by Marc Allen
You’ve heard it said another way many times before:
The Kingdom of Heaven is within.
Eckhart Tolle said it clearly and simply:
If you get the inside right,
the outside will fall into place.
— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
He went on to give us more words worth remembering:
If you are dissatisfied with what you have got, or even frustrated or angry about your present lack, that may motivate you to become rich, but even if you do make millions, you will continue to experience the inner condition of lack, and deep down you will continue to feel unfulfilled.
You may have many exciting experiences that money can buy, but they will come and go and always leave you with an empty feeling and the need for further physical or psychological gratification. You won’t abide in Being* and so feel the fullness of life now that alone is true prosperity.
FINDING YOUR PURPOSE
IS YOUR PURPOSE STILL UNCLEAR?
Many people have said to me, over the years, “I don’t know what my purpose is — how can I find it?”
My advice is simple: Ask for it. Then listen for an answer.
You can ask no one — or nothing — in particular. Or you can ask your own intuition, your own subconscious mind. Or you can ask the creative force of the universe, in any name you choose to give it. It’s a key we’ve seen before:
Ask and you will receive.
Seek and you will find.
— Jesus, Matthew 7:7
You can pray for it. You can sit quietly or take a quiet walk somewhere, and ask, “What is my purpose, underneath it all, or above it all? Show me what it is. Tell me what it is!”
Then wait for the answer.
Be as quiet as you can and listen to any words that softly come to mind. An inner voice might speak to you immediately. Or you may have to ask the question again, and listen again, before you hear a still, small voice within. Or maybe you’ll hear it an hour later, or while you’re taking a walk the next day. Or you’ll find your answer in a dream. Or in the remark of a friend. Or in something you hear on the radio or on TV. Or in a book or magazine. Or on the Internet. Or in a child’s song. Or on a billboard. Or in a sunset, a moving stream, the flight of a hummingbird, or a cloud drifting overhead. It could come from anywhere.
Ask for it, then wait for it, and it will come.
A VISION QUEST
If the answer doesn’t come after a while, take a few days off, or even a week or more. Go off, alone, to some place quiet and private. Be alone with yourself. Say your prayer every morning and every evening, asking for guidance. Throughout the day, ask your questions.
This time of retreat is immensely worthwhile, and a great purpose will emerge for you, a great mission, if you ask for it, and the perfect vocation will be a part of it.
Your life will take on new meaning, for you will have found your connection, not just to your work — your vocation — but also to your Great Work — your purpose. Life will be much simpler, easier, and more enjoyable.
PUT IT IN YOUR OWN WORDS
You are an original, and your purpose will be expressed in the perfect words for you. Here’s a hint — your purpose always has something to do with growth, with expansion into new areas, with both personal and planetary evolution.
As Barbara Marx Hubbard shows us in her great book, Conscious Evolution, we are ever-evolving beings and have reached a stage where we can choose to consciously evolve. This is certainly part of our purpose in life.
WHEN WE DISCOVER OUR PURPOSE
A great change takes place when we first become aware of our purpose in life. Life becomes simpler. Decisions become easier.
A great healing occurs, for all the diverse aspects of our being become unified: Our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual components become linked together, in one focused whole — and healing, magic, and miracles result.
Once we discover our spiritual nature, it infuses the mental and emotional and physical parts of our being with life, love, and creative power. When our minds, emotions, and bodies are attuned to our spirit and our purpose, they become filled with healing, creative energy. Our minds infuse our emotions and bodies with intelligence and power. Our emotions infuse our minds and bodies with love and enthusiasm and its attendant creative power.
We fully realize what it means to be alive, what it means to be, as James Allen puts it in As You Think, “a being of power, intelligence, and love.” We discover the truth of his great words:
As a being of power, intelligence, and love,
you hold the key to every situation,
and contain within yourself that transforming
and regenerative agency by which you may
make yourself what you will.
— James Allen, As You Think
It’s worth repeating: If this is a bit too metaphysical or spiritual for you, don’t worry about it. Skip over anything that’s not appropriate for you at this time, or change any words that may not be appropriate for you. The words themselves aren’t important — it’s the ideas behind them that are keys to great growth and change. Discover what these powerful ideas are in your own words.
ACHIEVING OUR PURPOSE
Once we fully discover our purpose, we discover the means to achieve it. It is contained within the purpose itself; it is contained within you. Within you is your purpose and vocation; within you are the keys to the greatest fulfillment of your desires. You have only to ask what they are, and then listen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that we would not have our desires in the first place if we didn’t also have the means to fulfill those desires. Deepak Chopra took that idea to another level:
Within every desire
is the seed and mechanics for its fulfillment.
— Deepak Chopra, Creating Affluence
For every significant desire you have, you can create and implement a plan for its fulfillment. If you take these keys to heart, and remember them, they can change not only your life but your whole world as well.
SUMMARY
WE HAVE NOW TAKEN THE MOST IMPORTANT STEPS
Continuing to work with the steps and keys in the first three chapters of this book may be all you need. Let’s review them. The repetition will do us good.
I discovered the first step — writing an ideal scene — on my thirtieth birthday. The next few steps came almost immediately after, over the next few days. All the other steps, or keys (call them what you will), that follow the first three lessons in this Course were things I discovered over the next ten or fifteen years, and each of them has been tremendously helpful. But I am certain it was the repetition of these first few steps that made all the difference, moving me from small-thinking poverty to expansiveness and abundance, from frustration to a deep, never-failing sense of gratitude and fulfillment. So it’s worthwhile to review these first few steps:
• WRITE YOUR IDEAL SCENE.
This takes a lot of thought, and over time, more and more pieces of it will fall into place for you.
Every ship needs a destination, otherwise it wanders around aimlessly and gets nowhere. What is your destination? Where do you want to go in life? Who do you want to be? Begin with the end in mind.
Once we have our destination in mind, we make a plan to get there. Once we make a plan, the first step to take becomes obvious. Once we take that step, the next becomes obvious. We move forward, in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way — and, in its own perfect time, we arrive at our destination.
The human will, that force unseen,
the offspring of a deathless soul,
can hew its way to any goal,
though walls of granite intervene.
— James Allen, As You Think
• MAKE A LIST OF GOALS.
Within your ideal scene is every significant goal you have at the moment. List all of the major goals. There may be just a few, or you may have ten or twelve or more.
&n
bsp; • AFFIRM YOUR GOALS.
Rewrite your goals in the form of affirmations. Word them so that they are in the process of happening now, with words such as these: In an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, I am now achieving success and fulfillment (or) I am now taking a quantum leap in my artistic success (or business success), in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all.
Nearly every day, read and affirm your goals. This immediately puts your limitless subconscious mind to work.
Here’s a possible affirmation — feel free, of course, to change the language to make it your own:
I now work and live in harmony with my purpose.
I am now doing the inner work,
and the outer world, easily and effortlessly,
is now bringing me the fulfillment of my dreams.
• MAKE A ONE-PAGE PLAN FOR EACH IMPORTANT GOAL.
Word it simply, so it penetrates to your subconscious mind. You may need to make longer, more detailed plans for some of your goals, but be sure you have a clear, simple one-page plan for every major goal: a summary for you and all others involved to easily grasp.
• REFLECT ON AND WRITE YOUR VOCATION AND PURPOSE IN LIFE.
Take the time to ask these essential questions, and listen for the answers:
What is your vocation, your calling?
What is your highest purpose in life?
When you have a vocation, your work becomes your pleasure. When your plans are aligned with your purpose, you will inevitably succeed, for you will discover opportunities everywhere and receive all kinds of support from sources you never even dreamed of when you began this adventurous journey.
You will be what you will to be.
— James Allen, As You Think
Think of work as
Vocation.
It comes from the Latin word for calling,
which comes from the word for voice.
In those meanings it touches on what work
really should be.
It should be something that calls to you
as something you want to do,
and it should be something that gives voice to
who you are and what you want to say to the world.
A vocation fills you with a sense of meaning.
It is something that you choose because of
what it allows you to say with your life.
It is, above all else, something that lets you love.
— Kent Nerburn, Letters to My Son
* Everything by Kent Nerburn is worth reading, especially Letters to My Son, Neither Wolf nor Dog, Small Graces, Simple Truths, and Calm Surrender.
* Eckhart Tolle uses the words Being or Presence to describe the “peace that passes all understanding” that is found within. He says you could use the word God, but he prefers Being or Presence, because people don’t argue about those words: No one believes their being is greater than another person’s being.
LESSON 4
SEE THE FULL HALF OF THE GLASS, THE BENEFITS IN ADVERSITY, AND KEEP PICTURING SUCCESS
MOVING FROM STRUGGLE TO SUCCESS
This simple key gives us a way to clearly see the difference between those who create success and those who continually struggle — and once we see it, we can see how to move from struggle to success in our own right.
SEE THE FULL HALF OF THE GLASS
THE GREAT GIFT OF LIFE
We have all been given a great gift — the gift of life. The cup that is our life is half-full, half-empty. We choose, consciously or unconsciously, which half we focus on — and what we focus on is what we create in our lives.
This is an important key to remember, though it seems easy to forget in the course of our busy days — though if we use some of the tools in this Course, our busy days can become easy and relaxed, healthy and positive instead of stress-filled busyness.
An old friend of mine has had his own business for years, and it has been a constant struggle. We keep meeting and talking, and I invariably end up trying to give him some of this material, some of these keys. And yet he’s stuck in the same old rut, year after year, struggling to survive, scrounging to pay the bills, barely making his payroll.
He is passionately trying to do what he wants to do, though he has all kinds of conflicts about it, and a wife who wants him to do something else because he struggles so much. He works very hard — much harder than I do, probably twice as many hours per week — yet he seems unable to see where he is undermining all his efforts.
A POWERFUL IMAGE
One day I asked myself, as he was giving me his ongoing litany of problems, what is at the core of his difficulties? How can we get to the bottom of it all? And the image of the half-empty, half-full glass immediately came to mind, and then this phrase (which we’ve seen before): What we think about expands.
It’s a very good thing that the image of the half-empty, half-full glass has become so well known, because within it lies a very important key to fulfillment, to realizing the life of our dreams:
Each one of us has been given a great gift:
the cup of life.
It is half full and half empty.
We choose which half to focus on, at every moment.
The full half contains all our unique gifts and strengths, all our dreams and creative ideas, but the empty half is a constant reminder, if we choose to focus on it, of everything we lack: all our shortcomings, doubts, fears, problems, obstacles.
It is all part of the great polarity that is at the foundation of our lives and our world. It is the Tao (or God, or the universe, or chemistry, or physics, or whatever you choose to call it), with its endless interactions and continuous interplay of light and dark, activity and stillness, yin and yang. If we didn’t have emptiness, there would be no fullness; if we had no darkness, there would be no light. Each thing needs its opposite to define it and even create it. All life is a play of these opposites, so it’s best to embrace it all — our greatest dreams and our deepest fears, our strengths and weaknesses — and acknowledge and work and play with both sides of the polarities.
My friend was nearly continuously focusing on the empty half of the glass, on what was wrong, to the point where he almost never considered the full half, even though it is the only place where he can find what he needs to overcome the seemingly endless problems and obstacles of the empty half.
That’s the key: Spend more of your time focusing on your fullness, your strengths, your dreams, your plans — the things you love in life — and less time on the things that are preventing you from realizing your dreams. What we think about expands.
Unsuccessful people focus on the problems;
the successful focus on the solutions.
Focus on your fullness, your strengths, your dreams —
the things you love in life.
Unsuccessful people focus primarily on the difficulties, on what isn’t working. They complain a lot, or else suffer in silence. They struggle; they are powerless. What they give their attention to expands in their minds and in their lives.
Successful people focus primarily on what is working and what could conceivably work in the future — and, just like everyone else, what they give their attention to expands in their minds and in their lives. They focus more on possible solutions than they do on the problems. They’re aware of their abilities and gifts, and even more aware of their dreams and desires, and they look at problems and obstacles as creative challenges. And so they inevitably move toward the fulfillment of their dreams. Any failures along the way are simply necessary steps they have to take to realize those dreams.
Successful people have discovered something very important:
When you focus on the half of the glass that is full,
when you focus on your dream
and on how it can be fulfilled,
you discover everything you need to create success.
You could put it this way: Within the half of the glass that is full is everything you ne
ed to connect to the abundant fullness of the universe.
OVERCOMING PROBLEMS AND OBSTACLES
Successful people become powerful not by denying their weaknesses and shortcomings and problems, but by fully acknowledging them. Perhaps one of the most important things I do in my seminars is show people as many of my weaknesses and shortcomings as I can. I find great joy, in fact, in telling people I’m basically lazy (I don’t do mornings, for instance, or Mondays, or Sundays), I’m extremely disorganized (my desk is chaos), I’m not that smart (financial balance sheets are still a mystery to me), I have a spotty memory, I neglect to do important things, I lose things because my filing system is completely dysfunctional, I forget people’s names and entire conversations, even some that are important to my business or social life — the list goes on and on.
