I May Be Wrong: The Sunday Times Bestseller

I May Be Wrong

Contents

Prologue

1Awareness

2Successful but unfulfilled

3Breathe more, think less

4The Brothers Karamazov

5My monastery debut

6Don’t believe your every thought

7Mum, I’m going to become a forest monk

8Natthiko – ‘One who grows in wisdom’

9The intelligence of the moment

10 The eccentric commune

11 The rhythm of a forest monastery

12 Kitschy wisdom

13 The magic mantra

14 Maybe, maybe not

15 Ghosts, asceticism and grief

16 Self-inflicted psychological suffering

17 How many Pepsis can a hermit drink?

18 Closed fist, open palm

19 Get a fucking job, mate

20 Don’t forget to leave room for miracles

21 Only one thing is certain

22 ‘Hips Don’t Lie’

23 But I’m the monk who never doubted

24 Farewell letter

25 Darkness

26 This too shall pass

27 It starts with you

28 Life in trousers

29 The meaning of life is to find your gift and give it away

30 Trust will get you there

31 The news

32 Is this how it ends?

33 Everything will be taken from you

34 Be the thing you want to see more of in the world

35 Dad

36 Forgiveness

37 From shallowness to sincerity

38 This is where it ends

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Prologue

After leaving my life as a monk behind and returning to Sweden, I was interviewed by a newspaper. They wanted to know more about my somewhat unusual life choices. Why would a successful businessman give away everything he owns, shave his head and go off into the jungle to live with a bunch of strangers? Some way into our conversation, the interviewer asked the million-dollar question:

‘What is the most important thing you learned during your seventeen years as a Buddhist forest monk?’

The question made me feel nervous and flustered. I had to say something, but I didn’t want to rush this particular answer.

The journalist sitting across from me wasn’t a person of any discernible spiritual interest. He had no doubt been shocked to learn about all the things I’d chosen to forego during my time as a monk. After all, I’d lived without money, without sex or masturbation, without TV or novels, without alcohol, without family, without holidays, without modern conveniences, without choosing when or what to eat.

For seventeen years.

Of my own free will.

And so, what did I get out of it?

It was important to me to be honest. I wanted my response to be the absolute truth as I saw it. So, I looked inward and before long the answer bubbled up from some quiet place inside:

What I value most from my seventeen years of full-time spiritual training is that I no longer believe my every thought.

That’s my superpower.

What’s great about that is that it’s everyone’s superpower. Yours, too. If you’ve lost sight of it, I hope I can help to guide you along the path to rediscovering it.

It’s a tremendous privilege to have had so many opportunities to share what I learned during my years of continual effort to achieve spiritual and personal growth. I’ve always found those opportunities deeply meaningful. I’ve been given so many things that have helped me, that have made my life easier to live, made it easier to be me. If I’m lucky, you will find something in this book that can help you. Some of these insights have been pivotal to me. Not least in the past two years, when I’ve found myself in Death’s waiting room earlier than I would have wished. Perhaps this is where it ends. But perhaps it’s also where it begins.

one

Awareness

I’m eight years old. As usual, I’m the first to wake. I pace around my grandparents’ house on an island on the outskirts of Karlskrona, south-east Sweden, waiting for my younger brother Nils to wake up. I pause at the kitchen window. Suddenly, the noise inside me falls silent.

Everything goes quiet. The chrome toaster on the windowsill is so beautiful I skip a breath. Time stops. Everything seems to shimmer. A couple of clouds smile down from a pale morning sky. The birch tree outside the window waves its glittering leaves. Everywhere I look, I see beauty.

I probably didn’t put my experience into words back then, but I would like to try to now. It was as though the world was whispering: ‘Welcome home.’ For the first time, I felt completely at home on this planet. I was present in the here and now, with no thoughts. Then my eyes welled up and I felt a warmth in my chest, which today I would call gratitude. Hard on its heels followed the hope that this feeling would last forever, or at least for a really long time. It didn’t, of course. But I’ve never forgotten that morning.

I have never felt completely comfortable with the term mindfulness. My mind doesn’t feel full when I’m truly in the moment. More like a big, empty, welcoming space, with plenty of room for everyone and everything. Conscious presence. It sounds like hard work, the opposite of being relaxed. For that reason, I like to use a different word: awareness.

We become aware, we remain aware, we are aware. It was awareness that blossomed that early morning beside the toaster in Karlskrona. It feels like leaning into something soft. The thoughts, the feelings, the physical sensations – everything is allowed to be exactly as it is. It makes us a little bit bigger. We notice things in and around ourselves we haven’t noticed before. It’s an intimate feeling. Like an invisible friend who’s always on your side.

Needless to say, your degree of presence affects how you relate to other people. We all know what it’s like to spend time with someone who isn’t present. There’s always this nagging sense that something’s missing. I feel it comes to the fore every time I meet young children. They’re less than impressed by our analytical skills, but amazingly sensitive as to whether or not we are in the moment. They can tell when we’re faking or when our thoughts are somewhere else. The same goes for animals. But when we’re present, when we’re not hypnotised by every little thought that flashes into our heads, people find us much more pleasant to be around. They give us their trust. They give us their attention. We connect with the world around us in a completely different way. You know this already, of course, and it may sound trite. And yet, many of us forget. It’s so easy to become hung up on appearing clever and impressive that we forget just how far sincerity can take us.

two

Successful but unfulfilled

I left school with good grades and had my pick of universities, but no clear plan for my future. Taking a fairly casual approach to the whole thing, I applied to a few different degree courses. As it happened, I was in Stockholm that August when the entrance exams for the Stockholm School of Economics were being held. It was the path my dad had chosen: finance, economics, big companies. So I sat the exams, an entire day of demanding tests. Turns out I did well and a few months later I received a letter saying I had got in. Lacking in direction as I was, I reckoned I had nothing to lose by enrolling. Economics is always useful; it opens lots of doors. So I’d been told. But the real reason I decided to accept my offer from the Stockholm School of Economics was probably that it made my dad proud.

I graduated in the spring of 1985. I was twenty-three. Sweden’s labour market was booming. Employers recruited us straight out of school, before we had even graduated. One sunny evening in May, I was sitting in a fancy restaurant on Strandvägen in central Stockholm with an older investment banker. I was being interviewed for a potential job over dinner. I did my best to sound intelligent and eat at the same time, always something of a challenge for me. When the dinner and interview were over, we shook hands and the banker said:

‘Look, I’m pretty sure you’re going to be asked to go to our head office in London for further interviews. But can I give you a piece of advice before you go?’

‘Please.’

‘When you get to the next interview stage with my London colleagues, try to appear a bit more interested in the work.’

I knew what he meant, of course, but I was taken aback at being called out. Back then, I was, like so many of my peers, a young person in search of my adult life. That often means working with what you’ve got. Sometimes, there’s an element of play-acting involved, like pretending you’re more interested in something than you really are. On that particular evening, my acting skills failed to convince. But things seemed to work out anyway. I had other job offers and, before long, I was climbing that career ladder.

A couple of years later, one Sunday afternoon in May, I was lying on an scratchy red Ikea sofa I’d had shipped over from Sweden, a warm sea breeze sifting in through the open window. I was working for a big international company and had been transferred to their Spanish offices. I had a company car. A secretary. Flew business class. Had a lovely house by the sea. In another two months, I was set to become the youngest ever chief financial officer of an AGA subsidiary. I’d been featured in the AGA in-house magazine and was unquestionably outwardly successful. I was only twenty-six years old and, to an outsider, my life was the picture of perfection. But I think almost everyone who has ever appeared outwardly successful has also eventually realised that’s no guarantee of happiness.

Success and happiness are two different things.

To others, it must have seemed I’d played my cards right. I had all the trappings of material and professional success. I’d gone straight from university to three intense work years in half a dozen countries. But I’d done it with sheer willpower and self-discipline. I was still playing a part, still pretending to be interested in economics. You can get away with that for so long. But we all know there comes a day when discipline alone is no longer enough. A job, what we spend our days doing, has to nourish and stimulate some deeper part of our being. That type of nourishment is rarely derived from success. Rather, it comes from feeling connected to the people you work with, feeling that your work has meaning, that your talents are somehow making a difference.

Me? I felt a bit like I was playing dress-up when I put on my suit and picked up my shiny square briefcase to go to work. I would tie my tie in front of the mirror in the mornings, give myself a thumbs up and tell my reflection: ‘It’s showtime, folks!’ But my internal, subjective experience was: ‘I don’t feel good. I don’t like going to work. Thinking about work often makes me anxious. There’s a twenty-four-seven swirl of doubts at the back of my mind, with questions like Did I do enough prep? Am I good enough? When are they going to see through me? When are they going to realise I’m just pretending to be interested in economics?’

As I lay there on my red sofa, those doubts seemed more insistent than usual. I thought about what the books at the Stockholm School of Economics had taught me: what is the prime motivation of an economist working for a big company? Maximising the profits of the shareholder. ‘What does that mean for me? Who are they? Have I ever even met a shareholder? And even if I have, why would I be interested in maximising their profits?’

My mind was buzzing with thoughts about the coming work week and my to-do list. There were some things I needed to get done but didn’t feel fully up to doing. A management meeting where I was expected to have an opinion about whether or not a carbonic acid plant outside Madrid should be expanded. A quarterly report I had to submit to our headquarters in Sweden. In other words, my chest was contracting with plain old Sunday night angst. I assume just about everyone knows what that’s like. When you’re in that kind of mental state, it’s as though your every thought passes through a dark filter. Whatever you’re thinking about, it leads to worry, anxiety, despondency, helplessness. I remember thinking something along the lines of: ‘How can I help myself? I’m lying here, stuck in a spiral of dark thoughts. This isn’t good for me.’

Then I recalled a book I’d recently read. For the third time, as a matter of fact. I found it pretty dense, so even though I’d read it cover to cover three times I reckoned I’d only understood about thirty to forty per cent of the material. The book was called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

It wasn’t really so much about Zen Buddhism. Or the art of motorcycle maintenance, for that matter. But it did contain a lot of ideas. And one of the ideas I picked up on was: ‘That which is peaceful inside us humans, that which is still and calm, that isn’t ruffled by thoughts that are always present in the background – that is valuable, that is worth taking note of. That has rewards.’

After a while, I had a dawning sense of realisation.

‘Okay, so, all the thoughts I’m thinking right now are making me feel bad. Just blocking them seems impossible. Swapping them for positive ones feels disingenuous. I mean, am I supposed to lie here and pretend I’m looking forward to that management meeting?! Talk about superficial. What can I do if I want to achieve calm and stop being hypnotised by my own thoughts?’

The book underscored the value of locating the stillness we all have inside. But how was