“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” William Shakespeare
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After I got fired, I was stuck in a strange no-man’s land. On the one hand I was mouthing the words, “This is for the best,” “I knew this was coming,” and “I was planning on leaving anyway.” And all those things were true… in my mind.
But underneath that, in my emotions, was seething anger, victimization and feeling incredibly hard-done-by. This latter stuff, underneath the surface, was more subtle. But to the world, and my friends and family, I showed my nice-guy game face. (It was very important to me to look as if I really had it together. What a farce.)
What is interesting is that if you can look at any situation on the physical plane, it actually is neutral. Even my getting fired, for example, was a neutral situation and it was part of my path and my healing as a leader to realize that it truly was my thinking that made it "bad" or "good."
So are your really bad situations actually, really... bad? How do you know?
You have a soul, you incarnate, you die. Those situations you have in your life fill in the comma I just placed between the “e” in incarnate and the “y” in the word “you” before the final word “die” followed by and completed by the symbol “.” Period.
So what of it, my friend? Why do any of these life situations we find ourselves in actually, well, matter? You come into physical form, you dance around (or flop about, its your choice in any given moment) on the physical plane for one hundred years or so, and then you drop your body. Your body and all those situations are gone. Dust in the wind. Less than the comma I placed above.
So why on God’s green earth do we put all this emphasis on the things happening on the physical plane, acting as if our very soul would be extinguished if that person (or situation) does that (whatever that is) to us? Which, of course, doesn't seem very plausible. Can a soul... die? Seems like a long shot. About the worst that can happen is that you lose to use of your body. But the soul, well, it never left home in the first place. Did it?
Regardless of what your soul does or doesn't do, if you look at your situations with any sobriety, you will see the truth in Byron Katie's words when she says, “Reality is always kinder than the stories we tell about it.”
The bottom line? Virtually everything we tell ourselves about what is happening to us is both significant, and it is not. On the one hand, it is significant because we are here to learn and we can hardly afford to squander the opportunity. That is tantamount to returning the gift of life unopened. And on the other hand, what is happening to us is insignificant because at some point your body will fall away, the illusion of being separate from will fall away, and there will be your soul shining, untarnished, undiminished and timeless. However, will it have learned what it came to learn? Will it have served the purpose it came here to serve?
Through your responses to your challenges, you determine that. Choose well. And, by the way, your choices depend on your perception.
Thus, what you think about life may not be true. What you think about your challenges and the situations you are in may not be true. You don't see the divine blueprint, do you? So how can you know? But thinking, it makes it so.
If what I am sharing here were actually true, what do you suppose the implications are on the decisions you make as a leader?
Life, when you begin to see in, begins to appear more and more like a dream...
It is your purpose to wake up within that dream...
Which brings me to the next quotation… and what you will find in tomorrow’s post.
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This is a follow-up to the October 7th post Leadership, Perception and Emotional Intelligence and is a continuation of looking at the connection between perception and the ability to break through the next level of leadership. During this exploration, I share a part of my own story through quotations...
