By John David Balla

When I moved to Sedona over four years ago, I unpacked a great deal of optimism and ignorance along with my personal belongings. Having just abandoned a high paying and prestigious corporate job in Chicago, for this “clean slate,” and no plan other than to give Sedona a whirl, the only certainty I possessed was that I had no idea what I was doing.

Yet, like so many who come to Sedona, I anticipated greener pastures, which of course, was bereft of any basis in reality.

Fresh off a month long stint in Peru, Sedona did not have the impact on me that it does for so many.  Its suburbanesque layout of one strip mall after another down 89A -- West Sedona – and the many “New Age” shops that peppered it emanated a contrived, even antiseptic sensibility, lacking both soul and creative touch, sort of like the fish sticks my mom used to serve us in the ‘70s. Indeed, if this was the best “woo-woo” aesthetic Sedona had to offer, many would be rightly underwhelmed.

Where was the theatre? The metaphysical and aesthetic fireworks that make us utter, “Oooh… Aahh, or Woooo”?

Answer: The same place it has been for the past 300 million years. The red rocks themselves in their raw and natural state. Now that’s some good woo. Of course, it should be stated that really good “woo-woo” is never seen as “woo” at all.  Enter the “vortex” spin on the ancient rocks. And voila! We have entered the “woo-woo” zone.

But then again, I did just return from Peru, where spirituality is a way of life, not a spectacle, and certainly not compartmentalized to any zoning laws. Actually, the whole country – save for Lima – is one big spiritual venue, except you won’t find a shaman castle or posters for an ayahuasca fair. You simply jump in and experience most things in their raw, natural states.

So is this what good “woo-woo” looks like?

During my first two and a half years in Sedona, I had bigger fish to fry, like just trying to survive, a common tale of the Sedona newbie trying to adjust to a tourist-driven economy. But I would be fine. After all, I was a white male, college educated American. How could I possibly fail with all that in my favor?

Sometimes you can have all the odds in your favor, play your cards right and wake up one day to find you have only 37 cents to your name. That is exactly what happened about a year after I moved to Sedona. But what this also taught me was that “action,” that quality indelibly etched in the American Dream, is not enough, and will never be enough.It’s at about this time when I decided for the first time, that I would try something totally “woo-woo.” I would try to have faith that things would work out. I would trade in my “nocebo” – belief that my life was about to implode – for “placebo” – belief that things would work out, despite being down to my last 37 cents.

My new faith medicine – part of taking that “uncoolness” plunge – could not have been more antithetical to the behavior patterns that had become synonymous with my personality. But I could not have picked a better place to do it than in

Sedona, Arizona, where faith runs exceedingly disproportionately high to action.  After all, I was the weird one who was always talking about doing things, and then, actually doing them. Yet the irony is worth repeating. I was down to my last 37 cents.

True. I wouldn’t find a bunch of over-educated, multiply addicted, underemployed creative geniuses hanging out at the local pub, slamming shots of Wild Turkey, doing one-hitters in the john, and quoting Plato better or as well as any Philosophy professor at NAU. I wouldn’t find Lou Reed living across the street from me, or Keith Richards passed out at a stoplight, cigarette dangling.

Nope. Faith just isn’t cool.

Good “woo” is never a fad, or theatrical in quality. It never seeks the lime light, nor does it horde its magic for an elite few, using its self-declared “sacredness” as an all-too-common smokescreen as an analog to modern day “slight of hand.” Good woo is ubiquitous and modest and seemingly “unmagical.” It makes no claim that you were of great nobility during a past life. (Any decent statistician could debunk this claim in not time at all.) In fact, it lacks theatrical (magical) props in general.

To accentuate this point, I will now quote one of the most uncool people ever to live.

“Whether you believe you can, or believe you can’t, either way, you’re right.” – Henry Ford.

While bad woo is nothing but an illusion, neither founded in truth or some higher good, but of course, claiming both, “coolness” is the perfection of a personality to the point of art form. As such, certain truths are contained within its expression. But that is not truth. For that we must ascend to higher levels of the metaphysical food chain, where moral polemics are irrelevant; where all opinions and positions cease to exist.

Pretty “cool” stuff. 

John David Balla is a former eBusiness analyst and systems integrator who now subsists as a corporate dropout in search of knowledge that brings forth healing, wisdom and freedom by bridging conventional paradigms of technology and consciousness with ancient ones. He is also Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for the Sedona, AZ-based startup, Virtual Onramp, LLC, a video asset management solutions company focused on delivering the most powerful, easy to use, and affordable Internet Video Solutions to small-to-midsize businesses. He can be reached at john@virtualonramp.com