Once we begin to recognize that our old way of seeing
things is attracting negative things into our
lives, we begin to feel the attraction to become something
else. We begin to focus on the things we love and this takes
place in greater and greater intensity as we adopt a wider
view of the world around us. We learn to accept things and
to even experience gratitude for the way things are because
this brings more joy and happiness to us. It is a difficult task
at first as our old ways of seeing the world tend to permeate
every area of our lives and negativity has become a very bad
habit. It is even hard, in the beginning, to root out our negative
emotions as their source tends to be very cunning and
hidden from our view. In our work and at home we can especially
see that we have established many bad habits that
keep us stuck in the more narrow fields of consciousness
and the magnetic power of these old ways is very hard to
overcome.
The difficulty of inner work results from the great
effort required to escape from the familiar gravity
of lower attractor fields and move to the influence
of a higher field.
– HAWKINS
In order to arrive at this higher level of consciousness,
we eventually find that we must begin to apply a new awareness
to every aspect of our lives. The spiritual effort
becomes a daily practice that we apply to our careers and
our relationships. At first the efforts seem very difficult but
eventually we come to see that something else has been
working in our lives which is far beyond our own personal
power and has begun helping us along the way. In fact, this
power has been there all along but we were not aware of its
presence until now.
Our careers require extreme amounts of time and effort
in our lives and yet, this area is often relegated to the ‘back
burner’ when we think about spirituality. We think of our
spiritual lives as a time to read or meditate and our careers
as a time to make money and survive. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Our careers are an intricate element of
our spiritual lives and an area that needs considerable attention
if we are going to attract positive energy into our lives.
We will have to learn to think more positively about our
careers if we are going to attract positive energy throughout
our entire day.
A career involves more than just a job. A career involves
a progression or an increase that brings us toward a greater
level of success in our job. This happens by becoming more
advanced in our spiritual pursuits. It is often a surprise to
many people who practice spirituality that some of the most
successful career minded individuals are also some of the
most spiritual people in the world. It is the underlying drive
to succeed that fuels people’s desire to have a career and facing
the daily challenges of a career is a great way to improve
ourselves.
DESTRUCTIVE THINKING
Many people are dead set against money and careers. A
common sentiment is that “money is the root of all evil” and
many Americans believe that the corporations and the government
are only out to exploit people for power and control.
Money is often set in a bad light by those of us who
may study spirituality or religion. The Eastern traditions
often emphasize the importance of being “unattached” to
wealth and success so that many people misunderstand the
intentions of corporations or millionaires who are in possession
of great wealth. Having a lot of money does not necessarily
mean that there is going to be an attachment to money.
Indeed, the Biblical quote alluded to above actually reads
“The love of money is the root of all evil.”29 (1 Timothy 6:
10, my emphasis) Many great millionaires become philanthropists
and help to solve enormous problems all over the
world. It is the attitude that we carry toward wealth and
power that creates the attachment that many religions often
speak of. This is an idea which is very often misunderstood
and which often leads to destructive thinking.
This misconception about the meaning of “attachment”
often leads many people to think that you have to be poor and
unemployed in order to be spiritual. A reverse sort of egotism
can even set up with this kind of thinking where people will
oftentimes see themselves to be ‘better’ than the rich and successful
simply because they don’t have any money or success
themselves. As time goes on, these less fortunate people
become unhappy in their lives because the rewards they
imagined themselves to eventually gain for their commitment
to poverty were somehow not materializing in the way
they had hoped. They become angry at the world as if some
mysterious enemy had taken over their lives and made them
fall into a terrible misfortune. This problem only comes
about as a result of people’s negative thinking. They imagine
a future when everything will fall apart for the rich and successful
and they will get their just rewards. The future never
arrives for having lived a life of poverty and unemployment
and they wonder “What went wrong?”
The attachments of the ego take place in all areas of the
world and not just for the rich and successful minded people.
A career can certainly become a place where people
abuse their powers and exploit the less fortunate people of
the world but it is also a place where the less fortunate can
become bitter and resentful. The world around them simply
becomes dark and hopeless because they never made the
effort to overcome their unfortunate state. They hate the
people in power and resent the larger order that has come to
exist around them. Overcoming this kind of negative thinking
is extremely hard. We have to start to consider the possibility
that powerful people may only be doing their best to
make the world a better place. We may not understand who
the corrupt people are and who the philanthropists are until
we have walked a mile in their shoes. Abetter place to focus
our energies would be in our own lives and on our own negative
thinking. In this way, we may learn to overcome these
destructive thoughts and lead ourselves out of the negative
patterns we have set up in our lives.
CONSTRUCTIVE THINKING
A career is the perfect place to set up your spiritual
workshop because it is an area that requires a great deal of
time and energy everyday and involves almost every aspect
of spiritual principles in order that you make it successful.
Even if you are starting out at the very bottom as a dishwasher
in a hot and dirty kitchen, you can make your career
into an intensely spiritual pursuit that will eventually lead to
other jobs and a more productive career that brings happiness
and joy. Everyone needs a job of some kind in order to feel
productive and the simplest or the most complex jobs
are equally fertile ground for spiritual practices.
The key to long term success is not in the particular job
that you are doing. The key is in working on yourself as you
do your particular job. This is constructive thinking because
it makes it possible to use your time even more productively.
When there is not an extremely important task immediately
at hand, you can focus your mind on the present
moment and simply experience your own inner consciousness.
This effort will eventually widen the attractor field in
which you find yourself and open up greater amounts of
energy into your life. If you make sure and work harder on
yourself than you do on your particular job, success will
surely follow wherever you go. Once you begin dedicating
hours a day to your personal development, your success will
not be far behind.
THE DETAILS OF LIFE
Oftentimes, spiritual enthusiasts may tend to think that it
is ‘ok’ to avoid the details of life because spirituality is associated
with keeping things ‘simple’. We think we should
live simple lives and we can ignore the details. We don’t
worry about mortgages or going to the dentist or sorting
through the mail. We like to wear sandals and meditate. We
like to feed the pigeons and sit on a park bench. Keeping
life simple is certainly an essential spiritual principle but
paying attention to the details of life is also something that
we shouldn’t be afraid of. Looking at the details doesn’t
have to mean looking at the details of ‘worry’ and ‘fear’.
The details can in fact be extremely beautiful.
Here are a few details that we certainly don’t have to worry
about and that don’t help us to move forward in our
lives. First of all, we don’t have to worry about the detail of
“urgency”.
Urgency suggests that things aren’t exactly as
they need to be and therefore the universe has somehow
been created ‘wrong’. This is a negative idea that only feeds
the flames of our discontent. We don’t have to worry about
the detail of “being in a hurry” because we now feel confident
that everything is happening for a reason. Similarly, we
don’t have to worry about the detail of “recognition” or the
detail of “popularity” when we go about making a career for
ourselves. If we have faith in the larger attractor fields, we
know that our just rewards will eventually come to us after
we have taken care of the more important issues at hand.
Finally, we don’t have to worry about the detail of “tomorrow”
and this idea is very eloquently expressed in the first
book of the New Testament.
Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to the
span of your life? ... So do not worry about tomorrow,
for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s
trouble is enough for today.
–MATT. 6:27, 34
Details that consume us never help to accomplish anything
worthwhile in the end and it is easy to overlook the
important details when we are running around like a chicken
with our heads cut off. We may simply be trying too hard
to control the wrong things and so the more important
details tend to elude us. Eventually we have no energy left
for the most important things which are the experience of
joy and happiness in our lives.
Once we’ve learned to look for spiritual truth, we will
begin to find it in every area of our lives. This will especially
be true in terms of the details. The details of a beautiful
flower will be seen in the same way as the details of the pile
of mail at the front door. Even a can of garbage can be seen
as beautiful, as Dr. Hawkins notably states:
One adds the pathway of the heart by making a
decision to be unconditionally loving to all that is
encountered….. This means one has to learn to love
even a garbage can. When seen correctly, garbage cans
are not only loveable but beautiful and perfect……
When the beauty and loveableness of the beat-up old
garbage can reveals itself, the spiritual seeker can
affirm that they are well along the way.
– HAWKINS
After we have calmed down and begun to attract more
positive energies into our lives, all the details of life become
stunningly beautiful and full of promise. We can return to
the details about the mortgage and the dentist which at first
seemed so fraught with worry and fear. We may begin to see
great opportunities in the pile of mail instead of endless
problems and worries in each bill. The details of life provide
us with a great opportunity to experience beauty and joy but
only if we approach them with the right attitude. If we carry
an attitude of worry and fear, the details will also express
this back to us as objects of worry and fear. If we carry an
attitude of joy and gratitude, the details of life will express
these more positive ideas instead.
Little jobs can also be a joy if we learn to practice a
spiritual presence in our lives. A wider success will eventually
come from what first seemed like an unimportant detail in life
and success will become the rule instead of the exception.
Don’t be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are
small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that
much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones
tend to take care of themselves.
– DALE CARNEGIE
Letting the big jobs take care of themselves is a profound
idea but something that should not be misunderstood
in terms of being ‘lazy’ or apathetic. We don’t ignore the
importance of the big jobs when we take on the attention to
the smaller ones. It simply becomes the case that we understand
we aren’t in control of the big jobs. We control only
the little things and keep the big jobs at the forefront of our
awareness. By staying aware of what is ultimately most
important, we actually call this into our lives according to
the law of attraction.
One of the greatest examples of this kind of behavior
can be seen in the activity of thousands of individual ants.
Each of them has one small job to do but they also have a
larger pattern in mind as they work together to create an
elaborate ant colony. Underneath the seemingly small attention
to detail that each ant displays, is the larger vision of the
colony. The queen ant is often seen as the ‘leader’ and yet
she never gives any direct orders to the ants. The queen
doesn’t “tell” the ants what to do. Each ant reacts to its own
individual scent and leaves its own chemical trail which provides
a stimulus to the other ants. This is the law of
attraction working in each ant’s life.
Genetics and other factors
certainly play a role in the “decisions” of each ant but there
is still an autonomous presence in each ant so that they can
make their own decisions within the larger framework.
Despite the lack of a central “leader”, ant colonies still
have an amazingly complex pattern of behavior and individual
ants have even been shown to be capable of solving
complex geometric problems. An example of this is the fact
that ants commonly determine the furthest distance from
each of the entrances to their hills in order to know where
the best place to dispose of their dead. The ants individually
measure the distance between hills in order to locate the
grave sites for other ants. This is a higher order of consciousness
at work and something that reflects the greater
good of each member of the colony.
This larger vision of order and harmony that can be seen
in the behavior of ants and many other groups of animals, is
a necessary element behind the energy which contributes to
the completion of even the smallest jobs in our world. The
larger spiritual energy fields are acted on through the individual
attention to the smaller details in life. These more
detailed jobs become the active purpose of our daily experience
through their connection to the larger purpose. The
larger vision fuels the smaller attention to detail and each of
us can then move along to a greater and greater awareness
of what is.
EMERGENCE IN CAREER
In science, the concept of ‘emergence’ can be used to
describe the way small jobs are ultimately related to their
larger attractor fields. This concept of emergence helps to
explain how these smaller, simpler tasks receive a spiritual
energy through their connection to the larger whole. This is
the idea that more complex patterns arise from the more
simple details of our behavior.
For an activity to be thought of as ‘emergent’ it is generally
seen as unpredictable from a lower level. To the casual
observer, it may appear as though the person is simply doing
a very menial task that is unimportant. It is unpredictable
and unprecedented, however, when the reasons for this simple
behavior become more apparent in terms of a larger
scheme. Although they cannot be explained by reference to
typical explanations, a more complex explanation helps
them to make sense.
In a typical job, a common reason for taking that job
may be ‘money’ or ‘opportunity for promotion’. These are
common ideas that serve as simple reasons for going to
work. They are fairly simplistic but are still commonly held
to be the driving force behind many people’s careers. If a
person is doing the job in order to increase their spiritual
connection, however, this may represent a new level in the
system’s evolution. This would be an example of an emergent
pattern that could not be readily observable from simply
looking at the individual person. It is a pattern that gives
a greater significance to the person’s job and would ultimately
become more apparent as time went on because the
persons career would begin to visibly reflect this hidden
dimension. As the person’s career progressed, the emergent
pattern would be an extremely helpful and productive pattern
of activity that could be seen more as a property of the
collective whole rather than just a simple financial pattern.
In many cases, a person’s behavior in their job cannot be
explained according to lower level reasoning. Many physical
properties in nature are the same such as that of molecules
which transmit sound. There aren’t any specific qualities
in the molecules which explain the larger pattern of
behavior such as the transmission of sound. Emergent structures
are patterns seen from a single event or a simple rule
and yet they are still inherent in each individual part of the
system. Although there is nothing that is immediately evident
as an explanation for the behavior, the interactions of
each part in relation to the larger whole lead to an order and
harmony that can be seen by each person.
MONEY
Money is one of the most common explanations that people
use to describe the reasoning behind their job. It is an
extremely simple explanation and yet it is often considered
less than adequate to bring complete happiness in their lives.
“I’ve got to pay the bills” is a simple yet insufficient reason
for obtaining joy and harmony in our work. If we are to experience
real happiness and a strong purpose in our jobs, we
must typically involve ourselves more intimately with our
job performance and make some kind of alternate contribution
either to the larger purpose of the company or to ourselves.
Money plays an important part in this sense but other
factors such as improving our quality of life also plays a role.
Successful people make money. It’s not that people
who make money become successful, but that
successful people attract money. They bring
success to what they do.
– WAYNE DYER
Donald Trump has expressed the importance of money
in terms of “a scorecard that tells me I’ve won and by how
much”. Trump is one of the most successful real estate
developers of the modern age. He is more associated with
wealth and money than even Bill Gates, who is the richest
man in the world. Donald Trump has explained that his
happiness really doesn’t come from the money but from
the business dealings themselves. Trump obtains his joy in
‘making the deal’ and this only happens to generate large
amounts of money as a byproduct. He certainly pays attention
to the money but the real joy is located in the ‘deal’.
If Donald Trump couldn’t make deals, he simply wouldn’t
be happy.
The pattern that emerges in the career of Donald Trump
is one of many successful ‘deal makers’. At first glance,
people see the money as the motivating factor because it is
the simplest and most easy explanation. Of course, the
money scorecard is definitely important but it isn’t the
whole picture. When we look closer, we see a more complex
pattern emerging.
In other fields, money may also have a certain ability to
serve as a scorecard but this scorecard may become less useful
as we move into more subjective fields of work. Art, for
example, is not always judged so well through its monetary
value and yet, it can still be a very good way to make some
initial judgments. In terms of money and our careers, we
will always have to take into consideration the importance
of this simple explanation but this is only an initial way of
seeing the larger pattern in a career. As we begin to focus our
spiritual efforts in our job and career, a larger pattern may
eventually emerge which can bring even greater success.
Part III. Career
GOAL SETTING
One of the most important elements to having a successful
career is to think big. The more you are able to put into
your mind, the better things you are going to achieve. Earl
Nightengale has also said that a person’s common problem
is not that they can’t achieve their goal, but that they never
set the proper goals that they need to be successful. Setting
the right goals is a very big part of achievement itself. A goal
is sort of like having a dream that includes a specific deadline.
The more detailed the goal is, the better. “Having a million
dollars” is a great goal but it isn’t a very detailed one. A
goal needs to explain the useful aspects that are going to
assist you in your achievement.
Daily habits are a great way to fill out the details of a
realistic goal. We have to make sure our work ethic will
match with our dreams and ask ourselves if we are dedicated
enough to carry through with the effort. The financial
rewards are only one small part of a realistic goal. They will
not typically work as a sole motivator in our career.
Attention to spiritual values in our careers can bring about a
more comprehensive practice which can then return to us as
a worthy investment in the future. We will eventually learn
to function in a productive way with the other people in our
lives who will help to make us more successful as we move
along our career path.
The Law of Attraction
things is attracting negative things into our
lives, we begin to feel the attraction to become something
else. We begin to focus on the things we love and this takes
place in greater and greater intensity as we adopt a wider
view of the world around us. We learn to accept things and
to even experience gratitude for the way things are because
this brings more joy and happiness to us. It is a difficult task
at first as our old ways of seeing the world tend to permeate
every area of our lives and negativity has become a very bad
habit. It is even hard, in the beginning, to root out our negative
emotions as their source tends to be very cunning and
hidden from our view. In our work and at home we can especially
see that we have established many bad habits that
keep us stuck in the more narrow fields of consciousness
and the magnetic power of these old ways is very hard to
overcome.
The difficulty of inner work results from the great
effort required to escape from the familiar gravity
of lower attractor fields and move to the influence
of a higher field.
– HAWKINS
In order to arrive at this higher level of consciousness,
we eventually find that we must begin to apply a new awareness
to every aspect of our lives. The spiritual effort
becomes a daily practice that we apply to our careers and
our relationships. At first the efforts seem very difficult but
eventually we come to see that something else has been
working in our lives which is far beyond our own personal
power and has begun helping us along the way. In fact, this
power has been there all along but we were not aware of its
presence until now.
Our careers require extreme amounts of time and effort
in our lives and yet, this area is often relegated to the ‘back
burner’ when we think about spirituality. We think of our
spiritual lives as a time to read or meditate and our careers
as a time to make money and survive. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Our careers are an intricate element of
our spiritual lives and an area that needs considerable attention
if we are going to attract positive energy into our lives.
We will have to learn to think more positively about our
careers if we are going to attract positive energy throughout
our entire day.
A career involves more than just a job. A career involves
a progression or an increase that brings us toward a greater
level of success in our job. This happens by becoming more
advanced in our spiritual pursuits. It is often a surprise to
many people who practice spirituality that some of the most
successful career minded individuals are also some of the
most spiritual people in the world. It is the underlying drive
to succeed that fuels people’s desire to have a career and facing
the daily challenges of a career is a great way to improve
ourselves.
DESTRUCTIVE THINKING
Many people are dead set against money and careers. A
common sentiment is that “money is the root of all evil” and
many Americans believe that the corporations and the government
are only out to exploit people for power and control.
Money is often set in a bad light by those of us who
may study spirituality or religion. The Eastern traditions
often emphasize the importance of being “unattached” to
wealth and success so that many people misunderstand the
intentions of corporations or millionaires who are in possession
of great wealth. Having a lot of money does not necessarily
mean that there is going to be an attachment to money.
Indeed, the Biblical quote alluded to above actually reads
“The love of money is the root of all evil.”29 (1 Timothy 6:
10, my emphasis) Many great millionaires become philanthropists
and help to solve enormous problems all over the
world. It is the attitude that we carry toward wealth and
power that creates the attachment that many religions often
speak of. This is an idea which is very often misunderstood
and which often leads to destructive thinking.
This misconception about the meaning of “attachment”
often leads many people to think that you have to be poor and
unemployed in order to be spiritual. A reverse sort of egotism
can even set up with this kind of thinking where people will
oftentimes see themselves to be ‘better’ than the rich and successful
simply because they don’t have any money or success
themselves. As time goes on, these less fortunate people
become unhappy in their lives because the rewards they
imagined themselves to eventually gain for their commitment
to poverty were somehow not materializing in the way
they had hoped. They become angry at the world as if some
mysterious enemy had taken over their lives and made them
fall into a terrible misfortune. This problem only comes
about as a result of people’s negative thinking. They imagine
a future when everything will fall apart for the rich and successful
and they will get their just rewards. The future never
arrives for having lived a life of poverty and unemployment
and they wonder “What went wrong?”
The attachments of the ego take place in all areas of the
world and not just for the rich and successful minded people.
A career can certainly become a place where people
abuse their powers and exploit the less fortunate people of
the world but it is also a place where the less fortunate can
become bitter and resentful. The world around them simply
becomes dark and hopeless because they never made the
effort to overcome their unfortunate state. They hate the
people in power and resent the larger order that has come to
exist around them. Overcoming this kind of negative thinking
is extremely hard. We have to start to consider the possibility
that powerful people may only be doing their best to
make the world a better place. We may not understand who
the corrupt people are and who the philanthropists are until
we have walked a mile in their shoes. Abetter place to focus
our energies would be in our own lives and on our own negative
thinking. In this way, we may learn to overcome these
destructive thoughts and lead ourselves out of the negative
patterns we have set up in our lives.
CONSTRUCTIVE THINKING
A career is the perfect place to set up your spiritual
workshop because it is an area that requires a great deal of
time and energy everyday and involves almost every aspect
of spiritual principles in order that you make it successful.
Even if you are starting out at the very bottom as a dishwasher
in a hot and dirty kitchen, you can make your career
into an intensely spiritual pursuit that will eventually lead to
other jobs and a more productive career that brings happiness
and joy. Everyone needs a job of some kind in order to feel
productive and the simplest or the most complex jobs
are equally fertile ground for spiritual practices.
The key to long term success is not in the particular job
that you are doing. The key is in working on yourself as you
do your particular job. This is constructive thinking because
it makes it possible to use your time even more productively.
When there is not an extremely important task immediately
at hand, you can focus your mind on the present
moment and simply experience your own inner consciousness.
This effort will eventually widen the attractor field in
which you find yourself and open up greater amounts of
energy into your life. If you make sure and work harder on
yourself than you do on your particular job, success will
surely follow wherever you go. Once you begin dedicating
hours a day to your personal development, your success will
not be far behind.
THE DETAILS OF LIFE
Oftentimes, spiritual enthusiasts may tend to think that it
is ‘ok’ to avoid the details of life because spirituality is associated
with keeping things ‘simple’. We think we should
live simple lives and we can ignore the details. We don’t
worry about mortgages or going to the dentist or sorting
through the mail. We like to wear sandals and meditate. We
like to feed the pigeons and sit on a park bench. Keeping
life simple is certainly an essential spiritual principle but
paying attention to the details of life is also something that
we shouldn’t be afraid of. Looking at the details doesn’t
have to mean looking at the details of ‘worry’ and ‘fear’.
The details can in fact be extremely beautiful.
Here are a few details that we certainly don’t have to worry
about and that don’t help us to move forward in our
lives. First of all, we don’t have to worry about the detail of
“urgency”.
Urgency suggests that things aren’t exactly as
they need to be and therefore the universe has somehow
been created ‘wrong’. This is a negative idea that only feeds
the flames of our discontent. We don’t have to worry about
the detail of “being in a hurry” because we now feel confident
that everything is happening for a reason. Similarly, we
don’t have to worry about the detail of “recognition” or the
detail of “popularity” when we go about making a career for
ourselves. If we have faith in the larger attractor fields, we
know that our just rewards will eventually come to us after
we have taken care of the more important issues at hand.
Finally, we don’t have to worry about the detail of “tomorrow”
and this idea is very eloquently expressed in the first
book of the New Testament.
Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to the
span of your life? ... So do not worry about tomorrow,
for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s
trouble is enough for today.
–MATT. 6:27, 34
Details that consume us never help to accomplish anything
worthwhile in the end and it is easy to overlook the
important details when we are running around like a chicken
with our heads cut off. We may simply be trying too hard
to control the wrong things and so the more important
details tend to elude us. Eventually we have no energy left
for the most important things which are the experience of
joy and happiness in our lives.
Once we’ve learned to look for spiritual truth, we will
begin to find it in every area of our lives. This will especially
be true in terms of the details. The details of a beautiful
flower will be seen in the same way as the details of the pile
of mail at the front door. Even a can of garbage can be seen
as beautiful, as Dr. Hawkins notably states:
One adds the pathway of the heart by making a
decision to be unconditionally loving to all that is
encountered….. This means one has to learn to love
even a garbage can. When seen correctly, garbage cans
are not only loveable but beautiful and perfect……
When the beauty and loveableness of the beat-up old
garbage can reveals itself, the spiritual seeker can
affirm that they are well along the way.
– HAWKINS
After we have calmed down and begun to attract more
positive energies into our lives, all the details of life become
stunningly beautiful and full of promise. We can return to
the details about the mortgage and the dentist which at first
seemed so fraught with worry and fear. We may begin to see
great opportunities in the pile of mail instead of endless
problems and worries in each bill. The details of life provide
us with a great opportunity to experience beauty and joy but
only if we approach them with the right attitude. If we carry
an attitude of worry and fear, the details will also express
this back to us as objects of worry and fear. If we carry an
attitude of joy and gratitude, the details of life will express
these more positive ideas instead.
Little jobs can also be a joy if we learn to practice a
spiritual presence in our lives. A wider success will eventually
come from what first seemed like an unimportant detail in life
and success will become the rule instead of the exception.
Don’t be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are
small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that
much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones
tend to take care of themselves.
– DALE CARNEGIE
Letting the big jobs take care of themselves is a profound
idea but something that should not be misunderstood
in terms of being ‘lazy’ or apathetic. We don’t ignore the
importance of the big jobs when we take on the attention to
the smaller ones. It simply becomes the case that we understand
we aren’t in control of the big jobs. We control only
the little things and keep the big jobs at the forefront of our
awareness. By staying aware of what is ultimately most
important, we actually call this into our lives according to
the law of attraction.
One of the greatest examples of this kind of behavior
can be seen in the activity of thousands of individual ants.
Each of them has one small job to do but they also have a
larger pattern in mind as they work together to create an
elaborate ant colony. Underneath the seemingly small attention
to detail that each ant displays, is the larger vision of the
colony. The queen ant is often seen as the ‘leader’ and yet
she never gives any direct orders to the ants. The queen
doesn’t “tell” the ants what to do. Each ant reacts to its own
individual scent and leaves its own chemical trail which provides
a stimulus to the other ants. This is the law of
attraction working in each ant’s life.
Genetics and other factors
certainly play a role in the “decisions” of each ant but there
is still an autonomous presence in each ant so that they can
make their own decisions within the larger framework.
Despite the lack of a central “leader”, ant colonies still
have an amazingly complex pattern of behavior and individual
ants have even been shown to be capable of solving
complex geometric problems. An example of this is the fact
that ants commonly determine the furthest distance from
each of the entrances to their hills in order to know where
the best place to dispose of their dead. The ants individually
measure the distance between hills in order to locate the
grave sites for other ants. This is a higher order of consciousness
at work and something that reflects the greater
good of each member of the colony.
This larger vision of order and harmony that can be seen
in the behavior of ants and many other groups of animals, is
a necessary element behind the energy which contributes to
the completion of even the smallest jobs in our world. The
larger spiritual energy fields are acted on through the individual
attention to the smaller details in life. These more
detailed jobs become the active purpose of our daily experience
through their connection to the larger purpose. The
larger vision fuels the smaller attention to detail and each of
us can then move along to a greater and greater awareness
of what is.
EMERGENCE IN CAREER
In science, the concept of ‘emergence’ can be used to
describe the way small jobs are ultimately related to their
larger attractor fields. This concept of emergence helps to
explain how these smaller, simpler tasks receive a spiritual
energy through their connection to the larger whole. This is
the idea that more complex patterns arise from the more
simple details of our behavior.
For an activity to be thought of as ‘emergent’ it is generally
seen as unpredictable from a lower level. To the casual
observer, it may appear as though the person is simply doing
a very menial task that is unimportant. It is unpredictable
and unprecedented, however, when the reasons for this simple
behavior become more apparent in terms of a larger
scheme. Although they cannot be explained by reference to
typical explanations, a more complex explanation helps
them to make sense.
In a typical job, a common reason for taking that job
may be ‘money’ or ‘opportunity for promotion’. These are
common ideas that serve as simple reasons for going to
work. They are fairly simplistic but are still commonly held
to be the driving force behind many people’s careers. If a
person is doing the job in order to increase their spiritual
connection, however, this may represent a new level in the
system’s evolution. This would be an example of an emergent
pattern that could not be readily observable from simply
looking at the individual person. It is a pattern that gives
a greater significance to the person’s job and would ultimately
become more apparent as time went on because the
persons career would begin to visibly reflect this hidden
dimension. As the person’s career progressed, the emergent
pattern would be an extremely helpful and productive pattern
of activity that could be seen more as a property of the
collective whole rather than just a simple financial pattern.
In many cases, a person’s behavior in their job cannot be
explained according to lower level reasoning. Many physical
properties in nature are the same such as that of molecules
which transmit sound. There aren’t any specific qualities
in the molecules which explain the larger pattern of
behavior such as the transmission of sound. Emergent structures
are patterns seen from a single event or a simple rule
and yet they are still inherent in each individual part of the
system. Although there is nothing that is immediately evident
as an explanation for the behavior, the interactions of
each part in relation to the larger whole lead to an order and
harmony that can be seen by each person.
MONEY
Money is one of the most common explanations that people
use to describe the reasoning behind their job. It is an
extremely simple explanation and yet it is often considered
less than adequate to bring complete happiness in their lives.
“I’ve got to pay the bills” is a simple yet insufficient reason
for obtaining joy and harmony in our work. If we are to experience
real happiness and a strong purpose in our jobs, we
must typically involve ourselves more intimately with our
job performance and make some kind of alternate contribution
either to the larger purpose of the company or to ourselves.
Money plays an important part in this sense but other
factors such as improving our quality of life also plays a role.
Successful people make money. It’s not that people
who make money become successful, but that
successful people attract money. They bring
success to what they do.
– WAYNE DYER
Donald Trump has expressed the importance of money
in terms of “a scorecard that tells me I’ve won and by how
much”. Trump is one of the most successful real estate
developers of the modern age. He is more associated with
wealth and money than even Bill Gates, who is the richest
man in the world. Donald Trump has explained that his
happiness really doesn’t come from the money but from
the business dealings themselves. Trump obtains his joy in
‘making the deal’ and this only happens to generate large
amounts of money as a byproduct. He certainly pays attention
to the money but the real joy is located in the ‘deal’.
If Donald Trump couldn’t make deals, he simply wouldn’t
be happy.
The pattern that emerges in the career of Donald Trump
is one of many successful ‘deal makers’. At first glance,
people see the money as the motivating factor because it is
the simplest and most easy explanation. Of course, the
money scorecard is definitely important but it isn’t the
whole picture. When we look closer, we see a more complex
pattern emerging.
In other fields, money may also have a certain ability to
serve as a scorecard but this scorecard may become less useful
as we move into more subjective fields of work. Art, for
example, is not always judged so well through its monetary
value and yet, it can still be a very good way to make some
initial judgments. In terms of money and our careers, we
will always have to take into consideration the importance
of this simple explanation but this is only an initial way of
seeing the larger pattern in a career. As we begin to focus our
spiritual efforts in our job and career, a larger pattern may
eventually emerge which can bring even greater success.
Part III. Career
GOAL SETTING
One of the most important elements to having a successful
career is to think big. The more you are able to put into
your mind, the better things you are going to achieve. Earl
Nightengale has also said that a person’s common problem
is not that they can’t achieve their goal, but that they never
set the proper goals that they need to be successful. Setting
the right goals is a very big part of achievement itself. A goal
is sort of like having a dream that includes a specific deadline.
The more detailed the goal is, the better. “Having a million
dollars” is a great goal but it isn’t a very detailed one. A
goal needs to explain the useful aspects that are going to
assist you in your achievement.
Daily habits are a great way to fill out the details of a
realistic goal. We have to make sure our work ethic will
match with our dreams and ask ourselves if we are dedicated
enough to carry through with the effort. The financial
rewards are only one small part of a realistic goal. They will
not typically work as a sole motivator in our career.
Attention to spiritual values in our careers can bring about a
more comprehensive practice which can then return to us as
a worthy investment in the future. We will eventually learn
to function in a productive way with the other people in our
lives who will help to make us more successful as we move
along our career path.
The Law of Attraction
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