This is my first post here so I will introduce myself briefly along with the key concept I'm struggling with right now, which I believe concerns the very heart of the personal development movement.
I've been heavily involved in personal development ever since I broke through a self-destructing spiral about five years ago. Since that break I've taken an immense amount of time to immerse myself in hundreds of books and thousands of hours of tapes on personal development. As my mind always works, I passively assimilated these vast amounts of information until my subconscious developed a plan so thorough and beautiful I could implement it in one fluid, inspired motion.
A little over a year and a half ago this resulted in what I would call "a mudslide of enlightenment". It was an incredible state in which I followed my intuition blindly and with an unwavering faith for over half a year. Progress went so quickly, fluidly and effortlessly that all the obstacles in my path melted away like snow under the sun. It was as though my actions were guided by the souls of the great minds whose materials I had studied... as it turned out over the last year however, this advance was to be stopped by one assumption, one state of mind, one piece of advice from these great minds that I was not willing to accept.
It was a single person that brought this development to a standstill. It was a person that I met at the height of my mudslide towards personal enlightenment. I connected to that person on a level so deep that it felt like our souls were dancing and embracing each other, no wonder that against all odds our paths crossed again less than two days later and that our love easily bridged a distance of a 1000km. This same person is now my partner and it is through encountering him that I found what I believe to be the greatest fallacy of the personal development movement.
If I judge this relationship according to the terms I've learned in the personal development movement this relationship is harmful to me, it's holding me back, limiting my progress, disrupting my balance. However, despite all of this, I still have a love for this person that I believe is almost as profound as the love that Jesus or Buddha would have felt for every human being; a remnant of this true connection I made at the height of my enlightenment. For a long time now I've intensively contemplated the cause of this incongruity between my mind and my heart and it has taken me over a year to be able to formulate the problem. It were the words of George Orwell that finally made everything clear to me.
I believe that in the personal development movement there is an implicit assumption that goes as follows:
- You should focus on improving yourself
- Through improving yourself you will act as a role model for others
- Through acting as a role model you will improve the world as a whole.
However reading the following paragraph from
Chapter 21 in
George Orwell's
1984 revealed to me the fallacy of this train of thought:
Quote:
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'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
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Now if the object of power is power, if the object of persecution is persecution and the object of torture is torture then it follows that the object of personal development is
personal development. Therefore,
the entire personal development is focussed on improving and optimizing one tiny aspect of this universe of time and space: your life, instead of the greatest thing we have control over: this world.
It is this error in focus that lead my mind to believe my relationship was bad while my intuition told me it was good; the truth is that this relationship is indeed bad for my development but also that this relationship is indeed good for the development of this world as a whole. The consequences of this shift of focus are great and in applying this shift to the lessons of personal development I have already learned many lessons.
I most profoundly realized the consequences of this shift in focus when I shifted the focus of the exercise in which you visualize yourself as you dream of being 10, 20 or 50 years from now and then visualize the path you will take towards achieving this dream. I invite you to try this variation: visualize this world as you want it to be 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000 and 5000 years from now and visualize the path mankind will take towards achieving this dream. I hope that in doing this exercise you will see, as I have seen, the inherent limitations and ineffectiveness of trying to improve this world through improving yourself.
Now where does this leave us? I don't know. All I know right now is that I am working hard on thoroughly implementing this shift of focus in my life, that I am active contemplating what would be needed to support this effort if it were to be adopted by a larger group of people and that I've given this project the name
mondiality: on global citizenship which, ironically enough, is the name under which I originally intended to become insanely rich by conquering the worldwide real estate industry.