I realised after 36.5 years in the natural world that saying the word NO, talking negatively about anyone or anything, and complaining is completely redundant and a mark on my own soul. The word YES and giving LOVE and celebrating the NOW is all there is and all we need. John Lennon had it right. All you need is love. Humanity’s greatest struggle lies in self-love. If we have that, we have it all. Comfort, peace of mind, harmony, dream manifestation, fiction becoming reality. Making fiction reality is fundamental to creating the future. Whether it be through design, art, architecture, or just living in general, like a baby monkey learning to ride on the back of a pig. Saying YES and not NO is the best start. YES is more. But then for those that don’t meditate. It’s really fucking easy. 20 minutes morning and night. When I’m in the best state my thoughts, actions and words are clear. Words shape and define our world; language is key as we shape our paths through the words or thoughts we put into the world. We can uplift or lower ourselves and others through these thoughts and words. The world spoke close to 7000 languages once but that number is diminishing. Anthropologist Wade Davis said “losing a language is like losing an old growth forest of the mind”. Watch here + here. Within the forest of language and knowledge are many pathways to love, happiness and pleasure. Listening to Wade makes you realise our greater story and how there is so much out there to learn and to take us forward. Design must connect to what it means to be human at the core. The Hawaiian practice of ‘Hoʻoponopono’, reconciliation and forgiveness, is a simple tool to couple with meditation as a daily mind exercise; pleasure is all in the mind so we must exercise it. Create our own reality in whatever shape or form we want… for me, this is the core. The greatest amount of pleasure I have ever experienced in my life was consuming a psychoactive cactus with the Huichol indigenous tribe of Mexico. The main thing I learnt and experienced about the higher power of this creation is that every single piece of ‘everything’ is connected and is amazing. We, as beings, are so incredible and have so many layers of complexity that we’ve forgotten how to see what is in front of us. I saw it for a brief moment in Mexico. For Indigenous Australians, god is nature. Without sun, without nature, humans couldn’t exist; so we must love and live in nature. If we work on the core of what it is to be human – get right with ourselves, love ourselves – then pleasure in any form is achievable and longer lasting. Your brain decides what is pleasurable and what isn’t. Re-train that old stained brain to maintain the frame the frame that everything is insane and not mundane and refrain to explain whatever you want that particular thing to remain. The cocktail of what one deems to be joy, happiness, ecstatical, wondrous, and orgasmic is pure fiction. Open your mind. Eat well. Make it whatever you want. Don’t worry, it’s only a dream on a big revolving sphere and make notes as you go develop your own belief system, like Jodorowsky did. I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you ~ James Brown