The Anatomy of Success

Something really great was about to happen. Success at last!

It doesn't matter what it was. It could have been a new job, or a publisher agreed to print something I'd written, or I was about to move to the next level with someone special, or I was about to receive a patent on a new invention, or I was about to surpass the 1,000,000-visitor-barrier on my blog. Fill in the blank with anything you please.

At that moment, on the verge, on the eve, something inside told me I wasn't ready for this; I wasn't prepared. I had been well along the path of enlightenment for nearly three years, enjoying the awakening process, eyes opening. But the process wasn't complete. Thus, outward success felt premature.

And that's the important point, how it felt. It always comes down to how we feel these things in the physical body.It felt unstable. I felt myself leaning forward, into the future, into the following day when this indicium of success was scheduled to take place.

There's a name for this feeling. We call it hope. Its opposite is fear. We think of hope as positive and fear as negative, but they're actually flip sides of the same coin.

And hope and fear are intimately related to success and failure in that we hope for success and we fear failure.

The Tao Te Ching says this:

Success is as dangerous as failure

Hope is as hollow as fear.

A few lines later, Lao-tzu explains:

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?

Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self.

The Tao Te Ching goes on to say:

What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

your position is shaky.

When you stand with your two feet on the ground,

you will always keep your balance.

Hope and fear are both unstable conditions. Keep your feet on the ground, keep your awareness focused on the present moment and you will keep your balance.

I was in the Navy for a long time. As the Navy puts it, "Keep your eyes in the boat."

Our good friend Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose,put it this way:

"What the world doesn't tell you--because it doesn't know--is that you cannot become successful. You can only be successful." (p. 270, italics original)

In other words, success is a state of being at any given moment. Success is not something that's in the future, which doesn't really exist. Life only ever comes to us as this present moment, and your treatment of this moment helps to determine what your next moment will be like, and the next and the next and the next.

Hope--and its evil synonym, egoic wanting, and let's call it this instead--does nothing positive for the present moment. It takes your attention away from the present moment and focuses it on a future moment.

Another of the Navy's aphorism on this subject is "Hope is not a plan." Do something in this moment, in other words, that will affect the next.

Let us properly define success, then, as Eckhart does in the very next sentence. He advises, "Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment." (A New Earth,p. 270)

A successful present moment is the only success there is.

So what does it take to have a successful present moment? It takes inner peace and the joy of being. If you don't have these in this present moment, then you are not successful.

If you don't have inner peace and the joy of being, stop whatever it is you're doing and figure out how to get them. (See A Cure for Anxiety Parts 1, 2, and 3 for helpful hints.) I'm not kidding. Go ahead, we'll wait. . .

My title promises the "anatomy" of success and here it is.

People who are interested in a blog like this generally believe in a benevolent universe, or more accurately, one that has "The Good" as its highest ideal, philosophically speaking. (For a further analysis on this topic see The Philosophy of Success elsewhere on this blog).

When we achieve enlightenment, we bring ourselves into alignment with the impulse of the universe. We bring ourselves into alignment with The Good. And we thereby become its agent.

The impulse of the universe, then, arises in us generally--and from time to time in specific ways--to move The Good forward. And this is a prospect which we are all too happy to engage. We are inspired, in other words. We are enthusiastic. We envision success in these endeavors, whatever they may be. This could be a family, a ministry of some sort, an artistic achievement or any other calling.

If we also equate inner peace and the joy of being with "The Good," we begin to get a glimmer of exactly how we hold back The Good in our lives and for those whose lives we touch.

Things like hope and fear and anxiety and depression and hatred and all manner of negativity are not The Good. They are opposed to The Good. To the extent that we hold these things in our hearts and reflect them in our physical bodies, we hold back the good from manifesting in our lives and in the lives of those around us.

This is so because if The Good were to associate itself with that which is not "The Good," it would cease to be "The Good."

To put it in more concrete terms, if the universe were to grant me success while I was still harboring egoic wanting in my heart, it wouldn't be doing me any good. It would only be perpetuating that which is not The Good in me. And that the impulse of the universe cannot do.

Success is necessarily held back until egoic wanting is eliminated and inner peace and the joy of being reside within me.

So if you wish to be an agent of The Good, focus on inner peace and joy. This is the only way to make yourself a channel through which The Good can manifest Itself in the world.

What takes the place of egoic wanting in the enlightened realm is visualization (See "The Visualization of Success," elsewhere on this blog).

As for that good thing that was about to happen to me, it was in fact delayed due to an unexpected snowfall in England.

But thankfully, only by one day. Just long enough to inspire this post. I "hope" you find it helpful.

I welcome your comments! Let me know what you think.

Next stop: The Philosophy of Success or The Visualization of Success