Читать книгу The Tao of Influence - Karen McGregor - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe Sage helps all things come to know the truth they have forgotten.
—Tao Te Ching, Verse 64
Power is a mystery to most of us. People often think of it as either a positive or a negative force: something that can either destroy the planet or change the world for the greater good. One dictionary definition of power is: “The ability to influence a course of events or the behavior of others”—for better or for worse.
Throughout the many years of working with powerful people, I’ve come to recognize that the most significant outcome of power is the ability to influence. Yet influence can be fleeting and damaging if power is fueled by personal fear and egoic needs. We need not look far to see how that has played out. Greed, corruption, manipulation, and deceit are rampant among those who are driven by a need for power. They are constantly strategizing their next move to get something from someone or something. While many might consider these actions powerful, they are not an expression of true power because their influence is temporary. As the Tao Te Ching says in Verse 55, “Whatever is not Tao comes to an early end.”
True power doesn’t come from the mind or the ego. We cannot think our way to being powerful. True power originates in the love we are born with—the only energy form that creates true lasting influence. I call it love-power because of its infinite capacity to influence. Love-power cannot be contained by the ego or the mind. In fact, the mind has no capacity to contain even the smallest grain of infinite love. The job of the mind is to be our personal computer and collector of facts; it was never meant to be the source of our true power.
Yet Western civilization sees the mind as the source of power, confusing power with intellect. But the intellect is often intertwined with the ego, so love-based power often morphs into fear-based power, which I call distorted power. This is where destructive actions come from.
While popular self-help books refer to the term “losing your power,” I don’t believe we can ever lose it. However, we can distort the power we are born with and close off our access to our love-power. In other words, most of us begin life with our love-power quite active—we are happy, curious, in an unending state of awe, quick to forgive, and wide open to other people and to new opportunities. But, after a few years, we inevitably experience the fear or suspicion that we are not enough as we are. This suspicion leads to thoughts and emotions that become a set pattern of behaviors, which in turn become our state of being, taking us out of our inherent pure love-power and into fear-based, distorted power.
These patterns are so commonplace that many misinterpret negative power as “normal.” Other than condemned, premeditated acts of violence, we often perceive control, domination and force as acceptable everyday behavior—behavior that has become normalized as “who we are,” or worse yet, “who they are.” For example, if we are quick to react to a text that we consider undesirable, we don’t think of it as a misuse of our power, but as a justified tendency to be “hot-headed.” When our natural power of love becomes distorted, we turn to trying to exert power—but as we do, we end up diminishing our own power just a little more. Each time we lower the energy of love, we close ourselves off to the only true source of true positive, influential power.
The field of quantum physics has now made speculations about energy a reality. In terms of measuring energy, our power vibrates fast or slow, depending on whether we have distorted our power or remain in our love-power. This is why we often feel that we are “losing our power.” We feel less energy physically. We feel emotions that make us tired and weak, because we do the opposite of what we have come to the planet to express. This distortion of power is still a form of power, but it is a power that, over time, will lead to poor relationships, lack of health, and even lack of abundance in life.
In his ground-breaking book, Power vs. Force, David Hawkins calibrates the energy of each of the levels of human consciousness, on a scale ranging from one to a thousand, where one is mere existence, and one thousand is enlightenment. The calibration is based on a clinical science that emerged in the 1970s called kinesiology, which uses the body’s muscles to indicate truth or falsehood (the body is strong with truth and weak with falsehood). Shame, guilt, apathy, grief, and fear all calibrate at one hundred or less because they are part of the falsehood or illusion that humans exist in. Love, joy, and peace calibrate between five and six hundred, as they represent the eternal Truth of who we are as Divine Beings in a human body. We begin to see the level of enlightened beings like Jesus and Buddha in the range of seven hundred. All levels of consciousness below two hundred are destructive, and all levels above two hundred are constructive. This gives us great insight into our relationship with power, because as we begin the journey to stay in our love-power, we are more and more attuned to the way in which our actions and thoughts impact our energy and the energy of those around us.
When we are in pure love-power, those around us are influenced merely by being in our presence. On the other hand, distorted power can bring many people down with us, or we can feel down when someone begins to turn from love-power to fear-based power. Have you ever experienced a meeting with several fearful people and felt exhausted later? Have you ever spent an afternoon with a complaining friend and ended up going straight to bed or decided against doing that productive task you intended to do when you got home? If so, you’ve experienced the energetic consequences of distorted power.
When distorted power meets love-power, it is outmatched. Hawkins says that one person living in the highest vibrations of consciousness is enough to counteract seventy million individuals living in the lowest vibrations. That is, the power of one person living in pure, unconditional love (calibrating at approximately five hundred) can counteract 750,000 individuals living below level two hundred, the borderline of destructive consciousness. The greatest form of influence—the most impactful, positive effect—comes from living in heightened states of consciousness, where your being tangibly impacts the consciousness of the world.
Distorted power can be so ingrained in our everyday way of being that we don’t recognize it in our words and actions. Acting as a victim or martyr is an expression of distorted power; engaging in passive-aggressive behavior is a use of distorted power; insisting that your way is the only way is distorted power at work. Distorted power can also take the form of careless behavior, risking everything to feel special and noticed, and demanding the universe and its inhabitants take notice. Not following through on your word, showing up late for events, sharing unkind words about another being—all of these are expressions of distorted power. All of it can bring you down in an instant.
The Laws of Nature
But how do we shift from culturally condoned patterns of expressing distorted power to expressing our true love-power? To overcome our habit of being stuck in an energetically low level of power and free ourselves to activate the radiant love-power within, we can look to Mother Nature for simple teachings that can be helpful to this kind of personal evolution.
True power is ruled by the laws of nature, so understanding them lays the groundwork for us to experience a pure relationship with power. The laws of nature are impersonal; they exist whether any person or life form wants them to or not. They are also universal—they apply to one and all—the natural world as well as humanity.
When we are aware of the laws of nature but still violate them, we distort our power, reduce our vital energy, and lose track of happiness. After all, disagreeing with the laws of nature—irrefutable as they are—cannot produce fulfillment, joy, peace, or sustainable relationships. Yet, most of us fall into the trap of expressing distorted power every day. Except maybe the Dalai Lama. (There’s always an exception!)
The three laws of nature that have the greatest impact on our relationship with power and our growth as an influencer are the Law of Change, the Law of Letting Go, and the Law of the Impersonal.
The three laws of nature
• Law of Change
• Law of Letting Go
• Law of the Impersonal
The Law of Change
Accept difficulty as opportunity.
—Tao Te Ching, Verse 63
Nothing in life stays the same. Nature flows with cycles of change. Plants and animals live in a constant state of growth, decay, and rebirth. Humans are the only species that resist change—especially whatever they interpret as difficult change. We believe this or that “should not” happen. With the onset of the 2020 pandemic, we can see that those who accept and adjust to their circumstances are more influential, peaceful, and fulfilled.
Our love-power is freed up when we accept and work with the Law of Change. Influential people with a high degree of love-power know that lasting influence is not maintained without attention to this law. Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi each served at the highest level for the good of all by adhering to the Law of Change. These people had comforts of home and family and, in some cases, considerable wealth, but listened to a deeper calling to set out on a path that would change the future of humanity in profound ways.
Undoubtedly, change was not easy for these leaders; there were times when they, too, resisted change. Yet their perseverance altered the course of humanity. The irony is that when we resist a fundamental law such as the Law of Change, the short-term resistance might feel like a relief, but we suffer in the long run. We can feel sadness, anger, or a host of other emotions. We often turn outward, blaming, complaining, and repeating the same story or circumstances to others. When we point fingers of blame at the outer world, it’s generally because we’re not accepting the Law of Change in our inner world.
Recognizing the Law of Change in our physical reality is also helpful. When I tell people I recently turned fifty, I find it humorous to see how people react. “You don’t look fifty!” is one of the typical consolation prizes offered up. Others are speechless, exuding a quiet sympathy. Still others offer products to help me look younger and reduce the increasing number of wrinkles appearing on my face. While I have come to love and accept my body at this time in my life, most people don’t share this sentiment. For most reaching their second half of life, fear of aging suddenly takes hold. But what has your body been doing for the last few decades, if not changing? The body must, within the laws of nature, go through cycles of change, constantly and dependably.
When people resist the Law of Change on the physical plane, they join the ever-growing number of people who chase after external sources of satisfaction to avoid having to change. They have compulsive urges to buy things, reinvent their looks, renovate their homes, and more. They become obsessed with making money to manipulate their external environment so they can maintain an illusion of a safe world they can control—what they can change according to their time frame and preferences. In other words, they are creating the illusion of change as they try to avoid and resist the change that is being asked of them internally.
Here’s the rub: when people don’t change, they are more easily controlled and manipulated. The powers that be are well aware of this, too, make no mistake. For example, it only takes a stroll through the average North American shopping mall or an online shopping hub to realize how deeply entrenched we are in the culture and habits of buying. But if you can unplug from the thousands of daily offerings supporting an addictive fix—temptations that temporarily help you feel okay about yourself so that you don’t have to undertake real change—you’ll experience a massive leap in consciousness.
When physical changes like new clothes, new hair, a facelift, a house renovation, a new car, or a new phone quickly prove to be a fleeting satisfaction, people may enter a dark period where they feel empty, lost, directionless, or without purpose. Many feel the pain of the bandage of buying. They spend their lives living out the dreams of others because they haven’t developed a practice of listening to and acting upon the whispers of change within.
When we accept the Law of Change and recognize that all things come and go, we activate the courage within to make necessary changes that empower true power and influence. The Tao is essentially about allowing the flow of life to flourish, without resistance, and to bring us the wisdom and inner guidance that accompany it.
The Law of Letting Go
The treasure of life is missed by those who hold on and gained by those who let go.
—Tao Te Ching, Verse 75
In nature, everything has a beginning and an end, a cycle of birth and death, decay, and renewal. For these cycles to continue unimpeded, nature needs to release the old to make way for the new. This principle, of course, is closely tied to the Law of Change. Yet the Law of Letting Go deserves as much attention because of how it shapes the universe and everything in it.
Let’s take a look.
In nature, plants that hold on to dead or dying flowers have less energy than those that quickly let go of flowers that have completed their life cycle. In the garden, dead-heading plants helps them last longer and produce even more flowers. If flowers that have finished blooming are not released, the plant no longer thrives. The energy of the plant is revitalized when the old has been released. This shows us that energy itself does not grow old; energy just gets blocked and stuffed down by any form of resistance to letting go.
Similarly, your life force, your love-power, is impacted each time you hang on to old grievances or even recent ones. It’s also affected when you hold on to people you were once in relationship with or those who have passed over. Your love-power turns into distorted power the moment you hang on to anyone or anything, even as our collective illusion convinces us that what was good should never go away. Or, that if you let go, then you have lost. Or, if you let go, then you must be unworthy, less than, or unlovable. Or, there must be something wrong with you. So, you hold on to what is ultimately siphoning off your energy, in spite of the truth.
Most people will do anything to avoid seeing the beliefs that control them. But by resisting the Law of Letting Go, they avoid looking at the illusions and beliefs they’ve built their life upon, the biggest of which is, “There must be something wrong with me if I have to let go of something that was once so good. I must have made a mistake that proves I’m unworthy.” Most of us hang on to our baggage only to begin a search for answers as to why we are unhappy. We may blame others; in fact, chances are good that we will point fingers to something or someone that is stopping us from moving on.
Relationships are one of the most difficult things to let go of. I’m not referring to the act of divorce or separation, although that may be an end result. I’m referring to letting go of the unhealthy energetic ties that we have built up with a person that we are or were in an intimate relationship with.
One of the most profound relationships of my life, and one I will always cherish, was with a man I met after my marriage fell apart. For the eight years we were together, he gave me emotional support when I was punishing myself over a failed marriage. He comforted me when I was sad or angry about yet another issue concerning my former husband—the man I spent almost two decades of my life with. But my optimistic view of the new relationship was flawed from the beginning—I resisted the truisms of the Law of Letting Go.
I had been carrying a lot of blame, anger, and guilt—mostly toward myself—for many years after my divorce. I refused to love myself, and I resisted letting go of my numerous negative beliefs about myself as a wife and mother. So, guess what I attracted? A rescuer! The classic archetypical pairing of the wounded bird (me) who meets the rescuer (him). For a while, I felt soothed by the resurrected belief that I was loveable, and he felt temporarily worthwhile because he could help someone in need. The dynamic played out for years. I felt trapped by my circumstances, stuck in victim mode, and only accepted help that didn’t really move me forward. Then things really went sour. I became increasingly unhappy, pointing the finger outward, and he felt resentment that he was not being acknowledged for his assistance, which then turned into passive-aggressive behavior. We both wondered, “Why can’t they be more like me?” No surprise how it ended.
By resisting the Law of Letting Go, both of us were not stepping into new opportunities to grow and live our full potential. Our energies were invested in hanging on to our unhealthy needs and our ego desires to protect ourselves from not being enough. Most people stay in this kind of resistance and hang on to old habits, behaviors, circumstances, and relationships for years, if not decades. But true influence can’t happen when we resist letting go, in any areas of our lives. Others sense that we’re not living our authentic truth, not genuinely present.
What do you need to release? What are you hanging on to that no longer serves you? What power struggle are you engaged in that drives you to stay exactly where you are as you store all your mental and emotional baggage of the past? How does the way in which you see the world distort your natural and pure love? The Buddha said that we see through the eyes of fear, and this perspective becomes so real that we forget we are living an illusion. The minute we are trapped by the illusion of fear and the needs of the ego, we buy into the illusion, and it becomes seemingly impossible to let go, surrender, and be in the flow of life that is the Tao.
The Law of the Impersonal
The Sage is like Heaven and Earth. To him, none are especially dear.
—Tao Te Ching, Verse 5
Several years ago, I had the privilege of taking human behavioral specialist Dr. John Demartini and a friend sightseeing in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, my homeland. It was a nippy spring morning, and as the hours went by, I noticed that no matter what we discussed or what we encountered that day, John was absolutely grounded in peace, stillness, and overall happiness. Even when we spoke of tragic personal events, he didn’t alter his state. I had never met anyone like him before, and I realized that he was living the Way of the Tao and embodying the Law of the Impersonal. He didn’t see any individual event as better or worse than any other. And as a result, he didn’t suffer. He put it this way, “Suffering is expecting the world to be only one way and then being surprised when it’s not.”
Nature is a great role model for us when it comes to the Law of the Impersonal. Nature does not hold anyone or anything “especially dear.” It does not give to only a few, nor does it protect just a few from tragic natural occurrences. Nature does what it does, whether it’s a fire, a flood, a tornado, or a new life. Nature simply creates and destroys. Humans are the only creatures on the planet that take every act, word, and thought personally. Most of us feel we cannot exist in an impersonal world. Even when it comes to concepts of the Divine, most of us take it personally, and that is why we suffer. Believing that if we are good, then bad things won’t happen, we are surprised to realize that no matter if our behavior is good or bad, “good” and “bad” things will happen. No one is immune. It’s not personal.
In my own life, a dear friend passed of cancer, leaving behind young children, three of my clients passed away in the past few months, and the son of a friend just died in an auto accident. It’s tempting to ask, “Why?” In our Western world, we worship our intellect as having all the answers to life. Our civilization has come up with the answers to most everything, so why not this, too? We want to know why. But it’s not personal.
Two animals died in my backyard this summer. I was shaken to see the remains of a rabbit attacked and killed by a hawk. A week later, a bird hit my front window in the early morning, and I watched it die within seconds of falling to the ground. I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do to stop it. Tears welled up in my eyes as my prayer to return this bird to life “failed.” So often, we want to control what we perceive as “not good,” even when it has to do with death, and even when we know that death is part of life. It is a natural law; all that is living will die. And yet we resist. We suffer. But it’s not personal.
Our refusal to accept the impersonal nature of life can increase our suffering and contribute to the distortion of our power. Instead of allowing ourselves to feel the emotion of sadness, we become bitter, for example. We dwell on the same unanswerable questions over and over: Why did this have to happen in my family? Why are we cursed while others are so blessed? Some give up on God. Some decide not to grow or evolve. Some people sever their relationships with others and stop pursuing new ones. When we take the impersonal personally, our positive influence comes to a halt. Taking it all personally, some people end up feeling sorry for themselves, considering themselves to be the perpetual victim, and telling their sad story to anyone who will listen. Others become full of rage and hurt others with their words and actions. All of this suffering occurs only because they demand that a personal universe give them reasons for why things happen as they do.
Part of the disconnect is simply because the mind is a reasoning tool that cannot comprehend how the same Source that loves and supports us doesn’t consider us special at the same time. It doesn’t make any effort to treat us as special. For most, it is incomprehensible.
When I’m guiding budding entrepreneurs to share their message and sell their products and programs, I remind them that one of the best mindsets in business is to learn to expect and accept challenges as they arise. This is not about being pessimistic; it is creating a foundation for the acceptance of natural laws. It’s not a matter of if those challenges will happen, it’s when. That perspective empowers people to withstand challenges, not out of fear, but out of love.
What it comes down to is this: expectations will immediately or eventually bring suffering. The need to always have things turn out the way we expect will ultimately create unhappiness; the unmet expectations then turn love-power into distorted power. Harboring expectations fuels the ego’s ploys to make us feel safe, to let us see only the threats in life, to look for refuge in what we have, to get what we want—rather than look for challenges and risk losing what we have to evolve or grow.
When people take the world personally and don’t like the cards they’re dealt, they blame others, God or the Universe, for things not going their way. Some people become aggressive as they try to control the outcomes, insisting that they are special and deserve special treatment. This ‘specialness’ builds into a sense of entitlement—a common form of distorted power. Feeling entitled, they perceive that the universe, their community, and the people in their lives owe them something. It’s all a result of the inability to see the impersonal nature of life.
The solution? Stop using your mind to figure things out. Fully accept the Law of the Impersonal, this intrinsic law of nature, and accept the entirety of what life brings. As Lao Tzu wrote, “Sometimes you’re behind, other times ahead, sometimes strong, other times weak, sometimes with, other times alone; to the Sage, the movement of life is perfection.”
Reflections
Draw your attention to how your ego fights your acceptance of your current situation and the present moment. (And it will—every day.) Combine this attention with the daily practice of gratitude. Learn to see every moment as a moment of grace. Gradually the acceptance of an impersonal world will become more commonplace than the ego’s fight for specialness and personal meaning.
Choose a new favorite journal to begin recording insights from your journey with The Tao of Influence. Like this one, each chapter will close with an opportunity for you to reflect on and integrate your learnings.
Ask yourself: Which of the three laws of nature do you flow well with? Which one do you feel most at peace with? How does the acceptance of this law enrich your life? How has your acceptance of this law affected those around you? What steps can you take to help others activate this law of nature in their own lives?
Ask yourself: Which of the three laws of nature do you resist? How has your resistance to the law contributed to your personal suffering? How has your resistance to it affected the lives of those around you? What steps can you take to more fully accept this law of nature and let it flow in your life?
