Let Your Better Self Shine

This article was originally published by Technorati on 12 February 2010. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

I have a confession to make: I like Shine from Yahoo! I'm pretty sure it's for women, with fruity colors and Cosmo-esque content. But I like it.

I like it because from time to time they post articles like Brett Blumenthal's 6 Personality Traits to Admire and Acquire, articles that point us in the direction of our ideals.

The traits Blumenthal most admires (spoiler alert!) are Selflessness, Tolerance, Genuineness, Sensitivity, Integrity and Humility. She readily admits, however, that the list could be much longer.

This article's title invites the inevitable comparison to Dr. Stephen Covey's 1989 international bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. These are habits he recommends, not traits, but there is some overlap.

The Anatomy of Success

Something really great was about to happen. Success at last!

It doesn't matter what it was. It could have been a new job, or a publisher agreed to print something I'd written, or I was about to move to the next level with someone special, or I was about to receive a patent on a new invention, or I was about to surpass the 1,000,000-visitor-barrier on my blog. Fill in the blank with anything you please.

At that moment, on the verge, on the eve, something inside told me I wasn't ready for this; I wasn't prepared. I had been well along the path of enlightenment for nearly three years, enjoying the awakening process, eyes opening. But the process wasn't complete. Thus, outward success felt premature.

And that's the important point, how it felt. It always comes down to how we feel these things in the physical body.It felt unstable. I felt myself leaning forward, into the future, into the following day when this indicium of success was scheduled to take place.

There's a name for this feeling. We call it hope. Its opposite is fear. We think of hope as positive and fear as negative, but they're actually flip sides of the same coin.

The Visualization of Success

What is Visualization?

Visualization is the process by and through which everything comes into being in our lives, both good and bad. Visualization is in our nature; it's simply a quality that all human beings possess. We are doing it all the time.

Therefore, we need not worry about the mechanics of visualization. They operate automatically. The more salient concern is the service to which this wonderful, creative faculty that we possess is put. On this question there are two options. We can either use this tool in service to our own egos or in service to The Good (see The Philosophy of Success for a discussion of this assumption).

The Philosophy of Success

Philosophy is the foundation of everything. Or to put it more accurately, philosophy--specifically that branch of philosophy called metaphysics--is the study of the foundation of everything. So I think it's important (See The Anatomy of Success elsewhere on this blog).

The term metaphysics probably comes from Aristotle. In the first collection of his lectures, the chapter on what he called the study of First Philosophy came right after the one on physics. In Greek, meta means "after," thus the field of First Philosophy is called Metaphysics today, so one theory goes.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,by Robert Persig, is one of my favorite books. And one of the biggest contributions that book makes is toward a better understanding of early philosophical thought for us normal folk.