By Cathy Eck 

Inspiration or Motivation

I became possessed by this topic nearly thirty years ago as a business owner.  Some rare employees loved their work and needed no motivation to do a stellar job.  Most did their jobs well but did better with incentives, and some couldn’t be moved with a forklift.  They were apathetic and had no motivation.  All problems came from the last group.

My curiosity prompted me to  enroll in a Master’s Degree program in Transpersonal Psychology (because I still thought the answers were outside of me).  I wanted to help this last group and eliminate our problems; but I also wanted to make sure that my children fell into the first group.  I realized that those who required no external motivation lived from the inside out — from inspiration.  The inspired ones were the happy ones.

Most of the world lives from the outside in.  Something good happens, and they are happy.  Something bad happens, and they are sad.  They are emotionally tossed about by the world, never able to stay happy for long unless they micro-manage their life.

I first noticed this watching my mother and her supposed love for football.  When her team won, life was good.  When her team lost, I wished I lived on another planet.    As a young child, I couldn’t understand how a football team could affect her moods in such a profound way.  Enjoying football is great; letting football ruin your day or week is insanity.  I wanted my dad to get her therapy, but my dad said she was normal.  “Normal, my ass,”  I thought.  The seed to understand the link between thoughts and emotions was probably planted in my childhood family room.

What About Passion?

My mother would have said that she was passionate about football and her team.  She was inspired to watch football, and she almost sounded reasonable.  But I later learned that inspiration doesn’t drag your ass around and make you crazy.

Even the best of psychology looks outside for the cause, so it is doubtful that therapy would have helped my mother.  They would have told her to pick a better team.

If people are out of work, it’s the economy’s fault.  If they are sick, germs, toxins, or an unhealthy lifestyle caused it.  Wars are caused by terrorists.  But the real insanity is that people go to speakers or clergy to get motivated or inspired.  No one says to themselves, “Gee, this might be backwards” because we are trained so well to think this way.  And don’t even get me started on the notion that God is outside of us handing out rewards and punishments like Santa Claus.

We are all born inspired.  Children don’t need motivation to learn to crawl or walk.  Plants don’t need motivation to pop out of the soil.  We are hard-wired for growth and exploration.  Inspiration handles life nicely until humans tell us to do what they want us to do; then we need motivation.  My conclusion, with my third group of apathetic employees was simply that they were in the wrong career.  I did them a favor; I fired them.

Initiation Reverses Our Direction

The initiates said that everything has a cause, and the cause is always in our own mind.  Even the person who just cut you off on the freeway couldn’t have done it without a belief in your mind (which might appear to be unconscious) that allowed him or her into your world.  This is why abusers groom their prey; they have to insert a belief in their prey’s mind for the abuse to occur.

There is always a causal belief for anything in our life.  It sounds crazy when you’ve never heard that before, and it is painful to go down this alley because we feel so responsible. We have to remember that we borrowed the beliefs that got us into this mess from others because we came to this earth as innocent children without discrimination. We didn’t do anything wrong.  At the same time, once we know better; we need to reverse the damage.

When I finally understood this, I found it sort of funny because I realized that in the beginning, it must have been extremely hard to get people not to follow their inspiration.  As I’ve worked on my own mind, I’ve seen tricks, traps, and blind spots indicating that our history was filled with instances of the collective false mind nearly losing to the True Self.  So the gamemasters had to install a patch in the software.  They had to invent yet another religion or create a new dictator or rewrite history in some bizzaar way to make sure that we didn’t figure out that we are powerful, unlimited beings who don’t have to do what they want us to do.  The elite, rich, and powerful of the world are nothing without the slaves that do their work for them.  When you realize that, you lose your motivation do serve them.

Quite frankly,  initiation would take an hour or a day if we didn’t have so much training in living from motivation.  Everyone is looking for answers out there, when the answers are inside of them.  It is the ultimate mental trick.  As we let go of beliefs, our focus moves inward to the center where life is calm and consistent.  When a wheel turns, if you are on the rim, you get a wild ride; but if you stand right in the center, you barely move at all.

Thus, initiates were described as calm, peaceful, and wise.  They didn’t display emotions.  But this wasn’t because they had slick poker-faced personalities.  They had no emotions because they had no beliefs.  They simply weren’t being tossed and turned by the chaos of the world.  They created their lives from the inside out, and lived from the center of the wheel.

Santa or Satan, same letters, and both are embedded in the illusion of Santa.