- The Bigger Picture -

The question ‘Who Am I? is possibly humanity’s number one frequently asked question, a question that probably produces more possible answers than there are stars in the sky.  I have asked myself this question many times in my life so far, and explored many of the recommended methods that are supposed to help one find an answer. These methods have ranged from world travel to travelling the inner worlds, and this website is an attempt to document some of my experiences during this exploration.  But here I offer some of my ideas about who I am now.

I am a spiritual being having a human experience, as I believe are all of us.

I am a virtual reality computer game avatar in a vast holographic 3D virtual world, where the players – many of whom created the game in the first place – have handed the remote control to the avatars, so soon after the avatar’s entrance in the game that most avatars are not aware of the existence of the player.

Although I would lend credence to many of the ideas of the so-called New Age movement, I no longer consider myself purely as a lightworker, having had to learn to work with the darker aspects of my soul in recent years!  But I am not just a darkworker either, I consider that both of the light and dark polarities are different manifestations of what is basically the same energy, so I would rather call myself an energy worker.

Despite some of my lyrics in The Love Frequency, I am not sure that the term ascension – the idea that one spiritually evolves moving up through the dimensions until one can finally throw off this mortal coil and become purely spirit – is fully appropriate for the pathways I find myself on.  I certainly believe it has been important in our understanding of the whole process of spiritual evolution, but these days I find myself more aware of a process of descension, that of my soul or higher divine self in the gradual process of ‘descending’ into my physical body. Because of the soul’s inherent multi-dimensionality, I am becoming more aware of the different dimensions but not in the sense of ascending through the various levels so much as being aware – from my physical centre – of dimensions intermingling with each other.

I wonder that in some ways the focus of many on ascension is a stepping stone – or perhaps a hangover –  from the Christian idea of the rapture. It still has the idea of physical reality being something somehow considered as low consciousness and something that needs to be moved beyond.  It is often suggested in many of the channels of the Crimson Circle rather that physical existence is in some ways the highest ladder on the rung that existence or All-That-Is has seen so far, and that there are angels and spirits simply clamouring to come here.  In order to evolve, one must enter and master the Earth realms, over may lifetimes.  The soul guides the ‘lower’ human ego to gradually evolve its awareness to the point that the soul feels welcomed by the human to merge with it, momentarily at first but gradually increasing to the point where it becomes the norm.

I will continue to add to this as more ideas come to mind…

I have a strong memory at around the age of five or six of asking my father why he spent so much time reading and studying, and not out playing football as I liked to do.  Up until that moment I had thought that grown-ups knew everything, so it puzzled me that he would spend so much time with his head stuck in books.   His answer was that he was searching for the truth.  At the time I was very impressed, and thought that that must have meant that he was someone really important, as if he had been charged with the responsibility as a seeker of ‘The Ultimate Truth’ by the rest of humanity.  I was surprised though that he didn’t already know it, as he seemed to be able to give an answer to almost every question that I had asked him up until that point.  But it must have struck a chord with me, because since then I have had a drive to know the higher truths, especially the big picture questions of what exists beyond this physical world and what happens to us when we die. Over time I was also impressed by his persistence, because I soon realised that most believers learn enough to have a simple understanding of what they believe, without further questioning.

Despite having to go to Church and Sunday School every Sunday with my parents, they were not particularly pushy with their religious beliefs, and we were given space and time to form our own belief systems.  When I was around the age of 11 or 12 I asked Jesus Christ into my heart.  I had been doing a Bible correspondence course for children, and one particular lesson was written in such a way that it led the reader to a point where the invitation was made to seem the most logical thing to do.  And so without really understanding the full significance, I got down on my knees beside my bed and prayed, and asked God to forgive my sins and Jesus to come into my heart. This made me a Christian, according to the lesson.  At the time I think I felt a little nervous buzz, but apart from that not too different from before – a little cleaner perhaps, though that feeling probably only persisted until the next time I was told off for doing something wrong…

Some time a bit later, a few weeks perhaps, I was sitting one Saturday afternoon in the backyard of the family home in a small country town in New South Wales, Australia. As a child I would daydream a lot.  My father would often chide me for ‘living in cloud-cuckoo land’.  He had just erected an old wagon wheel (as pictured) in the garden, in order to grow plants up it.  I can remember staring at the wheel for quite a while, getting lost in a daydream, trying to work out what I really felt about this Christianity thing and what God was really like.  The wheel must have had a bit of a mandala effect on me, and I heard what seemed like a voice in my head.  However it was nothing like the voices that are usually there chattering away, expressing my thoughts and usually sounding like me or someone else with whom I might be having a mental conversation.  As I can’t remember specific words I would probably now describe it more as a deep resonating sound that seemed to come from all directions inside my head, as if I was wearing a set of headphones.  This sound seemed lift me into an altered state, to almost instantly transmit knowledge to me, rather than speak actual words. Somehow I knew that this was the ‘voice of God’ – or someone very close to Him at the very least!

As if in answer to my questioning, the voice ’said’ that life is like the wagon wheel, that I then seemed to be merging with. God is the hub of the wheel, the centre of all life.  Humanity is the rim of the wheel, and all the religions and philosophies are like the spokes of the wheel.   Each of us are born at a particular place on the rim, close to a particular religion or belief system, that points toward God at the centre.  As we look down the spoke towards the hub, the religion gives us a glimpse of the divine.  But each religion only gives a small facet of the whole picture.  In order to gain a truer picture of God one would have to travel around the wheel and see God from every angle, looking down each spoke.  

The voice finished and I returned from that trance-like state to a normal state of awareness.  At the time there was little doubt in my mind that this knowledge was somehow greater than anything I had learned up until that point.  But although I was aware of the existence of other religions, my experience at that early age had only been of Christianity.    And so I did not have a big enough frame of reference in which this knowledge was able to sit comfortably.  I tried for a time to assimilate it, but the weight of the Christian teachings that surrounded me made it impossible.  For the rest of my teenage years I committed myself to Christianity, and resolved to at least try and understand it well before exploring other spokes.  I remember slight feelings of guilt towards ‘the voice’ as over the next few years – when the memory occasionally came back to me – I would somehow distort the wheel to make Christianity the only essential spoke in the wheel, or some similar vain rationalisation.

From my late teens into my early twenties I felt more and more the constricting and often conflicting limitations of Christianity, and began to explore other belief systems.  I was particularly inspired after seeing the movie ‘Ghandi’, by his politically effective and compassionate non-violent approach that encompassed all religions, and started to read about the Hindu and Buddhist religions.  But ultimately I found that their texts just seemed like other versions of Christianity.  There were some seemingly deep truths, but it was mostly cultural histories and largely irrelevant and incomprehensible rules. I was usually left feeling that it might have made more sense if I had actually been there at the time.  So for a lot of my twenties I put the big questions on the backburner as anyway I was having too much fun to get serious. There was plenty of time for that later…

Once I left Christianity at the age of 22 however, the memory of that first experience came back more clearly and probably more often.  I no longer had a reason to distort it.  And fuller significance of the experience has only come in more recent years.  I see now for example how that as the spokes get closer to the hub, they get closer to each other, as higher truths of many belief systems share many similarities.  Also that even if one travelled all around the rim the picture would be still be incomplete, because it is impossible to see all of the hub from the two-dimensional perspective of the rim.  To see the centre of the hub where the axle sits, for example, one would have to leave the rim, perhaps by stepping out of the confines of physical existence… And ultimately these days I would say that if one were to use the word ‘God’ – something that I try to do as little as possible as it is loaded with many different meanings for each person – it would more accurately describe the whole wheel.

First public public performance, age 11

Paul Vedant has had a unique and varied musical heritage. Growing up in a devout Christian household in an Australian country town, he began playing guitar and piano at age 11. At 15 he was playing guitar in a folk/country/gospel group in the local church. It was the tail-end of the 70’s singer/songwriter period, and he was also known to play covers of songs from Chuck Berry and the Beatles to Don McLean and Neil Young – on guitar at bush campfires and on pianos in town – with anyone who would listen or join in.

On moving to the city to begin an ill-fated arts degree, he played what are still some of his best-paying gigs on the streets of Melbourne, in an illustrious busking career performing Simon & Garfunkel covers with a hometown friend. He played ambient and gospel piano in the church of the God Squad Motorcycle Club. It was there that he began to play electric guitar, and then after a Robert Johnson experience he sold a portion of his soul to the devil of rock´n´roll.

He then played guitar with several bands in the Melbourne 80’s post Nick Cave underground scene, including The Movers, The Crucifixation and The Bird Dissolves. He also occasionally guested with The Fish John West Reject, playing piano on a couple of tracks on their Swim album (1989) and the single The Orchard (1990).

Box the Jesuit, 1993. Paul Vedant (as Paul Wonderlick) at left

In 1990 he moved to Sydney to join the legendary glam art metalheads Box the Jesuit, performing and co-writing songs on their last album Guide Dogs for the Spiritually Impaired (1993) and video Kosmic Ganda – a tribute to Goose (1994). He also guested on keyboards with You Am I at the Box the Jesuit Stark Raving Elvis Tribute show in 1991.  In January 1992 Box the Jesuit supported Nirvana at the inauguaral Big Day Out. Later that night Vedant attended his first dance rave, and there had another crossroads experience… Fortunately his soul had only benefited from the earlier sale, and so he was able to sell another substantial portion, this time to the devil of digital dance music.

He continued to play with Box the Jesuit until they broke up in 1995, then took a break from performing music, and backpacked around the world with an acoustic guitar for a while before settling in Spain. He was encouraged out of his performance retirement when he met dj loopez, and played solo at the Funky Finca festivals in Andalucia (2000). He then began working with dj loopez at the Funky Finca recording studio, creating music digitally and laying the foundations for what was to become nu-funk, with the addition of Manu El Santero in 2002.  In 2006 he released his first solo song The Love Frequency, which came 2nd in the Crimson Circle worldwide song competition in November 2006.

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