So Carroll wrote a song about his experience and posted it on You-Tube, hoping for a million views within a year. It only took four days to get his million views. Becoming an overnight celebrity, his story had instant appeal and he appeared on a range of media outlets from CNN to The View. United stock dropped 10 percent, losing $180 million in value.

Quantum scientists have proved that everything in this world is interconnected and relative to each other, that all of reality, is holographic. The very nature of a hologram requires that all parts contain the whole, that a small fragment from any part of the whole contains the image of the whole. All phenomena life are inseparable, existing as parts of a single reality.

Nobel-winning molecular biologist Matthieu Ricard, says interdependence is crucial to our survival:

“Interdependence is essential to the manifestation of phenomena. The world would not be able to function without it. So a given phenomenon can come about only if it is linked to others. Reality cannot be localized and fragmented, but should be considered as holistic and global.”

If all things are interconnected then the information about all things must be available to all. Everything we thought to be true, including Newtonian physics, is increasingly being revealed to be untrue and unreal. The interdependence and interconnection of all things is becoming obvious to all. The time is approaching when anyone who tries to ‘localize and fragment’ information and attempt to control and manipulate it for their own ends, will fail – sometimes, like United, spectacularly.

The principle of the inseparability of all things, the immutable and eternal and actual truth of life, known and understood by quantum physicists for a hundred years, is becoming our truth. Dave Carroll is a harbinger of the new world we will create once we understand this truth. Bless him.

She was young, intelligent, talented and beautiful. It seemed that absolutely anything was possible. Motherhood was only one of the long list of contenders – and she dismissed that out of hand because, as she said, that would have been such a waste of all her education.

Only someone who is not a parent could ever think that.

Parenting – especially high quality parenting – takes every ounce of wisdom available to us. I’ve always said being a parent is like being the manager of incompetent employees, with the lowest status job description (there’s nothing like telling someone at a dinner party that you are a full-time mother to prompt eye-glazing, yawn-inducing, ennui) who is assigned the most difficult and abstract job specifications and expectations, working 24/7, no entitlements, no benefits, no pay.

The more we know of literature, history, the arts and the sciences, the more we are able to contribute to the creation and development of thoughtful, insightful, healthy and balanced children who will ultimately become citizens of the world.

But, more importantly, the more we know about, and understand, psychology, sociology, metaphysics, and spirituality the more able we are to solve the intricate and complex problems that arise in forming loving, peaceful, and emotionally intelligent beings who have self-awareness, compassion for themselves and for others, and who have an emotional and psychological tool kit and skill set that enables them to cope with whatever life brings their way.

Being the best parent we can be takes enormous wisdom and self-awareness (to say nothing of self-love). We cannot delegate, procrastinate (even at 2am) or obfuscate. All we have is ourselves and somehow, someway we have to find within our own depths the almost inhuman levels of patience, humor, endurance and resilience that are the bare minimum of good parenting.

Whilst education is by no means a pre-requisite, it is an amazing head start.

I was stunned. This came out of nowhere. We didn’t know that our former landlord had even begun legal proceedings against us as he had served all documents at the Cleveland office of Ian’s company, which were never passed onto us. He was suing us for the theft of various items that he had left in the attic of the house whilst we lived there and for leaving the property in an unclean state. Both claims were incontrovertibly false.

The financial claim for damages, which had been awarded against us was for only a few hundred dollars. But it was not the money I was worried about. I was affronted at the sheer falsity of the action, but beneath that, I had a sickening fear of damage to the reputation of both Ian and I with Ian’s company, something to which I could never speak to defend.

I was extremely unsettled and anxious about this. The sting of the injustice of it all was intense. We had been denied our day in court to defend ourselves and now we had to bear the attack on our reputation and integrity. A court of the land had decided, and officially declared, I was both a thief and a slattern. I was powerless to do anything about it, and it was this seeming powerlessness that led to an increasing sense of anxiety and anger.

I remember one night I just could not sleep, my mind was racing. I moved to a bunk bed in the kids’ room so as not to disturb Ian. I ruminated over this unfair attack on me and my good name for some time. In the dark and quiet of night, as I hit bottom of my self-pity pit, with nowhere else to go, I started to ask for spiritual help.

No sooner had I mentally reached out for inspiration and assistance a Bible passage came instantly to mind. It is from the Book of Matthew, where Jesus says:

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also.

The New Living Translation of the Bible puts it this way:

If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat, too.

This was exactly the inspiration I needed to let go of all of this. To find peace and resolution I had to trust the Powers That Be and abandon all attachment to being heard to reestablish my good name. I realized I had to accept the situation as it was and know that if I had not done anything to effect my reputation then any such attack could only ever be fruitless and ineffectual. But I had to trust.

In the morning I told Ian to communicate to the Cleveland office that, in the effort to achieve resolution of this matter we were willing to pay the claim. Interestingly, we never heard about this matter again. It just went away.

Whilst we were living in Wellington I made friends with a guy who was doing his PhD in Tort Law – the body of law which enables one to achieve restoration and reparation for damage, injury or loss due to the wrongful action of others. He told me that he had discovered that people involved in legal disputes under tort law actually do not begin to heal until their dispute has been resolved and the legal action ended.

Whatever needs to be done to resolve and end all disputes must be done, otherwise we will never know peace. There is nothing else for it. If we want peace, there can be no disputes.

It was a light, clean sweat, but a sweat nevertheless. At first I felt so uncomfortable with it my normal life became curtailed to the degree I started to become unhappy. I am not an indoors person, and too much time spent inside causes a slow decline of mood and optimism.

If I wanted a happy and fulfilling life I had no options but to change my perspective. I made myself become comfortable with my body being wet all over, no matter what I was doing, and more importantly, what I was wearing. I had to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, until it was no longer uncomfortable to me.

If l have learned anything it’s that life is pretty much a constant scramble to cope with undesirable and unexpected conditions and events. Life continually throws things up at us that catch us off guard, making us feel sad, lonely, angry, even bitter or depressed.

But most of our unhappiness lies in our inability to accept the situation. Thwarted expectations, disappointments, betrayals, and failures shake us up, often to our very core. They cause us to look at things differently and they throw new light on our life and our situation. These difficult experiences cause us to question everything and, if we are wise, make the necessary adjustments and alterations to reinstate our peace and equilibrium.

Interestingly, American yoga teacher Tara Stiles says inverted poses like the shoulder stand have the effect, like failure and disappointment, of turning everything upside down, reversing the action of gravity on our body. This sort of physical shaking up has a very real and positive effect, allowing us to see our life and problems in a new light, and even reducing anxiety and stress as well as increasing self-confidence, mental power and concentration, and for those who care, stimulating the chakras.

For this reason she calls the shoulder stand the super pose. She says if we regularly spend time inverted in a shoulder stand all sorts of good things will happen, to our bodies and our minds and emotions.

We have to find the mental and emotional strategies that give us the flexibility and acceptance we need to dodge and weave the cannonballs of pain and heartache life hurls at us. Shoulder stands seem like a good start.

She wrote how she’d come to the conclusion that giving people large sums of money, no matter how well intended, can be a form of theft – the theft of her friends’ life lessons. Everybody has important life lessons to learn and to deny them the opportunity of the learning is equivalent to causing a child to skip a grade level at school when they are not ready for it.

There is as much wisdom in knowing when to do something as knowing what to do. Sometimes we can be so focussed on figuring out the right course of action to take that we give little or no thought to the appropriate timing.

An essential part of our education and socialization is learning to discern between actions – which are normally classified in binary terms like good/bad, right/wrong, smart/dumb, etc. A great deal of experience as well as social and emotional maturity is needed before we can understand the full consequences of any action. This necessitates much time, effort and attention.

Of equal importance, however, is learning the right timing. Rarely do our ‘life teachers’ coach us in this aspect of discernment. More often than not we learn it through harsh, and often painful, experience.

For instance, I have learned the hard way that what often starts out as kindness can quickly degenerate into condescension, and even unkindness, if we have no consideration for how our act of compassion is perceived by the recipient of our largess.

Similarly, whilst honesty is crucial at all times in loving relationships, candor is not. Without the restraint of appropriate timing a blunt statement, thought honest, can become unloving, even controlling, if we pay no heed to the other person’s capacity to bear our candor.

Wisdom is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon because it is context sensitive. Its dictates shift and morph according to circumstance, with few circumstances being exactly the same. Then, layered over all of this is the crucial role of intention. Thus there are no hard and fast rules, which makes good judgment a precious and hard won attribute.

Life has surely taught me that the right thing at the wrong time is no longer the right thing. Wisdom without love is mere knowledge or philosophy. Love without wisdom is not love at all.

In the old days when we were all actually fighting for survival, this would have been the basis for a clear and sensible division of labour. The men did the work that ensured the physical survival of the family – providing shelter and food – while the women performed the mental and emotional gymnastics necessary to provide the social, spiritual and emotional succour.

This interdependence made eminent sense. Everyone knew their role and mostly women and men stuck to their socially prescribed roles.

But things have now changed. Physical survival is no longer our motive or goal. In modern Western democracies survival is almost a given. We all have the means, or access to the means (even if it is by government subsidy), to survive.

So what’s left over after that? Now that we no longer have to spend the vast majority of the day fighting to live another day, what do we do with all that time and energy? Clearly many people have just unwittingly, or maybe consciously, shifted the goal posts. Where we once worked to put food on the table we now work to have nicer food, on a more beautiful table, in a larger, fully loaded house.

Accumulating stuff has almost become our raison d’être. The fact that storage companies are one of our fastest growing industries as well the proliferation of television shows dedicated to the phenomenon of hoarding suggest that something is out of balance. And where there is imbalance, there is suffering.

So what is the 21st century approach to life? If we don’t need to worry about survival, we have the privilege to create the life we desire, as opposed to the one we need just to get by.

Further if we do not have to rely on someone else to play a key role in our life strategy, if we are equipped with the freedom and opportunity to independently circumscribe the conditions of our own life then it now seems logical that we all integrate the masculine strength with the feminine flexibility within ourselves so that we are better able to function competently and healthily in every aspect of our life.

If we are to be the captains of our own desire then we need all the tools, skills and aptitudes that we once accepted were province of only one sex or the other.

The time for this is now here. Wholeness and balance are the non-negotiables in the new age. 2012 is the threshold of this new age and it is incumbent on all of us to find the balance that will enable us to spiritually thrive. Everything else, including our heart’s desire, will follow.

So I decided to look at it all differently. I decided that the actions of others would not affect me, that I could decide how I would experience this relationship hiccup. I was confident I had done nothing to contribute to the state of affairs between the other person and me – if I felt there was something I needed to apologize for I would do so immediately, but there was not.

So, I reasoned, I didn’t need to ruminate over these events. I could just let it go. All I had to do was make that choice.

Experience has taught me that not everything can be talked out. Resolving difficulties, differences and misunderstandings through talking can only happen when both parties are totally honest with themselves, and each other, and are as prepared to do whatever it takes to make things right as we are. Anything less, and talk is just a waste of breath.

Too many times people want to make their own issues about someone else, because they are not prepared to face their stuff. That’s ok, everyone has to do what they have to do. After all, that’s how we all learn, ultimately, that we want to do things differently. We have to try out the other options to discover for ourselves they are not ideal, and do not take us to a place we want to go.

So we have to be as intellectually dishonest as we want to be in order to get to the point where we realize that in fact truth and candour alone bring peace and harmony. We have to find this out for ourselves, it is not something someone else can teach us.

But we who are on the other end of the dishonesty do not have to suffer. If we do suffer, it is important to understand, it is because we choose to suffer. What others do can have no impact on us, if we decide not to engage in the game. What is it to us if the other person cannot face up to their truth? So long as we stand in our truth, we are always ok.

In this situation I hadn’t actually lost anything, other than a perceived lost opportunity. But even then I know I can still be happy, peaceful and even joyful without that opportunity, because peace and joy are not dependent on things external. They are purely a state of mind. So once I choose peace and joy, then they are mine and no one or nothing can take them away.

What others do just does not matter. It’s what we think about what others do that totally matters.

Clearly there’s an awful lot of lies and deceit going around. It seems we are all vulnerable to being tricked, deceived or manipulated on a daily basis.

So what is our defense in the face of this staggering onslaught of dishonesty? Learning how to physically spot a lie might be helpful. However this may require more sophisticated skill than previously thought because, as Meyer says, the research debunks conventional wisdom about lying: people may well lie whilst looking us in the eye, and they don’t always ’stutter, stammer, blush or fidget.’

Consistent with the approach to life based on the notion that our thoughts, actions and intentions determine and create our experience, the best defense we have against the deceit of others is to be completely, utterly and entirely honest ourselves.

On the basis that everything is energy, different emotions are actually energetic impulses that vibrate at different frequencies, according to the degree to which they reflect love. The closer the emotion is to love, the higher the frequency. The more high frequency thoughts and emotions we have, the more able we are to access the full spectrum of qualities at that frequency.

So when we have loving thoughts and intentions we access much more than just the emotions and qualities, both in ourselves and in others, normally associated with love, including kindness, consideration, generosity, acceptance, compassion etc. Once we operate at the higher frequency we are also able to access high value qualities like truth, power, and protection.

So the longer we are able to remain at a higher frequency the more lower frequency thoughts and behaviors start to feel incompatible with our sense of things and eventually become intolerable. When we are accustomed to thoughts of acceptance and peace, exposure to violence and attack seem to have an even greater impact than when such experiences are a part of daily life.

It follows then, when honesty and truth are our modus operandi we can immediately detect when we are presented with words, actions and ideas of a baser frequency. We may not be able to see it with our eyes, or hear it with our ears, because lies only have their desired effect if they ’seem’ eminently sensible and logical. But when we live in honesty and truth no matter how few telltale signs exist to inform our rational brain that we are being deceived or even tricked, we will just ‘know’ it, through some inexplicable sense or feeling.

The next step of course is to learn to listen to our feelings even when they fly in the face of seeming circumstances, reason or logic.

Honesty isn’t just a virtue or an admirable quality to aspire to. It is an intrinsic part of our protective armor that ensures our safe passage in a tricky world.

The play’s author, Eve Ensler, has said that she started talking to women about their vaginas and quickly realized that too many women have conflicted feelings about their genitals and that way too many women’s sexual lives have been hijacked by male sexual violence and aggression.

The redemptive power of telling their stories motivated Ensler to create a work that gives voice to this largely unspoken aspect of women’s experience and has, over the years, attracted the imprimatur of many big-name actors. Ensler soon realized she had tapped into a deep well of silent suffering but, as she recently said on Australian radio, women found freedom in telling their truth.

The transformative power of truth telling is unexpectedly enormous. Recently a friend confided in me, telling me of an experience he had had which few knew about and was a source of shame for him. After talking about it I was able to point out to him that this experience was the way he chose to learn, and there is absolutely no shame in that.  The experience had the effect of changing the direction of his life, and he acknowledged that was a good thing. I think this lessened the intensity of the shame at the time, and now it has almost disappeared entirely.

I then shared with him an experience that I had never told anyone before. It was a secret I had carried for several years, not realizing what a burden it had been, and how heavy it made me feel.

No sooner had I finished relaying my story I felt instantaneously lighter, freer, and happier. I immediately felt the weight and power of the secret dissipate till it no longer had power over me. I was now free to let it go. To steal Gotye’s line from his international hit song, it quickly became only ‘[something] that I used to know.’

I once read this passage somewhere: That which has light shed upon it, itself becomes light.

Truth telling liberated me from the constraining and limiting effects of darkness. Shedding light on what was lurking in the dark corners of my memory not only caused the shadowy secrets to dispel and diminish, it transformed them into a source of light, freedom and expansion.

Both the secret and its revelation became a source of inspiration by expanding my understanding of the human condition. The emotional effect was to shift me from shame to compassion, for myself and others and, like my friend, it has left me grateful for the lesson.

Telling the truth does indeed set us free.

So often we emotionally commit ourselves to a particular timetable and outcome. We use our very best rational thought, we make good, sound choices and decisions until we think we have conjured up a sensible course of action with a desirable, though realistic, goal which we then dedicate our hearts and minds to.

But then things don’t work to plan. We don’t really understand it and it defies rationality and logic – because we did everything possible to make it a good and reasonable plan. Yet something is awry and all our planning seems to be out the window and there is little we can do to get the whole project back on track. Initially we become impatient, and then anxiety sets in.

If I’ve learned anything in this life, it is that we never have any control over timing. It is as if the Universe has its own sense of time and it rarely looks anything like ours. In fact the two are about as alike as the proverbial chalk and cheese.

And one thing we need to understand about Divine timing is that it is intractable. Unlike human timing, there is absolutely nothing we can do to manipulate it, force it or hurry it along. It is what it is, and the more we fight it the more nothing changes except our own state of mind – usually from peace to panic to panic attack! The only thing we can do is relax and let go.

About 18 years ago we moved to Sydney and were looking to buy a house. I found one that we thought had huge potential. It was less than our budget because it needed some renovation and I was confident that we would be well within any reasonable price range at auction.

What I didn’t allow for was another bidder who wanted that house, and only that house. We ended up in a bidding war – something I swore I would never do – until I finally came to my senses and backed down. I was so disappointed. I never saw being the underbidder as a possible outcome. It was a huge blow.

In the meantime a friend suggested I look in an area closer to the harbor. I hadn’t looked there because I assumed it would be too expensive for us. But I took the advice and started my search. I found a house that we ultimately bought, at a price within our budget, but only because the vendors had had two failed auctions and was unable to sell at the higher price they initially sought. If I had found the house only a couple of months previously it would have been too expensive.

Of the six houses I’ve lived in, it turned out to be my favorite house of all. My bedroom had what the real estate agents like to call “harbor glimpses,” something I never thought I would ever be able to afford. The house pretty much ticked all of my top ten requirements that I wanted in a house, and anyone who has bought a house knows that things are good if you can get the top five!

And it was all because of (Divine) timing.