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Remember that you cannot act outside of your dharma and be happy over the long term. You cannot pretend to be someone else and find lasting success, because that is a crime against wisdom. The root of all dis-ease is crimes against wisdom, which pull you away from your core purpose. Deception, anxiety Positive Emotion: Sloth, jealousy Positive Emotion: Anger, pride Positive Emotion: My follow-up question is this: In reality, both of these are in us.
Which one we express determines how the world sees us. So which part of you do you want your potential mate to meet first? The answer is obvious, but many of us have forgotten how to be ourselves. The best way to do this is to know your role in any interaction, and your dharma type is the compass that will help you find it. Let it show you your role and lead you to your true self. In any interaction, each dharma type has a purpose.
An Educator should give people more wisdom and guidance than they had before. No matter what the situation, your role as an Educator is to create understanding. Be that compassionate, nonjudgmental, peacemaking Educator and see what happens the next time you talk to the guy at the bus stop or the lady across the counter. Educators are deeply passionate, but emotionalism should not rule your interactions. Think of Gandhi or your favorite teacher or priest: Educators are exemplars of truth, purity, and wisdom, and always leave you knowing more than before you met them.
Kick the tires, take it for a spin, and see what happens. Warriors are born to protect that which cannot protect itself. They are made to lead, and qualified to do so because they also know how to follow orders. As a Warrior, your role in any interaction is to offer solutions to problems and take control, if necessary, to get the job done.
This should not be in an aggressive or boisterous way, because aggression is a sign of weakness. The best Warrior gets things done quietly, efficiently, with the fewest casualties and the most benefit for all involved. From protecting health by combating disease or teaching yoga to fighting for human rights, the smartest Warriors choose their battles. Pick the smart fight and finish one job before starting the next. Whether you give a compliment, a gift, or a free backrub is entirely up to you, but in your next interaction, see how you can bring shakti, positive energy, to others.
You are the happiness broker to the world, dear Merchant, and there is no job as delightful and easy as yours, so get to it! You will find that your own happiness is linked to how much you give to others. This is the ironclad law of cause and effect that every evolved Merchant learns: As a Laborer you love to care for and nurture friends and family, and when you approach everyone as potential family you will grow your circle wider than ever.
Think of Mother Teresa and Oprah Winfrey: And when you have your family around you, you get the security and sense of belonging you need. Outsiders combine different elements to forge innovative solutions to long-standing problems. Dear Outsider, discover and share your unique expression; you will benefit others and yourself. The key to attracting your ideal mate lies in having a larger vision for your life. What matters is that you are engaged in pursuing your dharma. Once you understand the core tenets of your dharma type, you can maximize your potential and minimize your weak points by evolving.
To do this, find which type you tend to evolve into see below. Each of us has a complementary archetype that represents the qualities we need to incorporate to become the best we can be. Instead, by taking on qualities of their complementary type, they become the best they can be. Educators evolve when they take on qualities of the Warrior, like discipline and the ability to stick to a goal. Merchants evolve into Laborers and vice versa, because each one has what the other needs. Laborers are sometimes too closed off from the world and need the fun and variety of the Merchant type to bring them out of their shells.
Merchants, for their part, learn stability from the Laborer. When types devolve their worst qualities emerge and their talents are prevented from coming to the fore. However, all factors being equal, these types are not as well-suited for these jobs. When Educators devolve into Laborers, they become stuck in a mode of thinking or attached to their knowledge in an egotistical way.
When Laborers take on Educator values, they lose their own inherent strength and intuition. Educators think with their heads, Laborers with their guts. Switching these around creates confusion and leads you away from your dharma. When Warriors devolve into the Merchant type, their strength turns to bravado, and instead of championing a noble cause they glorify themselves, fighting for the highest bidder. They become mercenaries to money, which often favors the strong, going against their dharma to protect the just and the defenseless.
Merchants devolving into Warriors paint a similar picture of unnecessary force in the name of currency, not courage. Medicine is by and large a Warrior profession; it takes Warrior doctors to fight on behalf of patients against a common enemy—disease. In a Merchant society, however, doctors find it difficult to practice medicine the way they would like to.
America is a Merchant nation, and it has a poor record of dealing with its Warriors—both those on the battlefield as well as those working in the trenches of its health care system. In contemporary America, hospitals have become more like sales centers for the corporations that own them than centers of healing. This is evidenced by the practices they follow: Such practices may work for car dealerships but not for healing institutions, which is why the results have been catastrophic: You can never become another dharma type, but you learn much by absorbing the energy of the dharma type that promotes your evolution.
This does not mean that you should avoid dharma types that encourage your devolution. However, being around them is less conducive to your personal growth because devolution pairs speak very different languages. Take special care to communicate exactly what you mean around types you devolve into because the potential for misunderstanding in these situations is high. Imagine that they are from another city, country, or even another planet, because, for some intents and purposes, they are!
Slow, careful communication will ensure that your intentions are understood and will head off potential problems before they arise. As an Educator, I know firsthand that one of the hardest things for my type is walking the walk, following through on the precepts we counsel others to embrace. But for Educators to grow into their dharma, they must actually live what they preach.
Martin Luther King Jr. A look at examples like Dr. King and Gandhi—the latter an Educator, the former an Outsider playing an Educator—reveals the power Educators harness when they live their purpose instead of just talking about it. When I started practicing every principle I counseled others to follow, my life opened up.
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Educators may read fitness articles but never actually do the work, claiming their job or family limits their time. For Educators to evolve they must take on Warrior traits. You need to move, walk, ride, and tone your body so your mind will be firm. Express your passion through movement and creativity; your work life and your love life will flow more smoothly.
A Merchant might look at the corporate ladder and try stepping on everyone to reach the top. This is devolution into the Warrior. Building friendships and cultivating people who owe you favors is a much smoother way to the top than making enemies.
Just as with cause and effect, you gotta give to get. So get going giving! For Merchants to evolve, they need to make something real in order to appreciate its value. The price of a house or a stock depends on the market. Value is an idea, one often linked to emotion. But a brick is a brick, a turnip is a turnip. Once Merchants connect to the process of building a house or preparing a home-cooked meal, they begin to appreciate the value of shelter and good diet.
Merchants do well to get in touch with the Earth element, and taking a cooking class, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or learning a trade are great ways for them to ground themselves in their Laborer point of evolution. A Laborer trying to outsmart her date with tricks and trivia is going to crash and burn. This could mean anything from horseback riding touch to having wholesome, down-home food smell and taste. Communication via body language is much stronger than communication through words.
Which do you want to use to say what you really want? For Laborers, lightening up and enjoying themselves is a first step to evolution. Taking a salsa class, traveling, singing, and playing, especially in a communal spirit, uplifts the Laborer type. By evolving into Merchants, Laborers also find their own true worth. By evolving into the Merchant, you learn to stand up for your skills and get your due in society.
Other Merchant values involve learning the money game and how economics works, from compound interest to real estate. Taking a financial literacy class, for example, is a great way to get a grasp on money matters and manage your finances. But when Warriors cultivate money and power for self-serving reasons or at the cost of their higher purpose, their spirit wilts. Such Warriors die early of heart attacks or fall into vices like gambling or drinking.
Being successful is fine, as long as you also fight malaria in Africa or devote time to eradicating illiteracy in the inner city. It means that a new, higher idea is trying to emerge through old conditioned thinking. I invite you to use this as an opportunity to dig your roots deeper into your true self through journaling and further contemplation. Often, this results in breakthrough insights, life-changing paradigm shifts, and new ways of seeing and being in the world.
Let the seeds of these ideas fall upon the fertile soil of your soul, water them with your willingness to grow, and keep plowing forward. This is a path of revelation; you will be revealed to yourself. So what happened to Bonnie? The thing she thought she needed—improving her business—did not happen. Instead, she got a job that paid the bills, which gave her enough relief to get back in touch with one of her true loves—music.
I just reconnected to that part of me that was already whole, my true self, had a feeling of my innate completeness, and then surrendered my control of the outcome. Warriors require more protein and fewer carbohydrates to feel their best. But this is an overly literal interpretation of ancient teachings. Grab hold of them and they can stop a downward spiral away from your true spiritual self. American society thinks nothing of pursuing education ten hours a day in classroom and homework time for many years, and American society thinks nothing of pursuing athletic excellence through many hours of practice every day year after year.
We are born blank slates, empty shells, and must make something of ourselves—internally and externally. Whether or not you consciously buy into that B. Meeting our expanding needs is a necessary and even noble goal, but if the underlying beliefs and value systems guiding it are in opposition to the fundamental harmony of the universe, it will ultimately result in more suffering and limitation, and a disconnect from our true selves. So, what does the acorn principle have to do with this?
For one, it reveals how to harness the power of the universe rather than oppose it. By understanding this aspect of Mother Nature, you will discover a vital clue to your own nature and how you were designed to grow. The Principle of Correspondence, a Hermetic law, states: The identification of this principle, along with other correlations in interdisciplinary studies, led some scientists and philosophers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Albert Einstein, to the conclusion that the same processes which occur in nature—and their underlying principles—can be found in other areas of life.
For many natural laws, there is often a parallel moral, scientific, and spiritual law that mirrors it. For example, the positive and negative charge required to conduct an electric current can be correlated to the masculine and feminine energy that must come together to create new life; the masculine and feminine is correlated to the left and right hemispheres of the brain and its functions; and the concept of yin-yang in Chinese philosophy, medicine, and science reflects a multitude of contradictory yet also interdependent dualities found in nature—fire and water, light and dark, the sun and the moon.
In the context of Emergence, however, the acorn analogy is taken to the next level: Locked up in the seed of your soul is not just an image, calling, or pattern of potential—it is the fully realized True Self, formed in the invisible dimension of your being. And, while it makes use of the raw materials of your life to take shape, it is not dependent on anything outside of you for its existence, as it already possesses the power and substance to manifest whatever it needs.
Why do two children growing up in the same home with largely the same experiences go on to pursue such different professions as a priest and a plumber, or a cop and a crook? Can the nurture argument really explain that? Can it explain the true self of a Da Vinci, whose parents had nothing to do with the arts, or a Mozart, who became a master pianist and violinist at age four and created his first symphony at age five?
Hillman even suggests—and I agree—that many seemingly aberrant behaviors of children and some adults are actually evidence of inner conflict between the seed of their calling and their undeveloped conscious mind. However sincere the intentions of doctors, teachers, and parents may be, we must ask ourselves: How many masterpieces, inventions, and innovations are we repressing with our societal pressure to conform to certain norms of being good boys and girls? Maybe you even repressed them out of fear, confusion, or a desire to fit in, be loved and accepted , or not rock the boat.
As a kid, I had a strong desire to create, whether pinging out the boogie-woogie on our baby grand piano, shooting sci-fi movies on my Sears super-8 reflex camera, or lying under my covers with a flashlight, filling a sketchpad with utopian worlds. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism—you name it, I was fascinated by it. Likewise, you have a unique chance to revisit the aspects of your character that have been present since childhood and discover your true spiritual self.
The signs of your true Self were there from the beginning. The truth—as the great spiritual masters have taught—is that all of life is conspiring for our awakening and fulfillment. Just as there are certain plants that require rough soil to activate chemicals that make them heartier and better able to thrive in their environment, the challenges I faced created the perfect conditions for my growth, compelling me to push my roots deeper and strengthen my inner structures.
Like certain seeds that need a forest fire to germinate, those early childhood experiences sparked a fire within me that cracked open the seed of my potential and allowed it to grow. What I can now see is that all of these powerful promptings were my acorn or true Self guiding and directing me, creating opportunities for me to cultivate the inner and outer conditions necessary for its emergence. The same process is true for you. Your soul is your soil, and if you generate the right inner conditions—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—your seed will have the right nutrients to thrive. No matter how thick the clouds may be outside or how dark the night, the light is always shining within, ready to illuminate the seed of your true Self and nourish its growth.
God made man in His own image, and man has been trying to return the favor ever since! In other words, we keep trying to understand God in human, material terms, like some anthropomorphic being sitting on a cloud. But this is an overly literal interpretation of ancient teachings. This divine inheritance includes our ability to decide what we focus our awareness on i.
We have been born under a case of mistaken identity. And almost everything we see, hear, and experience—almost everything produced by society—keeps us in the dark about who and what we truly are. Our mistaken identity is that we are merely human beings having an occasional spiritual experience; that we are born in sin, circumscribed by our personality, a product of our culture and family, conceived on a certain date, destined to die. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Sin, as it turns out, is not some demonic quality of our soul; the word is an archery term that means to miss the mark. The only original sin we were born with is this false belief about who we are. This human incarnation is a magnificent thing, like a work of art, with the potential to reveal great beauty and meaning. Your true Self is, as Genesis 1: Everything you need for your total fulfillment is already within you, constituted as a part of this essential Self.
And when you are more identified with your true Self—and learn to depend on it for everything—all your needs will emerge without the effort and struggle so common to the human experience. I remember the first time this true self principle became real for me. It was before I stood on that stage I spoke about in the beginning of this book, and before I had the words to explain it.
It was an initiation, something we all have at a certain point—often many points—on the path of personal growth. At a certain point, I had gone through my savings, had no work or future prospects, and had exhausted all external means of support. I was left with nothing but my spiritual insights—literally living on a prayer. As I was losing sight of my true self, I was also, to be honest, pretty pissed off at God.
One day, after groveling for another rent extension from my landlord, I sat in my worn faux-leather meditation chair and laid down the gauntlet: God, either there really is a true spiritual Self with everything it needs to fulfill its purpose, or this is all a bunch of bull. I meditated and prayed and beseeched and surrendered, trying to reconnect to this essential Self I had touched in my brush-with-death experience in that coral reef. Wave after wave of emotion rolled through me, threatening to drown me again, with no end in sight.
And in that moment, it was like a pressure valve opened inside my body, draining me of all anxiety. I crawled into bed and fell asleep. For the next few days, I went about my business, actually forgetting that I had a problem. It was my former acting agent, calling me with an audition. I immediately knew it was the answer my true self had trusted would come and accepted the audition. There are a few key elements to this experience that I want to highlight.
I just reconnected to that part of me that was already whole, my true self, had a feeling of my innate completeness, and then surrendered my control of the outcome. By making this connection, I cultivated the conditions in consciousness that allowed it to naturally emerge. Had I tried to visualize the outcome, I might have fantasized a variety of things, from getting a job as a spiritual teacher or writer for which I was unqualified , to winning the lottery or receiving an inheritance from a long-lost uncle one can always dream.
At first, as in my case, doing so might help you pay your rent and put food on the table—meeting your basic survival needs is often one of the initial results of making this connection. But the underlying principle has more profound implications. The realization of your essential Self, and the resulting activation of the Law of Emergence, can transform every aspect of your life—and those lives that touch you—ending conflict, dissolving fear, and creating a world that works for the highest good of everyone. We spin our wheels trying to come up with solutions to all of our social, political, personal, and professional problems.
We create new policies, more restrictive laws, bigger prisons, and more powerful weapons to attack the issues—or just twist ourselves into knots trying to solve things. Besides these broader implications, an understanding of our true Self versus our human self is a primary condition in the successful activation of the Law of Emergence. To the extent you identify with the part of you that is changing—the human self—you create resistance to the part of you that is emerging—the true spiritual Self—much the way an acorn would if it identified with its shell instead of the oak.
This prevents our evolution. We keep trying to solve the problems created by the human mind and its limited or distorted perceptions—problems such as separation, self-preservation, competition, and conflict—using the same mind-set that created them. But you can never solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it. When, however, you identify more with your changeless, boundless True Self, you stay rooted in your core, even as your human incarnation and external world continue to change form and reveal your ever-expanding good.
You no longer live from the level on which the problems were created. You stop doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.