How Beautiful Can Life Be?

"How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it." 🌸🍂🎑

For a lucky few of us, Quest Festival meant something so much more than a mere weekend escape from the madness of society or an excuse to get wasted out of our minds. The real, high consciousness, transcendental experiences that occurred over these short few days became truly pregnant with magical possibilities—fragments of lessons and insights on a near cosmic level that many of us are now still grasping onto, still processing in our sober minds in order to somehow take a piece of the truth and light back into the authority, separateness, and rigidity of our “real worlds.” 💭

The foremost lesson underlying it all, that always bears repeating, is how similar we all are—and how we are all learning the same lessons, only with the most wildly and creatively different circumstances of our lives. But in the end, everybody just wants to love and be loved in return, to hear and be heard, to truly see and be seen. People move towards what feels good, so when you give people your sacred space of unconditional love, listening, and acceptance, together we can finally reveal our deepest inner selves: as endlessly fascinating, profound, and beautiful little children. 👶🌸

Indeed, adults are but children confined in these mechanical, steel-wire bodies and personas—little nymphs and daisies, goblins and fawns just waiting to come out and dance and sing in the candlelit dark. 🙈🙉 It is this innocent magic borne through art, love, and beauty that can, and will, save the world. And what true beauty is is but the purest expression, the utterings and howlings of our deepest truths, resonating with one another in the harmonies between the soulful notes we play, the falling flows of our bodies together, the colours of our brushstrokes alive... the poetic essence of our very beings. So make art, and love, and bask in the beauty of existence—it is all around you, behind every mask, every glance, every sky and leaf. We are all here in a heaven only waiting to be discovered. 🌌

What does it truly mean to be alive? Everybody has different answers to their own philosophical inquiries, but for those who have sat in a circle of soulful human beings sharing the utmost depths of our heart and soul to complete strangers, holding hands and chanting love amongst dancing rainbow lights, making our sacred promise to care for mother earth, laughing together, singing soulful songs from the depths of our being, spinning fire, flowing and letting fall our bodies together to the music, looking into one another’s eyes, sharing space and saying yes to our vulnerabilities and inner children and magical beauties… well, it really does bring it up a notch, what kinds of ecstatic experiences of love and connection are truly possible to us as the sensitive and beautiful human beings that we truly are.

I came close to tears so many times, listening to one another's inner children opening their hearts and expressing some of the purest, most beautiful and heartfelt poetries I've ever heard. The beauty of the ambient mushroom was in its ability to liberate the inner rascals of everybody, making us all feel that much less alone in hearing others speak our heart. When our purest expression becomes a beacon of the highest beauty, we know that what each of us are deep inside must be none else but the very light that birthed the cosmos. 🌅

Yet, what made it all beautiful beyond all anticipation is the authentic and profound healing, the catharsis and release we were finally able to feel from the tensions that have been built up for so long, too long in this such rigid world we all live in day-to-day between these pockets of magic. There is an ache that we all feel inside, a gash of separation from the womb of Nature, a profound disconnection from the trees and soils and spirits, from our human families, tribes, and communities, and from the full expression of our inner light, of our silliness and creativity and vulnerabilities and all the awkward bumps and soft spots and laughs and groans and moans and sighs and any and everything else in between.💗 

In a sacred space of unconditional acceptance, we are all of it and we are whole. Fallen and dissolved away are the imaginary shackles of artificial needs, of social media and television and social hierarchies and engineered fears; of Abrahamic monotheism, Newtonian classicalism, secular nihilism, Darwinian dog-eat-dog-ism, and all the other disempowering narratives we tell ourselves to convince ourselves that we are any bit smaller, less magical or less alike than we really are.

As I recognise the God in you, and you the God in me, we can at once manifest our highest truths and deepest depths in this cosmic playground of ours. We can finally release the spirit of divine play. The world is ours; it is magic, it is woo-woo, it is hocus pocus, bloobaloobies, childlike imagination extending out into infinity. 🤺💃🌄We are only limited by our beliefs, and when the imagined narrative as it is now serves us no more, we have the power to reset our imaginations and release the open-minded space to manifest a new, better, and truer world. 🌏

Every soul is a droplet's reflection of the ocean of existence; everything is an interconnected web of harmony, relativity, and intervals; musical notes dancing with each other, finding our place on the bar, reaching at our harmonies with one another. The universe without is a reflection of the universe within, and we are all creating each other's world through the thoughts we think, the vibrations we energise, the love or fear we emit between each other. So come back to live in the divine now which you once inhabited as a child, and join the holy moment, the dance of life. Recognise and realise your power, shine your light so you can spread it, heal yourself so you can heal the world.

Ram Dass said that, from a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it's got you. Everything is a lesson, and we must recognise it when it comes, and move in the direction of our fear and of our light. 🌖 Every moment is practice for the next. There is no need to doubt yourself. Heed your calling and set your intentions. Be empowered, be radiant, be authentic. And above all, be a beacon of love. What you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. So focus on what you can give, not what you can get, and you will suddenly find yourself letting yourself go, releasing all the tensions of self-protection and insatiability as you fall into effortless inner peace.

With positivity, guidance, and unconditional love, everybody can respond by reflecting back and becoming their highest light. We cannot judge anyone for anything—it is all one. One happening, one pulsation, one universe. Ergo, our prejudices are always wrong—we must always try to look past them. And forgive, forgive, forgive. The line between love and fear cuts through the heart of every man, so carress your inner darkness that you might see reflected in others, and heal it with your light. There is only one truth and one way forward and that is love.

And finally... find the others. We are most powerful when we are together. We are the culmination of billions of years of evolution right here, right now. We are gods, we are magic, it is all right here, this is heaven only waiting for us to realise it together. Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, the only thing that matters in the end is your people, your community, your tribe—and that can extend to the whole world if you let it. After all, you see the world as you are. As we have found at the festival, default, unconditional love for a community of strangers is possible. This love was inside us all along—it only needed the right circumstances to be called upon and flourish in harmony with all of each other.

Our transcendental experiences these nights were a calling from the universe for us to become lightworkers, and we must now bring this out into the world by manifesting love for all beings. 💛Love everybody, hug everybody, smile at everybody. Face the disharmonies in your life and sing your harmonising song. We must heal the wounds that hurt the most—not to judge, but to build bridges to those who are lost the most, the most far-out and dissimilar manifestations of ourselves. The greatest beauty is found in the greatest healing, the connection of the furthest notes, until the world is finally whole.

Behind these masks we don, we are God in drag, spirits of divine light, love, and compassion; of infinite possibility and creativity. We are all here to contribute our gifts towards something greater than ourselves. These gifts of ours are found in places where we feel most alive. As much as we must move in the direction of our fear—our unlived adventures, our dormant possibilities—we must, above all, move in the direction of our light.

If you feel the gentle fire within you to alighten the world as I do, to find somewhere we belong and express the fullest depths of our love, then go forth and spread the spores of inspiration that you bear deep inside. It is just in our nature as human beings as part of this balanced whole to create beautiful spaces of love and tenderness, to manifest The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible. As Alan Watts put it, we do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. If you feel it in your heart to be right and true, you must only and simply keep moving in the direction of your light.

And take us with you... we are all just walking each other home. 🕊️

The World We Knew As Children

And so it goes that all good things come to an end. Three days in the most gorgeous natural landscapes with more love, beauty, community, and good vibes than I ever could have asked for, and surrounded by some of the soundest people on earth. Utopia - life as life should be. A bunch of lil human beans in their most natural, expressive, and childlike forms dancing around, huddling together over campfires, singing songs and playing drums and making art. It became unbearable sometimes, how cute it all was to behold, every second of these unforgettably beautiful days.

In a place like this, it’s apparent how beautiful — and how alike — we all truly are. When we are given a free space in which to express our true selves without judgment, to engage in fun and creative activities, to decorate ourselves in colourful adornments, and to act like the wondrous and loving children that we really are inside — well, that’s exactly what happens. It brings out the very best of us all. Free of the bonds of normal society, of nine to fives and billboard advertisements and authority and deadlines and social stigmas, we reveal ourselves to be exactly who are, who we want to be. And we all love one another for it. Because who we are are the most fun, innocent, and loving little children, full of wonder and generosity and music and beauty. When the human imagination is let loose, it does some truly amazing things.

And it makes me wonder if a real life like this is possible for us all, every day of every year. Living off the land, trading amongst one another, gathering and loving as tight-knit communities of lovers and artists and musicians and creators of our own world, of our own culture. As Terence McKenna put it, “we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanising values that are handed down as control icons. […] [But] the culmination of man’s effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it’s not that we are ‘doing’ it. It’s that a natural law that we are still unaware of is inexorably unfolding.”

Truth is, we don’t have to behave like machines. We don’t have to drill ourselves into working routines that wear us away to the bone, only to numb and dumb ourselves with alcohol and coffee and cigarettes every week. (It’s no wonder those are the only legal “drugs,” and the mind-expanding ones are stigmatised and criminalised to oblivion.) We don’t have to diminish our infinite divinity and creativity into being mere cogs in the machine that is society; we don’t have to fetishise consumer mania, to submit to institutions and tax collection schemes and megalomaniac companies that use and disempower us.

We can empower ourselves by deconditioning ourselves from the culturally-engineered values of money, interpersonal competition, isolation, and soulless, instant gratification; from the imprisonment of social class and structure, of social expectations and stigmas, of celebrity worship and reality-television politics, of cultural diversion and degrees and soul-sucking jobs and useless pensions. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behaviour. Because if you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan. And the plan of culture is to suck the productivity out of you until you die, while keeping you docile and disempowered enough to believe that this is “just the way things are.”

Outside of these tiny, constricted frameworks, entire realms of possibility abound. Deep inside, we feel ourselves to be beings of infinite imagination, of divine consciousness and feeling and possibility and love. We are more than capable of creating our own culture rather than consuming those of a sterile, dying world. We are more than capable of expressing the fullness of our love and compassion, of recognising the oneness within us all and treating one another like brothers and sisters, of cooperating together to create new and beautiful things. We are more than capable of extending our feelings of genuine human love and connection with not just our closest friends, but with everybody in the world.

What made Quest Festival so beautiful was the warm energy and loving vibes that coloured the atmosphere, the deep connections, engaging in creative workshops and activities and letting out our inner children, and most importantly, being among like-minded free spirits amidst nature and beautiful scenery. We don’t need fancy equipment or amounts of money to do this - the essential ingredients are already with us.

Please join me in sharing the love, in being ever patient and compassionate with our brothers and sisters (including animals), and in doing things that bring us together as who we truly are. In expressing your creativity and inner child and innate vulnerabilities and letting completely loose. In abolishing the stigmas and pressures that imprison us, in accepting and loving one another for who we are, in offering spaces free of judgment for all. Then watch the beauty that unfolds.

You may think you have enemies, but the truth is, as Benny Lewis puts it, everyone just wants validation, love, security, enjoyment and hopes for a better future. The way they verbalise this and work towards it is where things branch off, but we all have the same basic desires. You can relate to everyone in the world if you look past the superficial things that separate you.

With genuine love, humans are, at one with the universe, the most beautiful little children in the world. In the end, love is all that matters, all that will have mattered. And as a gang of British hippies once put it — it is all you need. Namasté.

The Urgency of Brotherhood

Yesterday, at least 143 people, including 15 children, have been killed, and 187 have been wounded in two Muslim-targeted suicide bomb attacks launched by IS in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The victims were out shopping and celebrating the end of Ramadan in a central district lined with clothing and jewellery stores, restaurants, and cafés, much akin to those of the bustling cities of the West with which we are so familiar. At the sudden strike of multiple thunderous bombings, dozens of innocent civilians suffocated, burst apart, or violently burnt to death. At its wake, groups of women were left crying over the burnt wreckage and charred bodies of their loved ones, once teeming with life, love, and endless promise.

This is one among far too many stories of violence, loss, and suffering that are happening in our shared home today. Yet, though painting as violently sensationalist as possible of an image, it goes unheard of in social media and otherwise, with no mention of the destroyed lives of the innocent victims or of the cruelty of the violence enacted upon them. The 143 people — each with a long and complex life as vivid as our own, with all the things they have accomplished, the dreams they have dreamt, the lives they have touched and loved, and hearts they have broken in their passing, multiplied by 143 — were tragically and violently lost. All the while, they will be fleetingly remembered in our media narrative as nothing more than the number 143, only to be quickly forgotten once again.

While it is understandable that we naturally feel much more for those with whom we share geographical, racial, and cultural similarities, that we are shaken more by incidents that happen on familiar soil, the whole enterprise of human accomplishment and progress had never been from the basis of easy, instinctive reactions. It is only when we rise above our vices — when we work to overcome our bad habits and inertia, our biased cognitive distortions and prejudices, that we progress and evolve as human beings and as a collective species. It is only by rejecting our instinctual selfishness through hard spiritual and mental work that we can live up to our virtues of compassion and justice for all, and evolve towards a fairer, more peaceful society. The harder this work is, the more necessary it is.

We do this by stepping up to cognise the incredibly damaging effects that such a biased and tribalistic Western media coverage has on the state of the world. Firstly, by viscerally erasing the fact that Muslim-targeted violence is being enacted by IS overwhelmingly more so than Western-targeted violence (up to 97% of terror victims are Muslims), it feeds into the Islamophobic narrative that IS is motivated by Islamic justifications, and that Islam must therefore be held accountable, further contributing to the slew of Islamophobic terrorism enacted by Westerners all across the globe. But moreover, and perhaps even more damaging, by endlessly focusing on Western victims while erasing Middle Eastern victims of terror, creating a gap between the way we treat the two, we bolster the distortive image that the world is made up of “Westerners” and “the other, Brown-skinned people,” who apparently do not deserve as much mention as, or are not of equal worth to, Western victims. It further divides us psychologically and politically, insidiously perpetrating violence against innocent civilians on all sides. It turns us into passive observers, ultimately desensitising us and diminishing our ability to empathise with people who are different from us. This is very, very dangerous.

As consumers of an inevitably biased and propagandistic mainstream media, as messengers and perpetuators of its psychological, cultural, and political effects (including the engendering of further violent attacks), we each have the responsibility to fight back against this bias, to rewrite the ways in which we collectively respond to such stories; ultimately, to restructure the problematically euro-centric narrative into one that tells the story of one human family, with equal love, empathy and respect for all of our fellow beings, no matter where we come from. The power of the people to do this, through social media, is now greater than ever. And as with great power comes great responsibility, it is critical that we use this power for the greatest good that we can manage.

Share and consume stories that matter, speak of the victims of unimaginable violence so they may be remembered and honoured for who they were, speak up against injustice far and wide, use social media to spread awareness to one another of the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in faraway lands. If we treat them like family, as we do our Western fellows, “they” will begin to feel like “us.” Little by little, we can bring them that much closer to us at heart, so we can all begin to shift our collective worldview into one where we will one day instinctively and intuitively empathise with them as much as we do with those who share the same skin tone or speak the same language. We will naturally be as horrified about Middle Eastern suffering as we are about Western suffering; our cognitive distinctions between “us” and “them” will disappear, and the destructive powers of division will no longer engender violence and war. In a time where hatred and xenophobia seems to be truly poisoning our lives, we need to learn to take the effort to love each other that much harder more than ever. After all, each other is all we’ve got.

Today we mourn the more than 330 human individuals who have died or been traumatically injured in ways we cannot begin to comprehend. Today we hold them in our loving thoughts, and extend the greatest possible condolences to the families and friends of those affected. Today we#PrayForBaghdad. May the world one day know peace.

On Carnism

Once upon a time, inhumane oppressive belief systems that support the widespread violent subjugation of other races, of women and of homosexuals, among many other marginalised groups, were considered completely normal, natural, and necessary. Once upon a time, fatal public lynchings, total dehumanisation and enslavement of black people were considered normal every-day occurrences. As our collective consciousness continues to evolve, most of us now look back at these past behaviours - the way we used to treat other races, women, homosexuals, and so on - as being insanely senseless, barbaric, and primitive. Today, although the battle for equality and compassion is far from over, most of us who are rational and caring human beings can recognise the barbaric absurdity of such behaviour.

However, today, for the most part, this compassion, awareness, and understanding selfishly extends only so far as it applies to fellow humans. Most of us, when asked, would readily proclaim ourselves to be animal lovers. Many of us live among beloved dogs and cats whom we love and whose souls and intelligence we cherish and readily acknowledge, and direct our utmost anger and disdain towards cultures who normalise the violent consumption of dogs and cats (unaware that we ourselves are part of cultures that normalise the violent consumption of “farm” animals). Many of us would even pet the beautiful cows and pigs at petting zoos with love and adoration. Yet we continue to subscribe to meat-based diets that propagate a widespread, extremely brutal, holocaustic system of oppression against our fellow, sensitive beings, running counter to our core human values of justice, truth, and compassion. Although they are often kind, caring, and rational human beings, meat-eaters depend on a set of defence mechanisms to excuse their violent behaviours, such as denial of the brutal truth, ill-founded and selfishly based justifications, cognitive distortions of our perception of meat as food rather than as our fellow, beautiful animal creatures, and the widespread systematic normalisation of the farm animal holocaust.

Most people would not willingly support the unnecessary, abject torture and the most brutal forms of violence and cruelty imaginable that we as a species currently inflict upon trillions of animals belonging to the unlucky species selectively chosen to be our “food” every minute - living beings much like ourselves with beating hearts, lungs that breathe, eyes that see the sun rise and set, and bodies and minds that feel the same sadness, connection, love, and pain we do. Sentient, conscious beings that can be as intelligent as 3-year old humans, beings that develop deep and lasting bonds with their family and friends and cry for weeks when taken away from one another, that enjoy the sunshine, massages, and the company of loved ones. Beings that we, through our selfish and irresponsible lifestyles, are now enslaving, torturing, and slaughtering by the millions every minute. Even further, most of us would not willingly support a system that is rapidly destroying the environment and our climate, our only earth and home, our health, and our connection with the natural world, with which we are one.

Yet, despite all this, most of us willingly play into the hands of the meat industry that, for profit, deliberately propagates the myths that eating meat is “normal” or “necessary,” that deliberately renders the system and innocent victims thereof (animals, the earth and its environment, and even our own health) invisible from public consciousness, and that distorts our minds to the point where we perceive “farm” animals to be nothing more than objects of consumption to be tortured and violently slaughtered at leisure. By eating meat, we are supporting and making rich one of the most evil and greedy industries known to man; we are supporting the extremely brutal destruction of the environment and of our health; we are supporting the most cruel enslavement and torture imaginable against trillions upon trillions of sensitive and beautiful animals. Is that who we are? Is that who you are? Only when our core values line up with our actions can we call ourselves morally responsible human beings. It’s time to take a hard look at ourselves and bring into our awareness exactly what it is we are doing, and what the consequences really are. It’s time to expose and say no to the harrowing cruelty of the meat industry, to stop turning a blind eye to needless suffering, and to stand up for the voiceless, for the innocent tortured souls. If not now, then when?

The following, extremely informative and eye-opening video has scenes of torture that are extremely hard to watch and may make you cry, but that is nothing compared to what the animals endure each and every second. If it’s too harrowing to watch even for a minute, then it is certainly far too harrowing to support throughout a lifetime with a meat-eating lifestyle. As human beings, we have a moral responsibility to face up to the consequences of our actions, especially if these consequences are on the level of extreme, unimaginable pain, mutilation, and torture. It is my hope that some day in the nearest possible future, we will look back on our normalised farm animal holocaust days with the same anger, disdain, and disbelief that we do when we look back on our days of normalised extreme sexism, racism, and homophobia.

Subscribing to a plant-based diet is extremely easy, healthful, delicious, and even fun. It will light up your conscience and your soul, will over your lifetime save dozens of thousands of animals from abject torture (a vegetarian saves between 371 and 582 animals per year), and will connect you back to nature like nothing else. Wake up, free your mind, and be the change you wish to see in the world. It’s time to choose kindness over cruelty.