(Friday Filosophy 1/27/23)
Happy Freakin’ Friday!
Here’s your tasty new edition of Friday Filosophy – the weekly postcard where I challenge you with a question, idea, or topic you may want to think about. Today let’s look at who is responsible for your life. (I’m writing a new book about prosperity and this is a little piece from it.)
Once an urban myth takes hold, it never seems to die. For instance, the one that says an undercover agent has to admit that they are police officers if you ask them outright. (I guess the people who believe this have never seen an episode of The Wire or Miami Vice.) So it was no surprise that as I negotiated a deal with a drug dealer for the sixth time, for the sixth time he asked me if I was an undercover police officer. After assuring him I wasn’t, he produced an 8-ball of crystal meth, which I accepted and replaced with the cash.
Going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing this is probably not the opening story you were expecting to read in a book about prosperity. But that’s where we should begin...
Because I wasn’t mystically transported into that crack house in Liberty City by fate, accident, or random happenstance. It was the logical progression of hundreds of seemingly inconsequential small daily decisions I had taken along the way. And the state of your prosperity or lack of it in your life right now is no accident either. We are both irrefutable proof of what James Allen asserted decades ago:
Your life is created by the thoughts you give precedence to.
You can’t manifest health, happiness, and wealth without looking into the everyday thoughts that allow you to create them – or repel them. It’s astonishing how few people recognize the foundational limiting beliefs they possess. And going deeper, the thoughts which they then give precedence to. Allen used the garden analogy: If you allow your garden to develop on its own, it will likely become overgrown with weeds. But if you cultivate it you can grow prosperity-inducing fruits, vegetables, or flowers.
You often hear people complaining about the circumstances they are fighting. Unfortunately, they’re frequently fighting an effect, but still nourishing and preserving the cause. That cause could be a conscious habit like alcohol, other drugs or a gambling addiction, or an unconscious belief like thinking you are not worthy, money is bad, or that it is spiritual to be poor. Unless and until you deal with the cause, the effect is going to keep coming back. Doing deals in sketchy crack houses was just the end result of me losing sight of who I could become, and falling prey to negative, self-destructive beliefs instead. Those beliefs would have eventually killed me, so I was forced to reexamine them.
How about you? Are your beliefs empowering or impairing you? More importantly, what are the daily thoughts those beliefs are causing you to have? If you’re not manifesting the level of prosperity you desire, it’s easy to dump the blame on the economy, your ex-spouse, or some whacked-out conspiracy theory. But if we’re being honest, we both know that you didn’t get here by accident…
New on the Podcast:
Can Everyone Be Rich? (Forgive me for the lousy sound, as it was recorded on a beach in Corsica.)
Apple: http://ow.ly/xziO50MyQNA
Spotify: http://ow.ly/QbaH50MyQNz
Anchor: http://ow.ly/MJbf50MyQNy
YouTube: http://ow.ly/mW4Q50MyQNB
Have a great weekend and go commit a random act of kindness.
Peace,
- RG
P.S. If you are a prosperity warrior, an agent of change, or someone who is destined to put a dent in the universe, you need to be at TRIBAL ’23. All the cool kids will be there.
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Keith Richards says after he kicked dope that part of the reason he got into it in the first place was that he never felt comfortable being the big rock star and scoring dope from lowlifes kept him on the ground.. personally I think that's a bit of a cop out, I mean Mick Jagger had the same pressures, if not more and didn't go down that road.. I think KR just liked drugs.. but give him credit when he had to clean up he did.. he liked music more and he's even quit drinking.. says that wasn't agreeing with him anymore.. the guy knows his limits..
This insight is more profound than most of us realize. The idea has been almost worked to death by personal development "gurus." We've heard that we are what we think about so many times that we are likely to agree with it immediately. But, for many, that agreement is "in the head." We quickly say aloud or to ourselves, "I know that." T Hark Eker points out that the three most dangerous words in the English language are, "I KNOW THAT." We can "know" something intellectually, but we don't fully "know" it until we EXPERIENCE it. If we allow ourselves to feel thoughts in our bodies and accept the emotions that they arouse, we can begin to appreciate that thoughts are powerful things that are born in our inner world and show up everywhere in our outer world. Understanding this as a concept is only the first step to real personal transformation.
I'm not saying anything that you haven't already expressed in this valuable post. Writing this comment engaged me in the process of making this important thought three dimensional. Thank you.
Another reason your post excites me. It reminds me to look at my everyday world with a beginner's mind. Then, something as "ordinary" as a spoon or a vacuum clearer becomes extraordinary because it was a thought before it was a thing. Through that lens, any object in my environment empowers me because it mirrors my human potential.