Success and Heaven on Earth

My definition of success changed the day I first saw the above image.  It’s the Egyptian Weighing of the Heart Ceremony.  The deceased must have a heart as light as a feather, or they cannot gain entrance to heaven.  This wasn’t the judgment day scene I’d been taught; it was the best guidance for living life I’d ever encountered.  It was the truth.  It’s still my favorite image, and I intend to share everything I learned from it in a book.  So I’ll just leave it at that for now.

On that sweet day, years of unsuccessful research suddenly fell into place like a puzzle magically assembling itself.  I realized that the false self has a physical focus and hears the judgment day message as something which occurs ONLY at death; the True Self has a mental focus, and views the message as a guide for life.  If our True Self leads, our life becomes orderly.  Problems and suffering disappear.

Success as a Currency

Success is defined by society based on false physical/material standards.  Famous or wealthy people are successful.  A big house or nice car renders us successful.  Certain labels mean success.  Our body matching popular standards means success.

Just like the amount of money in our bank account defines our financial worth, our measure of success becomes our personal worth.  False selves honor the material definitions that give them the greatest worth in the illusion.  So, we spin around, chasing false material desires, to potentially be labeled worthy.  When we fulfill those false desires, we still don’t feel worthy because we haven’t gotten our mind right.  The physical is the effect of the mental, not the other way around.

There are also intangible currencies like being nice, doing good deeds, saying socially acceptable words, serving our country, or fitting in.  These are based on achieving a proper physical appearance.  We’re want others to judge us as successful, good, or right.  If we’re honest, our judging God is actually a complex of our human authority figures’ belief systems.  We become imprisoned by their success currency; we either submit to the definitions or rebel against them.  Submission and rebellion become our dreaded bottom of the triangle.

Success Defined Correctly 

The correct definition of success is mentally oriented.  We want our mind to measure up to our perfect inner standards.  Then whatever we express will be perfect.  We become the masters of our life, and only our life.

After staring at the above image for hours, I wrote down my OWN definition of success:    If anyone could cut my mind open, they would find nothing but unconditional love and truth.  It’s not very complex.  I never made it my brand.  Recently, I realized that I needed to share this; I saw people I mentor getting stuck on this very point.  Defining success in this way turned my life upside down; I had to remember unconditional love and truth as they were before I dove into the illusion.

People think unconditional love is caretaking, sympathy, tolerance, sex, making someone feel good, being kind and submissive, fighting for your country, believing mom and dad’s harmful advice, and not saying fuck.  Those are all examples of conditional love.  Unconditional love exposed and dissolved every false crack and crevice in my mind.  But now, I could no longer sympathize, enable someone’s beliefs, or have national, cultural, or social pride because I would be contributing to the illusion.  Unconditional love turns our world upside down.  Unconditional love and truth (along with all other True Self qualities) were powers that were hijacked by the false self and redefined.  Supporting anyone’s false self was hate, not love.

Creating this mental definition of success was infinitely more demanding than creating material goals.  It required disabling my will and letting go of everything I believed.  It demanded that I honor my emotions completely.  It also made others, who still had a physically oriented perspective, uncomfortable.  They couldn’t project their emotions on me anymore, and I didn’t look up to them.  It takes lots of practice to live this way.  But it’s worth it.

You might think, “Cathy, where’s freedom?”  You always talk about freedom.  Returning the powers of love and truth to the True Self allows for freedom.  My definition guides everything I do.  It’s my North Star.  The unconditional love gives me courage to speak up.  Truth allows me to honor my emotions and know what’s false.

Your Turn

How do you want your mind to be?  Do you want it filled with creative ideas or bursting with beauty?  Do you want it to sprout fun ideas for inventions?  Do you want a quiet, peaceful, and free mind?   What makes you, YOU?  Living from YOUR definition of mental success is the only way to be free and eternally joyful in the physical world.

Next, you must let go of all physical definitions of success that you’ve believed.  They’re ALL bullshit.  Suddenly, those supermodels you admired look artificial.  The billionaires look like crooks.  The muscle men look deformed.  Competitive athletes look barbaric.  Gurus look like big egos, the very thing they claim not to have (LOL).  You’ll take back your own True Self.  We actually project our True Self on false selves who fit society’s definition of success when we look up to them and believe them.  They look good only because we see our OWN True Self in them.  Take away that false halo, and they’re impostors.  Projecting our True Self is just as handicapping as projecting the unloveable parts of our false self.

The big secret is that there’s no outer judge on a cloud who decides if we go to heaven or hell when (or I prefer if) we die.  The judge is inside of us; it’s weighing our heart each moment against our own True Self’s measure of success.  We decide if we spend today in heaven or hell.  That’s freedom.

Image credit:  [URL=http://media.photobucket.com/user/mafiashaolin/media/JudgementDay.jpg.html][IMG]http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g127/mafiashaolin/JudgementDay.jpg[/IMG][/URL]