A Turnaround Success

The "little I" seeks to enhance itself by external approval, external possessions, and external "love." The Self That God created needs nothing. It is forever complete, safe, loved, and loving. It seeks to share rather than to get; to extend rather than project. It has no needs and wants to join with others out of their mutual awareness of abundance. - A Course in Miracles

This Sunday we begin a new series based upon the parable of the Go Giver, a book that offers practical advice on how to be successful in business and life by following a radical principle. Generosity and authenticity are not the watch words of traditional business practices, nor readily endorsed by our rational minds. Yet creating value for others and unqualified sharing of our resources and gifts is the very premise of this little book. This premise, which seems anathema to business success and our self protective nature, squares perfectly with spiritual wisdom teachings. By following these teachings we might find success in the world and in our spiritual understanding.

In the midst of these challenging economic times, we have seen and felt the fear based responses. We know how to contract, protect, withhold, and hedge our bets. When we have suffered a loss our thoughts instinctively go toward a sense of lack and limitation. We often have visceral sense of emptiness, internalizing the loss in our body and psyche. This is a survival reaction designed to motivate the responses, which will ensure our physical well being. But it is only at a very rudimentary and basic level that this survival response is useful. Certainly we need to take whatever steps are necessary to provide for our bodily needs, provide food, and shelter, and basic human comforts. Beyond that point, this response only perpetuates our fear and limits our creative responses that can help us grow and prosper.

This sense of loss we carry typically results in compensating outlook in which we are on constant look out for what we can get to make us whole again. We are looking to fill this void, this emptiness, this hole in our souls, carved out by our response to loss. Perhaps it is a kind of reciprocal sense of fairness which reasons that there should be some compensation for what has been taken away; trying to find some kind of fairness in the universe in all that has happened. We may wish for the universe to drop some blessing of equal weight on the other end of the see-saw to at least get us even.

In the face of this instinctual response to loss are the spiritual masters who say "give and you shall receive" This makes no sense to the surface mind which forms its logic from the outer world of appearances. Giving when we have lost, seems antithetical to our goal, contrary to what we think will help us. When we first hear these prescriptions we often laugh at the absurdity of such logic. We who have suffered loss should not be expected to give, that we should be the ones at the receiving end of the equation. That is, in receiving we shall receive. Yet beneath this surface logic is deeper spiritual truth which says that it is only when we give of ourselves that we will discover a greater reservoir of supply within our self. It is perhaps the most profound and surprising turnabout experience that we can have as human beings to discover that whatever we share with another we experience for ourselves.