Gary's Brief Story

What follows is an attempt to give you some understanding of what motivates me and why Personal Development is so important in my life, and why I want to help others with their personal development:

From a very early age I have loved learning for its own sake. I have done some stupid things in my life, and continue to make mistakes, but never the same one twice. But my intentions are honourable. I want to live a good, enjoyable life and always try to do my best and I am sure that most people do too. I am very persistent and when I am vitally interested in something I will follow it to the end of the road.

When I joined the workforce, I quickly rose up the management ranks and soon learnt that the workers and the managers might as well have come from different planets! I tried my best to get these warring parties together, and had some success organising after-work social functions. I was an Accountant in those days, but I was more interested in the people side of things than the numbers, because I had worked out that if people were happy in their jobs then they did better work, and they looked after the customers and then the numbers improved. I wanted more freedom in my life and grew tired of the stifling office routines and corporate politics and created my own management consulting business.

I can identify the exact day when I became very, very serious about personal growth. It was the morning of December 9th, 1983. Whilst driving to a client's office I heard on the radio that a man had been murdered at a country town in Western Victoria. That man was my younger brother Ray, who had stayed at my place only two days before this terrible event. I went to the morgue to identify him, and when I saw him on that slab - stabbed in the heart - a dagger of another kind bounced straight back at me. The dagger was 'my own mortality'. The message was a shocking one; "Ray would not have thought he would be dead today. This does not make any sense. Life is not what you thought it was. It is precarious and short. You too are mortal, and one day, maybe tomorrow, who knows? you will die. What are you doing with your life, because this isn't a dress rehearsal!' I found this wake-up call rather unsettling!

The alleged killer was caught and charged with Ray's murder but before his trial he committed suicide. I found out later that he blamed Ray for the break-up of his marriage.

My reaction to these events was to become one of the most obsessively curious and dissatisfied individuals on the planet - about the human condition, about how life is so fragile and can end in a moment of madness and what, if anything can be done about it. All the elements of "man's inhumanity to man", are evident within my family upbringing and the unhappy, broken and violent relationships in the world at large.

Some of the many questions I have tried to answer about life and human nature include the following, but please keep in mind that my answers, (in blue) are a work-in-progress:

Q: Why is death such a taboo subject?
A: Evolution has put humans in an extremely challenging situation by giving us foresight about our own mortality, so this situation is enough to make any creature go nuts! You have to give our species a big tick for finding such creative solutions to this 'impossible' problem. What are they? Deny it; ignore it, and it might go away of its own accord; invent a God who will protect us and bring us back from the dead if we follow the rules of whatever religion we believe in; go beyond all suffering, including fear of death, by meditating on who you really are, and realising that you are not a body or a mind or a soul, so there is nothing to die. For some bloody-minded reason, none of these appeal to me. A dream may come from the mind, but in my experience it needs a brain to contain it and a living body to sustain it. I love THIS LIFE too much, and I never signed any death contract. So how do I live with this contradiction in my innermost being, and still enjoy life and live with meaning and purpose, without becoming full of despair? The best way I have so far discovered is to live creatively and make a positive contribution to the world.    

Q: What is the root cause of human suffering?
A: There is not one single cause but you could say that we are certain that we exist as isolated, separate, individuals and this makes us feel permanently restless and anxious. As we get older we tend to close ourselves off from others and so worsen our feelings of being on our own. But is this the whole truth? Has language - the word - made us think we are fixed psychological entities that look out on the world and are therefore separate from the world? Or if you take away 'the word' that is, your name and your human identity - the roles you play, are you not simply unfocused awareness? Is this awareness exclusive to you or inclusive to all? Is life more accurately put, a changing, flowing, dynamic process, rather than a bunch of separate, fixed objects with fixed identities?  For example, are you the same person at 5pm today that you were at 8am this morning? This is brilliant because it means that human nature and by definition, your life or anyone's life is not fixed, but can change. But you have to want to change. What is it that wakes you up to the need for change in your life? Isn't it some kind of awareness, that something is wrong, you feel a discomfort, something is nagging at you, and it won't go away, so you have to do something creative to resolve the tension?   

Q: Why are so many people stuck in boring, unhealthy work and have unsatisfactory lives?
A: They allow others to think for them, and through misuse have lost their natural creative ability. The neo-Darwinist view of evolution is very dangerous because it effectively excludes consciousness, mind, intention, creativity and all that is subjective and valued in people, and reduces people to being simply victims of their genes and therefore mindless machines in a constant, competitive battle to survive. This so-called 'scientific' and objective way of understanding ourselves dehumanises us, and is mainly responsible for the development of machine-like job roles in vast factories where the goal is efficiency - not humane and creative ways to live. It is very dangerous for the future of our species because this causes us to despair and hate our mindless jobs, and by extension, ourselves. This then becomes a vicious circle, and people become victims and blame others for their problems. The only way out of this destructive pattern is for people to take responsibility for their lives, which really means to learn how to respond creatively to their life challenges, to learn to think for themselves and understand that the industrial/ materialistic system can only provide more 'stuff' but rarely inner peace or joy.   

Q: Why do we allow Governments to go to war, when the majority of people are against most of the wars?
A: Most democracies are not true democracies i.e. of the people, by the people and for the people, but ruled by a few elites within a political party system with their own agendas. Unless the political system is changed to a form of direct democracy where the people are self-governing, then things will stay the same. How might this come about? There are no longer any technical reasons why people can't vote on any issue, given automated teller machines etc. The only real obstacle - and it's a massive one - is just how many people really want this kind of power and there would need to be enlightened leaders who wanted it too. Only the truly repressed might, and most people have got it pretty good - in Australia anyway.

Q: Why do we allow too many kids to suffer, whether from physical abuse or from neglect of various kinds?
A: Many times we look the other way because the family unit is considered a sacred cow in most societies. The other aspect is that we only pay attention to things that are close to home. What happens in another country is unfortunate. What happens in my country is not very good. What happens in my town is getting a bit serious. What happens in my street is getting very uncomfortable. But what happens in my own family usually gets my attention! Unfortunately it is usually the powerless and the dependent that bear the brunt of the violence that stems from frustrated individuals who may also have suffered at the hands of their parents or carers. Until we tackle the root cause - i.e. frustrated individuals who don't know how to get what they want and lash out at those closest to them - the problem will continue.
 
Q: Why don't we treat the environment, animals and nature as our most valuable assets, given they are our life-support system?
A: It is our arrogance and feeling of superiority over all other species and nature in general that makes us believe we can do anything we want. This includes destroying rain forests, depleting oceans of fish, polluting the atmosphere, etc and also thinking we can solve any of these problems with technology, rather than taking a good, hard look at ourselves and why we behave the way we do. Most people don't understand that evolution is a continuous, creative, changing process, in which the rules of the game of life are also changing as the participants change the playing field. We have been lucky so far but our luck is running out quickly but we don't really FEEL WE ARE THE PROBLEM. The 'slow' changing climate is still too remote from most people's everyday reality. Unfortunately our brains are conditioned to react to short-term, local events. Gradual remote change that happens slowly and builds up to an eventual crisis point is not part of our evolutionary equipment. Of course humans are responsible for polluting the atmosphere and even if we weren't responsible, we had better do something to fix the problem if we want to stay in the game and conserve our beautiful planet for our children and future generations. I can only see this happening if we become much more self-aware, creative and cooperative on a global scale.

Q: Why don't we protect animals from the terrible suffering they endure in factory farms?
A: We don't feel their suffering as fellow creatures. According to some religions, animals don't have souls like people, so they are expendable, just a resource really to be used for our benefit. Anyone who has spent some time with just about any animal, whether domestic or not, would understand that they love their life just like you and I do, and want to live without the unnecessary suffering that humans subject them to. See also my answers to the war question and the environment.

Q: Why do we eat animals when it is much healthier not to eat them, and better for the planet and also we could feed billions more people?
A: This is a combination of just about every answer I have given above. There is so much misinformation about health and nutrition supported by very powerful and wealthy industries and lobby groups with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Again, unless you learn to think for yourself and find your own answers to these questions, you are likely to live a significantly less than full and healthy life. The significant environmental benefits from adopting a vegetarian diet include: reducing oil consumption, enabling fresh water to be redirected to more efficient uses, reducing the drivers for climate change, including carbon dioxide and methane and enabling our oceans to revert back to vibrant ecosystems and not least, healthy people.

...and the most fundamental personal development question of them all...

'Who am I?'

I will leave this question hanging for the time being. However, if you haven't grappled with this profound question, you are seriously under-valuing your true potential and true nature.

Rising like a phoenix from the ashes of my family background and my search for sanity and meaning in the world - comes the Superlife program.

Hey look, I'm not saying I'm perfect, or a guru. In fact I can be a pain in the a..., I am very stubborn when it comes to finding out things for myself, I am very sceptical of experts, and authorities of all kinds - not because I have anything against them per se, but because we are living in an age of extreme specialisation. This means that our experts know a lot about a very small part of life but most situations are not reducible to a single part or cause. In short we need to look more at the big picture of life, and seek to understand the whole dynamic situation, and that includes my life and your life and our common environment and interrelationships. Also, Superlife is definitely not about new-age crystals and all that nonsense.

In pursuit of a full, creative, adventurous life I have conducted some unusual personal development experiments, such as living in the bush by myself for one year, and also trying to live in the present, with no hope for any future. I nearly went crazy, but not quite. Well, I did go almost vegan (perfection is not good for you either!) and ate lots of nuts, and had some totally unexpected and unpredictable things happen!