Handbook of Whacky Wisdom

By David Guthrie

                  HANDBOOK

                          of

            WHACKY WISDOM

           by DAVID GUTHRIE

After a lifetime of spiritual searching, many years of occult practices, and 30 years of working as a Natural Therapist specialising in healing emotional issues, David clearly and concisely explains in the Handbook of Whacky Wisdom the ancient wisdom of the Masters generally not acceptable or understandable to the preponderance of mankind. Having experienced many profound spiritual experiences, David imparts his slant on the fundamental dilemma of 'what is our purpose' and he provides practical steps to experience his proposal.

To assist the reader to easily manoeuvre through the minefield of universally available religious and spiritual information - which at times is confusing and intangible to the vast majority - in this practical non-fiction work they are exposed to some thought-provoking views on subjects from the basic to the more controversial and confronting.  Despite anyone's past trials and tribulations, the Handbook of Whacky Wisdom supplies explanations and solutions to take responsibility for one's self and gain rational knowledge to achieve peace of mind in this fearful, dark, threatening, frustrating, and contradictory world.

This compelling work is a comprehensive, definitive, analysis of advanced Occult and Esoteric mystical science. The book is written in a simple, clear, understandable manner with a broad range of readers in mind and is interwoven with some of the author's personal accounts. The author explains in a very practical, logical way - which is not restricted to any convention, system, background, nationality or religion - how each person restricts Knowledge with their belief system. The reader - from the layperson to the spiritually aware - is not left high-and-dry as the seeker is provided with very simple, fundamental - yet extremely effective - useful tools to  release their limitations to achieve profound states of mind and realise full awareness of their inner light and peace – the NOW.

308 Pages

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Guthrie
• Release date: Jul 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386717829

David Guthrie

When 30 years old, David Guthrie had an extraordinarily profound spiritual experience which set him on a path of self-understanding. In every question or problem is the answer or solution and from a young age David questioned everything and eventually received understanding. As a Naturopath, Kinesiologist, lecturer and trainer, by sharing the wisdom he gained through study and experience has enabled him to help many others. One of the most important principles he learnt was that knowledge and power divorced from Love leads one into darkness and not into the Light. David’s constant life’s work is to heal his mind and in that process ease the pain and suffering of others. David lives on the Gold Coast, QLD, Australia, where he facilitates lectures, treatments and training. Connect with him: [e-mail]

Book preview

Chapter 1

Cycles

As a teenager, I heard an American comedian on the radio making sounds with his voice of a car being driven very fast on the highway. He then made the sound of an out-of-control car crashing. The next sound he made was like the starter motor trying to start the engine. The whirring sound started off fast and loud, then slowed down and progressively got faster and faster. Then it stopped and the comedian said, ‘hubcap’. He had really fooled me! The sound he made of the hubcap rolling around had sounded exactly like a starter motor trying to start the engine. That made me very curious and really got me thinking about different types of cycles. The more I contemplated cycles, the more convinced I became of how they all appeared the same.

A cycle is circular like a ring and everything in this earthly realm consists of cycles within cycles, within cycles. All cycles have the same dynamics or speed, but different lengths of time. When we set goals, we start cycles. If you were going to try and swim the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool underwater, you would quickly gulp in the first amount of air and then slowly fill up your lungs with more air, then right at the end of your capacity you would take in a quick short gulp of air. This is the same as ripping a hubcap off the wheel of a car. The cycle starts with a bang or excessive energy. The hubcap seems to slowly roll around because it is almost standing vertical, then it progressively increases in speed as the outer rim gets closer to the ground. It goes extremely fast just before the final rush to complete the cycle. All cycles start off with a lot of energy, and then they seem to regress and slow down, and then slowly increase in speed until right at the end they really speed up, and then abruptly stop! Cycles do not slow down towards the end and they all end the same way as they started; no movement: they are finished.

A cycle is like holding down with your hands and maintaining compression on, a large coil spring. Initially you will have enough energy and strength to push it down (the ‘bang’) then almost immediately you will find it a strain to maintain the force (the ‘grind’) and eventually you will have to release the pressure with the obvious result of the spring quickly bouncing up (the ‘quickening’ and the ‘end’). The Berlin Wall was a classic example of a long-term cycle. After three and a half centuries of Czar rulership in Russia, Communism exploded and ruled with an iron fist – this is the bang and the holding down of the coiled spring. After many years of harsh rule and with the slightest easing of that intense pressure (suppression of the populace), the Berlin Wall came crashing down, virtually overnight and Russia opened itself to the outside world (the end).

If you are aware of seasonal cycles, they will also show you how all cycles unfold. Winter will start off with a bang. There will be a cold snap for a few days and then the weather seemingly reverts to autumn again for a while, after which it gets progressively colder and colder. Right at the end of the winter cycle it will get extremely cold again for a few days, then suddenly spring will arrive with a week or so of beautiful weather. Then it changes back to seemingly wintery conditions before progressively improving into warmer spring weather.

Here’s another example: the sun seems like a large orange ball as it quickly pops up over the eastern horizon, then it seems to decrease in size and its progression through the sky seems quite slow. Just as it goes down over the western horizon, it seems to increase in size and quickly drops from view. This same phenomenon or dynamic occurs in all cycles regardless of the length of time involved, whether they are sun cycles, seasonal cycles, breath cycles, age cycles or goal cycles. All cycles have a big beginning, what appears to be a slow middle and a seemingly increasingly fast ending. Even the cycle of a fever intensifies just before it breaks.

If we have a goal, no matter what it is, initially we will all be enthusiastic with a lot of energy for it. After a short while the energy or enthusiasm will wane and it will seem like a grind. As we progress towards the completion of the goal, there will be a flurry of activity to finish it. It is like the night-time cycle. All the dark and cold cycles of the night are compressed into the last part of the night. It is commonly known the coldest and darkest time of the night is just before dawn, just before the sun rises. Goals and cycles are the same. It seems to be extremely hard just before the completion of any goal. A lot of people give up at this time of the cycle just before reaching their goal. If we understand cycles, we can develop the mental stamina to stay with the process until the final achievement.

David Icke is a professional conspiracy theorist and has written many books on the subject. Many years ago, I had a cup of coffee with him at a Brisbane seminar. Using a saucer spinning on the coffee table, I demonstrated how cycles operated. He was so impressed that he now uses this demonstration in his international seminars to inform people about his version of the coming times.

Cycles don’t really speed up. Using the saucer as an example, the outer rim of the saucer, which is the cycle, circle or ring, is constant and does not change in diameter. However, as the rim gets closer and closer to the table, the spinning motion appears faster because the cycle is compressing.

The romance of any idea, plan or goal may seem wonderful initially; however, the reality of it is always hard work, difficult or painful. There is usually a fleeting feeling of accomplishment or achievement and then the novelty wears off rapidly. To fill the vacuum, another goal is sought. The word satisfy comes from the root word sate. Sate means: ‘to satisfy completely, as the appetite or desire’. Achieving any goal cannot be, and is never, completely fulfilling or satisfying. If the completion of any goal was totally satisfying, we would feel full and complete and would never have, or need to have, the urge to even think of starting another goal. The outcome of every goal or plan is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; very elusive, impossible to grasp and is never how we anticipated it because of the many unforeseen factors involved. We may have a glimpse of the gold and think that we have made it, however, we remain unfulfilled, unhappy and disillusioned. We then strive for another pot of gold, hoping that it will be better. The search is constant and goes on and on. We expect that the next rainbow will give us the elusive gold.

Sir Francis Chichester, who was the first person to single-handedly sail around the world via the clipper route, stated, ‘I had not then learned that I would feel an intense depression every time I achieved a great ambition’. (The Lonely Sea and the Sky)

Every expectation leads to disappointment. The sensible and truly aware person will not start any cycles by having any plans or goals! With plans and goals, we are constantly going around in circles. If nothing is satisfying, then it must be irritating. Nothing of this shifting and constantly changing world can satisfy; therefore, the world must be irritating. Any irritation means that we no longer have peace of mind. This realm is a physical and mental aberration of contradictions and cannot give us peace of mind or freedom.

Chapter 2

The Bang

I was raised in a post-Second World War, extremely dysfunctional and violent family.

From a very young age, my view of the world was that people never really grew up. Adults carried on like little kids, arguing, lying, bullying, fighting, backstabbing and generally not getting along. I did not have much interest in the world and I thought that it was boring. I distinctly remember one night when I was eight years old, I climbed up on to the roof of an old corrugated-iron shed in our backyard in a sugar-mill town in North Queensland, Australia. I sat looking at the stars and wondered with exasperation, ‘What am I doing here?’ Even though, at the time, I didn’t know the appropriate word to use because of my limited vocabulary, I now know that I viewed the very restricted world I knew as ‘insane’. I started to question the validity of whatever anyone said and I wondered why they thought it was true.

As I grew older I participated in many adventurous activities like parachuting, gliding, caving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, water skiing and many more, with the hope that something would give me a permanent buzz and would keep me interested in living in the world. However, I always found that after the initial excitement wore off everything became quite boring. When I was 25, I backpacked around Europe for 12 months. After arriving back in Australia, and feeling at a bit of a loose-end, I chose to build a yacht and sail around the world, even though I had not even set foot in a dinghy beforehand. I thought that would have to be the ultimate long-term buzz that I was looking for to make my life interesting, exciting and worthwhile.

Four years later, after completing the construction of our 40-foot steel ketch, my wife, our six-month-old son and I were making our way up the east coast of Australia. Sailing from Sydney to Cairns, we called in to Southport on the Gold Coast in southern Queensland. While we were on anchor there, I met a very interesting man called Ron, who was living on his yacht anchored nearby. Ron was built like the proverbial brick toilet. He was as wide as he was high and very solidly built. Yet he was not threatening in any way. As a matter of fact, he was quite the opposite. There was a beautiful calm peaceful demeanour about him, which made me feel inclined to seek his company regularly over the following couple of weeks.

Without sounding arrogant, I have never had a spiritual guru because I always felt that I was my own teacher and that I learnt from all that happened around me. And luckily for me, I never had any formal religious upbringing and I also have not had any formal psychology training. All formal training must deny freedom of thought, as it demands that we conform to the belief system of the training, otherwise the training is unnecessary, ineffective and irrelevant.

I could never relate to the Christian concept of us all being sinners and laden with guilt. And on top of that, that there is a judgemental God watching over each one of us to see if we are doing the right thing. If we did do wrong, we would end up in Hell with the Devil. And people who really believed in God were ‘God-fearing’?? Who or what was this vindictive, punishing God that religious people feared? It just did not make sense to me that God was such a critical, scary, evil being.

I managed to avoid the religious classes at high school and I have only been to church a couple of times for other people’s weddings. My initial impression of religions and religious people had been rather negative due to a very strict, harsh and hypocritical headmaster at one school that I went to, who on Sundays was a pastor at a local church. I saw, and still see, that all religions give people the green light to not do the right thing by others. All religions afforded people the luxury of being hypocritical. This has recently become very public in Australia (and other places in the world), showing that all religions right from the very top echelon are a viper’s nest of paedophilia and child physical and emotional torture. If you want to ignorantly follow these people, who obviously do not practice what they preach, then it is at your peril. The definition of a hypocrite is someone who is not quite themselves on Sundays.

I do not like to use the term ‘God’ because there are so many different connotations throughout the world. Some are not very pleasant and some are distinctly evil. This word has been used throughout history to hypocritically justify the committing of numerous atrocities. Many wars, killings, murders, terrorism, rapes, plunder and pillages have been instigated and condoned based on religious scriptures about conflicting Gods. On an ignorant superficial level, all religious texts can be misinterpreted and construed to suit any distorted mental framework. The ignorant lack any deeper understanding of the messages and whatever cannot be understood is usually fearful. The feared is to be attacked and defended against. Despite this negative implication, I have referred to, and will refer to this word ‘God’ occasionally for general ease of use. To date, I still have not read the Bible, but I know a lot of the stories in the Bible because I come from a Christian society. Later I will be quoting some relevant Biblical stories and statements throughout this book and because of that reason I had to do research on an internet Bible site for accuracy. I was surprised at how horrendous, barbaric and stupid some of the stories are – and this is supposedly the word of God?

Despite my dim view of religions, I thought possibly some religious teachings might have been the reason why Ron was so calm and peaceful. I had never been able to find anything to make me feel that peaceful and content. The more time I spent in Ron’s company, the more curious I became. One day it got the better of me and I asked him rather facetiously, ‘Are you religious, mate?’

Ron replied by saying, ‘Funny that you ask because I used to be a pastor with the Assembly of God.’

From the hypocrisy that I had seen throughout my short life, I did not hold priests or pastors in high regard. So when Ron told me that he was a pastor, I just thought, ‘Yeah, big deal, so what!’ But I listened as Ron proceeded to tell me his very interesting story of how he had become a pastor.

Ron’s brother, John, had been in jail with the last person to be hanged in Australia, whose name was Ronald Ryan. The hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967 had a huge impact on the Australian public and there were riots, demonstrations and petitions. His hanging was the turning point for the abolition of the death penalty throughout Australia, which was finally legislated in 1985.

While John was in jail, Ronald Ryan told him, ‘The only way to save yourself is to turn to God.’ Ronald had impressed John so much that he decided to study religion in jail. When John was eventually released from jail he went around to his brother Ron’s home. He grabbed his brother, shook him and told him, ‘The only way to save yourself is to turn to God!’ Ron was so inspired with the ‘fire in his brother’s eyes’ that he decided to study religion as well.

Ron was 25 years old at that time and was into bodybuilding, fast cars, chasing after women and drinking booze: typical ‘young fella’ stuff. Ron also had a major handicap – he was analphabet or totally illiterate, so could not read or write. To study religion, Ron told me that he would go to his garage at night with a Bible, kneel on the gravel and pray for understanding. He said, ‘The words would literally just leap into my mind,’ and ‘sometimes I was literally physically floating around my garage.’ I felt that Ron was very sincere and had great integrity – I just could not doubt a word of what he was saying.

Ron said he ‘studied’ several religions just by praying for understanding of their Scriptures. He was inspired to join the Assembly of God and became a pastor. He said he developed spiritual ‘gifts’ like hands-on-healing and speaking in tongues etcetera. He really wanted to progress up through the hierarchy of this religious organisation, but a requirement was a university degree in Theology. This was impossible for Ron because he was still illiterate. He became quite frustrated and went sailing instead and that is when I thankfully met him.

Ron’s stories inspired me so much that I quietly decided that I would, for the first time in my life, pray! One night, when I got back to my yacht, I knelt at the end of the bunk. I was a 30-year-old agnostic and had never been to church or prayed before. I felt like a real bloody idiot. So there I was, feeling extremely foolish, not sure what to do, but determined to go through with the process anyway. I thought in my mind, ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to say, just hit me with it!’ Then in a micro-millisecond – ‘whoosh’ – I seemed to take off like a rocket, faster than the speed of light. I then burst into mega millions of rainbow-coloured atoms and then quickly passed through that into pure blazing white light and inexplicable, incomprehensible BLISS! It was so profound that I cannot possibly describe it in words because it is totally beyond my intellectual mind. When I finally came back into the idea and sensation of the body, I felt so amazingly fantastic and peaceful that I could not stop myself from bursting into tears from the sheer joy of it all.

From that moment, I knew that all my searching for the permanent buzz was over. All the things that I had ever done, all the adventures that I had undertaken, all the plans and goals that I had had, everything was totally irrelevant and meaningless. All my worldly pursuits had been a waste of time. It was impossible for anything of this world to give me this experience of such profound bliss and peace. For days afterwards, my mind was completely still, peaceful and joyous. I had never felt this fantastic in all my life. I had no needs, no desires and no fears; everything was wonderful and perfect just as it was. This was the ultimate experience that I had been looking for and was my initiation into the spiritual path. This was the bang at the beginning of the cycle – the grind was yet to come.

This profound spiritual experience was the most significant turning point in my life, and it was inadvertently instigated by Ronald Ryan, the last person to be sent to the gallows in Australia for murder. Without that man on death row passing on his inspiring message to John, who then passed the message on to his brother, Ron, I may still be searching and groping in pain and suffering for the answer to my predicament. I feel privileged and blessed; no one can possibly comprehend or even know how grateful I am to that amazing person, Ronald Ryan. No matter how terrible any event appears, who can possibly know its many and varied outcomes and how many people it touches in a quality manner?

A few years after I had this initial major spiritual experience, somebody introduced me to ‘A Course in Miracles’ (originally published by Foundation for Inner Peace). I was stunned when I started to read it because it described in minute detail what I had experienced. Initially I felt great resistance to all the Christian religious terminology used throughout the book. However, once I got over the terminology hurdle, I just lapped it up. The words just spoke to me and I easily understood exactly what it was saying. ‘A Course in Miracles’ (or ACIM as it is commonly known) was apparently channelled through from Jesus Christ. One great thing about it is that it has a workbook section, which contains a different lesson every day for a whole year. It is designed to break down our personal belief system – and open our minds – so that we can experience our reality of love and bliss. It is structured so that anyone who adheres to the guidance can have the same experience as the one I had on the boat.

Chapter 3

Reaction

A few days after this major experience, my wife and son came back from a road trip to North Queensland. Apparently, she had had a very unpleasant trip up to Cairns and back again. All she did when she got back was swear and curse and carry on about this terrible trip. She went on and on about it for days. However, despite her silly behaviour, I still felt blissful and my mind was at peace. I just could not believe it! Eventually, after a few days, I had had enough of her whining. I let my ego take over. I judged her for what she was doing and reacted by yelling, ‘SHUT UP!’ Immediately my state of bliss and peace disappeared. I had made the fatal mistake of buying into, and reacting to, the external drama of the world and my mind felt like it was burdened again.

After sailing to Innisfail in far north Queensland, my wife and I chose to stay for a couple of weeks with our yacht tied up to pylons in the Johnstone River. One day, we had a barbeque at a bush waterfall with a fellow sailor and his girlfriend. We were having a great time; but after a few drinks my wife and my friend started arguing over some trivial matter. My wife started reacting quite severely to my friend who kept egging her on. The silly argument went on for some time and disturbed our previously congenial atmosphere.

I eventually said, ‘Hey, guys, how about you