by Marc Allen
I was filled with doubts that I deserved my dreams in the first place, and filled with fears that if I did somehow manage to create the stuff of my dreams, they would corrupt me and send me wandering off in a direction contrary to God’s will and to a life well lived.
Then I had a child. That certainly brought major changes in my life, including a love I have never known before and some insights as well.
I asked myself what I wanted most for my child, and realized I want him to be fulfilled in any and every way that he wants to be. I want him to do, be, and have whatever he wants in life. I want him to live the life of his dreams. That is my will for my son.
And then I realized that my will for my son is exactly the same as God’s will for me — and for you as well. God wants us to have exactly what we want for our children: God wants us to be fulfilled, to be fully, uniquely who we are, without limitation, for we are no less than a unique and miraculous creation of a vast and endlessly creative universe.
CELEBRATE GLORIOUS FAILURE!
I have a friend who creates magic on a stage, director and playwright John Clarke Donahue. He always comes up with something worth pondering and repeating every time I talk to him. He recently launched into something like this:
“We should celebrate glorious failure! Why be afraid of failure? Why not celebrate it? When we allow ourselves to fail — in small ways and in glorious huge flops — we’re guided to great things by our creative spirit.”
Celebrating failure allows us to picture success more freely. This is a great key to discovering the far reaches of our creative spirit.
Celebrate glorious failure!
Most successful people I know, including me, love telling stories of their failures. Our failures are the cost of our education. We learn from our mistakes. Embedded in each one is always some great lesson we needed to learn in order to succeed.
Stories of failure are great teaching tools. They can teach us what not to do, and that’s invaluable.
KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE SUCCESSES
It helps to more clearly picture your own unfolding success story if you keep your eyes on other people’s success stories as well. In whatever arena you imagine, there have been those who have succeeded brilliantly, there have been those who have failed spectacularly, and there have been those who just muddled along and barely supported themselves.
Which one of these paths do you choose?
Keep focusing on those who are successful, and you’ll soon be joining them. When I first began my little company, I heard far more stories about failure than about success. I was told 80 percent of new businesses fail; I was told you can’t make money in publishing.
But as I looked around, I saw some success stories, too: people who were supporting themselves very well doing what they loved, people who were making millions of dollars, even in publishing. When I look back, I can see that it was remembering and focusing on the success stories that helped me keep moving toward success.
THE KEY IN A NUTSHELL
You dream, you imagine.
You create a plan.
You create a great challenge, with many apparent obstacles.
As you encounter these difficulties, these problems, you look at each one and ask,
What is the opportunity here?
What is the benefit in this difficulty?
What is the gift?
If you keep imagining, and keep looking for the opportunities, benefits, and gifts that come to you, you will succeed, without a doubt. It is inevitable.
YOUR CONDENSED VERSION OF THE COURSE
Add any notes or quotes from this lesson and from the rest of the lessons that follow in this Course to your folder. In the first three lessons, we covered all of the essential ingredients in your folder — your ideal scene, your goals, your plan, your vocation, and your purpose. From here on throughout the Course, feel free to add anything at all you feel moved to put in your folder.
Work with it in your own creative way to make it a tool that works for you. Be sure to review the items in your folder regularly.
SUMMARY
• Each of us has been given a great gift: the gift of life. It is half full and half empty. We all have unique strengths and abilities, and we all have weaknesses, fears, and challenges.
• When you focus on the half of the glass that is full, when you focus on your dream and how it can be fulfilled, you discover everything you need to create the life of your dreams.
• All of us are talented; none of us are perfect. Fortunately we don’t need to be perfect to be successful. In fact, we already have all the tools we need to be successful.
• Within every adversity is an equal or greater benefit. Within every problem is an opportunity. Even in the knocks of life we find great gifts. This is a great key to success.
• Those who succeed have a clear, focused picture of their success. The success they attain matches the expansiveness of their dreams. The key to achieving success is to be able to clearly imagine it. Once you clearly imagine it, opportunities appear all around you.
• “Luck” is preparedness meeting opportunity. When you prepare, opportunities present themselves.
• Jesus said, “Ask and you will receive.” He didn’t say, “Ask and you will receive, if you deserve it.” It’s not a matter of whether or not you deserve it, or whether or not you even need it: Simply ask for it, and then prepare to receive it.
• Celebrate glorious failure! We learn a great deal from our mistakes. Keep focused on your own successes, and the successes of others, as well.
• The key in a nutshell: You dream, you imagine. You create a plan, and within it is a great challenge, with many apparent obstacles. As you encounter these difficulties, these problems, you look at each one and ask, What is the opportunity here? What is the benefit in this difficulty? What is the gift? If you keep imagining, and keep looking for the opportunities, benefits, and gifts that come to you, you will succeed, without a doubt.
• Add any notes or quotes from this lesson and from the rest of the lessons that follow in this Course to your folder. In the first three lessons, we covered all of the essential ingredients in your folder — your ideal scene, your goals, your plan, your vocation, and your purpose. From here on throughout the Course, add anything at all you feel moved to put in your folder. Work with it in your own creative way to make it a tool that works for you.
Within every adversity
is an equal or greater benefit.
Within every problem
is an opportunity.
Even in the knocks of life
we can find great gifts.
LESSON 5
LIVE AND WORK IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ALL
I began working with these ideas the day I turned thirty. I wrote down my ideal scene — my dream life five years into the future — and I began affirming that each goal embedded in the life of my dreams was now manifesting, in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all.
It took me about ten years to fully achieve my ideal scene. I had a successful publishing company. I had recorded several albums of music and written several books. I had a beautiful home and a loving family.
During the next ten years, I wrote Visionary Business and then, after that book was published, I discovered the work of the renowned scholar and futurist Riane Eisler — and she gave me a whole new understanding, a new vocabulary and perspective, a way to simplify and clarify my life and my life’s work. She gave me a great key to success.
I realized that key was something I had understood for years, for it had been fundamental to the success I had achieved, and fundamental throughout Visionary Business — but I hadn’t had the exact words for it, and so couldn’t really see it or communicate it clearly until I read her work. Like most great keys, it is simple, even obvious to most people:
The more you live and work
in partnership with all, the happier,
; healthier, and more successful you will be.
THE CHAUCE AND THE BLADE
I first met Riane Eisler when we produced a condensed audio version of her great, celebrated book The Chalice and the Blade. In the book, she shows us that beliefs about society and the world were very different even just a few hundred years ago, and completely different a few thousand years ago — a tiny blip on the scale of human evolution. And, most important, she gives us a model for a livable future — based on going back to our roots, rather than inventing something new.
It is called the partnership model.
A great key to success is to discover where in our lives the dominator model — symbolized by the blade — is operating, and discover how to move more fully into partnership, symbolized by the open cup of the chalice.
Nearly all the world history we were taught in school has been the history of the blade — the history of domination — the conquest of warrior societies, beginning with the Greeks and Romans.
World history — at least this is what I was taught — started in Sumer, “the cradle of civilization,” but quickly moved to Greece, “the birthplace of democracy,” where it all really started. Then it moved to Rome, then the rest of Europe, and finally America! It was the history of the people who dominated the world, told from their point of view. Learning this history in school consisted of memorizing a great many dates for a great many wars.
India and China were mentioned somewhere as having ancient cultures, but all we ever learned about them was that India had a caste system and strange religions, and China invented gun powder, but they only used it for fireworks, and never invented guns. Africa was “the dark continent,” shrouded in mystery. We knew little about it, except for Egypt, a great civilization four thousand years ago, now dead, and baffling.
Latin America was hardly even mentioned in the world history I was taught. Australia was mentioned only as the place that was settled by British convicts.
The world history we were taught was the story of the conquerors. An endless procession of wars and conflict, because violence only leads to more violence and domination leads to endless conflict. In the last century, we took the dominator model to the extreme, killing millions of people in world wars and finally having the nuclear power to annihilate life on earth!
But Eisler proves without a doubt that very different societies flourished before the select few we studied in our world history, and these societies have even coexisted with warrior societies, in some form, right into modern times — societies symbolized by the chalice, by partnership rather than domination.
We need to apply principles of partnership in every aspect of our lives, in all our relationships — with our families, our businesses, our communities, our governments, and our world, as well as with nature and spirit. The more we live and work in partnership, the more harmony, rather than conflict, we create in our lives and in our world.
This is the Great Work ahead of us:
the reinvention, the re-creation of society
so it is built on partnership rather than domination.
Partnership — from our families to the family of nations. This is a great key to success.
THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIP
Riane Eisler goes much further with it all in The Power of Partnership. This book was an eye-opener for me: It simplifies a lot of complex problems, and helps make solutions appear, solutions that are doable.
Eisler gives us what she calls a lens, a way to view our lives and the world, and it is a powerful tool. Through this lens we see everything in our lives and in our world on a continuum, with perfect pure partnership on one end and total domination on the other. We see that every relationship we have expresses either partnership — with its respect, harmony, and love — or attempts at domination, with its endless conflict, fear, and need to control.
In The Power of Partnership, we look at every relationship in our lives in a series of expanding circles, beginning with our relationship with ourselves, then moving out to our intimate relationships, including family and intimate friends, our community and work relationships, our relationship with our nation and with our world, and with nature and spirit. It’s very powerful to examine every one of these relationships in our lives and see whether partnership or domination is primarily at work.
Once we start viewing ourselves and our world through this lens, we can clearly see how the partnership model, with its underlying respect for all, is definitely the simplest, most intelligent, and by far the most fun way to go — in every area of our lives. And we see that our ongoing challenge is to break free of the dominator model, with its underlying need to control others, and its endless resulting conflict.
The partnership model involves finding creative win-win solutions to problems. It is based on the Golden Rule, a great key to success in itself, one that most of us have heard many times, but very few of us practice in our lives:
Do unto others
as you would have them do unto you.
The partnership model is based on respect, on an awareness of the great value, even sacredness, of all life. The dominator model is based on fear, and leads one person or group to attempt to exert control over another. In a system of domination, the result is endless struggle, endless conflict for everyone involved. In partnership, the result is harmony, respect, love, and an explosion of creativity and joy.
Which would you rather have?
No one would choose the system of domination if they knew they had an alternative, but most of us haven’t been given the lens to see the world in this way, and so don’t have the tools to break free of the dominator model and move more fully into partnership in all areas of our lives.
But now literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide have read Riane Eisler and/or encountered other people of vision — from Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa to Albert Einstein, Eckhart Tolle, Shakti Gawain, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Deepak Chopra, James Allen, and Napoleon Hill, to name just a few — and many people have seen remarkable changes in their lives and in their world as a result. A great movement has been born, and is gaining momentum: a movement toward partnership in every significant area of our lives.
Domination is the problem,
partnership is the solution.
In the things that are working smoothly in our lives, we have already discovered the power of partnership. In the things in our lives that still have struggle and conflict, we need to look at where there are still old patterns of domination.
PARTNERSHIP IN EVERY RELATIONSHIP
It is definitely worthwhile to look at every significant relationship in our lives, and ask ourselves which model is operating, partnership or domination:
OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OURSELVES: Are you in partnership with yourself, do you nurture and support yourself, or is some inner critic or critical parent beating you up, undermining your uniqueness, your creativity, your joy of life?
We need to be as gentle and accepting with ourselves as we ideally want to be with our children and intimate friends, and forge better partnerships with the creative child and spirit and genius we all have within.
OUR INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS with our lovers, family, and intimate friends: Is there domination? Or do we truly have partnerships with family and friends? Is there respect? Does everyone have a voice? Is love acknowledged, in some way?
OUR WORK AND COMMUNITY RELATIONSHIPS:Do we have supportive partnerships with those we work with? Or are we still involved in a subtle or obvious system of domination?
Smart, successful employers have partnerships with every employee, every customer, every supplier, every stockholder or owner, everyone they interact with in their communities. Valuable employees have partnerships with their employers, their customers, other employees — everyone they interact with as well. Successful artists realize they have a network of partnerships that help them create and promote and sell their work.
Do we work in partnership with those in
our community? Is everyone respected, does everyone has a voice? How do we find creative solutions that respect the people and the environment of the community? How can our businesses better support the communities they’re located in?
More and more creative partnerships are being developed on a community level that address the communities’ problems. Community partnerships can resolve those problems.
OUR NATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: Do we have a successful partnership with all other Americans? Are we working together as citizens of one great country?
Do we have a smooth working partnership with our government? In some ways our government has been a visionary partner, in other ways our government continues to act as an aggressor and dominator. Where is the system of domination still firmly in place, and where is partnership operating? How can we move from the current system to one of greater partnership for everyone involved?
We have endless challenges ahead of us — and that means endless opportunities, benefits, and gifts.
OUR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: How successful are our partnerships with all the other governments and citizens of the world? Where is our country a dominator and where is it a partner in the world arena? What can we do to bring our nation’s actions closer to partnership with other nations? What can we do personally to live in greater partnership with the peoples of the world?
