This topic is crucial, and therefore has to be dealt with straightaway, to orientate you effectively for the changes you need to make. I get that you will react negatively to it, to the need to read it, and may even be tempted to skip over and go to something with a better ‘click bait’ friendly title. PLEASE DON’T, please read this..
See, you won’t read this in your average spiritual self help book (they are oblivious, see it as an absolute thing you have or you don’t) or even ancient text (they expect you to know), so I’ve done this to get you out of the blocks as quick as possible, rather than wallow around trying to figure ‘yourself’ out…
To be super clear – Motivation, in so much of life but PARTICULARITY spirituality, is EVERYTHING. Remember this, its important – your motivation at the beginning of spiritual practice is SO crucial to progress, so much so that your motivation actually IS your spiritual practice. Please get this – the best form of your DESIRE TO DO is same as the what you NEED TO DO itself, its the same thing.
Intellectually all motivation to something new or challenging comes from ‘curiosity’, which in itself come from a sense of ‘Open mindedness’ and ‘Bravery’. And that’s nice, but in our modern mainstream world we have ‘choices’, many MANY choices and we are worn out by them, kept so busy by them that we are often looking NOT to have to make them unless we have too, not to have to try. We can easily sedate, distract ourselves from having to do anything that requires effort, and that is what we tend to do – if we don’t urgently need to do it. We have become weak, saving our (not so) precious time in order to ‘relax’, but we have loads of time to spend if we remove the ‘need’ to relax ‘in order’ to enjoy our lives! You are WAY BETTER OFF finding a way to ENJOY what you do, then there is no need to relax and do nothing – spiritual practice is the best type of rest and relation there is.. Indeed, the generic goal of dead, soporific ‘relaxation’, the aim of most people’s lives is a curse, and I mean that to sound hard. To point your entire existence at a process that allows you, in a small way, some precious time to relax, for your leisure, is the mentality of a ‘slave’, pure and simple.
Crucially, most people now understand ‘motivation’ as a form of ‘desperation’, as the usual customers of both modern and ancient religion are ‘motivated’ enough by their desperation because they CAN’T relax anymore, they HAVE to TRY, push through all the negative perceptions and personal resistance that everyone initially has to spiritual practice, and I mean ‘everyone’ has, and do whatever it took to get ‘something’ out of it. Be clear – Motivation is everything.. but it should NOT be a form of ‘desperation’, motivation cannot be effectively maintained as a form of aversion, it HAS to be positive.
Now, motivation is a tricky beast.. to paraphrase the immortal words of Napoleon – folks are moved by two levers only, fear and self Interest. But in my experience that’s not quite it.. see to me ‘motivation’ is more complex, working more like Nuclear Fusion than a simple mental test performed on every decision, based on the balance of how attracted and repelled you are at that moment, motivation is more about power, the power to start and finish what you have started.
Fusion, the basic concept of ‘forcing’ 2 elements together to make a new one of less combined mass, with the excess mass being released as usable energy, is the holy grail of modern science for good reason – free energy for everyone. The problem is that overcoming the electrostatic charge that repels the elements and stops them combining requires massive amount of force, which is fine in the center of a star, but harder to come by on the surface of our little planet. Indeed the only reliable use of fusion as its stands is in super powerful atomic weapons, and even that requires so much energy they have to first use a fission nuclear bomb to provide enough energy to detonate the fusion bomb.
Now stay with me here.. the reason I like the model of fusion for motivation is this – the repelling electrostatic charge is not the whole story, see there is another much stronger force, they call it the nuclear force, that is actually pulling the elements together, its just that it only works at incredibly short range (effectively holding all matter, and hence the universe together), unlike the weaker electrostatic one which works at infinite distance. So, this pathetic little electrostatic force succeeds by simply keeping matter ‘at a big enough distance’, so matter never gets a chance to ‘naturally’ fuse together. But… there is a ‘threshold’, where if you can push the elements close enough together, just for an instant, passed that threshold, the nuclear force takes over, in the broad strokes crushing the particles together, creating a new element and fusion effectively ‘happens by itself’, and with the right set of circumstances becomes a chain reaction.
This is how motivation works, if you can generate enough pressure in yourself to do something that overs comes your weak but very persistent resistance, you can easily do things you otherwise would not – once you have broken your resistance to ‘starting’, your ‘underlying’ desire, your attraction to it takes over and provides the force to continue. See in my experience the interplay of your intellectual desire and resistance creates an almost literal fence, barrier, stockade in your mind to progress, and you simply can’t ‘think’ your way past it, so you get stuck, locked, frozen into a state of apathy.
So the fundamental point is this – to be successful your motivational force MUST be in ADDITION to the basic intellectual attraction, the short range desire, to achieve your goal, OTHERWISE it is simply not going to work – if you don’t use something else to push yourself closer to your goal the weaker but way more persistent repelling power will win out. That’s the trick to this…
And this is how it works in the world.. successful people are motivated either by others or themselves by ADDING an additional short, sharp ‘push’ to get them over the ‘hump’ of their resistance to ‘start’ and then they are away.. for a while. The issue remains, which is the real key to all this, of providing that additional short, sharp motivating force ON DEMAND, indeed ALL the time.
And its a simple trick, as long as you remember this additional force of motivation is a FEELING, a form of energy, its not intellectual in the sense you understand it now, indeed using further intellectual forces in the form of additional attractive thoughts about your goal tends to generate more intellectual repulsion at the same time, hence you tend to build that fence even higher over time.. Motivation is a ‘feeling’, or more correctly a ‘state of mind’, which is a collection of all your current feelings..
See however much you can look down on the ‘desperate’ of the world, that very desperation provides the continual force, that strength of feeling, emotion or mood to push past their resistance, and hence why they can motivate themselves to engage continually, which gets them in the door of spiritual practice and down the road some. They are not analyzing the pros and cons, they NEED to try something, so why not this.. However, when that pressure in that cooker lessens, declines, usually after they have made a little bit of progress, when they start to feel better, their motivation goes, which explains why the desperate don’t get very far into ‘real’ spirituality…
So, much as Napoleon is undoubtedly correct in a basic sense (and he always is..), what we need to do is provide you with a reliable, repeatable motivating force to get you into the world of real spirituality, otherwise this is not going to work. Be clear, this is NOT an engineering problem, its not about strengthening your desire or lessening your resistance as I’ve already said, its about improving your leverage OVER both of them with a 3rd force, that’s total separate from them, that’s exists as a form of feeling.
So you get this? Motivation is a independent 3rd force outside of intellectual process of like and dislike, that pushes you forward, that has a strong bias for action. That is what you need to develop, that is what I need to help you develop. Trust me, I’m not going to try and ‘make’ you ‘desperate’, not going to use the fear of ‘hell’ or ‘life after death’, that’s for the world of ‘normal’ spirituality, of organised religions, that’s for people who don’t want to feel ‘bad’ anymore, they want relief. Its way too unreliable as you will stop as soon as you don’t feel so bad anymore. Desperation to achieve anything, no matter how justified or warranted is really the beginning of failure. I’m going to teach you a form of motivational force that is of itself a form of practice, teach you one of the killer methods that exists in the real world of spirituality.
I’m going to go way beyond simple motivational tricks and teach you ‘ENTHUSIASM’ as a spiritual practice. And it will change your life forever, you will simply never be the ‘same’ again.
Enthusiasm is a wonderful word, one of the few ancient Greek ones in the English language that still largely retains a spiritual meaning in the dictionary – to ‘feel’ the abundant energy and drive that comes from your own spiritual power. See enthusiasm is a ‘thing’ in itself, something that has a tangible existence, a level or quantity. It has many other names in various spiritual traditions of the world, but I’m going to stick to this one, as with all my writings for you thus far, its important to relate it to your actual experience, rather than some ‘dead’, esoteric metaphysical concept.
However the use of Enthusiasm has been polluted by a terrible effect you see a lot with old words in the English language – its common meaning has subtly evolved to represent what Enthusiasm ‘looks’ like, rather than what it is, rather than the personal experience of it. Enthusiasm, to most people, now means to ‘passionately encourage’, to shout positive advice to others like a soccer mum on a Saturday morning. That’s not true, so be clear – it does NOT mean you become some sort of demented, ever happy Pollyanna type character, who runs the local scout group or children’s football team, as that is manufactured for a purpose.
Enthusiasm is about literally ’empowering’ you to do whatever you choose, because its hugely ENJOYABLE just to DO anything YOU have DECIDED to do. Indeed, you ‘want’ to do stuff, you are energized, fresh and don’t care much for sitting around on your ass.. In the normal world now only children are truly enthusiastic, and we loose ‘touch’ with it at a relatively early age, as soon as our minds become clouded by thoughts of self doubt and fear, and the endless ‘over thinking’ that creates. Indeed the burden of our thoughts, our memories, of our ohh so precious sense of self literally ‘uses’ our Enthusiasm, our spiritual power up.
Enthusiasm is an intensely private and personal feeling, a ‘self possessed’ feeling, a confident feeling, a powerful feeling, but most of all, in adults, its a SEXY feeling, feeling of being attractive, special. Indeed the key reason Enthusiasm works for anyone is that it puts you directly ‘in touch’ with your spiritual power, the power directly behind your libido, your sex drive, the manifestation of the power of life itself, both in terms of the feeling of ‘building it’ and ‘using it’. Remember this please – the feeling of enthusiasm IS the FEELING of your spiritual POWER. But, as an adult, you have both lost the ability to feel it directly and are literally wasting it every day, diminishing it, so its just not that strong anymore. And that’s bad thing..
In that way your motivation becomes your spiritual practice – the more you do it the better it gets, and the better it gets the more you do it, its a positive feedback loop, as all the best spiritual methods are.
So…. I’m going to show you how to motivate yourself to do anything you choose by getting back in touch and developing the 3rd force that is your ENTHUSIASM for life. This is a spiritual practice in itself as just by feeling enthusiasm you both build it up over time and it ‘improves’ you. I’m going to do that by teaching you how to manage your feelings, or more correctly your ‘state of mind’, as per the next post.
Excited? you should be… but that’s it for today – please read over this a few times, it’s that important.
The quote for today is a famous, but very apt one, from another sex mad genius, with a bit of a drug problem to go with it, its about the reason you NEED to explore your ‘state of mind’:
‘When a inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.’ – Carl Jung.
Laters..
TOB
