe it as “the new The Alchemist.”
Someone else described it as “a quiet little masterpiece.”

All I know is that this book came to me in a seriously weird way. Was it channelled? All creative endeavours are channelled. That’s how creativity works. Having a work channelled doesn’t make it special. That’s the norm.

But if I leave this plane having written The Golden Bridge and made the film The Way, My Way, then I’ll be happy that my work here is done. Anything else is a bonus.