I am 45 years old and have been a professional actor for over 24 years. Well if you count my childhood appearances in a few TV shows and being the son of two well-known actor parents in the UK, plus three years of Drama School, you could say that I've been pretty much surrounded by the business of acting and performing my entire life.
At a very early age though, I was interested in the bigger mysteries of life. Always asking those impossible questions like "Who is God?" and "How big is the Universe?" However, by the age of 11, it was clear that acting, not theology or cosmology, was my vocation, so with an interesting mixture of both inner conviction and a lack of self-confidence, I pursued my craft, threw myself at the world and became successful fairly early on in my career. I was, for the most part, over serious but very dedicated as I attacked my roles and somewhere at the heart of my desire to act was this continuing yearning to explore, understand and express the deeper meaning and purpose of human life.
No wonder then that I always wanted to perform in the weighty dramas, being drawn to the classics and the stories that dealt with moral, psychological and spiritual dilemmas. So I lapped up Ibsen, Shakespeare, Chekov et al, but after a good 10 years in the professional world exploring a wide range of genres and mediums in theater, TV and film, I realized that although I was covering a lot of ground I was not actually finding any deeper answers to the big questions through my work ... Nor was I going to, it seemed.
Not only that, I also knew that I could not be satisfied with simply settling for the worldly success of recognition and comparative wealth that I had achieved. By the time I was 30 years old, I was wondering if life would just go on with, well ... More ... but really just more of the same! I felt like I was in a flatland, realizing that performing and even success would never be able to satisfy my original longing to make real sense out of life. My soul felt hungry and it was saying quite loudly:
"Ok we've done a lot of things... but what are we really going to do with this life?"
So it's no surprise that I then began to pick up the spiritual search in earnest. I briefly flirted with some of the new age offerings available in the early 90's and found strength in Buddhism, but ultimately I was looking for something that was not tied to tradition. Part of me wanted to disappear into a cave in India, and I did end up going on retreats there, but don't ask me why, I always felt very strongly that the point for me was to find a way to live a truly spiritual life in the modern day world and be able to work with all the positive aspects of our cultural and technological advancements.
And after several years of seeking I did actually find what I was looking for in the contemporary teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment. I experienced first hand the transcendent nature of who we are as spirit first, beyond time and the mind, and I knew without any doubt that this dimension of ourselves was ultimately more real than anything else I had previously experienced. It blew my mind! My soul jumped for joy! All my original questions were being answered in the discovery of this consciousness that inherently united everything and everyone and pointed to an incredible potential for humanity. It felt huge and seemed to hold a significance way beyond myself. I didn't really know what I was saying "yes" to at the time but I knew that it was real, it was good and I had the sense that I was coming home....but...and here is the thing, at the same time I knew that I was about a million light years from being at the end of the journey, in fact, it was clear that it was just getting started. My life was upside down and the question now was. How was I going to live according to what I had realized? And do that with integrity? That is something that I have been working on and bumping into for fifteen years now but I am excited to be able share some of my explorations, successes and failures with you in this and future posts.
You can seek forever but when you start finding, there is nothing more to wait for. It seems to me that whatever path you choose to take, in the end its up to each of us to try, test and live what we find out, to apply it and see what actually works and that's the exciting and challenging part of this very real adventure.
For a while I even gave up being an actor in order to give my attention more fully to this spiritual pursuit but overtime it became clear to me that my work and my spiritual exploration were not mutually exclusive. In fact, as well as now loving my role on Law and Order, I am looking forward to developing film and theater projects to communicate more tangibly the thrilling dimension of our nature as evolving beings who are part of a much bigger story ... A story that we are all writing the next chapter of now.
And there is so much to talk about right there...!