| I am
a thinker who tries to follow in the footsteps of the
great wise men in the past - Socrates, Diogenes, Jesus,
Kierkegaard, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tsu, Huang Po,
Hakuin, and Nietzsche. My aim in life is to
awaken as many people as possible to the nature of
Reality. I was born in 1964 in Brisbane, Australia. My family was middle-class and well-off. I experienced few hardships in my early years and no traumas. The neighbourhood I grew up in was peaceful and happy. For all their faults, my parents were civilized people who placed value on literature, art and science. As such, they gave me an appreciation of the "life of the mind". Apart from my mother and sister, my upbringing was almost entirely woman-free. I attended all-boys schools, played golf in my spare time, worked as a chainman for a year after I left school, and studied surveying at university. I led a very sheltered life, you could say, one that was very male-orientated. I was like an exotic plant growing up in a greenhouse, mercifully free of the pressures created by the opposite sex. It wasn't until my late teens that I began to seek relationships with women.
|
 |
 |
Having
fully tasted the joys of worldly prosperity and success
in my childhood and adolescence, I became deeply
dissatisfied with conventional life. In 1986,
while still at university, I went through a major
existential crisis, which eventually led me to drop out
of society altogether. I moved out into the
countryside and began exploring art, music and mysticism
in an endeavour to find something more meaningful in life
than the usual business of slaving away at a career and
pleasing a wife. I slowly gravitated towards
philosophy, and eventually reached the point where I
consciously wanted to be a spiritual man - "just
like Jesus and the Buddha", as I used to say. I met Kevin Solway during this time, who was to have a lasting influence on me, and then in 1989 I moved to Hobart, Tasmania, where I pursued the philosophic life with great earnest. The next few years were very difficult, but were the making of me. It was a rough time during which I desperately tried to come to grips with ramifications of living truthfully, and it wasn't until the mid-90s that I began to make some real headway with it. I nowadays look back on that period in the same way that a butterfly might look back on its struggles to break free of its cocoon. |
I rely on social security payments for an income. My one and only full-time job was back in 1982. I have, over the years, been on unemployment benefits (by choice), the disability support pension (I was assessed as having a personality disorder*) and the carer's pension (while looking after a friend who was ill). I am currently back on unemployment benefits again. I have engaged in several relationships with women in the past, and also sired a son in 1992 (who doesn't live with me). Nowadays, I am basically a hermit.
* Assessment files: PDF Translation |
|
