There's two ways to succeed in life: the world's way, and the soul's way. When you see the world's way, in the traditional way, you won't be able to sustain happiness for very long. When you see with the soul, you won't have to play games anymore, and you'll be free to create a life uniquely suited to you. Soul prosperity is a completely different kind of prosperity. Soul prosperity bypasses cultural norms, surpasses manipulative game-playing, and rejects the systems the world is selling. This is the soul's way, and whether or not you become an enlightened person will depend on how well you can see with different eyes.
If you believe that wealth, youth and physical beauty guarantee fulfillment, you will always be led, and therefore always be a follower. But you didn't come here to live someone else's life. You came here to live your own. If you only see what society tells you to see, you will have swallowed someone else's interpretation of life. You can only live in a prescribed way for so long. Eventually you will have to learn to develop your own way of seeing, your own style. There is no other way for your soul to grow than by walking your unique path. You will experience frustration and disappointment whenever you've wandered off your path. That's because souls weren't meant to follow. They aren't mean to take orders. Only the mind finds comfort in following, only the mind responds to orders. When you have veered off your soul's path, you have unplugged yourself from your source, and all your attempts to fit in, to better yourself, to have more, even to amass knowledge will only amount to feelings of futility. As long as you insist on doing life like someone else expects you to do it, you'll live in a state of perpetual dismay. There has to be another way. We were not meant to toil in futility. Our souls were meant to live peacefully, harmoniously, and in oneness. We were not given a life just to survive it! While your mind can have a mile-long to-do list, and while you may achieve every goal on that list, still you can come away feeling as if you've really achieved very little which was deeply meaningful to you. This pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction has been with most people all their lives. This is because your soul is dissatisfied, your soul is bored! Your soul doesn't wish to be fulfilling a menial laundry list of to-dos as proof of your value. Your soul already knows you are valuable. It does not need to prove it to anyone. It is your mind which persists in incessant list-making and endless activity. The egoic mind would have you toil endlessly, never satisfied with anything for very long, until you break down in a heap, cornered by the demands you've placed upon yourself.
Your soul, that eternal part of you, isn't interested in any of those things. The soul's purpose is to attain enlightenment. When I say enlightenment I mean to awaken to reality, to attain spiritual truth about who you really are, and the journey of the soul. The soul wants you to SEE. It wants you to learn to decipher true from false. It wants you to become not smart, but wise. It doesn't care a wit about your college degree, your age, your sex, your sexual orientation, or what you look like. It doesn't care where you live, and it certainly doesn't care how much money you make. The soul doesn't discriminate like that-only people, governments and religions do. The soul will ask you to answer this question: what is life for? The soul wants you to stop playing the games you've been taught, and to learn a different way of navigating life. Your mind, however, is content to go on playing games forever. So there is always a tension between what the mind wants (to keep busy, to look important, and to fit in), and what the soul wants (to understand its Divine nature, and to assist others in this realization).
Most of us are so busy trying to survive life that we feel we can't find time to actually enjoy the living of it. That's like saying you can't find time to do what you were sent here to do. When you believe, "I don't have enough time" to contemplate, meditate and thereby come to understand yourself and the reason you're here, you've completely and totally missed the point of being invited to the party! You just whizzed right by it. "I don't have enough time" is just another lame excuse of the mind. It's erroneous thinking. It's not that we don't have time to develop ourselves spiritually, because we all have the same 24 hours a day to work with. The yogis, mystics, saints and spiritual teachers found time because they understood the value of this endeavor. They understood something we are still in resistance to. They realized what a trap it is to follow others, to do what conventionality says you must do in order to be a "success." They vehemently rejected those systems, that psychological programming and societal models, because they understood life was not supposed to be used for making money, and it wasn't supposed to be a popularity contest, or a beauty contest, either. Their souls called them away from the "follower mentality." I've come to a place where I don't wish to follow anymore. I've come to a place where I am no longer hard and impenetrable, the ego's fortress, and these days I can risk letting the truth in. I've come to a place where I no longer give angry, rude, deceitful, demanding, and narcissistic people my time. Not because I haven't been all those things before (I have), but because now I'm intent on planting spirituality in my life, and I don't wish to be robbed of these precious seeds. Peace, honesty and simplicity have become more valuable to me than fortune or fame.
Recently a young man wrote me, admitting he is a narcissist (thinking only of himself), and considers himself a psychopath. He was considering suicide. I told him that being a narcissist and a psychopath is a choice. I told him he's choosing a life of anger, anxiety and depression, a miserable existence. I told him that even if he inherited these tendencies via genetics, even if he had an abusive childhood, he could still get help via counseling and medication. If he had avoided help, he was in fact choosing to take on an identity of narcissist and psychopath. I advised him to seek psychological help and to stop hurting himself and others. It didn't surprise me when he never wrote back-it's easier to blame others than have to change ourselves. When people complain to me about how the world has made them into a criminal or an addict, I could show them countless others who have had it worse in life, and decided to take the high road instead. When my daughter committed suicide in 2013, I was faced with a choice, a choice all trauma survivors are faced with (I call it the Rocky moment). It was a pivotal moment in my life. I had to choose: was I going to withdraw and retreat from life, or was I willing to take this enormous wound and reach out to others who were hurting? It was like struggling to my feet after I'd gotten the knockout punch. The referee was counting, and even though I could barely hear the count, I refused in that moment to be beaten. I grabbed onto the ropes, dragged myself up, and staggered to my feet. I wasn't going to go down like that, not yet, not that way. It was my Rocky moment. There are going to be circumstances that will knock the wind out of you, and people who, if you let them, will knock you senseless. If you have the guts to pull yourself up, shaky, beaten and bruised, refusing to be bullied by life, well then, you're going to feel like a champion. Life is a lot like boxing. It's You vs. Your Problems. Some rounds you'll win, and other rounds your problems will win. There may come a day when you'll be delivered a knock-out punch, that southpaw left hook you didn't see coming. Your jaw's going to be dislocated, your nose is going to get broken. You'll be seeing stars as you spit out blood and teeth. And in those ten seconds when you're face-down on the mat, you're going to have to decide if you are going to find the inner strength to get up and be known as a fighter.
It's easy to give up on yourself. People do it all the time. It's easy to blame who you've become on your genes or an abusive past. It's a lot harder to get up off the mat when you're hurting so bad, when you've been pummeled, when you want to run away and disappear into a bottle of booze or a joint or some other pleasurable distraction that kills the pain for a couple of hours or more. Eventually though you'll get tired of running, and besides, you can't run from your soul. It's who you really are, and wherever you go, you'll be taking it with you. It's easy to see what others tell you to see, and to follow where others lead, because then you don't have to spend time looking and finding the answers for yourself. To see with your own eyes is to see with different eyes, and that takes immense courage. When you walk to the beat of your own drummer, most people won't understand, because you're not doing life they way they were taught to do it, the way they think it "should" be done. I'm not suggesting you should be irresponsible. But I am encouraging you to begin to listen a little closer to that innovative, creative, "think out of the box" voice that comes to you every now and again. I'm encouraging you to interrupt the insanity of survival mode and let yourself be alone with the deeper thoughts once in awhile. I'm encouraging you to begin to investigate and discover who you'd like to become, minus the overlays of who you think you have to be. I'm hoping you will become dissatisfied with being told by a dysfunctional society what constitutes happiness, and decide for yourself what will really make you happy. I hope you will stop trying to please your partner, your boss, your family and friends, and figure out what YOU want. I hope you'll begin seeing with different eyes, not with the eyes you've been told to use. I hope you'll begin to see reality.
To see all of Nina's books: http://www.amazon.com/Nina-Bingham/e/B008XEX2Z0
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