Ben Ralston

Why we are all nothing more than ants (and no less than Gods)

I don’t know how old I was exactly (somewhere between 8 and 11) when my Father took me for a walk one evening. The magic of being up late in the balmy summer twilight, and that oh-so-precious time with my Dad meant that something special had to happen.
And it did.
As we walked along the street we chatted, and it was just another day. Just another moment sliding by.
Then we stopped and my Father looked up at the sky, my hand in his. I looked up too and he began to tell me, with a ‘time is not sliding by now’ tone of voice, just how big the universe is.
He explained how many planets there are in our Solar system, and how many Galaxies there are, and the distance from here to the moon, and so on. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that as he outlined the vastness of the universe, I began to realize just how tiny and insignificant I am. By the time he finished, I felt like an ant.
But I also felt like God…

Time had stopped sliding. In fact, it had just stopped. It had expanded in every direction, and stopped. It was infinite. The Universe (space) and that moment (time) had become one. Time and space stretched away from me in every direction, and I just stood there, feeling like God.
I can’t describe that moment any better. It was a revelation. That’s all. It might have been the best thing my Father ever did for me.
*** 

20 years later I was an addict. Yeah, some of you don’t know this, but I spent 2 years of my life in a room in Swiss Cottage, London, eating nothing but baked beans and take-away Balti.   
Those 2 years almost killed me…
I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. I nearly destroyed myself there. I did lose friends, money, time, and health. But I’m still here. I didn’t lose my life.
You’re probably wondering what I was addicted to…
It’s embarrassing. If you’re a recovering heroin addict, or a recovering alcoholic, or a recovering pretty-much-anything-else-you-can-think-of, at least there’s a certain enigma to it.
I’m a recovering video game addict. Not so ‘cool’ huh?
Oh well, at least I’m alive.
Anyway, I lived on beans and balti for a while, and spent 20 hours a day trying to save the world from Nazi aggression.
The game I played was a WW2 strategy game called Sudden Strike 2. An amazing game, very complex, requiring a lot of skill and team-play. I got so good at it that the team of players I got together won the European championships… which were really the world championships, because they were the only championships that existed. So players from all over the world took part.
When I first started playing, I met a German guy called Warhead (he wasn’t really called Warhead, that was just his nickname). He destroyed me in a 1v1 game, and taught me a good lesson. He also told me that all the German players were the best, but really arrogant, and how he’d like to get a great team together to beat the arrogant Germans at the championships the next year. I told him to teach me all he knew, and that together we’d do it.
And that’s what happened. We won the next year. But it almost cost me my life.
I’ve got lots more to write about this: about addiction, and healing, and how being an addict is like living inside a prison inside yourself, and how healing is just all about breaking free of that prison.
I want to say that every one of you reading this is an addict too, but most of you don’t even know it. The ones you hear about – like me, yes – who are addict addicts, are just the ones who are most sensitive and open. They don’t know how to adapt to a world that seems too big for them, and they don’t know how to handle the pain of it all, and they need something to ease that pain; to make them feel safe. So they become addicted, in a way that is very obvious and painful to those around them.
When I was 24 I had a beautiful girlfriend called Adele. She was a dancer. She found me one evening in the Back Bar – a gay bar I was working in by mistake (long story for another time) – and insisted that we go home together. It was a beautiful, bitter-sweet relationship that taught me a lot.
Adele’s Father was an alcoholic. He was really seriously in trouble when I met him. He kept trying to kill himself. Once I spent Christmas with Adele and her family and her Dad threw himself off a bridge. (Into a river. In Scotland. In December). He simply couldn’t handle any more moments sliding by. He survived, and we spent a lot of time that Christmas in the hospital. I talked to him a lot. He was a sweet, funny guy, who just didn’t understand the hypocrisy and corruption and deceit of this world. He didn’t know how to play the game of life, so he gave up and played the game of alcoholism instead.
It was a very sad Christmas.
The biggest lesson I learnt from meeting Adele’s Dad was: you can’t make people change. And it’s one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learnt.
Sometimes people contact me to ask if I can help their loved ones. And I often have to say:
“No”.
I don’t help people who aren’t ready to help themselves. It’s a waste of my time and theirs. You can’t make people change.
It’s a bit of a cliché, but very true about addiction: you usually have to hit rock bottom before you’re ready to start climbing back up.
When I became an addict, it was because I’d completely forgotten about the part of me that wasn’t ant. I felt I was 100% ant. Feeling so small and insignificant; powerless to change anything about each moment that simply slides on by, regardless. Lost in time and space, with no purpose other than pain.
Now, after healing all the hurt that caused me to forget my God-ness, my Beingness, I am whole again. Now I feel half-ant, half-god again. And it’s so good to be alive. It’s good to be a vital part of a vast universe, and to know that the sheer magic and wonder of life is the means and end of itself.
It’s Good.


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EVERYTHING. Is. Perfect.


It is so easy to fall into the trap of looking at the world and finding fault.
When we look, we find what we are looking for, every time. Because we are CREATORS. We create our reality in the form that we choose. We are all-powerful.


If you want to experience peace in the world around you, there must first be peace in your heart.
If you would like to have more money, first find abundance in your Self.
If you would like to know more joy, first seek that place inside yourself where joy comes from.


The world around us is perfect. Don’t you see it!
Through a telescope: All the galaxies expanding and contracting in the eternal rhythm of life (universe)… the planets dancing around each other in their perfect orbits.
Through a microscope: All the internal systems expanding and contracting in the eternal rhythm of life (breath)… the electrons and neurons and atoms and molecules dancing around each other in their perfect orbits…



I am not a scientist, so please forgive me for any factual errors! But the fact remains that when we look up, we see the macrocosm. When we look down, we see microcosm. There is a perfect symmetry to the world around us, a perfect order. This is the truth behind the ancient Hermetic law: “As above, so below; as below, so above. As within, so without; As without, so within“.


When we see chaos, it is because we have created chaos. When we experience suffering, it is because we have attached ourselves to suffering. When we find we are without, then it is time to look WITHIN!
Then it is time to learn from our mistakes, to ask ourselves “what am I trying to teach myself” and to re-learn to see the world as a child does.


A child sees through eyes that are untainted by expectation. It sees things as they are.
Let’s see things as they are. Without fear. Without expectation. Without judgement. Without shame.
Don’t look. Have the courage to see.


It means that we must open ourselves completely.
It means that we must not hold on to what we think we know.
It means letting go of all that is comfortable.


But the trade off is this:
We step out of our little bubbles, our little comfort zones; and into a whole new world of beauty and joy.
We realize that we are infinitely connected to ALL THAT IS, in unimaginable ways – unimaginable because we cannot experience that reality with our imagination, with our thoughts, or with our ideas. Only through BEING, can we come to know that bliss.


I was once teaching a seminar, and I told the group that everything is perfect. One student asked me:
“what about war? what about rape? what about all the suffering in the world?”
It’s a good question, and not one that is easy to answer!
But the answer is this:
All human suffering is caused by our belief in duality. When we believe that there is suffering, there is. When we believe that the world is a hard place, it is. When we look for problems, we will certainly find them. And that is what we have been doing for a very, very long time.
Now, in this age, on this day, at this moment, we can change all that.
At any moment, any one of us, no matter what our circumstances, can change. We can always look inside ourselves and choose a different way. We can always look inside ourselves and let go of the pain, the suffering, the depression, the anger, the lack.
We can always see beauty, joy, and love, WITHIN. Because that is where it comes from. And if we all do that, then war, rape, suffering, will disappear. We create them with our negativity.


We are perfect as we are. God, whether you see him as a being, or an energy, or nature itself, doesn’t make mistakes.