In a today’s culture of so much hurry, time for travel is often the first thing to get sacrificed. Why give ourselves the luxury of time to lie around, producing nothing, while the rest of the world continues to move, change, and leave us behind? In this competitive world, it seems ridiculous to opt out of participation for an extended period of time.

It doesn’t matter what stage of life you’re in, either. For kids graduating from high school, there’s the real economic benefit of college. For kids graduating from college, there’s the need to get real work experience. For the experienced, there’s a need to pay college tuitions back. And so on till death. Excuse after excuse for never taking the time to stop, and take a step outside.

No matter where you start from, creating the time to travel is going to be a difficult task. That’s where its reward lies.

A common problem with Americans these days is a love of the easy. Every other advertisement is promoting an “easy” solution to difficult problems. Overweight? Just call us, and we’ll mail you meals to slim you down. Unsatisfied with your life? Just take these pills and your brain will be fixed.

Only, these “easy” solutions never solve the real, underlying problems. You aren’t physically active enough because you don’t take the time for fitness. Your lifestyle bores you to death because you haven’t taken the time to figure out what wouldn’t.

The solution to these problems is challenge.

It’s easy to put off working out or changing your lifestyle. It’s very difficult to take a step back, look at your life, and decide significant parts of it are just plain wrong.

This is where long term travel comes in to help.

It’s impossible to get a full perspective on yourself while on the hamster wheel of daily habit. Travel shocks you out of these habits and gives you time to reflect. These two simple changes start a chain of events that lead to personal growth and understanding.

Just starting the process of planning for a trip leads to personal growth. You can’t leave for six months at a time with an unhealthy financial situation. If you’re in debt, travel is a real motivation to get out of it. How quickly can you turn around your financial situation so you can see the world?

If you’re not in debt, the prospect of saving for a few months of travel can be just as intimidating. How difficult would it be to save $10,000 for a full year of travel, and what changes in my lifestyle would be necessary to make that possible?

Either way, you’re forced to simplify your life into what really matters. Is buying that new computer really going to improve your life, or is it going to mean another month’s worth of delay for the trip? This little mental shift puts things into focus. You work and spend more efficiently. All of these mental shifts before you even stepped foot on a plane.

But then what about once you’ve left?

Will you really learn anything meaningful while drinking Margaritas on the beach in Thailand?

Without hesitation, the answer is yes. If you’ve worked hard and sacrificed to be able to sit on a beach and drink margaritas for a few weeks, then you deserve it. I think you’ll realize how quickly you can get sick of lying on a beach and drinking margaritas.

Because, once you’ve started challenging yourself to become better (in your own eyes) you get addicted to the process. You’ll realize that sitting around on a beach getting sloshed for years isn’t going to make you a better person, and it definitely isn’t going to lead to a life you’ll be proud of.

So you’ll look to the next challenge: What does a life you would be proud to live look like?

This is such a huge, fundamental question that it blows me away no one asks it at school. Even if we’re put on this planet for no other purpose than procreation and gene selection (hah!), this question is still of the utmost importance. What kind of a life do you want to live?

Of course, culturally we’re programmed to have a similar response as everyone else within our culture. For Americans, it would be a big house, a nice car, a great job, and a happy little family. But once we shock ourselves outside of our immediate culture, we realize how relatively unimportant that big house and nice car are. What matters universally takes over instead.

And those universal things include a great job and a happy family. A great job matters, because regardless of what we do, we have to continue working, to continue producing. There is no way we can get to the point where we can cease to produce meaningful contributions to the world. It’s flawed logic to stay at a job just because the pay is good. Ultimately, the pay is not nearly as significant as the portion of your life you wasted not living how you wanted.

The biggest spiritual lessons from travel are universal truths. No matter what religion you follow, it’s become popular because there is some universal truth to it. No religion has ever encompassed every universal truth, but all of the big ones address them in their own way to their own audience. A few months of travel and reflection will give you at least a few universal truths, and that alone is worth the price of entry. Discovering that Jesus’ words are actual, testable truths, that the Buddhist’s eightfold path is a testable design for a meaningful life, or that the Hindu concept of being here now is really the most profound concept you’ve read, you’ll find the spiritual gems of wisdom that have been handed down from generation to generation. Wisdom kept in the hands of those brave enough to seek it.

And that wisdom is what society needs most. Now and forever. So step outside and ask yourself if you’re willing to seek it yourself.

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On December 28 2006, I read Ram Dass’ book, Be Here Now.

I had heard of Ram Dass from a whole lot of people, and picked up snippets of his philosophy, the main one being the title of his book - BE HERE NOW. It left me a little skeptical, mostly because of how many people worship his writings. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that spiritual leaders with blind followers suck.

But I gave the book a chance anyways, figuring there’s something worthwhile in everything popular, it’s just a matter of cutting through the BS to get to it. So I began by reading the first few pages to get an idea of Ram Dass’ point in the book.

It turns out, he was a very successful (by stereotypical American standards) phsychiatrist working at Harvard before he took an extreme spiritual path. He owned a plane, a large house, fancy cars, the whole nine yards. He was frustrated with his life, though, and felt instinctively something wasn’t right. He had so much, yes, but he still felt empty, and all the things he had weren’t adding up to enough.

Then he met Timothy Leary and decided to take psylocibin as phychiatric research. What happened when he took psylocibin changed his life.

He realised that his life was just a game that he was playing very well. Beneath that surface game lied something deeper, more profound, and more worthwhile than just worldly pursuits. He was intrigued, and knew he was onto something. He never had such a profound undertanding so quickly.

So he got more involved with psychedelics, and eventually realized he couldn’t continue with his egotistical pursuits at Harvard. At the same time he also realized he couldn’t achieve true spiritual power while relying on a psychedelic drug to get him closer to a more profound experience. He decided to take the spiritual path of following a guru.

Now, here’s where I get upset. The whole guru thing. The idea that one person has achieved something so profound spiritually they’ve grown above it and assume they can teach better than the best experience - personal. To me, spirituality is something so important that we can’t let someone else tell us what is and what isn’t. We must experience and know for ourselves.

But he followed his guru anyway. And he came upon some profound lessons. Lessons that are found in every religion to some extent. That’s because every lasting religion was started by people experiencing the same thing under different circumstances - the eternal in the now in the eternal now.

What the hell does that mean?

Be here now. This moment we are currently present in is the only real thing we ever have. It’s never going to become something else, it’s never going to stay the same. Wherever we are, we’re interpreting our experience. If we interpret pain is unbearable, it is, if we interpret pain is fleeting, it is. Whatever we decide to interpret as real becomes real.

Be here now. Surf the moment to death. Our lives can end at any point in time. Nothing is a given, the only given is this moment we find ourselves in right now.

Experience the beauty and appreciate every breath.

Couldn’t every religion break itself down into that one sentence? At it’s most basic form, every religion is saying the same thing:

Be here now.

In other words,

Experience the beauty and appreciate every breath.

The desire for a beautiful, amazing life filled with an incredible lover and thousands of friends isn’t real. The only thing that is is the moment we are in right now. Why let this moment be spoiled by petty desires that aren’t real? Surf the current moment to the end instead, in a constant state of gratification and presence. By focusing completely on the current moment, we can experience the eternal. We can focus on truly helping. There is no attachment, there is no death, there is only what we feel what we know right now. The future holds nothing, doesn’t exist.

Does that scare you?

It should. Because it’s so profound and so simple. And because it’s provable by daily experience. When you wake up, you immediately begin interpreting your reality and deciding what to focus on. Are you focusing on the process of awakening, or are you worrying about problems in your life that haven’t affected you yet?

It’s a simple step. The most profound wisdom is always the simplest. Start now… be here now.

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