What is your scale for measuring success in life? Is it about accumulating wealth, name and fame and power? Or is it about achieving the esoteric ultimate experience of enlightenment?
Many of us are taught by society to see success in the outer world in the form of career, happy relationships and contributions to community. We are also reminded of the importance of success in our inner world on the spiritual plane. Some people actually think that they are mutually exclusive i.e. one can only travel towards one tangent, either the material life or spiritual life. No! The truth is life is choicelessness, choosing to travel in one tangent only brings suffering because you will be missing the other dimension in life.
Life is about continuous expansion to embrace all dimensions. The moment we resist expansion, we are moving toward contraction, death itself. According to Paramahamsa Nithyananda, he defined success in 3 levels in life – i) Individual level: what you think as success, ii) Societal level: what society wants or thinks as your success and finally iii) Cosmic level: what Cosmos thinks as your success.
Most people think that there is a conflict with the 3 aspects of success. Some people think that they can be successful individually but not at the Cosmic level. Some people who can’t achieve individual success but thinking they have Cosmic success, they go on justifying their poverty in the name of spirituality. They create theories like poverty is sacred, they feel blessed for being poor. These people are cheating themselves by adding sacredness to their incapability and ignorance.
To have success in life, we require 3 levels of re-wiring of our brain:-
The first shift in our cognition is only an intelligent being creates the need only based on the seeds available inside. Our need should be based on the seed we carry inside. Only unconscious being carries the greed beyond the seed he carries. We need to find out what bio memories we carry in this birth. By aligning ourselves to what we call as success is life. Life is not confined to only the waking state. Life encompasses all 3 states of consciousness – waking state, dream state and deep sleep state. Whatever discontentment we have individually in life, we repair it during our sleep. That is why our dreams and sleep are closely related to our waking state. It is during the sleep that we start weeding out the discontentment within, and re-program our inner space. So if we work on completing self daily prior to sleep, we will not only have high quality deep sleep, we will also start reducing the time we spend in the dream state. When this happens, we will experience individual success. Individual success is about taking individual responsibility of your body, mind and lifestyle and expanding the space of what you feel as you.
The second shift in cognition is to understand the success that society wants us to have in whatever field we choose. Aligning ourselves to what society calls as success is work. To do this, we must first drop the innate hatred we carry about social recognition i.e. the dichotomy of wanting social success yet not willing to bend for something which society demands. Whether we like it or not, we are going to spend 8 hours per day to work or else we fall into depression through laziness and constant fatigue. The key is to maintain the freedom in the way you engage with society, this comes only when you are clear about what you want in your life. Fundamentally, by our nature, one third of our day is spent on moving around and creation. If we spend 8 hours per day in intelligent working i.e. intensely planning and working, social success is guaranteed.
The third shift in cognition is achieving what Cosmos defines as success which is experiencing the ONENESS with Universal Spirit. Aligning ourselves to Cosmic success is sadhana (spiritual practice). This requires us to go beyond the impermanence of life and by intensely connecting to the space of Existential reality through practices such as rituals like puja, mantra chanting and internalising life’s deeper secrets and being in completion with life.
In essence, our life should express towards work and sadhana. Each individual has to figure out these 3 levels of success for himself or herself. By our nature, human beings are hard-wired to flow towards all these 3 aspects. Choosing one over the other is not considered true success in life. It is important for us to create the right inner space for these 3 aspects to be in synchrony without conflict. If we are able to live an expanded life with all 3 aspects flowing in harmony, we live as fulfilled beings. Namaste. 🙂