I am blogging about the real Jim Cassa, going back down through time all the way to my childhood years while growing up, to show you where I come from and to give you more insight into this being who walks the earth under the label society gives him as Jim Cassa.


By the age of fifteen years I was living in an ashram located in a country town in the rural part of Australia. The ashram was peopled with spiritual monks who wore orange robes very much like Tibetan monks. It was my decision to go and live in the ashram, it upset my parents very much at the time, and for a fifteen year old it was a life changing experience. But I am getting a little ahead of myself.


Before I tell you more about my teen ashram experience, how and why I ended up living there, I need to fill in some blanks of my life first. I would like to take you back in time to my childhood years. The early Jim Cassa years will give you more insight into who I am, where I come from and , with a bit of luck, let you know where I am going with this blog narration.


My parents were hardworking middle class people and your everyday urban dwellers. I respect and admire my mother and father very much. I grew up in a comfortable home and had what is considered a normal everyday upbringing. I remember in grade school enjoying the childhood process of transformation and doing my best, at the time, to please my parents and teachers. I am grateful for the comfort of my early years.


During childhood years you cannot but help, when young, to absorb into yourself all of the parental and societal influences around you. These influences come from parents, schooling, and whatever is happening in the surrounding childhood environment. We all absorb this energy coming from the thoughts and actions of the previous generation.


Grown ups carry a distinctive kind of energy with them everywhere they go. Children absorb this energy into their being. Some might ridicule this saying that because they cannot see this energy it does not exist. I do not care what people think and I put things out on my blog and if anyone wants to accept or reject it then it is their choice. Positive energy, or negative energy, is passed onto the children and one of the key ways children learn is through imitation.


Children come from a very pure dimension before they are born. There is zero restriction or limits placed upon the soul before birth. After the soul is birthed into a physical body you are lumped with a myriad of physical laws, limitations, and restrictions you never had before in the spirit realm.


Stacked upon this you have other souls , that is people, walking upon earth stuck with the same restrictions you have. Interaction with others naturally leads to clashes and conflict. This creates suffering and unhappiness and from this experience lessons are learned.


During my childhood I looked at the adults around me. I looked at how they lived, worked, and had fun. What I witnessed in those years of youth was alarming. It seemed to me that adults lived superficial lives and acted very much like machines. I knew they were trapped. Like grooves in the old style vinyl records they were living their lives going around and around in senseless actions.


What alarmed me the most was many of the grown ups around me had no awareness of their mechanical like actions. It appeared that everyone I met lived their life by one word > REACTION. I saw lots of action based on reaction to other people, the news on TV for example, and I thought when a child, did someone dumb down the humans on this planet or what? All actions based on reaction come from fear.


I loved reading books and my father would order a small bundle of books by mail order every month which I eagerly devoured with intellectual gusto. New books were one of the highlights of my childhood and did much to develop my independent thinking skills I later used to successfully deprogram myself, and others who asked me, to release the negative conditioning and energy blocks I picked up while growing up into a young man.


NLP, or neuro linguistic programming, has some strong points. No one system of personal development has ever enlightened anyone 100% and if anyone tells you all you need is one new age modality, usually theirs, to solve all of life’s problems they are lying.


I have met energy healers who were overweight, with no knowledge of even the simplest nutrition, and I used to teach yoga as a professional believing back then hatha yoga is all you need to be super healthy. I modified my views, over the years, on the entire mind, body, and spirit connection.


The best mind body approach, I found, is to use what works and whatever gives you the results you want. This can be hard to follow, and very challenging, especially if you have invested lots of time and energy learning a particular new age modality only to find, years down the tack, that you discover in the real world your new age wisdom, that you spent a fortune on the course you followed, is not what it is claimed up to be!


At ten years of age my father showed me his weekend newspapers. He used to buy four different brands of newspapers on the weekends. It was his end of the week ritual.


One Saturday morning he called me over and mentioned that my name was published in the middle of one of the newspapers. This newspaper paid you $2.00 for a witty saying, or a funny joke, or some kind of a short story. Weeks before I had submitted several short writing pieces to the newspaper and to my surprise one of them got published! I was amazed and excited at the same time.


In those days $2.00 was a lot of money for a ten year old kid but I didn’t care about the money all I wanted was to see my writing in print. I received my first taste of getting published to a wider audience. This newspaper was one of the biggest weekend publications in the country and for a while I was floating on cloud nine. I was on top of the world at ten years of age and a budding entrepreneur ready to take on the world.


One day my father decided to sell the family home and move to another, what he considered a more affluent, suburb. I was devastated losing all my childhood friends. I was the victim of the upward mobility of the society at the time. I protested the house move but no one listens to a ten year old kid even if he does get published in one of the leading newspapers in the country. It did, like many of our life events which at first appear tragic, manage to turn into a blessing in disguise.


The religion I was born into was the Christian Orthodox religion. Our new home being in a different neighborhood required a new school for me. My dad scouted out all the schools in the local area. In his mind the best school to continue my education was a private one.


I did not care myself since I already had my own growing personal library of books, and had access to the local community library which then appeared to me as enormous, plus I was frightened of picking up the bad habits of the grown up teachers. By bad habits I mean their value, or lack of value to be precise, system and way of living!


But there was one problem, for me and my dad, and that was the private school was a Catholic one. We were not sure how welcoming they would be to Orthodox Christians.


I do not know how he did it but my dad managed to convince the Catholic clergy to accept me and it was settled I was in. What followed, in the beginning of my private school education, included throwing water on my face, singing songs in Latin I did not understand, and watching how altar boys in class were granted special treatment. My second religion was Catholic and I had not yet reached thirteen years of age yet!


Two years later , at the ripe old age of fifteen years, I embarked upon learning about my third religion. Ever the seeker this turned out to be Buddhism. It was my religion of choice. Yes, by that time I was mature enough to choose my own religion and become a follower of the wise and famous Buddha himself. This gave me lots of confidence , because back then, around 1982, I was the only teenager doing it. Come to think of it now I was breaking new ground for teens.


While most other male teens where joining bands, dreaming of buying their first car, and dating girls I was more interested in learning about Buddha, his way of life, and the philosophy of this remarkable figure in human history. I did this on my own without parental or guardian influences. It was an empowering act of power.


I am grateful for my early religious experience in all of its variety. There is truth and strength in every religion. I have never had any need to put another religion, or person for that matter, down to justify one religion over another. This is a liberating view to have.

Basic thinking processes of the mind only use two possible outcomes. Yes and no, good and bad, right and wrong, but this style and manner of thinking is very limited as it filters out a lot of information. It is the most basic of intellectual functions at the lower end of the spectrum.


There exists many shades of gray in between the two thinking extremes. There is no right or wrong, good or bad, it is only the interpretation of our personality in an attempt to make sense of the world.


Everyone is born with a purpose in life. This purpose, and reason for living, is positive and empowering and brings light into the world. A child has pure intentions when young. But as a child grows habits form and are absorbed into him from the existing culture.


Personality grows and one’s true inner nature becomes buried under the customs of society and how one is supposed to behave. Soul purpose is soon forgotten and artificial goals take its place.


Personality is the social mask we present to the world. It is not the real part of a person but merely a bundle of social layers acquired by socialization and imitation from the surrounding environment. Personality can only react to the environment. It can never create anything positive because to do that you need soul power. In other words only by being in tune with your inner self can happiness be experienced in joyful and creative living.


The more in touch with the soul, or inner workings of your being, the greater your actions become and the more impact you have on the world. You transform yourself from reactionary mode to creating positive long lasting change.


By this time I had discovered the alternative religion of my choice, Buddhism, and was desperate to find out more about it. The people around me knew zero about this subject. I faced a dilemma. Not sure how to proceed I did not give up on my goal of finding out more about this Buddhist philosophy but I was stuck at home, a fifteen year old teen, with no resources except a burning desire to find more spiritual knowledge.


Sitting in my home study one day I happened to be listening to the radio. It was an interview where a Buddhist monk was discussing her life. I listened in amazement. Synchronicity was at play. I heard words like karma, ashram, living the dharma, and past lives being talked about during the radio discussion. These were words that I did not at the time understand but I got excited and there was an energy about her, the Buddhist monk, I was familiar with her energy but I could not place it exactly in my memory.


The calmness, intellectual power, and speaking ability of the female monk impressed me greatly. She talked about how she lived her life in an ashram and how everyone that lived on the ashram followed Buddhist principles. This sounded like the place to live for me!


A group of people in a community style way of living all meditating together, following the Buddhist scripture, fired me with unbelievable enthusiasm, I HAD TO GET TO THIS PLACE , no matter what, and see for myself what it was all about.


Destination ashram in mind, a 1,500 mile journey from where I lived at the time, at the age of fifteen I left home, to the shock of both of my parents, and made the journey to the ashram to live and breath the Buddhist way of life full time. Lots happened while I lived in the ashram, and I have much to share, but this is for another blog post.