Welcome to Issue 3 of my infrequent newsletter. I hope you are well?

I will be at a few events over the coming weeks - the London Tarot Conference this weekend, then Ilkley's Complementary Medicine Festival, Birmingham's Mind Body & Soul Weekend, and finally Cambridge's MBS Show.

Check the website for dates and exact locations, and maybe I'll see you at one of them?

In preparation for the release for the film '2012', here's some controversial thinking. I know, that's not like me is it? :)

The World Ends Today

Many folks await 21^st December 2012 with hope and expectation. They believe that day will bring the end of the world as we know it, as we come to the end of the Mayan Calendar.

The latest of many ‘End Times’ myths,  this one is all about  the Earth’s collision with Planet X, geomagnetic reversal, polar shift, solar flares and tsunamis that make Boxing Day 2004 look like a ripple in a pond. But why does it have to take events like these for us to recognise that the human race is in the last chance saloon, right now? Wasn’t The Great War meant to be the war that ends all wars? Do mass murderers get any worse than Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong? Can the destructive power of science be any more clearly showcased than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki where hundreds of thousands of souls were obliterated in the blink of an eye? The world as we knew it has already ended a thousand times over, and every day we have another opportunity to build a new world, but still we wait - for tomorrow, for a leader, for something, anything to turn up to save us the trouble of solving the mess ourselves.

‘End Times’ beliefs have been around for a long time. The Millennium Bug seems laughable now, but think back, a lot of people were worried, some people were very worried and some other people sold up and hid away on desert islands.

This time around, ‘The 2012 Problem’, will make some people very rich, and many others very disappointed, if not a bit relieved when the prophecies fail to come true. But it also risks lulling us into a mistaken belief that the die is cast and nothing can be done about the problems that face us. This is far from the truth, and we should begin by recognising that this belief is given power by our eagerness to place our lives in the hands of others. We are avoiding the responsibility of making a difference where it is most needed – right now!

Believe and have trust, and all will be well.

Alongside ‘End Times’ phenomena, is the growth in recent years of theories such as The Law of Attraction. No law in fact, just an idea, and one that does indeed work – but only up to a point.

I first came across the principle of The Law of Attraction in 1989 in a book called Mystic Mind Power by Carl Nagel. Within its pages were all manner of techniques for directing the power of the mind toward making things happen in the real world. I devoured it hungrily, and what do you know, it really worked! I was a naive and impatient 17 year old, with very little money, but by using these principles I managed to prove (or so I thought) that there was such a thing as a free lunch. I entered competitions in local cafes and restaurants, applied the techniques and ate for free every single day that summer. But then – suddenly and seemingly inexplicably – it stopped working. It took me years to figure out why.

I had to understand and then accept that life is for learning, nothing more. The more we learn the better our life becomes. Opportunities for learning about life present themselves in various forms. Sometimes they are enjoyable, sometimes painful, sometimes about things and sometimes about people, sometimes about us and sometimes about others, but so long as the learning takes place then anything is possible. I had stumbled across a fundamental discovery - it’s the learning that creates the magic. Everything becomes possible when we are prepared to do more today and be more than we were yesterday. The more we are willing to change and adapt and progress the closer we get to that elusive goal – peace of mind. The more we learn, the better our life gets. But I hadn’t yet learned about the flip side, that a refusal to learn, resisting progress and development, always brings a full measure of unhappiness. That lesson would come next.

So, back during that wonderful summer, while I didn’t have to spend money on food, I was free to spend it on having a good time. And so I did. This amazing power of attraction helped me to live a life way beyond my means that was damaging my health and my future prospects, and could never be sustained. The blessing of the Law of Attraction had turned into a curse, for I was not learning anything. In fact I was using the techniques as a short cut to avoid learning. If I could magic up lunch every day from no-where then why should I ever study to get a decent job, or work hard to get promotion? I’ll just attract everything I need – no stress, no effort, no learning, no development, no growth, no worries!

But of course it didn’t pan out like that. The techniques worked alright, but I found that you can’t cosmically order something which is in conflict with your Life Purpose, and you can’t continue to attract that which is no good for you, or which defeats the object of your life. It might be nice to think that you can attract a new house, a new relationship or a new job, but it might be essential for your development that you don’t do these things just yet. Maybe you need to see your current partner as they really are and learn to tolerate them, or it might be necessary that you continue to persist in your current job because an opening is just round the corner, even though you can’t see it. Changes can and should always be made, and there is no rule that says you can’t be happy, but happiness must be earned. What matters most is the learning, and it cannot shortcut that via the Law of Attraction, or by a belief that the world will end in 2012 when we will shortly afterwards ascend to heaven.

Beliefs are powerful things. For example, a strong belief in a ‘Parking Angel’ coupled with a focussed intention will certainly find you a parking space on a busy Saturday afternoon, when you really need it. No question about that. But if you call on this power to compensate for the fact that you left the house late, again, or because you got up late, again, then you are defeating the object of life, which is to learn, develop and grow. And that’s where the Law of Attraction, the Power of Thought and Cosmic Ordering all break down and cease to work.

Good news only, please.

During that enlightening summer of ‘89, I also read that I could protect myself from bad stuff happening to me. I formed ‘a shell of positive cosmic energy, that repelled all negative forces and attracted only positive life experiences’, and it worked really well, at first. I found myself suddenly in demand at parties and night outs, with new friends and new girlfriends. They were happy days, for sure, but the experiment crashed and burned soon after when reality – in the form of the need to learn, develop and grow – crept up and cracked me over the head that New Years Eve. Awaking in hospital I was mortified that my fondly held beliefs lay in such wreckage on the floor.

I had discovered that none us can avoid the learning. I had tried, and it didn’t work. I had learned the hard way that we cannot attract things which are no good for us, or are shortcutting our essential life lessons. I had finally grasped that we cannot insulate ourselves from bad things. Sometimes in fact we need this ‘blessed trauma’ to give us the reason to make the changes we so badly need.

Who knows best?

When my experimentation with the Law of Attraction and Power of Thought had delivered such catastrophic results I looked around for someone to blame, but it was a fruitless search. It would take me some years to realise that when things went wrong in my life I was always to be found close by the scene of the crime. What a depressing thought, but one that could be eased if I recognised that, magically, I was also there whenever good results came. I was contributing to my successes as well as my failures, but I had been too ready to hang both on others, when in reality it was all down to me. Both good luck and bad karma could be overcome by my own actions. I was the captain of my own ship – and that didn’t mean some kind of selfish or grasping attitude, it meant getting myself right so I could be of maximum benefit to others.

How Long Is Now?

So, if we return to the present day, we see the worship of all manner of deeply unsatisfactory people, we see innocents follow the flawed teachings of hollow religions and vague belief systems and we witness huge numbers of folk placing their trust in the hands of people that don’t deserve it, so that they can act all surprised when they let them down. Again. But don’t worry, say some. The magical date of 2012 is only round the corner, and then everything will be alright. You don’t have to do anything, they say, except of course see the film, and buy the book, and the card set and go on the course. Then all will be well.

Have we learned nothing?

If we wait meekly for tomorrow to be different, then tomorrow will be exactly the same as today.

If we wish to celebrate a new dawn, a new chance to get things right, to turn a page, start again and begin to transform this planet of ours into a paradise, then that time is now. Nuclear apocalypse or environmental collapse could come tomorrow, next week, next year, or never at all. We already have the ability to destroy the human race 20 times over, and we just don’t know when the game will be up, so surely it would be better to use our energies to make a difference while we can – today.

2012 is just another year, containing beauty and disaster, like every other year before it. Anything more is a myth, for the end of the world is happening right now, and we are witness to it.