Chapter 0

If there was a prize for the most beautiful sport in the world, sailing would likely be the winner. That is because it nourishes and heals its sailors in all the realms of body, mind and soul: There is something magical about the undulating motion of a sailboat as it’s working and winding its way through waves, driven by the power of wind.

If you have a fully functioning body there are ropes to pull and ease, and a joystick for steering. You shift your weight, stretching and easing muscles as you will your boat on its way. Everyone sails seated so there’s no real need for legs, and you can be strapped in tight if that’s what you need. If you don’t have arms, hands and fingers that work there are winches to adjust the joystick, ropes and lines, as long as you have some way of turning on and off a few switches.

There’s mental exercise too as the wind and waves are forever changing, you need to control your course while balancing the pressure and direction of the wind. Racing is great as other boats criss-cross your path, zig zagging their way through their wind and waves. The competition throws up sudden unexpected events, nothing is ever constant, it excites your brain.

No other sport comes close to sailing for inclusion, but inclusion is a word with many meanings. It can be disabled people competing against other disabled people, or people with the same disability competing against each other. Or a power assisted disabled sailor competing against manual control sailors. Or a disabled person and an able-bodied person crewing together. It can simply be including disabled people in the sport of sailing. Apart from disability it can be encouraging gender equity in sailing or including people with other forms of difference or minority. 

But all those inclusion categories mentioned above have something interesting in common. They identify people by their difference, either isolates them, or couples them in opposing pairs and then brings them together in a semi-inclusive event.

Hansa Class events are unique and based on the premise that at our core we are all equal, so any unusual aspect of our body or mind is irrelevant, giving equal opportunity to grow and excel. The only qualification, or classification you need to complete in a Hansa event is the vision of you out there on the water, as captain of your own little ship, and the will to win.

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Internationally recognised sailing events are organised under the Racing Rules of Sailing and governed by sailing’s peak body World Sailing, headquartered in London. Each sailing nation has its Member National Authority (MNA). The next tier down on this pyramid are all the nation’s sailing and yacht clubs, then below are their thousands of individual members.

Also affiliated either directly with WS, or through an MNA are the Class Associations which represent the owners of the various classes of sailboats which compete in organised events. The Hansa family has 3 classes, the 2.3, 303 and Liberty represented by the International Hansa Class Association (IHCA) which is recognised by WS. This relationship allows us to run officially recognised World Championships, which we do each uneven numbered year.

In the IHCA Event Management Guide on page 1 is the following Hansa Class Ethos:

“The International Hansa Class Association has always been anchored to the principle of inclusion, meaning the Class facilitates and promotes recreational and competitive sailing for everyone regardless of any defining characteristics of a sailor’s body or mind.

This goal is achieved through the Hansa sailboats being of Universal Design, a discipline which creates  products, in our case sailboats, which everyone can use.

The result is our events are open to all and provide equity, equality, dignity and respect without any need to classify or reference a sailors physical or mental ability.

That is our uniqueness in the world, and we believe this approach delivers the best outcome for all, by treating everyone as equals. This places our sailboats at the centre of a social issue which asks what is the best thing to offer disabled people. We are therefore more than just a class Association as in our DNA is the social justice agenda which embodies the simplicity of our non binary interpretation of inclusion.

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How we arrived at today is described in this story, but Out of the Ether transcends the mundane world of boatbuilding and sailboats as the design process was highjacked and used as an allegory to embellish a spiritual evolutionary journey.

No need for detail here, but over 40 years of fantastic experiences, I’ve been drawn, coaxed, pushed towards some extraordinary conclusions, which make perfect sense when you know the facts, having lived the timeline, walking in my shoes. 

Along the way evolved an understanding of inclusion, its ultimate meaning, its absolute simplicity, how pure inclusion is based on the highest principles imaginable, the fundamentals of our very existence and being.

But if you want to interface these lofty ideals with action on the water, to be compatible and fully functional, then the sailboats and ancillary equipment you use needs to be, unsurprisingly, of Universal Design.

UD blends simplicity and ingenuity to create elegant, affordable solutions that everyone can use. It is the facilitator which celebrates the diversity of life, reminding us that being different is not an abnormality, but perfectly normal.

So that is what was learnt in this most unconventional way as an amazing energy intervened in my life and helped me create our range of little sailboats, which makes it hard, even egotistical to claim credit as the designer as people expect you to do.

But maybe we can, as at our core we are all a spark of that creative energy, so in a way it’s a partnership and Out of the Ether is a way to acknowledge that. It tries to explain, to describe, what has to be the ultimate in symbiotic relationships.

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Out of the Ether is the story about the design and development of the range of Hansa sailboats, which began at Changi Sailing Club in Singapore in 1982. My life can be divided into Before Changi, or BC, which only warrants a few pages, and After Changi, or AC, as the chain of events which followed shattered every aspect of normality in my life, every refuge was torn apart, everything turned upside down until I had no choice but to surrender and admit I knew nothing, and had nothing, as there was little of my past worth having.

I had acquired a small rowing dinghy, which has its own story, and decided to turn it into the perfect sailing tender, a boat that you could row, sail or take the smallest outboard motor. It was inspired by visiting French cruising sailors who used the most unsuitable Optimist dinghy as their tender, to row to and from the shore. The Optimist is hardly an elegant or efficient sailing boat, and even worse as a rowboat, so it was easy to do something better.

I made a crude fibreglass mould on this plywood hull, and in that mould laminated a fibreglass shell, which next day was eagerly released from the mould. What happened next was mind blowing. I measured its length to be 2.22 metres, but the 222 characters on the tape measure took on a life of their own, pulsating and flashing, saying look at me, I am ultra significant, no you are not hallucinating or going mad, but your world is not as simple as you thought.

And so began the journey to find out what was the meaning of 222, with the design and evolution of the little Hansa 2.3 sailboat at the centre. Along the way things got so confusing that I thought 222 must mean the world is upside down, back to front and around the wrong way from how it appears, which does have merit as you will see later if you stay with me to the end. The suggestion here is that upside and downside are 2 opposites,  as are back and front, and around the wrong way suggests there must be a right way which again are opposites, which makes 3 polarised pairs, or 222.

But after 40 years of seeking answers a more refined meaning of 222 has evolved, and at its most profound level it refers to the actual structure of the universe, or more specifically to the dimension which our physical universe exists in, and a second dimension which is beyond the scope of our senses and is actually the source of it all.

So here we have 2 dimensions, one a binary world, a Duality, the other the indefinable concept of a Oneness. Which is a pair of dimensions, a 2. The Duality as its name says is made up from pairs of oppositely charged particles, so it’s another 2, while the Oneness, in its unique way also has 2 aspects, it being the incomprehensible source of life religions call God, with its outgoing communication, construction and creative energy system which does all its work.

The God at the heart of it all is so aloof and unknowable, to many ancient beliefs it’s even beyond being given a name. While it’s outgoing energy, which is used to create everything that is, can simply be called the primeval One.

This gives us 222 which symbolises and identifies the absolute fundamental structural foundation on which to begin an understanding of why the physical world is as it is, a world of opposites, of opposing ideas and sides, pleasure and pain, love and hate, peace and war, life and death. A world of struggle, to learn by trial and error, is it a jail, or is it a school. For all the good there’s near equal bad, slightly out of balance, always seeking balance, which keeps things moving forward. It can never rid itself of imperfection, of injustice or evil as it needs its opposites to maintain its near balanced existence.

The living individuals striving within the duality are sparks of the One, the life force, the eternal and infinite outgoing creative energy emanating from out of the ether, as if from nowhere, the Oneness. Religions call these sparks of life Soul.

The duality takes form as the creative energy, the One splits into waves or streams of positive and negative charge, the building blocks of all that follows, including the minds and physical bodies of everyone and everything. It follows of course that if Soul is the spark of life from an eternal world in Oneness, then there is no such thing as death, except death is a word which describes the end, or stop of a physical body’s time, which had its start at its birth in a polarised world, which here we can call the binary bubble.

Which is what it is, like a bubble of time, it had a beginning, it’s full of things, of ideas, the workings of mind.

We live in this world of matter which is built up into complex shapes and forms of atoms, which broadly speaking, are combinations of negative charge particles rotating around their positively charged nucleus. It’s also a world of energy which is found in different forms, one being waves, which can be described as positive in one hemispherical arc, and negative in the other. Or energy can be positive and negatively charged particles moving from one place to another, one form being moving along a wire as in Direct Current (DC) electricity, or back and forth as in Alternating Current (AC).

Moving from place-to-place means this is also a world which takes up 3 dimensional space. And It had a start, presumably at the big bang, which makes it a world of time.

At this point in time the physical universe is expanding, but if one day it reaches its limit and begins to retract, to contract back into itself then its time will come to its end, it will be no more. But that’s not the only way it could end as it could just as easily negate itself and simply vanish.

You should note that these 4 properties of matter, energy, space and time all have something in common, which is their reliance on polarity, or opposites, to give them substance, to make them work, or even give them meaning.

A group of Scientists are busily engaged in a search for a theory which unifies all the known energy forces into one, and as they split atoms down into their most elementary parts they will eventually arrive at a major problem. That is to see further they need to switch over from seeking proof to satisfy mind, and accept the illogical answers coming from the Oneness, as at the end of the road the polarised particles are coming from where, well actually they are coming out of a “nowhere”, as science would have reached the boundary of their perceivable, provable, logical universe. The only way to see further is from the illogical perspective of soul, which is going to be quite a challenge for science, seeing it generally denies the existence of what is broadly known as the “super natural”. 

If you, like our scientists are having trouble comprehending this, it’s because mind is also firmly rooted in the world of things. Think of mind as an etheric computer, a binary machine which records our experiences and runs our body. Like a computer, which works in combinations of somethings and nothings, mind gauges things in relation to its apposite. Hence hot and cold, hills and valleys, light and dark, yin and yang. The concept of Oneness is beyond mind’s comprehension, and the only way to relate to the Oneness is to live it, to be it, Its lived in the ever present moment of NOW.

Most of us are dominated by our mind, but when our inner self expresses itself, like we recognise something and its like a light comes on, it’s as if mind then immediately panics and switches it off and resumes control. The objective of life should actually be to work more through the inner self, and not allow the computer to run our individual show. It’s like the argument about the dangers of artificial intelligence, but we are already there as most of us are under the control of mind, our own artificial intelligence, the problem being the negative seeking nature of the software. What are habits but the repetition of stored experiences. With mind the default position is to protect and enrich itself, its inherently selfish, its down not up, so encourages self centred behaviour.

We therefore have 2 opposing forces here, often pulling in opposite directions. We therefore have 2 versions of what might be reality. Is the polarised world of matter and mind reality, or is reality the world of Oneness. To answer that we go back to the positive and negative particles at the boundary of the polarised universe, to the fundamental building blocks of atoms, and consider the equation +1-1=0. Plus one minus 1 equals zero, or nothing. In nature what is to stop those particles playing out that equation and negating each other. Its logical to hypothesise there is a force which sets them in motion, and keeps them apart by their centrifugal motion, and that this is the work of the unified force science is seeking. Unfortunately to prove that is a problem as to delve into the dimension of Oneness is beyond minds comprehension. It’s a conundrum beyond a logical answer.

This does however answer the question of which of the 2 worlds is the ultimate reality, because consider what will happen if the source of it all, the heart of the Oneness, switched off its outgoing communication, construction and creative energy, the One which split into the 2 streams creating the polarised particles, and then prevents them from negating each other, by this life force keeping them in motion. Withdraw that energy and those particles would negate each other and the whole lot would disappear. Everything which followed on from the Big Bang would vanish, everything in time would not be there, because it only existed in time, and time had come to its end, leaving only the source, its energy, and of course the individual sparks of life religions call soul. So the ultimate reality, the fundamental truth exists in eternity, not time.

Consider this. The difference between time and eternity is time is a measure of duration in a duality, while eternity is a property of a Oneness. Another property is infinity as the Oneness is boundless. Unlike space which is restricted to the boundary of the binary bubble.

But religions have different interpretations of this. In some beliefs the physical world is Maya, or illusion, but their world beyond is a void, a nothing. For another religion, in its world beyond, soul loses its identity in a matrix, a something. There we have a religion of nothing, and another of something, interesting that these are opposites, which raises the question is their proclaimed source the true Oneness, or is their inspiration still from within the lower worlds of duality, the worlds within the binary bubble.

As your computer mind contemplates the illogical nature of all this your true self may awaken as you live in that moment of truth, but mind will likely be shocked and its emotional response will jolt you back into the mundane logical world of time. You momentarily saw it, felt it, were awake within it.

With practice we can evolve to calmly live in both worlds, that is with our programmed and trained artificial intelligence computer-like mind sorting out the operation of the body, and your true intelligence living in the ever present moment of Now, in the driver’s seat, looking forward with optimism, knowing there is no such thing as death, that you are in need of nothing, so you might as well set about helping others who are less aware and therefore less fortunate than yourself.

Out of the Ether is my story behind the story of Hansa Sailing.  To me it’s a true story, but your story will be quite different so over to you to accept what’s real and what’s fantasy. But unfortunately for skeptics and binary logicians, or statisticians and mathematicians who could try to calculate the odds of these “coincidences” described in this story occurring, which must be in the region of many googles to one, what I describe here actually happened, and I’ve got a paper trail of evidence to prove it.

The option is always there to tell your demanding logical mind to take a break, and just imagine, what if it’s true. It’s not about what an amazing world awaits us, it’s what a magical world we are alive in NOW.

But having said all that, we need to be realistic and accept that when dealing with someone’s world view, their deep held beliefs, it’s usually a waste of time to try to change it, as the more you present arguments which suggest they are wrong, the more sure they think they are right. That’s what mind does. You can’t convince a single person to change their mind because being told their lifestyle or values are wrong only leads to defensiveness.

But if you are an adventurer like me who can’t resist digging deeper, if you’re ready to ask the Joker your own questions, who knows, you may be due for the surprise of your life. (Joker, my sacrilegious name for the One)

It’s breathtaking, exhilarating to awaken to know who you really are, not in theory but to live it, a spark of that One with its absolute genius as your guiding light. Now you can see you are not your mind at all, instead mind is a trickster looking after its own, and your bodies self interest. Mind then is a phoney, it’s just like a computer, and your body an even cruder machine you are using and can function very well without, which means there is nothing to fear in death, there is no such thing as death, except it marks the time you finally move on from your old body.

It leaves you aghast that the mainstream can have it so wrong, back to front in so many ways, but then it’s no wonder as the mainstream looks at life through the perspective of mind, so can’t see outside the bubble to where you are looking from. It’s there in their face, but it’s invisible, the ultimate reality, the simplicity of 222.

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