Ben Ralston

My wife told me to edit this (too graphic). I didn’t – read at your own discretion.



I had a miserable childhood.
Don’t get me wrong: I was blessed with great parents who gave me very strong foundations. But beyond that, I got a fairly tough deal.
Each and every school I went to sucked. Sucked with a capital S.
Strange really because they were all private schools; or as we say in England (in a typically counter-intuitive, oxymoronic kind of a way), public schools. The schools that parents have to pay a lot of money to send their kids to.
So I supposedly had one of the best educations that money can buy! Sure didn’t feel like it though… and I suspect that education is not something that can, or should be, bought…
***
When I was six, we lived in Israel for a year. I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew when we first got there, and I didn’t know a soul, but the ‘teacher’ made me stand facing into the corner at the front of the classroom, all the Israeli kids behind me sniggering at the pale, dumb kid who even the teacher didn’t like.
My mother had to pick me up from hospital one day – I’d had my head cracked open by a rock-wielding Israelite. I must admit, I may have thrown the first stone. But his was a lot bigger…



At the end of that year we moved back to England, and my ‘education’ began in earnest…

***
My first school back home: the ‘headmistress’ force-fed me (fairly violently) a particularly disgusting school dinner. I was about 8 years old I guess. To this day I would rather chew my own legs off than eat rice pudding.
Her husband, the ‘headmaster’, on a separate occasion punished me by taking me into his office – he closed the door, made me take my pants down, and bent me over his desk. He then beat me with a stick across my buttocks, gently. I suspect that he was playing with himself at the same time.
At that school, I had not a single nice teacher. Not one. There were only grey, lifeless, totally uninspired, empty-shell ghost-shadow excuses for human beings pretending to teach us. They didn’t teach. They stood at the front of the room and pointed their fingers, looking bored. The only thing to learn from them was that life is mindless, repetitive, and without joy.
When we, the children, mirrored their boredom, we were punished, usually by being given pages of ‘lines’ to write out as extra homework. Usually from the bible.
I would do my lines in bed with a flashlight so that I didn’t have to tell my parents that I’d been ‘bad’. One time my Father came in and caught me with a bible in bed (I’d managed to hide the paper and pen when I heard him coming). The memory of his face now makes me laugh. He obviously thought that his 9-year-old son was doing late night bible studies, and probably had visions of me becoming a priest!
He said something like:
“Ah, you’re reading the bible, eh? Yes, it’s an, er… interesting book isn’t it?”
Let me tell you – to a 9-year-old boy, the bible is anything but interesting. But I nodded and waited for him to leave so that I could finish my lines.

***
One day, when I was about 11, my mother told me she was taking me out of the school a year early. She’d enrolled me in a new school. I remember her saying to me somewhat apologetically:
“You haven’t been happy here have you?”
So I went to a new school for a year. It was much better. We had to travel a bit further each day to get there, but there were some nice teachers. Also, again, some very lifeless ones, but it was better. One of the nice teachers turned out to be a bit too nice though. He was the drama teacher, and he gave me the lead role in the school play: Hiawatha. He also invited me to his on-campus apartment where he played hardcore porn on his VHS and encouraged me to masturbate. He then sat in a chair slightly behind me, and masturbated himself…
I was afraid of him; fascinated by the beautiful naked women and the sex that he introduced me to; and deeply uncomfortable with the various situations that I kept finding myself in with him. But I didn’t tell anyone. Abused children rarely do…
He ingratiated himself with my parents by nursing my budding acting abilities (for which my Ma was grateful), and before I knew it he’d become a ‘family friend’. He’d come for barbecues and evening meals and I’d sit there inwardly squirming.

***
When I was 13 I went to high school, and for some strange reason I asked my parents if I could board there. I remember having fantasies of pillow fights and midnight snacks. I had two brothers 10 years younger than me, and perhaps I just craved the company of my peers. I don’t know. But the fun I had hoped to find wasn’t there. Instead there was an accepted culture of bullying and abuse that dated back to the dark ages – literally. Public schools in England are renowned for it.
The teachers weren’t so bad though, although I can’t say that any of them were great teachers. They still seemed pretty bored.
Except one. Mr Green, an English teacher. I will never, ever forget that man. He was only there for a year, but he changed my life. In many ways, he probably saved it.


At that school every teacher had a nickname. All the nicknames were things like ‘Witch’ (the very creepy chemistry teacher) and ‘Buttocks’ (the geography teacher whose arse was so large that she had to go sideways through doors. No kidding. I went through a phase of having a crush on her so bad that I would sit with an erection through entire geography classes. If ever she asked me to stand up and come to the front of the class I had to will my penis to behave: not easy when you’re 13-years-old).
Mr Green had long sideburns, and his nickname was… ‘Sideburns’. I wondered at the time how he got away with such an innocuous nickname. Now I realize that it was a sign of our affection for him.

How else do teenagers say “I love you”?
To me he was like a pool of glistening water, an oasis in a burning sandy-hot desert. Going to his classes I was excited, inspired, engaged. He gave us books to read that I could understand and believe in, and he read them out loud with us, sharing his passion with us. Every word of his was measured, had meaning, and was offered elegantly, with a smile.
His eyes shone, and he would encourage us when we did well, and berate us when we were fools, but everything was done with love.
One day I found out that he was leaving to go to a better school. I remember vividly how I felt. Betrayed, distraught, abandoned. He was too good for me.
He left, and I was alone with the shadows for the rest of my time there.
One sentence of his haunts me (in a ‘friendly ghost’ way) to this day. I must have not done something that I should have done (apologized to someone for something?), and he asked me why not – why hadn’t I done it? I couldn’t answer him. And he said:
“Ahh. You’re a moral coward”
I think that I’ve been trying to prove him wrong ever since.
Isn’t that what a great teacher does? Every word and action transmits wisdom, and the world around them becomes a wiser, better place.
Every word of his was a stone dropped carefully into the pond of my young mind, and his concentric circles of compassion and understanding continue to ripple on through my life, even to this day.
If only there were more teachers like that, eh?




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Abuse causes trauma. The trauma of abuse, until healed, causes countless problems later in life. Abuse does not need to be obvious (i.e. sexual abuse). It can also be subtle, (i.e. lack of attention from parents). Most people who suffer abuse tend to find themselves in a cycle of abuse – as was clearly my case. The good news is that it is very, very easy now to heal trauma. And it is no longer necessary to talk about what happened (to relive the experience). If you, or anyone you know, lives with the consequences of abuse or trauma, please contact me, because I can help.

How your personal views are worthless (and why you should probably re-think everything you think you know)


I once believed that:
If I don’t wear shoes, I’ll hurt my feet.
If I don’t keep warm, I’ll catch a cold.
I only need to practice yoga to stay fit and healthy.
I only need to stay fit and healthy to be happy.
What’s good for me is good for everyone.


When I was at school I had a friend who was, to be honest, an asshole. He once hawked up a big green lump of phlegm out of the depths of his chest and spat it full in my face. Yes, that kind of asshole. But he was nevertheless my friend, and I loved him, and somehow still do (although we’ve long since lost touch).
He once told me this saying, and it’s stuck with me ever since:
The more you study, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why bother?
Of course it’s a bit silly, but when I heard it then it felt very right. Perhaps because at that time the whole adult world seemed to be pitted in a deadly struggle to teach me crap. Parents, teachers, extended family, family friends, and distant relatives were all hell-bent on cramming my head full of algebra, geology, ancient history and chemistry, at a time when all I really wanted to do was climb trees.
Many years later I read the classic book ‘I Am That’, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, and the following line changed my life:
“Love says ‘I am everything’. Wisdom says ‘I am nothing’. Between the two, my life flows.”
Socrates said:
“All I know is that I know nothing”.
Such simplicity. Such beauty. Such wisdom.
That’s the kind of ancient history I am interested in… 

Shoes.

Of course, if you don’t wear shoes, you hurt your feet, right? It’s only logical.
There’s another way. Develop faith, and walk down a jungle-covered Indian mountain barefoot.
I also once got high (long time ago), and ran full speed down a narrow, steep, crooked and uneven footpath, (tree roots, rocks, and all) in the pitch dark. The odds of my making it down in one piece were probably about a billion to one. “But” as it says in the bible, “with faith, anything is possible”. (Mathew 19; 26)

Cold.

That’s why they call it ‘a cold’ isn’t it? If you get cold, you get a cold, right? Right!
Except, if you raise your energy, develop a strong immune system, and have faith, you don’t ever get colds (or, very rarely).
When I believed this one, I used to keep warm. I also used to get a lot of colds, flu’s, and throat problems. Now, I rarely dress ‘sensibly’, and I hardly ever get sick.

Fit and Healthy.

Many times in my life I thought I found The Answer. You know, the answer to all our problems – Life, The Universe, and Everything. But the truth is, there is no answer. The question is the answer, because in the asking of the question we find another question, and it’s in the very asking of questions that we find our purpose (isn’t it?). So every time you think you’ve found that answer, think again. The part of us that likes to believe in answers is our Ego. So what would happen is, my Ego would find The Answer, and then a little while later I’d realize that The Answer didn’t actually answer all the questions after all, and I’d set off in search of The Answer all over again. This is the definition of suffering isn’t it? It’s certainly one definition of insanity.
Nowadays, I very much concur with Carlos Castaneda / Don Juan’s secret to staying fit and healthy:
“The secret to having a healthy body is in what you don’t do”.

Happy.

It’s been told a million times by a million people better than myself, but I’ll say it again: happiness is an inside job.
‘There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path.’
That said, I’ve found something very interesting in my time thus far on Earth: we are innately happy beings. Given a natural, peaceful biological development (from conception to adulthood), and a supportive and loving upbringing / education, we cannot fail to be happy.
How many of us had those two simple things? Very few. Instead we have almost all of us experienced abuse and trauma, and trauma disconnects us from our happy Self.
So, yes, happiness is inside us already, waiting to come out, and yes, in that sense, Self Help or Personal Development is a waste of time, but you know what? Until you’ve healed the trauma, the happiness is hiding. Like the Sun behind the clouds.

Good.

Another cliché: ‘human beings are like snowflakes’.
Yes, cliché but true. No two of us are the same. Even if you take the most identical identical twins, they are deeply different; each unique. And as different as we all are, we are also all on different paths, and at different stages of the path. So no, there is no ‘one size fits all’ in this life.
One of the things that brought this home to me very clearly was a comment that a reader left after my article The 3 Reasons to be a Vegetarian. Calling himself simply ‘Omnivore’, this person said that despite having had been raised a vegetarian; and despite believing completely in everything that my article espoused; and despite having eaten the perfect ‘textbook’ vegetarian diet; he needed meat, and when he started eating meat, his health and sense of well-being improved greatly. He went from ‘surviving to thriving’. His comment helped me to understand that there is no right way to eat. (I thought I’d been writing The Truth, The Answer). It also helped me to find a better way for me to eat. Changing this belief – a strong viewpoint that I’d taught in seminars – wasn’t easy. But it was liberating.
What this world needs like a hole in the head is more beliefs, views, and opinions.
What this world desperately needs is more people who love themselves and each other and the world around them, regardless of views, beliefs, and opinions.
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Get out feeling good. (The wise grieve neither for the living, nor for the dead.)

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, oil on canvas, 1793 (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels)

You probably think you are “(insert your name)”. You’re not – you can legally change your name, but you won’t have changed what you are – your name is just a handle with which the world is able to pick you up and examine you.
You probably think of yourself as either a man or a woman. You’re not. That is just a gender association that you make based upon the genetic choices that your cells made when your body was being formed biologically. You are only an association as long as you are not being the genuine article.
You probably think of yourself primarily as your body. Most people do…
You’re not your body anymore than you are your car!
When you sit in your car, you don’t say: “I am a Ford / Honda / Daewoo”! (At least, I hope you don’t). You probably say: “I’m driving my Daewoo”.
Your car is just a vehicle that transports you from A to B.
Your body is just a vehicle that transports you from A to B. A very beautiful, wonderful, miraculous vehicle, but a vehicle nonetheless.
You are not your body. This may sound strange to you until you consider the following: if you have an accident one day and the doctor has to amputate a leg or two, (let’s say for the sake of argument – all your limbs)… will you be any less you? No, you’ll be the same you, just without arms and legs.
You probably think of yourself as American (or Slovene, English… whatever nationality passport you carry). You are not. That is just a label that you were given. Labels limit you  – you are much more than a label.
You are not American any more than you are Christian, or Buddhist, or Jewish, or Muslim, or … insert any other religious / spiritual belief system. These are just labels that you identify with. The real you is beyond labels, beyond identification.
You are pure light (bear with me here if you’re allergic to new-age-isms – I am too! But this is truth…) You are all colors and no color. You are pure light.
You are pure light. You are pure consciousness. You are pure love.
What is pure light, consciousness, love? Are these just nice words; nice new-age concepts that are devoid of real meaning?
No! They seem that way sometimes because their meaning is so subtle… but love, light, and consciousness are the fundamental properties of existence!
‘In the beginning was the word’: Consciousness.
And God said, ‘let there be light’: Consciousness.
Pure consciousness is what you really are.
Pure consciousness is your essence.
Your body, emotions, and thoughts are simply waves of consciousness. All that you think you are – just waves of consciousness.
What you really are is pure consciousness.
Swami Vishnu Devananda used to say something every morning when he taught the Sivananda Yoga teacher training course. He used to ask the question:
“What is today?”
When I was asked this same question (by his disciple Swami Mahadevananda), I replied ‘Monday’.
He said ‘No’. And waited.
‘5th February?’
‘No’. Long pause.
‘Your birthday?!’
Smile. ‘No. It’s another day closer to death’.
Today is another day closer to death.
Death is coming. Sooner or later it will catch up with you… how will you feel in that moment?
Will you be afraid? Sad? Regretful?
Will you be joyful? Excited? Will you celebrate?!
What dies is only the body. We do not die. Just as it is written in the Bhagavad Gita:
“The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.
Nor at any time indeed was I not, nor these rulers of men, nor verily shall we ever cease to be hereafter.
Just as in this body the embodied (soul) passes into childhood, youth and old age, so also does he pass into another body; the firm man does not grieve thereat…
…The unreal hath no being; there is no non-being of the Real; the truth about both has been seen by the knowers of the Truth.
Know That to be indestructible, by whom all this is pervaded. None can cause the destruction of That, the Imperishable.
Weapons cut It not, fire burns It not, water wets It not, wind dries It not.
This Self cannot be cut, burnt, wetted nor dried up. It is eternal, all-pervading, stable, ancient and immovable.”
So, the job, the house, the ‘stuff’. All the places we direct our attention: how important are they? You can’t take any of it with you.
At that final moment, when you are about to leave this body, the only thing that will matter is how you feel. That is important. You won’t be thinking about your bank balance, or your mortgage, or the news, or any of the other things that take up so much of our time these days.
You will be aware only of how you feel.
My advice: get out feeling good (without regret; without sadness; without fear).
Because perhaps death is just the first step of the next part of your journey, and the first step of any journey is a big one.
Get out feeling good.
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AN OPPORTUNITY

I have no idea why, but a friend of mine here in Slovenia asked me to write an article about Autism. So I will! I like a good challenge…


The reason it’s a challenge is because I don’t feel myself to be any kind of authority on the subject. My experience is limited:
I spent a year of my life working with young people for a charity in England called the Prince’s Trust. My job was to recruit 15 young people (aged 15 – 25), and then lead them through a 12 week course, which included many different things, for example a two week community project, a week of team building exercises in Wales (canoeing, rock climbing, bridge-building), and a week with the fire brigade. I ran three such courses, and on one of them I recruited Rosie, a 16 year old girl with Asperger’s syndrome – a form of autism…




I have seen two clients with autism. Both of them came to me because their parents wanted me to see them. On both occasions, I warned the parents that I was not prepared to see their children with a view to ‘healing’ them, but they insisted on coming, so I agreed. Both times, I felt strongly that there was nothing ‘wrong’ with the kids: I wanted to work on the parents instead!


That’s my experience of autism. But I suppose that I do have a strong opinion about it, so here goes…


There is nothing wrong with someone who has autism. Yes, they are different from what most people call ‘normal’, but since when was that a bad thing?
Somehow, our society treats people who are different with the view that we must ‘fix’ them. It is so, so sad.
There was a time when people who were different were treated with respect. Now all too often they are treated like ‘freaks’.
Let me tell you something: no-one is normal. You are not normal, I am not normal. There is no such thing as normal. Variety is something to celebrate, not something to be afraid of! Variety is reality: not two things in this universe are the same. Diversity is universal.


Rosie, the girl with Asperger’s syndrome, was to me quite beautiful. She was confused, angry, paranoid… many different variations of insecurity. But underneath all of those things, she was so amazing. She had the courage to speak the truth in every situation. That’s actually not normal at all – it’s completely extraordinary!
One of the ‘symptoms’ of asperger’s is that they don’t know how to lie. They don’t understand deceit. If you ask someone with Asperger’s if they are lying, they just get very very confused. They cannot comprehend the meaning of it.
I found that quite admirable, and I think that it’s something our society could learn a lot from…


And you know what – did her insecurity come from her condition, or did it come from the way she had been treated all her life – as someone that needed to be changed? Can you imagine, if all your life people had been trying to ‘fix’ you, constantly, day in and day out. Never being accepted for who you are?


A wise man once said:

“what we need, is for someone to come to our ear and say: ‘you are you, and I love you’. To be accepted as we are – that is the beginning and the end of life”



Imagine if our society welcomed and encouraged people to be different. Imagine if you could do whatever you felt like doing, just because you felt like doing it! Imagine being able to wear whatever clothes you wanted… or to dance naked through the streets. Imagine being able to express whatever you wanted, however you wanted, whenever and wherever you wanted. Imagine being able to live in whatever way you wanted… and to be accepted for it.


But we are conditioned all our lives to ‘fit in’, to stay within certain limits, not to upset the ‘order’ of society.


Rosie didn’t make it past the second week of my course. It’s actually a fairly amusing story so I’ll tell you: the second week of the course we all went to Wales for the ‘outward bound’ team-building week…

It’s a 6 hour drive, and by the time we get there, I am exhausted already. (The other kids on the course are not an easy bunch, to say the least – drug problems, ex convicts, a pregnant 16 year old, and so on, so the 6 hour bus drive seems like a lifetime – I have to constantly ‘remind’ them that it’s not ok to: smoke on the bus / fight / throw each others belongings out the window). And when we arrive, Rosie refuses to get off the bus. She announces that she is

“ready to go home now”.

So I sit with her and explain that we’ve just arrived, and that driving back to London for 6 hours is really out of the question. But – and know this about autists: it’s very hard to get them to change their minds! In the end, she tries to walk back to London! I walk with her for an hour, through fields and woods, until she gets too tired to go on, and then we walk back together to the bus. In the morning, I take her to the train station, and she goes home.
That course was simply too much for Rosie. I was actually surprised that she made it as far as she did. But I do wonder…


What would Rosie and other autists be like if our society really accepted them as they are? And it’s not just society at large: it starts at home. I’m sorry if you are a parent of an autistic child reading this, because what I’m about to say may not be easy for you to hear, but I’ll say it anyway:
In my (admittedly very limited) experience, parents are often extremely afraid, stressed, and un-accepting of their children. Look, it must be the hardest thing – every moment of every day is an almost unbearable challenge – to be the parent of an autistic child is INCREDIBLY difficult. I’m not making a judgement, because I have no idea how I would handle it, day in and day out…
But I do really wonder how it would be if the parents, and society at large, would be totally accepting of their autistic children.


There is a truly wonderful book called “And there was Light”, written by Jacques Lusseyran. It’s biographical: he was blinded at the age of 6; became a leader of the French Resistance in world war II, was captured and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, which he survived.
He describes at the start of the book how his parents not only accepted his blindness, but encouraged him to live a completely normal life – and as a result, he was able to ‘see’. He did not see in the same way that a sighted person sees, but he ‘saw’ light. This was how he was able to survive 15 months in a Nazi camp. He explains that as a child, he was able to climb trees, run through fields, and do all the other things that his friends were doing, because he wasn’t afraid: his parents encouraged him to be fearless. They didn’t treat him any differently after he became blind.
He also writes about how sorry he felt for other blind children who were always being told to ‘be careful’, and being overprotected by their parents. They became imprisoned by their blindness; victims of other people’s fear.


So I do wonder whether it’s similar with autism. Perhaps if we were able to really accept autism; but not only to accept it; to actively support and encourage autistic children to express their own unique abilities and gifts. To truly LOVE them as they are. More: if we were to treat autistic children the way we should treat ALL children: as our teachers. I am sure that if we were able to do that, our society would benefit even more than those children would.


Kahlil Gibran said:

“Keep me away from the wisdom that does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.”

We must bow before ALL children. When we look at a child and see something ‘wrong’, we create a tragedy. How can any child be wrong?


Jacques Lusseyran said:

“Light is in us even if we have no eyes.”

Well, light (and intelligence, and beauty) is in the autist too. WE must have the eyes to see it, and to learn from it, because autism, like everything else in this world, IS THERE FOR A REASON.


*Another great book is “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”, by Mark Haddock. It’s an award winning novel written from the perspective of a 15 year old boy who has Aspergers Syndrome.