Success!

The thoughts I share with you on these pages come from a myriad of sources that reach back thousands of years. It is remarkable to read the piece called The Exhortation of the Dawn (in the Appendix, a 4,000-year-old Sanskrit proverb, and find it to be perfectly applicable to our “modern” era! We can put all of these many years of human experience to great creative use, the consequence of which Earl Nightingale defined as “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal,” The result of which is SUCCESS.

My studies of Nightingale’s work began in 1975.  My studies helped me greatly in bringing my own life together with meaning and sense. Coincidentally, a significant number of my patients were experiencing struggle, confusion, and conflict in their own lives and what I was learning from Nightingale proved to be of great value to them, too; for they took charge of their lives, the quality of which changed greatly and immediately.

I share with you now what I learned from all this, which is the essence of all HOPE Group function: 

The Law of success:

o       We become what we think about most.

The Resource for success is:

o       the MIND.

• The Keys with which we access the resource are:
  • ATTITUDES, the most effective of which are:
    • Hope
    • Love
    • Forgiveness
    • Happiness
    • Inner peace
    • Serenity

The Guiding Principle of success is:

o       “Our rewards in life are always in exact proportion to the level and degree of our service.”[1]

The Rule we follow is:

o       ““Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if he or she were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.””[1]

The Qualities of success require us to be:

o       Loving, Kind, and Peaceful

o       Decisive, Assertive and Intentional;

o       Concerned, Committed, and Persistent

o       Clear, Centered and Grounded

o       Serene, Happy and Joyful.

The Feedback that shows us how we are doing is called:

o       the LAW OF RETURNS:

• What goes ‘round, comes ‘round.
• What you sow you reap.
• What you give, you get.

Hope and Success

Absent faith and love, hope is fundamental to starting one’s movement along the path to personal success; it affirms the possibility that things can make sense in spite of how they seem to be going. It encourages us to remember that life has meaning, value, and purpose. In relationship to the other six attitudes, hope can sustain their life-preserving and nurturing properties through the challenges that life inevitably offers.

Consider what we might call hope’s “mechanism of action”. How and why does it work? It is all about projections. Hope projects into the future and finds fear there, sitting on a pedestal of control over the present. Indeed, J. Krishnamurti described fear as “a product of time and thought.” Well, so is hope, which has the power to knock fear off its pedestal. Thus, it encourages and nurtures meaningful life in what J. Krishnamurti called the “now-moment”—also a product of thought, but this time without time.

How did fear become so powerful? Memory projected backwards in time, finding guilt and pain, and now it wants to try and protect you from hurtful and hateful things that happened back then by making the future look like the past. This is illusory thinking because it projects forward and backward to times that do not (any longer) exist. When you project in time, you are not home, you are in another time and lose power by being there!

This universal power of hope to bring us back to the present facilitates removing projection from anger! Consider this: anger is all about attack, whether it is but a thought or a hydrogen bomb. It is the consequence of fearful thinking. It is a compensatory reaction in the present moment. When you project anger, you are not home—you are in another space and you lose power by being there!

Stop projecting, come home, and be you, a spiritual presence in the world! Be here now!

Think about coming home. Consider adopting a personal centering practice based on the integration and balance of the four elements of the person: body, mind, soul, and spirit. Look at the notion that taking care of yourself in this way may have a direct beneficial effect on those with whom you have a significant relationship. (And the law of returns says that this effect will come back to you as well!)

In other words, if you would do unto others as you would have them do unto you, it might just be a good idea to know what you are doing by practicing it on yourself. It might include:

·        Prayer and meditation

·        Exercise and work

·        Balanced nutrition

·        Pleasure and fun

·        Spontaneous acts of beauty and universal kindness.

·        Mindfulness of every thought and action

What might happen if we were to begin to look at each and every human life as a gift of the universe, given at the instant of conception and promised for the whole of that life? What if we were to take the idea that there is a never-duplicated set of coordinates in space and time that define each life as if it were a plot of land to till? What if each one of us could get the idea that the entire universe knows us--by name? What would be the possible consequences for all of us if we could begin to get the idea that we live because the universe lives, we think because the universe thinks, we have bodies because the universe has a body, and we love because the universe loves. What would life be like if we were to give ourselves permission to know that the entire universe knows every one of us in person, and it waits with patience, love, and wonder to see what we are to do with this plot of land?

HOPE knows that the mystics throughout the ages have spoken of this possibility, and now science has information to support it!

To live as if time and space do not exist is to live free of attachments. To live free of attachments is to end suffering. This is success!