So what's it all about then?

What is the meaning of life?

Why are we here?

Why do I keep having to deal with all this?

About ten years ago, in fact almost exactly ten years ago, I was going through a difficult time in my life.  Well, to be honest about it, it seemed to me that all the pillars of what I had considered to be a pretty good setup for the previous seventeen years had come crashing down.  I felt used and betrayed, and I was left in a pretty miserable state wondering what to do.

While I was in that vulnerable place, I was introduced to something that felt like it was close to a revelation.  It was that first book by Neal Donald Walsch, Conversations with God.

Now you can (and I did) look at the motivation behind that book in two ways.  It could be:

- wow, here's a great idea to make some money and to get famous, I'll write a book and pretend it's been written by God, and I'll find a publisher, and I'll soon be a multi-millionaire"

or

- wow, here's a great idea to make some money and to get famous, I'll write a book and pretend it's been written by God, and I'll find a publisher, and I'll soon be a multi-millionaire"

The only difference between those two, of course, is that one of them (which, I'm not sure) is being used as an instrument of communication by a deity, and the other is a scam.

In the end, you can make your own decision as to whether you believe that it's divine intervention or human greed which is behind it all.  Either way, it doesn't really make a lot of difference, you probably read it anyway.


And I read it, anyway.

And the first thing that it told me was that I wasn't alone.  And a couple of days after I read it, I found another book, which jumped out at me in WH Smith's.  It was called "Who Moved My Cheese?"

Suddenly, my life was a very different place.  I had arrived in a different sphere of thinking, where there was a sensible, logical reason for every emotion, and once recognised, it could be controlled.  I also had a friend, this thing called a "soul" inside of me, and I discovered after a bit of practice that I could talk to it, and that it could talk to me, and that what it and I thought were really quite different, and that it was probably right, and that I was probably wrong - or rather, given that it was apparently The Real Me, then I was probably right, and now I was realising that I was probably wrong until I realised that I was right.

That's a bit complicated, but it makes sense to me.

The silly thing is that, unless I am faced with an unsurmountable problem, I tend to leave The Real Me in his box, and carry on regardless.  This is strange, as he was a great help to me ten years back.  Within the space of about three months, I changed from being someone deep in the throes of despair to someone who was pretty well balanced.  

Maybe I should commune with him more often in the good times - take him for a beer sometimes.

Sounds like a good idea, after all, what are friends for?