3. You are not separated into categories. You are at once the seer, seeing and the seen. To know true prosperity, you must learn to stop dividing yourself up and separating yourself from your prosperity.
There are not three of you in this world. There is not the observer, the observed, and the act of observing. What you observe is within you. Your observations are within you, and so is the entire process of observing. This is all you. Prosperous thoughts are yours, they are you. So too is what you observe as prosperity within you. And finally, the concept of being prosperous is all located within you as well. This may sound confusing, but it is crucial for you to grasp your oneness in all of this if you are ever going to know and become prosperity yourself. Ken Wilbur, in his fascinating book No Boundary, describes it like this; let these thoughts in as you prepare yourself for miracles in this dimension of prosperity:
The split between the experiencer and the world of experience does not exist, and therefore cannot be found. Initially this sounds very strange, because we are so used to believing in boundaries. It seems so obvious that I am the hearer who hears sounds, that I am the feeler who feels feelings, that I am the seer who sees sights. But, on the other hand, isn’t it odd that I should describe myself as the seer who sees the seen? Or the hearer who hears the sounds heard? Is perception really that complicated? Does it really involve three separate entities—a seer, seeing, and the seen? Surely there aren’t three separate entities here. Is there ever such a thing as a seer without seeing or without something seen? … Our problem is that we have three words—the “seer,” “sees” and the “seen,” for one single activity, the experience of seeing.
You must learn to go beyond your hypnotized state, which has convinced you that here is first you the thinker, then you the doer, and finally the concept of what it is that you are thinking and doing. All of this is actually one and the same.
This is how prosperity works for those who live it each day. All of what you have previously divided up as prosperity thinking, prosperous behavior and something called prosperity that is located “out there,” must be thought of as one. And that one can be you if you elect it! When you understand this, you will stop looking for prosperity as if it were something that you can wrench from its hiding place. You stop saying to yourself, “All I have to do is think prosperous thoughts, and it will come to me.” You stop setting goals for your own conduct that will lead you to this elusive thing called prosperity.
What you replace this triumvirate with is a singularity of thought and action, which reflects your understanding that you are prosperity if you believe in it. What you need for a prosperous life, you already are. It is all you, there are no boundaries despite the fact that we have invented different words to describe various facets of how we have chosen to perceive it. Wilber sums up the insanity of this boundaried thinking with this example: “We might as well describe a single water stream as ‘the streamer streams the streamed.’ It is utterly redundant, and introduces three factors where there is in fact but one.”
Now, take this awareness and implant it in your consciousness. You are not going to find prosperity. It will flow into your life only when you grasp this notion of your singularity. When you know it, your actions will reflect it. The very same thing may be said of scarcity. If you think scarcity thoughts, and act in scarcity ways, your life will be scarcity. You are what you think about, since that is all you have to act upon.
If scarcity is a word that defines your life right now, understand that it is not something that was visited upon you, it is simply your way of processing your life. You have divided yourself up as a thinker and a doer, victimized by something outside of you called scarcity. But in reality, you are scarcity. The choice of prosperity begins with your refusal to further splinter yourself, and instead to see the oneness that exists as you.
4. You cannot experience prosperity if you believe that you don’t deserve it. As I’ve said many times already, you exist as a divine, spiritual being having a human experience. Your essence, your very life, is invisible and boundless. In this realm, there are no judgments to be made. There is no one in this universe, now or ever, that is any better or more worthy of anything. Those who were born of royal blood are treated as royalty because some human beings have decided to elevate them. But in a much larger sense, through God’s eyes, there is no “better” or “worse.” It is this kind of thinking that you must learn to employ if prosperity is to replace scarcity as your way of living.
If you believe that you are undeserving of prosperity, that is the thought upon which you will conduct your life. You will not attract prosperity by thinking that you are undeserving, any more than you attract love by viewing yourself as contemptible. Surrender the idea that you are inferior. You are neither superior nor inferior, you simply are. And what you are deserves prosperity!
How can one invisible thought be more or less valuable than another invisible thought? When you view yourself as a spiritual being, when you create a real-magic mind-set of yourself as a thinking being first and foremost, then you stop the incessant comparison that leads you to believe that others are more deserving of prosperity. You are in a partnership with all other human beings, not a contest to be judged better than some and worse than others.
Once again, you have to undo the hypnotized state that led you to this kind of attitude. It began in your schooling, and it continues today. Here is John Holt on this subject, writing in How Children Fail:
We destroy the … love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards—gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys—in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.
There it is, that business of getting people to believe that they are better than others. You very likely have bought into this big lie in some areas of your life. How could you deserve to think of yourself as a special divine necessity when you didn’t measure up to the way others were performing or looking? You learned to compare yourself with others and even to believe that this is only human nature. It is the very thing that has not allowed you to develop a self-concept based upon being valuable, deserving and divine. On this subject of human nature, here is what John Stuart Mill wrote in Principles of Political Economy:
Of all the vulgar models of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influence on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.
Indeed it is a vulgar model, one that teaches people to grow into adults who believe that it is only natural to compare oneself with others, and it is therefore only natural to learn to play dirty in order to get ahead of the other guys. And if some do not measure up in physical or material ways to others, that is an indication that they are not deserving. It is a vulgar, obscene system that contributes to the creation of large numbers of people who know no other way to assess their own value other than in comparison with others, and in so doing, it creates many who simply begin to think that they are not deserving of prosperity in any sense of the word.
A competitive culture endures by tearing others down. A cooperative culture evolves by helping each person to appreciate their own value and to feel deserving and spiritually valid. The choice is yours. Even if all those around you choose to be in competition with each other, you do not have to live by that model. You can see that you are just as deserving of prosperity as anyone else on this planet. With that kind of mind-set, you will no longer act in nondeserving ways.
5. Rejoice in the prosperity of others. When you feel contemptuous, or even a twinge of jealousy, toward the accomplishments or life-styles of others, you are harboring negativity, where love must reside. When you have only love within you, because that is how you choose to regard life, that is all you will have to give awa
y. Thus, you can test yourself by checking how you feel toward people who have acquired a dimension of prosperity that is still eluding you. You cannot attract prosperity to yourself if you are filled with rancor, judgment, anger, jealousy, hatred, fear, tension or the like. This kind of negative inner mind-set keeps you from being on purpose. You cannot be fulfilled and envious at the same time.
If you feel satisfied and happy, that is what you have to give away. Foster an inner belief that anyone who has achieved prosperity is entitled to it, and that their success is not a reason for you to feel inadequate or wanting. Even if a person achieves prosperity through what you consider devious means, it is still not a reason for you to feel anguished and upset. Know in your heart that those who use others will be dealt with by a universe that works on purpose and harmony. But for the most part, those who have achieved their own measure of prosperity deserve only your love.
Try to shift your focus from what others have or don’t have to what you are going to do for yourself. Remember, when you evaluate and judge others you do not define them, you define yourself. Do you want to define yourself as a jealous, nonloving being if that is what will then expand in your life? Rejoice in the great prosperity that you witness in all others. Let go of the notion that it shouldn’t be that way. It is that way! That is all that you need to know. So too are you that way, whatever that way is in your life. Have a quiet acceptance of what is, send it love and then get on with the business of creating a full, prosperous, loving life for yourself.
These are the five factors that are most crucial for getting to a prosperity consciousness. Once you are working each day on developing this way of being, your higher self will begin to allow you to experience more and more prosperity in your life. This new consciousness will lead you back to that all-important dimension that is a central theme of this book: living your life on purpose.
PURPOSE AND PROSPERITY: YOUR TICKET TO REAL MAGIC
As you’ve seen throughout this book, you can only experience real magic when you get your life to purpose. When you are focused on learning through suffering or learning through outcome, you are using hindsight as your guide, and consequently you pay a heavy price in your everyday life.
In the area of your work, you may have been spending a great deal of time and energy doing things that you dislike, but telling yourself that it was absolutely necessary because you had bills to pay or a family to care for, or you simply had no other choice. Think about it this way, using numbers as a metaphor: If you are 99 percent invisible (thought and spirit), and only 1 percent form (the physical body that houses your soul), and you are doing something that you loathe, then you are essentially an inauthentic person. Your body is going through the motions, while you continue to think about how much you dislike the circumstances of your life. One percent is going through the motions, and 99 percent loathes the activities of your life. So if what you think about is what expands into action, the action or physical part of your life is loathsome and awful. You cannot experience fulfillment or the opportunity for prosperity miracles while you are living a life of loathsomeness. There must be bliss and harmony within in order for you to know miracles. Thus you must shift from suffering and outcome to purpose.
Getting to purpose in the work that you do, or the daily activities of your life, means knowing that purpose is about giving without concern for the results. When you are able to shift your inner awareness to how you can serve others, and when you make this the central focus of your life, you will then be in a position to know true miracles in your progress toward prosperity. There will be no limit to what you will receive in return for your giving and sharing, when giving and sharing are all that you have to give away.
Prosperity can be thought of as having limitless abundance in your life. You will never get to that point by hoarding, or focusing on what is in it for you. Remember, in a much larger sense, you cannot own anything while you are here, you cannot acquire anything—your life can only be given away. This is the area that you must learn to work on in order to be able to experience unlimited abundance and prosperity in your life.
The moment that you realize that giving is the key to your own abundance, you will also see that prosperity is readily available. It is not that difficult to give yourself away. Or is it? For some, they do not perceive the irony here. They want a life of prosperity, but concentrate exclusively on what is in it for them. Consequently they work, and struggle, and set goals, but they never seem to arrive, they never have enough. But, when you study highly successful people in all fields of endeavor, you find that they are not truly focused on the results that will accrue to them personally. Here is a perfect example, as reported in Srikumar S. Rao’s June 1991 article in Success magazine titled, “The Superachiever’s Secret”:
One day, Mehdi Fakharzadeh, Metropolitan Life’s top agent, went to see a policyholder who suffered from heart disease and was filing a claim. There was no prospect of selling him more insurance. Most agents (striving for their goals) would have just handed the man a form and left. Not Mehdi, who had “surrendered to the process” of helping people. Mehdi filled out the form for him. When he found out the man also had policies with other insurers, he got forms from them, filled them out, and made sure the refunds came through.
The man pressed payment on Mehdi, which Mehdi politely declined. But a few days later, Mehdi received in the mail a list of 21 of the man’s friends and relatives: names, dates of birth, number of children—with a personal introduction to each. Mehdi sold millions of dollars in insurance to them.
When you constantly remind yourself of the overriding spiritual, social or loving purpose that drives your work, you will find your entire state of prosperity shifting. Uppermost in your mind is how you can serve the needs of those around you by focusing always on their needs and their quotas. Being on purpose generally means that you are at peace with yourself, and that peace is what you have to give away.
My experience writing and speaking throughout the world and my personal contacts with thousands of people have led me to believe that this is the one secret shared by those who are experiencing prosperity miracles in their own lives. What goes around truly does come around. The more you give away and do everything that you do in the service of others, the more that seems to come back. And when it comes back, since you are not interested in hoarding or owning it, you are more inclined to give that away, and the cycle of real magic takes root.
This lesson of prosperity applies to all fields of endeavor. An airline business, for example, which is focused on serving its travelers, will prosper most greatly when the entire fabric of the organization is based on serving others. When that sense of serving is neglected at any level of the business, the entire organization suffers. Boarding an airplane early one time, I overheard the sarcastic voice of a flight attendant say, “Here come the animals.” I knew it was only a matter of time until that organization would perish from a scarcity of passengers. Sure enough, they have gone into bankruptcy. Employees need to know in their souls that they are privileged to serve those who are willing to give of their own incomes to use the service. The customers are responsible for their having jobs, and they should be valued and coddled and appreciated. The total emphasis needs to be on serving, forgetting about how convenient or inconvenient it is for the servers. This applies to whatever it is that you do. When you work in a dentist’s office, your goal is to serve and help others to improve the quality of their lives. If it is to make money, to get the patients in and out as fast as possible, the entire office will experience scarcity, not prosperity.
But I am not writing this book to an organization, I am writing to you, dear reader. You can shift your consciousness all you want, but you must also shift the emphasis of what you do from outcome and results in your own life, to purpose. Try it! Shift for a one-month period of time, and see if miracles don’t start showing up in your life.
Being on purpose in your life activities is simply a matter of changing aroun
d your own inner beliefs. You do not necessarily need to change positions or move to another location, for it is in the giving that you will experience this real magic. In the Bhagavad Gita, God’s words to Arjuna, the mighty warrior, are quite simple in this regard: “Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.” Notice that the emphasis is on what you have “in mind.” God’s final words to Arjuna are as follows: “The ignorant work for their own profit, Arjuna; the wise work for the welfare of the world, without thought for themselves.”
While this may seem like too lofty a notion for you, I assure you that the benefits of this way of thinking are available for you right now. You do not need to memorize a set of lofty principles. Rather, you must simply get in touch with your higher self, which is always with you, and allow this natural part of you to take over. It turns out to be a very easy and fascinating way to live, and it comes not from trying harder but by relaxing and removing the pressures from yourself.
The less you need to force this new way of being on yourself, the easier it becomes to let it be the guiding principle of your life. A quick look back at the characteristics of a spiritual versus a nonspiritual being shows you that this is more a mental exercise than a physical one. It is about allowing your natural self to flow peacefully and knowing that fulfillment comes from giving, not getting. Letting yourself just flow is a concept that you will want to become quite familiar with as you begin to allow the prosperity that you desire into your life.
GETTING TO “FLOW”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Flow, studied superachievers—including executives, top athletes and artists—who have gained a life of prosperity. He describes the principle of flow as an investment in ourselves to our limits, in which we experience complete joy in our working present moments. He says that “once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to achieve it.”
Real Magic Page 18
