Tag Archives: Spiritual

Bread and circuses

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In my quest to business success and our quest to inspire people I am asking myself more and more what people really want and whether I or we have the right or duty to interfere with that.

Last night I happened to spend some time in the cheapest type of karaoke bar in The Philippines where people were just having fun drinking, smoking and singing together. And nearby where I live there is also a very small and simple karaoke place where mostly the owner and his family just sing and drink. And do nothing else mostly.

And living in The Philippines for quite a while my opinion in general is that Filipinos are very happy people. They are or seem to focus on happiness and togetherness, not on ‘success’ in a more western type of view, like career and money. I know there is more to this, as this type of Filipino happiness might also be some kind of way of dealing with poverty, real poverty, like nothing to eat.

And comparing myself I also often ask myself if I shouldn’t just ‘stop’ with my ambitions in career and finance and stuff as my work seems to have not been of any use to anyone, at least most people seem to have not been really happy with the work I have been doing, either as a customer, a boss, or an employee. As I am very persistent (or stubborn) I have basically always stood up again after business defeat: find a new job after losing the old, starting a business, finding new customers after losing old customers, finding new employees after old employees left.

And besides how you could look at my career through the Principles of Success, I often ask myself whether I should not just stop with my business ventures, sell the house and just buy a hut on the beach or something and just do what many, especially poor, people do here: basically nothing, except smoking and chatting and drinking a bit. And what’s wrong with that anyhow? It’s a bit a similar issue as in the story about the Mexican fisherman (just search in Google for that).

So yes, should we inspire people to do more, be more, achieve more, dream more? Or not?

Looking forward to your comments.

The world knocks it out of you

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Be careful to create self esteem.

I just got an e-mail including this text at the end:

The reason I told you you’d be surprised at your own brand of superhero’ness is that your greatness constantly hides from you. The world knocks it out of you over the years. But it’s there waiting. Like a diamond ready to be shined up again and rediscovered.

And the subject like ‘rediscover yourself’ or something like that seems to come back in many books about, well, self development or something. Even Think and Grow Rich has something like that in between the lines, like don’t consider other peoples opinions, just be yourself. I also often encounter phrases like ‘keep your own council‘ (if you want to be successful). And the story of the diamond behind the mud is also very familiar.

So what is this, that ‘the world’ knocks ‘life’ out of us. Why are we ‘just ourselves’ after being born, being a baby and then somehow lose ourselves growing up and being an adult. Why do we need to ‘rediscover’ ourselves. Why don’t we just stay ourselves without this ‘intermission’? Has this always been the case, all since the beginning of human history? Or is this just our journey on earth being a human being?

And I’m a bit in doubt now, how to continue this post. One thing in my mind is that recently I had quite some spiritual experiences, like past and ‘now’ mixing together, like there is no time, like I can just relive memories as if they were real. The weird thing is that I can’t really look into the future in a similar way. I can plan, decide, but I can’t really see or feel the future. Or can I, I am thinking while writing this now. I did visualize some things recently. Some big things. And it felt indeed as if I was there, as if it was really happening. But it didn’t happen yet. Or did it? The mind is a weird garden.

Life is strange, that’s a sentence that comes into my mind more and more lately. Napoleon Hill also states somewhere something like ‘the strangeness of life’. And yes, yesterday or today I really also felt ‘that we had met’, as he ends Think and Grow Rich with. And just realize the title of the book contains the word ‘grow’, a word I can’t remember reading anywhere in the text of the book itself, but I may be mistaken or have missed it. Or is that maybe what it’s all about? Growing?

But still, I’m looking for success, I’m looking for something better than what I have today, where I am today. And I know it’s there, as I used to have things I don’t have at the moment. So my success at the moment is still about ‘missing something’, not about achieving something, not about feeling passionate about something. And I know it’s important to turn that around, as it means my focus is on the negative, on the lacking, not on the positive, the having or ‘coming’. So in my case I guess most important thing is to find the passion, or the desire as Napoleon Hill calls it. I felt it a bit yesterday, today, but right now it’s gone again, gone in fear and insecurity, even though I am starting to feel the fear mixed with excitement recently. Very good I think, progress I think.

So how to make this post inspiring to you? How to end this post? Maybe add a (Dutch) quote that my dad often used: “‘Be yourself!’ I said to someone; but he couldn’t: he was nobody.” – De Genestet. So something like:

BE SOMEBODY!

?

Or just point you to the Principles of Success and check where you are with that like in the related exercise?

Or just leave it like this and hope you enjoy my pondering in this post?

Looking forward to your comment!

Soul success

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When the team of Inspiration for Success asked me to write an article about “Soul Success”, I agreed at once. For me, it’s the only type of success that’s important. All other types of success are human successes, that satisfy earthly existence, human lives, wants and desires, ego. Soul Success is far more important than human success, for only the soul has a contract to be fulfilled, a destiny to be achieved as a job of work for our planet.  

In other words, you can gain all the success in life your sweet human heart hopes for, but if you don’t find success for your soul’s purpose on earth, you may have wasted your life.

Perhaps worse, after death, if you still need to achieve Soul Success, you may have to return to Earth and try again. Not such a nice thought for those who’ve had not such nice lives…

So the question is, how to tell the difference between achieving human goals and Soul Success?

A simple question, but too complicated with too many answers for this article. Which is why I wrote a book about it, with website too. The book “Angels on Earth” is on http://ww.allansweeney.com – the website is http://ww.angelsonearth.info. 🙂

Obviously I’m going to say, if you need Soul Success as opposed to achieving human goals, you need the whole book, not just this article. But here’s some clues.

The book describes the life of someone being driven by Soul Success, from before birth, to after death. It shows that no matter what country you live in, what family you’re from, what religion you have, what beliefs you promote, if you have a need for Soul Success, your life will follow a similar energetic pattern to other Soul Success seekers.

The big clue is this – Soul Success depends on age. You can probably realise that if someone has a big job of work to achieve for their soul on Earth, they are unlikely to achieve it before they are 5. They haven’t had enough life experiences to be able achieve Soul Success in the first 4 or 5 years of life.

Similarly, Soul Success seekers probably can’t achieve Soul Success as a teenager, or even in their 20’s or 30’s.  I often say to someone in their 20’s, “You are a Baby Adult!”. They usually look surprised, until I explain that less than 10 years ago they were considered to be a child, and 10 years isn’t long to learn everything about being an adult.

Someone in their 30’s is a teenage adult, as far as Soul Success is concerned. They’ve been through some of life’s problems, and put their version of understanding onto those problems, to try to make sense of being an adult on this planet. But as a teenager adult, they still haven’t understood what it’s all about yet. So although they may be achieving human goals, they are unlikely to be achieving Soul Success.

When someone reaches their 40’s, if Soul Success is part of their destiny, it becomes a force within that needs love and inspiration to break away from old habits and achieve soul needs. It’s a time of desperation, depression, anxiety, etc for some, as unconsciously they fear they may not achieve their inner needs, the needs of Soul Success. It’s a time of wonder for others as they progress to beauty and happiness as they begin to fulfill the dreams emanating from the love of their soul.

In their 50’s, most people with a deep feeling within that a destiny must be achieved on Earth, have had so many life experiences that, (except those who are mentally or emotionally incapable) they will consciously know what their Soul Success was, or can be.  This is a time for rejoicing. Inspiration has come at last.

This is a wonderful time of bliss and happiness, with similar loving soul friends. Soul Success is part now, not just of the soul, but of humanity too.

Naturally, nothing is for everyone. Some people are not destined to achieve a Soul Success in this life. Others who do have a Soul Success destiny, will achieve it faster or slower than the guidelines I’ve given. And some people may not achieve their destiny at all, at least, not in this life.

The important thing is this – we are tiny specks, unseeable to most of the universe. Your Soul Success is only the beginning of a longer, more beautiful journey. Take the pressure off yourself, and enjoy the ride. 🙂

For in-depth plans and goals to achieve Soul Success:

Dreaming

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Reading and thinking more about the ideas of Lynn Grabhorn who says that the only thing you need to do is something like ‘be in connection with your core self’ and certainly don’t force things through ‘do, do, do’ and ‘push, push, push’ made me very confused as these ideas, based on the Law of Attraction, seem contrary to the ideas of Napoleon Hill. From Think and Grow Rich

I got the idea of ‘push, push, push’, mainly through the idea ‘persistence‘ that probably suits me as a person, but maybe I’m not interpreting persistence properly, maybe I’m interpreting it as a very stubborn person. So I’m pushing a lot and it doesn’t seem to work. if you follow my posts you may have noticed in between the lines that I kind of came to a total stand still. As no matter how ‘persistent‘ I was, nothing seems and seemed to work, so I kind of stopped recently. And that ‘nothing seems to work, no matter how much I push’ has been going on for quite a while now, maybe even most of my life.

So the last few days it slowly sank in that my interpretation of the ideas of Napoleon Hill may need some adjustment and that my understanding of persistence does not imply ‘push, push, push’, but that the persistence should be based on a desire, a dream, and not simply based on just ‘something I want’.

So what made me think more, well the part of the book Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting: The Power of Positive Feelings about step 2: identify what you DO want. And it made me think more and feel more that I HAVE STOPPED DREAMING, I have stopped wanting things. I’m just surviving and even barely surviving. So again, what hit me and how do I get out of this ‘survival mode’, or better stated, how do I come alive again? Because the whole thing adds up. I”m not dreaming anymore, I don’t have any desire anymore, everything ‘living’ has just been killed long time ago. And it seems I’m not alone, because in Think and Grow Rich as well as in the book of Lynn Grabhorn and maybe also what I see all around me is that most people are kind of ‘surviving’ and not ‘living’, not living their dream or dreams.

So what happened to us, to you, to me, to most of us on this planet earth? We’re dreamers, we’re creators, so why don’t we create? And how can this site contribute to that?

And while thinking I realize i already made an exercise about relighting your desire, so it’s also not a new subject in the site. Let’s see if we can do some more there, as desire or dream seems to be the main thing, the main driver for, well, success I guess.

Vibrations

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Well, yesterdays visit to a friend brought me four new books. I was offered to bring six, but i brought four. Law of Attraction?

They are1:

And the fourth just disappeared, very strange, or did I just bring three? I’m quite sure I brought four, but maybe that’s what this article is all about, vibrating with something, and it seems i’m learning to vibrate positive as many good things are happening to me lately, even though I’m still very scared.

And now, some time after I wrote the post and added some stuff in the rest of the site I realize there is a fourth book on my desk: Fundamentals of Vipassana Meditation, printed and donated by The Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation.

I was also asking my Buddhist friend about some more background about the chanting, and one of the things she said that part or all of the chanting is getting in touch with the Universe.

So last night I started reading a bit and this morning i continued as I’m still struggling, still don’t understand. All the ‘going the extra mile stuff’ and ‘work your plan’ and ‘things will come back to you’ and ‘you reap what you say’ don’t seem to work for me. Often I go twenty miles extra and it just doesn’t work and I think mostly I plant positive seeds. And all I got back were bad results, most I got back was negativity, loneliness, people leaving me. And I did my best, so it didn’t add up.

So I guess there is more than Think and Grow Rich with all it’s principles of success.

Any how, I started reading and ended up with “Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting“ and I found some relief in it as i did not feel so good this morning, which made me also start reading by the way. And this book has a totally different approach to achieving success, to live a happy life than most other success books.

So what is different. Well, it’s not that different, but the book starts from the idea that ‘everything is energy’ and that ‘energy and matter’ are the same thing. And that we ourselves ‘vibrate’. And that everything around us, everything that is happening to us vibrates with the same vibration. So if we vibrate in a positive way, positive things come to us, vibrate with us and when we vibrate ‘negative’, negative things come to us, vibrate with us. So the starting point of this book is ‘vibrations’, where vibrations come from feelings, whereas e.g. the starting point from Think and Grow Rich is more like desire.

Not that different in the end though, as I guess desire and positive feelings or positive vibrations are not that different. And reading one line more, Lynn Grabhorn mentions deliberate creation and four steps to bring into your life whatever is your passion and much, much more. The four steps she mentions are:

  1. Identify what you DON’T want.
  2. From that, identify what you DO want.
  3. Get into the feeling place of what you want.
  4. Expect, listen and allow it to happen.

Sounds simpler than the ideas of Think and Grow Rich, although I still have the feeling they’re not that different, as also in the principles of success as described by Napoleon Hill the term Infinite Intelligence plays a major role.

1These links hold an affiliate code.