This is What I Want You to Know about Life

The last words of Maxi Jazz

I reconnected with my friend Dean Whitbread I met while I was building the video conversations then social networking app Seesmic in 2007 when I setup in San Francisco. Thanks to my newsletter, I am in touch with him again. That’s what I like most about writing online, I keep finding old friends who thanks to some Internet magic get in touch again. Instead of hanging-out in real life, we exchange comments or emails.

The way we write is the energy we put in the world, our “life force” and the form it has right now always changing. What I am writing today is a bit of my energy right this minute, I could not have written it the same way yesterday or tomorrow. It’s a great exercice of presence for me, this is why I do not do drafts or “think about what I write” to review it later. I just write, read again once and post it.

Dean sent me this video, that he “thought I might appreciate” so I watched it. I watched it a few times actually.

These are the final words of Maxi Jazz before he passed on Dec 23 2022. The synchronicity with my own father’s death at age 53 came to my mind. Patrick Le Meur died on 22 Dec 1999. Every year Christmas brings the memories of his death and also the good moments we spent together. This made me pay even more attention to Maxi Jazz’s video. Here are some of them.

This is what I want you to know about Life.

The same life force that created the entirety of the universe is flowing through you.

Meaning that everywhere the universe exists that’s where your life exists, where you are. It is the universe ultimately and the universe is you.

This knowledge requires a fundamental shift in attitude towards praying and prayer.

When you pray you’re not asking for help or at least you shouldn’t be. You are telling the Universe what you want to see happen in your life.

This works the same way as press-ups. One press-up or even a dozen is not going to make you strong. You have to do it every day and not give up.

Eventually what you desire, what you want to see happen occurs quite naturally in your life, even though at one time it may have seemed impossible.

So please take it from me. Whatever it is your heart desires. Whether it be a new guitar or a new job or World Peace, please pray hard and stick at it.

“You have to do it every day and not give up”

Press-ups or push-ups won’t make you strong if you don’t do it every day. Same as becoming a master at guitar, you have to do it every day for years, as in everything.

Malcolm Gladwell said the same in his book “Outliers: The Story of Success”

Throughout his book, Gladwell repeatedly refers to the “10 000-hour rule,” asserting that the key to achieving true expertise in any skill is simply a matter of practicing, albeit in the correct way, for at least 10 000 hours.

Pick something and do it repeatedly, every day, never stop. Even when it feels so hard and you do not see any result or even see negative results. I got that so many times in life, I learned some scales at the guitar and never made it through fretboard fluency as I did not keep going daily…

When you pray you’re not asking for help or at least you shouldn’t be. You are telling the Universe what you want to see happen in your life.

I really like this. I learned to pray when I started my red road with the vision quest and sundance. We have to prepare more than 500 or 700 prayers for each, it can be an entire week of prayers which we materialize in tobacco knots.

Here are one of my first tobacco prayers for a vision quest, I rolled them around my poncho… to avoid making a mess as this line will delimitate my “womb” during the quest.

I really like what Maxi Jazz says here, prayers should not be about asking the universe for help but telling the universe what you want to see happen. More like a manifestation. Then it’s about doing the work. Daily. This is how Boyan Slat made his dreams to clean the oceans happen. Not only by asking the universe to solve the ocean pollution issue but by deciding it has to be solved, become a leader in that battle. The prayer is more about what needs to be done in order to get the means to do this.

Anything is possible. Focus on a few or even just one “battle”. As Maxi says, a new job or World Peace. Boyan went for “save the Oceans”.

Pick your battles

There is a number of “precepts” we can work on at one time, we are very limited this way.

Trying to do everything at once is a sure way to fail.

I picked a few things I wanted to be really good at in the past, I wasn’t very conscious so I did not consciously pick them, they just happened because that’s what I wanted to do…

What’s the next prayer? The next battle?

That might be the hardest part. Pick one. Two maybe. Three is risky already.

I am 50. The past doesn’t matter. What’s coming next?

What will make me proud of what I did in the last part of my life when I die?

What will you pick for yourself as part of “life in the universe”?

Thank you, Maxi Jazz for leaving these wise words for us and Dean for bringing them to my attention. They’re here for me to meditate on today now that I wrote about them.