Journal
I have occasionally been asked why I chose to write Love Is The New Religion as a novel and, more specifically, as a thriller.
After all, the title of the book and the story that unfolds seem substantially at odds with one another at first blush. And for those of you who don’t know, the story itself has its roots in my own life.
The narrative reveals experiences, questions, discoveries and periods of profound change within it that often have been reflected within my own journey.
So it begs the questions - why not simply write a memoir? Why disguise parts of my story as a work of fiction?
Perhaps the simplest answer I can give is that I am not famous.
Memoirs tend to be written by people whose lives have already been lived in the public eye. We are interested in the private thoughts and experiences of people we already know: actors, musicians, politicians, sportspeople, entrepreneurs and other public figures.
If someone has spent twenty years in the public consciousness, we may well want to know what really goes on behind the scenes.
I don't have that luxury. At least, not yet.
But there is another, much more important reason. This book was never really intended to be a story about me. It is a story about love.
And, being frank with you, the journey that eventually led me to write it was not something I fully understood while I was going through it.
Looking back now, I can see that there were several stages to what I would now describe as an awakening.
At the time, I wouldn't have used that word. In fact, I'm not sure I would even have understood what it meant nor agreed with the label, because the experiences I went through were often messy and not, as one might expect, pleasant!
One of the earliest and strangest experiences involved the number 13.
More specifically, 13:13. The number started appearing everywhere – usually in pairs.
I would glance at the clock at home and it would be 13:13. I would check my watch and, seemingly inexplicably, it would be 13:13. I would look at the time on my computer or in the car and there it was again.
At first, I dismissed it as coincidence. After all, if you happen to look at the clock between 1:10pm and 1:15pm, there’s a good chance you’ll see 13:13.
But it kept happening at all times of the day and night.
I remember one particular evening at my mother's house. I was plastering the ceiling of her utility room and had stopped for five minutes to rest. It must have been eight or nine o'clock at night.
Yet the digital clock on the cooker showed 13:13.
I walked into the sitting room to find my brother watching television. I believe he was watching Family Guy, and one of the characters was wearing a number 13 shirt and then, bizarrely, started talking about a size 13 pair of shoes!
At some point, you begin to wonder whether you are simply noticing something that was always there, or whether there is something more meaningful taking place.
I still don't claim to know what this experience was meant to tell me. But it got my attention and made me curious. And curiosity, as I’ve since found out, is often where questioning begins.
For anyone who has gone through their own awakening, you’ll know you start to see the world very differently. One of the things I realised is how much we all take for granted and how much of our everyday assumptions we never question.
Yet, once you start questioning one basic assumption, you discover just how many assumptions underpin your day-to-day life.
We live surrounded by things we rarely stop to question, let alone examine in any depth. It’s almost as though we have chosen to outsource our thinking to someone else.
Whilst going through this awakening process, which I unfold within the book and other Journal entries here, I found myself asking questions about some of the most basic things many of us take for granted nowadays. Examples included:
Is the water coming from our taps as healthy as we are told it is?
How do we know that the information we receive about health is complete, particularly around one of the topics we’re seemingly never permitted to question – vaccines and hospital care?
Are the things we’re told by governments always in our best interests?
Who decides exactly what information we are allowed to see, and more importantly, what we’re not allowed to see, or which has been purposely buried?
What exactly is “money”? And why does it say “I promise to pay the bearer on demand” on British pound notes? If I’ve handed the “money” over, to the bearer, surely I have “paid” so why do I need to promise to pay again?
Why are there so many secret societies and why do they operate in the way that they do?
What is the nature of consciousness?
What happens when the final curtain falls?
And perhaps the biggest question of all:
What are we actually here for?
Some of the material I encountered online during this period was fascinating. Some of it was difficult to verify. Some of it I accepted, some of it I rejected, and some of it simply left me with more questions than answers.
But that wasn't necessarily the point.
The point was that I had started questioning.
And once you start doing that, and finding out how much you don’t know – or worse, finding out that what you knew was true actually turned out to be an egregious lie, it becomes remarkably difficult to go back to sleep.
A couple of years after this process of awakening started, I entered one of the darkest periods of my life – curiously after experiencing intense love – which led me directly into deep depression.
For around three months, I could barely get out of bed. Immersed in loneliness, a dark mental space and suffering from a feeling of loss, I spent an enormous amount of time doom scrolling online, exploring ideas around spirituality, religion, consciousness and what is sometimes described as the “truth movement”.
I became fascinated by subjects I had previously paid very little attention to.
I explored aspects of Catholicism and the (sometimes dark) history of the Church. I encountered people talking about spirituality and higher consciousness. I came across discussions about money, power and secret organisations such as the Illuminati.
Some of the people I encountered online were Christians. One man in particular, Paul, shared an enormous amount of what many would consider “conspiracy-theory” information that opened my eyes to ideas I had never seriously considered before. I remain deeply grateful to him for doing that, because I know it came at a cost – the loss of friends and family members who thought he was a little bit odd because of his views.
But underneath it all, there was a problem.
The more I learned, the more confused I became.
Because if there truly was an enlightened, spiritual dimension to existence, why did so much of what I was uncovering appear to be so dark?
If there was a higher form of consciousness or divine intelligence, why did human beings seem to be capable of creating so much suffering in the world?
If there was a truly loving God, where did the darkness and evil come from?
When you are already depressed and at odds with the world, those aren't particularly comfortable questions to sit with. And at my lowest point, I found myself questioning what in life was actually worth living for.
Perhaps the biggest challenge I faced was trying to reconcile two apparently opposing ideas.
On one side was spirituality, love, consciousness and the possibility of being part of something much greater than ourselves.
Yet on the other was everything that appeared dark, manipulative, corrupt, downright evil or destructive about the world humans had created.
I couldn't make the two conflicting ideas fit together and kept searching for answers.
Until, eventually, I found myself being drawn towards an experience that would change the direction of my life.
Ayahuasca.
The circumstances that led me to that fateful retreat were themselves filled with what I can only describe as extraordinary coincidences and synchronicities.
It felt less like I had discovered Ayahuasca and more like I had somehow been led, or rather pushed, towards it.
That is a story in its own right, and one I will explore in another journal entry. But it was during that experience that the deep conflicts I had been dealing with, began to make more sense.
The apparent contradiction between darkness and light started to dissolve. And somewhere within that experience, the idea for this book appeared.
The book didn’t appear as a carefully constructed business idea, nor as a marketing strategy. It was not something I had been planning for years.
The only way I can describe it is it felt as though the book had simply been placed inside me. I appreciate exactly how strange that sounds to admit on paper, but its genuinely how it felt.
And when I came out of the experience, I couldn't simply forget about it. I had to write it.
If I’m honest with myself, I had always wanted to become an author. There was something about the idea of creating stories for people that had always appealed to me since an early age. But wanting to write a book and actually writing one are two entirely different things – especially when you’ve had the “writing books doesn’t help you earn a living” belief reinforced for years.
Writing this book took me around three long years. Some nights I would sit down and manage to write a paragraph. That was it. One whole paragraph – and even then I was disappointed with it.
Other nights, something would happen and the words would simply flow. Pages would appear almost faster than I could type them or hold ideas together in my mind.
And then there were the nights when nothing happened at all. Just me, sitting in silence, waiting for something to happen.
This is the journey I think most authors share - you sit there with yourself, often late into the night and into the early hours of the morning, staring at a screen and wondering whether any of this is actually worth doing.
You doubt the story. You especially doubt your ability to tell it. You wonder whether anyone will even care or understand what you are trying to say. And, inevitably, you wonder what people will say about you if they dislike it.
What if people laugh? What if people attack me, the book or the ideas I share? What if the keyboard warriors arrive en masse with hateful words – or worse? What if people completely misunderstand the point?
Writing a book forces you to confront all of those things.
Eventually, though, I realised that I wasn't writing the book for the people who might criticise it. I was writing it for the people who might need to read it.
That brings me back to the original question - why a thriller? Because I wanted to take ideas and concepts that can sometimes feel difficult, abstract or even uncomfortable to share and wrap them inside a story.
I have always loved military thrillers, particularly the work of Andy McNab. I find his writing incredibly compelling which always made me want to keep turning the pages because I was emotionally invested in the characters and their journey. Entering their world, I wanted to know what happens next and how does the journey end.
That was my original idea, to create something that could exist on two levels. On the surface, its a novel - something you can simply pick up and enjoy. But beneath the story is another journey entirely.
A journey into questions about who we are, why we are here and what might happen if we started looking at the world through a different lens.
And honestly, I wondered if this approach might encourage more men to embrace the spiritual side of life. My limited idea was they might get hooked by the action, but then start asking deeper questions about their own existance.
Looking back, perhaps that is what Love Is The New Religion became. A Trojan horse in a way. The story opens the door, whilst the thrilling narrative gives readers a reason to keep reading. The characters give you somebody to care about, whilst the mystery unfolding gives you a reason to turn the page.
And somewhere along the way, perhaps, you encounter an idea you might not have contemplated before. An idea about love in a way you’ve perhaps never thought about it. Not the Hollywood romantic love - something much deeper.
The possibility that love is not simply an emotion we experience, but a fundamental principle by which we might choose to live.
That is why I didn't want to write a memoir. A memoir would have been about my journey and I don’t think that would have been of much use to anyone exploring this expansive topic. Instead, this book is intended to invite you on your journey.
It’s a far simpler premise - you don't need to know who I am, or what I’ve done, or even what I believe. You don't even need to be particularly spiritual. You can simply pick up a thriller and read the story. Hopefully you enjoy the ride.
And perhaps, somewhere between the pages, you encounter a question or some part of one character’s journey that stays with you long after you’ve put the book down.
Because, for me, I feel the greatest purpose of a book isn't to tell you what to believe, it’s to make you question what you already believe. And if Love Is The New Religion can do that, then perhaps the three years it took to write it were worth every single sleepless night!
So, perhaps in the end, this is what this book is really about. It’s not about convincing you that I am right and I’m not asking you to abandon the beliefs you already hold. I’m not even asking you to believe everything that I believe.
It is simply an invitation to remember.
To remember something that, somewhere along the way, we may have forgotten. That beneath everything we have constructed around ourselves — our careers, our possessions, our politics, our religions, our identities and our fears — there is something much simpler residing beneath it all.
The fact that we are all human beings. And we have the capacity to love.
The world doesn't need another argument. It needs more people willing to step outside the argument. To listen instead of attack. To accept instead of condemn. To forgive instead of punish. To look beyond the label and see the human being standing in front of them.
Love isn't something we need to discover. It is something we need to remember. That’s why I called the book Love Is The New Religion. Not because I believe we need another religion - quite the opposite in fact.
Looking at the state of the world, I think many would agree that humanity needs to rediscover what all of our respective religions were trying to teach us in the first place.
The underlying message of love.
Perhaps if enough of us cared to remember that, the world wouldn't need to be changed by somebody else. Change could begin with us.
And to me, that’s the most exciting journey of all!
