Our Sixth Sense - How We Know We Are Walking Our True Path

Our Sixth Sense

“You talk about knowing the true path as though it was visible and you can actually see it.  I can see the trees of the forest, the sun in the sky, and the waters of the lake, but how can I see my path if it does not exist in this world?” asked the boy.

The old man thought or a moment.  “Close your eyes”, he said.

The boy did as he was bid.  He sat on his rock in the clearing of the forest, with his eyes firmly shut.

“What do you see?” asked the old man.

The boy laughed.  “I can see nothing”, he replied. “My eyes are closed!”

“What can you hear?”

The boy sat quietly and let the noises of the forest come to his ears. “I hear the wind blowing through the trees and rustling the leaves, I hear the calls and songs of the birds, and I hear the chirping of the insects.”

“Keep your eyes closed and tell me what you can feel?” asked the old man.

Again the boy sat for a few moments. “I can feel the hard rock beneath me, I can feel the coolness of the breeze against my skin, I can feel the warmth of the sun’s rays on my face, and I can feel the weight of my clothes upon my back.”

“Now tell me, what can you smell?”

The boy raised his nose to the air and inhaled. “I can smell the scent of the pine trees in the forest, I can smell the freshness of the spring air, I smell the fragrance of the flowers in the clearing, and I can smell the scent of my own skin.”

“Good.  Now open your eyes."  The old man waited whilst the boy's eyes became accustomed once more to the light, before he went on.  "You use your other senses to tell you what it is that you cannot see.  So it is with the true path.  You may not be able to see the path but you will know the path by the way that you feel inside here!”  The old man banged his left breast with his clenched fist.  “It is here, in the heart that you will know the true path.”

The boy looked perplexed.  The other boys of the village laughed at his lessons with the old man who everyone said was crazy.  Perhaps they were right.  “How can I sense something with my heart?  That is not one of my five senses.”

“Your heart is a sixth sense.  Scientists will not speak of it because they cannot quantify it and so to them, it cannot exist.  But inside of your heart, that is where you find your true self.  That is the person who you were born to become.  Inside your heart is written the fundamental truth of your life.  It is within the heart that the soul of each of us can be found.  When you walk the true path, you become your true self, you live a life that is authentic and in harmony with the rhythm of your soul.”

This was hard for the boy to understand.  “How can I read what is written inside of my heart when I cannot see it?”

The old man looked up to the sky and smiled, then he looked kindly at the boy.  “What did we just learn about things that we cannot see?”

The boy was hesitant, a little unsure. “We can know them in other ways?”

“When we walk our true path we don’t see the path, hear the path, touch the path, nor can we taste the path.  But we do feel it.  We feel it inside of our heart.  When you are on the true path you will encounter moments that cannot be denied.  You will experience moments when a great up-welling of positive emotion occurs.  This emotion sweeps through your body and it fills your entire being with a feeling of great happiness.  Sometimes, the feeling is so strong that it shows itself to the physical world through the smile that erupts across your face and the tears that form in your eyes.  Not tears of sorrow, but tears of immeasurable joy.  You cannot contain these emotions and you will not wish to do so.  In these moments, your body, mind, and soul come together as one single unified entity, and through their combined power, they emit a wave of love energy out into the universe.  This is how you know you walk your true path."

They sat quietly, old man and the boy, each on a rock, each lost in their own thoughts.  The reverie was broken by the old man.  "It grows late.  We shall perhaps talk more of love and the wave another time."

The boy was still thinking on what the old man had said as they made their way back to the village.  He hoped that one day he might come to know his own true path and experience the feelings of which the old man had spoken.  For now, he was content to know that the possibility of walking his true path existed.  He understood that finding that path would take acts of courage and bravery, and he would need to face his fears.  Knowing that it could be done and that when he was walking it he would know it, this was enough for today.

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The Price That Must Be Paid

Walking the one true path is the greatest gift that you can possibly give to yourself.  The rewards of seeking out and of discovering your true purpose in life are truly remarkable, and in so doing, you will experience among other things elation, joy, a profound sense of happiness, total pleasure in what it is that you do, a sense of true purpose and accomplishment, a deep connection to life, and more than anything else, a sense of love.  But let me warn you.  Each step that you take along the path, does not come for free.  There will be tough decisions which must be made, and there will be a price that must be paid for your discovery and the enlightenment with which it brings. Are you ready to pay that price?

A man walks along the sand of a deserted, tropical beach.  The sun radiates down from a cloudless sky.  Yellow against blue.  The turquoise of the water is broken only by the rhythm of the waves, that create lines of white, that move perpetually ever on toward the sand, and to their ultimate doom, in the eternal cycle of the ocean.  Walking alongside the man is a dog.  Playful, barking with joy, running in and out of the water, trying to coax the man into throwing a stone, into throwing a stick, into throwing anything that can be chased and retrieved.  Together, man and dog, dog and man, walk ever on.  And the dream is made.

This was not just a dream. This was my dream.  This is my dream.  Only, now it is no longer a dream, it is my waking reality.  The man and the beach.  The dog is still to come.  I chose to follow my heart and to find a way of making my dream become my reality.  It wasn't easy, it's still not easy.  It has involved a lot of hard work, dedication, sacrifice, determination, luck and most of all, courage.  And yet here I am.

I was born in England.  I grew up in the south of England.  I experienced snow in winter and hard frosts on the ground in winter.  On any given day of the year there is the possibility of rain.  Oh! the endless days of rain.  Grey clouds settle over England and stay there, uninterrupted for weeks at an end, denying the people any glimmer of sunshine.  It becomes oppressive.  The clouds seem to push down, to suffocate the life out of those below.  It is possible to swim in the sea during the summer, but that requires stamina and hardiness, to endure the cold water.  The local beach where I grew up is a  mixture of shingle and sand, with large wooden groynes that run perpendicular to the coastline, at a spacing of around 50 yards.  All along the expanse of the beach that lines the residential area, a stretch of around six miles, these large wooden monstrosities lay, their purpose, to prevent the shingle and sand from being washed away by the long shore drift of the tide.  I longed for a soft, golden, uninterrupted, natural, sand beach, fringed by palm trees, and with warm, clear, tropical water.  England did not fit the picture that I had created in my mind for of dream.  England was not the place where I could live out my dream.  To do that, it would be necessary to move overseas.


Life is full of tough choices and hard decisions.  Anything that is worthwhile is not obtained easily.  Walking the true path is like this.  To fulfill my dream, to discover my true purpose in life, it was necessary for me to go overseas and in doing so, to live my life away from my parents, away from my brother and my sister, away from my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins.  It was necessary to leave behind those people I have known since childhood and count as my closest, dearest and oldest of friends.  It was necessary to leave behind my best and closest friend.  In short, to achieve my dream, I left behind every singe person that I cared for.  That is the price that I was willing to pay, that is the price that had to be paid.  There was no other option.  Actually, that is not strictly true.

Of course there was another option.  I could have chosen not to pursue my dream.  I could have chosen a life in England, close to my family and friends.  And in so doing, I would not only have denied myself my dream and the chance of finding true happiness,  I would have chosen the path of pain, misery and regret.  Had I not left England, I would forever have been unfulfilled and forever questioning my purpose and existence.  Forever wondering and asking myself, "What if..?"  My life would have been plagued by remorse and regret.

That I left my family behind not mean for one instant that I do not love them dearly.  I do.  It does not mean that I am not close with my parents, with my brother, or with my sister.  I am.  It does not mean that my family does not love me.  I know that they do.  What this means is that in fact, I love them all the more because of it.  Never once have my parents tried to stand in my way or stop me.  Never once have they tried to talk me out of going overseas.  They know me.  They know that I am driven by a passion to do what I must, and so they let me.  They understand that I must find my way.  That is the greatest gift they could give to me, and I am so very grateful for it, as I am grateful to them for all that they have given to me.  I could not be here, living out my dream, if it were not for their love and the opportunities that they have afforded me.

I return to England and visit my family and friends every 18 months to two years on average.  The thought of leaving, knowing that I do not know the next time that I will see them breaks my heart.  It rips me apart.  But I have to do it, if I am to follow my dreams.

That is the price to be paid.  There is always a price.  I pay my price for following my dreams.  I know that I must, I understand the sacrifices I must make, in order to pursue my purpose, in order to walk my one true path.  Yes, I pay my price, are you willing to pay yours?

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The Discovery Of Self

For so long, I believed that the path to finding love was all about boy meets girl.  I thought that the way to discover love, was through meeting another person and joining our hearts together.  My life's journey has taught me to see that before this discovery of love can occur, another, more important discovery has to be made.  The discovery of self.

In my life, I tried hard to please people and one way I found of doing that, was to act in a way that pleased them.  As children, this is how we learn right from wrong, good from bad.  When we do something that is viewed as incorrect, we are admonished or punished.  When we do something that is right, we are praised and rewarded.  This encourages us to develop behaviours and thinking that makes us seek out the rewards.  It is a form of training.  We are trained to conform to the rules of society, to our family's beliefs, to a religious view, to a teacher's needs.  In this way, we develop and the characteristics of our true selves, those things that define who we actually are as a person, as slowly and surely hidden - if we find that they do not conform to that which is required of us.

I grew up with the firm belief implanted in my mind that I had to find a good job, leave home, find a partner, get married, buy a house, create a home, raise a family, and then to eventually retire.  Everything around me told me this was so, and I firmly believed it.  In order to fit in and conform, I adopted different personality traits to suit differing situations in which I found myself.  At home, at work, out socialising with friends, with extended family.  Then it might depend on whether I was with this colleague or that colleague, my boss, my parents, my brother, my sister, my friends, my uncles, my aunts, my grandparents, my cousins on my father's side, my cousins on my mother's side, my father's friends, my mother's friends. my brothers friends, my sisters friends, my girlfriend, my girlfriends friends, my girlfriends parents and so on.  Each of these people received a slightly different version of me.  Much of it was the same, but certain behaviours and personality traits were either hidden completely, muted down, or extenuated and amplified.

I knew that I did this.  I referred to myself as a chameleon, always able to adapt to a situation and the people involved in it.  I liked that I was able to do this and viewed it as a strength.  It meant that people were always comfortable with me.  That I was able to find a way to relate to everyone on some level.  I have never really thought about why I did this until now. 

So, why did I do it?  The truth is that I was not comfortable with being my true self.  I had established a dislike of my own self.  I craved love and attention and did not wish to upset anyone or to alienate them.  I was embarrassed to be me, I was afraid to be me.  I feared that the true me would not be liked, that I would be laughed at, that I would be made fun of, that I would suffer humiliation.

For years I went on trying to be someone else.  Essentially, I was living someone else's life. I was living from a script, reading lines, following cues and directions, acting for an audience.  I was not myself.  What chance did I ever have of finding love in another soul, and of expecting that other person to love me, if I did not even love myself or respect myself enough to be the real me?

Then everything began to change.  Chance, fortune, luck.  Was it these that changed my life or was it that I had reached a place and a time where my true self could no longer be held back?  I know that it is a combination of everything.  That is what life is.  It is not one single moment that defines us or alters us, it is everything that has led us to that point.  It is every joy, every happiness, every hope, every doubt, every sadness, every glory, every loss, every elation, every fear.  Whatever it was, the dam broke and I burst forth.  My heart had been released and I began to finally become myself.  I began to allow myself to be comfortable being me.

Through that subconscious decision to finally step into my own light, my whole world changed.  I began to see life not as an endless series of mind-numbing, unthinking and necessary acts that will take me from point A to point B, but rather as one miracle after another.  By becoming myself, I became life.  By becoming myself, I became the light.  And by becoming myself, I became love.  I allowed myself to make the ultimate discovery: That love is found from within.  Once that is love is discovered, then the love from without is found not in another, but rather in a reflection of your own soul and in your own love.  Love holds a mirror and in that mirror will be reflected all that you hold in your own heart.

To discover your true self, is the true path.  To know your true self, is your purpose.  To accept your true self, that take courage and it takes an act of love.  From my own personal journey, I can tell you one thing I know for sure. The moment that you accept yourself is the moment that your truly start to live and love.

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Whales, Morays And The Rewards Of The Path

There will come many days on the path when the rewards of your endeavours leave you breathless.  These are the rewards for pushing through the doubt and the fears, these are the rewards for persevering where others have turned away from finding their own truth, these are the days that tell you that what you are doing, that the path on which you walk, is absolutely the right one for you.  Yesterday, was one such day.

I'll be honest, the previous few days I had been feeling a little low.  I had been mulling over my life, pondering the question of why I look for love in all the wrong places and why that part of my life is so unsuccessful.  I would never say I was in a bad place.  I could not say it was a state of despondency or a depression.  No, it was really just a fleeting feeling that came to me one morning and hung around, clouding my thinking, making me focus on this one part of my life with which I have always struggled.  But what is that one part that is a struggled when compared to the rest?

I had been speaking with Terry and his son Ari at the hotel over the last few days and in talking, we moved on, as is inevitable, to scuba diving.  Terry explained how he had not dived for almost thirty years, and, as he was now sixty nine years old, firmly believed that his scuba diving days were long gone.  I offered him the chance to try scuba in the swimming pool and to see how he felt getting back into the water.  To see this man's smile, splitting his heavily bearded face from ear to ear, was reward enough.  Terry decided he would try diving in the ocean again  Ari, had been involved in a serious snowboarding accident some year back that had almost cost him his life.  His head was fitted  titanium plates and screws that were holding it together and his legs the same.  Ari had not dived since the accident but he was now surfing again and enjoying a normal life.  We decided we would all make a dive together, just a shallow, cautious one, to see how things went.

Yesterday was the day of the dive.  Terry is one of those people who is always happy and laughing and full of life.  He is a joy to be around and is in possession of one of those infectious grins.  You just cannot help yourself but laugh around the man.  Despite not having dived for so long, he was no different on our way out to the dive site.  I had thought that perhaps he would become nervous and show some signs of anxiety, but I could detect none.

On our arrival at the dive site, there, waiting for us at the surface were two pairs of humpback whales.  I've seen whales before here but I had never seen them this close in to the dive sites.  One pair were almost right up against the rock, just a few metres away.  It is an incredible feeling to be so close to some of natures largest ever creatures, to see them basking at the surface, arching their backs, spouting huge plumes of water vapour into the air, putting up their flukes and diving.  Everyone on the boat looked on, enjoying this free spectacle of nature, knowing that what they were seeing and witnessing was something very special indeed.  Eventually, the whales moved off and we made our dives.

Despite the tough conditions of poor visibility and current, Terry never lost his grin and the enjoyment on his face after we surfaced was easily evident. It was clear that Terry had rolled back the years and shaken off all the rust.  As I recall the morning, I can recall certain moments when I could hear Terry laughing under the water.  An amazing man and an inspiration, and for me, the reward for a little perseverance and for taking the time to speak and engage with him.

I saw one other thing during the second dive I have never observed previously.  At Dirty Rock (so called because it is a cleaning station for many different species of marine life) a green moray eel was laying with its mouth stretched as wide open as it could possibly go.  It is usual to see a moray with its mouth open, because the eels use the opening and closing of their mouths to pump water through their gills.  But this moray looked more similar to a cobra that had opened its jaws to take its prey whole.  I was able to look straight into this open mouthed eel and I could not figure out why it was not closing its mouth, until I noticed the two small cleaner fish at the back of its throat.  What this open mouth moray afforded me, was a perfect view all the way inside of its mouth and into its throat, showing me the bones that lined the roof of its mouth, reminding me of the flying buttresses of a cathedral.  I knew that this was perhaps a once in a lifetime experience and that I might never have the opportunity to see a moray in such a way as this ever again.

Yesterday, I was once more reminded of the rewards that come from following your true path.  Not all rewards are the same for every person, but in nature, immersed and surrounded by life, that is where I find mine.  Helping a person to overcome a difficulty and to achieve a personal goal has always been something I have enjoyed.  I see it as an act of kindness and of love.  It is giving something back to the universe.  That is my own nature, I will always do that on instinct, I cannot help but do it.  Sometimes we may question the path and ask what is the purpose, or why does such a thing happen or not happen?  The answer to those questions is simple: everything happens when the time is right and when you are right.  Sometimes, the time is the right time, but there remains a lesson that you need to learn.  Other times, you are ready, but the time is not right.  When it comes together, those are the moments of miracles, when life rewards you for your efforts.  I still have a challenge in my life.  That challenge is to find the special someone who will be my companion on the path.  Perhaps the time is still not right.  Perhaps I am still not ready.  But I do know, that in the meantime, I am being rewarded richly for walking my true path, and for that, I will always be grateful to the universe, to the force that governs all life: nature.  Everything is love and if you know how to look, you will always find it.  And you will see it not with your eyes, but through your heart.

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The Inner Strength We All Possess

There was a time in my life, when I used to look at other people and believe that they must possess an inner strength and quality that did not exist within me.  These people always appeared to me to be extremely confident and to have a clear vision of what it was that they wanted from life.  They seemed brave and courageous, having no fear of the consequences of their actions, no fear of where their decisions would lead them, and no fear of facing the unknown.  Luck and good fortune seemed to find these people with ease and it seemed to me that they were presented with amazing opportunities, almost as if all that they had to do was to reach out and take them.  They spoke of life with a joy and a burning passion, they seemed full of energy and vigour, and they spoke of love, as if they had uncovered some secret truth of life that I was unable to discover, and they seemed to know exactly what they wanted and where they were going.  It seemed that these people were able to achieve whatever it was that they set out to accomplish and they did it with apparent ease.  These people were the exact opposite of who I thought I was.

I cannot recall ever feeling jealous of anyone.  I think that it was just that whenever I met someone like this, I would feel inferior to them and perhaps a little overawed by them.  I would say things to myself like, "I wish I could be like that", or "They are so lucky".  I saw a person who had been presented with opportunities that I could never have.  They appeared to enjoy the luck of life, while I enjoyed the misfortune.  My own achievements paled into insignificance when compared to theirs.  I had literally done nothing to speak of, nothing worth telling, at least in my own opinion.  I could never do what they had done.  I wouldn't have known where to start.  Just thinking about it created a feeling of fear within me.  I felt that I did not possess the strength of character, the resolve, nor the courage.  I felt naive and ignorant of the world outside of my immediate social sphere.  My own life seemed ordinary and remarkably dull by comparison.

Yet, there was something that happened whenever I came into contact with a person like this.  I would hear their stories and I would feel a yearning to do something more with my own life.  I wanted to be like these people and have my own adventures.  I wanted to travel to new places, to seek out and experience amazing things in life, and I wanted to be as confident as I perceived them to be.  I would feel a yearning for a life that was less ordinary.  It created a stirring in my soul.  I could feel that there was something deep inside of me that craved release, that wanted to be free.  It was my heart calling out to me.  Screaming that yes Andy, you can do this too, if only you would believe in yourself.  But I chose to ignore this voice time and time again.  My heart called to me but my ears were closed to its pleas.

Why?  Why could I not be like the people that I saw?  Why didn't I receive any good fortune or lucky breaks in life?  Why didn't opportunities come my way?  Why didn't I have the courage or the strength to do what they did?  Why couldn't I have the life that I wanted?  Why didn't I have stories to tell?  There was only one answer to all of these questions.

Because I was scared.

I was scared of life and I was scared of myself.  I really didn't know how to go about changing my life.  It just seemed too huge a task.  When I watched a documentary and saw amazing scenes of nature, of mountains, or lakes, rivers and oceans, or the incredible acts of wildlife, I felt a compulsion to do something different, to go and see these things for myself.  Yet I did nothing.  I was afraid that if I tried, I would turn my back on everything that I had and I would lose it all.  I couldn't see my future down that road.  If I stayed in my job, then I was able to see prospects for promotion, I could see jobs that I would like to do if the opportunity came my way.  The other road was too unknown and too dark.  Yet slowly and surely my life did begin to change. 

I have said many times that I have been extremely fortunate in my life to have been at the right place, at the right time.  However, I have come to the realisation that luck is hardly ever just random.  It occurs because of something that we subconsciously do.  In my case, although I wouldn't have admitted, I am ambitious and driven.  My ambition and drive created opportunities and when I was able to recognise those opportunities, I seized them with both hands and never let go.  Those opportunities presented me with the chance to travel overseas on business, to see new places, to meet new people, to begin to broaden my horizons.  Eventually, I would have the opportunity to live abroad in Hungary, and that is when and where everything really changed for me.  It is the same for everyone.  Good fortune and luck come to those who dare to take the opportunities that are presented to them.  There is an expression, fortune favours the brave, and it is quite true.  My own version of this expression is this:-

"Fortune favours those of us who dare to follow our hearts."

For many years, I was never conscious of what was happening to me as I progressed though my life, I was just doing what felt right at the time.  What I have come to realise now, is that throughout all of those years, I had been subconsciously soaking up snippets of information and storing them away.  All of these pieces of random information began to arrange themselves into something coherent, something that would form the basis for my own plan for life.  I was storing things away that would create opportunities for me in later life.

As an example, I returned from an overseas business trip one Friday evening and had flown into Heathrow, London.  I had a taxi driver booked to pick me up and drive me the 65 miles back home.  As I came through from the baggage claim, I spied my driver holding up a small board with my name.  I walked towards my driver, and as I approached, I was sure I recognised him.  "It's Gary isn't it?", I asked.  "Oh my god.  Andy?"  Gary and I had worked on the same factory production line many years before and had not seen each other for the intervening fourteen years.  He was now a taxi driver for a local firm and I was a manager in a global IT services company, returning from an overseas business trip.  How different our lives had become in those years since I had last seen him.  During the journey, we caught up on those years and Gary explained to me that he drove the taxi only during the monsoon season in Thailand, where he was a scuba diving instructor.  The moment he said that to me, it occurred to me that Gary's life appealed more to me than my own.  In the taxi that evening, on the road from London down to the south coast of England, I must have subconsciously stored that information away.

Through my business trips, I got used to travelling overseas alone.  I had to attend meetings and I had to give presentations on a regular basis, sometimes to fairly large audiences and to senior levels of management.  Through this, I gained a confidence in myself that had never existed previously.  When I was working in Hungary, I was asked the general manager of the company to give a speech at an all employee meeting.  I found myself standing up on stage, speaking to an audience of some 800 people.  If you read any of my old school reports they will all say pretty much the same thing: Andrew is quiet and shy and he doesn't like to participate in class discussions.  I was scared and I was nervous, but I still did it.  I overcame my fears and I found my inner strength and courage.

Every single one of us possesses the power to change our lives.  No matter what you think of yourself, no matter how weak you think you are, or how lacking in confidence, or how scared of the unknown you think you are, I can tell you that this is not true.  You are no different to the person that I used to be, you are no different from the person that I am now.  And you are no different to any one else.  The only thing that sets us apart is that I, like many others, sought to change my life and to follow my heart.  I decided to no longer let my fears of the unknown stop me, I decided that I didn't wish to be scared of life any longer.  I figured out that if I wanted the life of which I dreamed, it was up to me to make it happen.  I discovered an inner strength that I never knew I possessed.  And when I discovered that strength, I found an unlimited supply.  By following your heart, you are tapping into the power of the universe, and the power of the universe is infinite.

I am no different to any one else.  I am extremely humble about my life and about the opportunities that came to me.  I always give thanks for everything that has happened to me, because I am truly grateful for my path.  You too can do this.  Your life is your life and it is no one else's.  Never think that you cannot do it.  Never think that you are different to other people.  You are not.  Every single person that has gone in search of their dreams has been scared and has faced the unknown.  We persevere because we know the rewards that await us, because our hearts urge us to carry on.  The inner strength that you see in others is only a reflection of the inner strength that resides in you.

You possess the inner strength to change your life.  You possess the inner strength to seek out and to grab the opportunities that come your way.  You possess the inner strength to free yourself of the chains that bind you to a life that does not work for you.  You possess the inner strength to spread your wings and fly free.  You possess the inner strength to be all that you dream.  You possess the inner strength to become the real you.  Your inner strength is unlimited.  There is nothing that can hold you back or stop you.  Unleash it.  Don't take my word for it.  Believe it.  Go and make your dreams happen.  Find your one true path.

One of the greatest secrets of our time is this:  You are stronger than you can possibly imagine.  Unlock that secret inside of you and see just how high you can soar.

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