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The Personal Fulcrum of Creation

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By George A. Boyd ©2022

Q: Why is it that certain people seem to achieve a lot with their lives, when others struggle? Does this have to do with karma? Does this have something to do with their psychological make up?

A: People operate out of mental platforms or mindsets. If they do not inhabit the mindset where they create their own destiny through their volition, they may not act on their goals and dreams, and so you will not see much achievement. These eight platforms are:

  1. Catatonia – In this mindset, you are frozen: you cannot move. You give up completely. At this stage, others must care for you.
  2. Delusion – At this level, you believe there are unseen, malevolent forces that sabotage your life. You feel that these unseen forces control you and command you to do things, even if you don’t want to do them. This is the stage of psychosis.
  3. Terror – At this stage, worry torments you, and you think about the catastrophic things that could go wrong with any choice you make. You envision frightening scenarios. If your worry and fear are compelling enough, you may be afraid to venture out of your home. At this stage, anxiety permeates your life, and any decision is terrifying.
  4. Narcissistic entitlement – When you operate from this platform, you believe that others exist only to satisfy your every wish and desire. They exist only to ensure your happiness. If they do not immediately satisfy your demands, you abandon or betray them—their utility only exists for them to serve you. If they fail to do that, you send them out of your life, and may revile them.
  5. Dissatisfaction – When you function in this mindset, you are unhappy with your life and the world around you. However, you don’t take responsibility to make the changes that will bring you greater happiness or will bring positive changes to the world. Instead, you blame others and act out your anger upon them.
  6. Fantasy – When you act from this level, you have hope and enthusiasm that your dreams could actually come true. But you resort to magical thinking at this level. You may pray to whatever Higher Power you believe in; use vision boards to visualize exactly what you desire; burn candles; and participate in rituals that are supposed to bring you luck, merit, and good fortune. You might gamble or play the lottery, believing this will bring you the money you desire. You invest in get rich schemes that are supposed to bring you quick wealth, only to be disappointed again and again. Those who are overweight may try a series of diets and get thin quick schemes. The issue here is that you don’t make it happen: you hope and believe it will appear magically.
  7. Planning – When you occupy this platform, you become obsessed with goal setting and making meticulous plans. The drawback with stage is that you may not enact your plans, and achieve little. Your challenge here is to find out what holds you back from taking action, and carrying out your plans.
  8. Choosing – Here you discover your Self, and experience that your volition actually carries out the plans you make and reaches the goals you set. At this stage you are empowered. You take full responsibility to make things happen. You don’t make excuses; you get results. In this mindset of self-awareness and personal empowerment, you create your destiny.

The breakthrough that is needed here is for people to discover their Self and operate from this empowered mindset. If people don’t go to the place where they can make things happen, things don’t change and they don’t achieve much on their lives.

In Mudrashram®, we teach you Centering Techniques in our intermediate meditation classes—the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program—to directly focus you on the Self to help you realize it, and in time, to act from this platform.

Psychotherapy aims to gradually rehabilitate your ability to function from this empowered core of your personality.

Coaching expects you to operate from this level, and holds you accountable to achieve the results that you can only do from this place of choice.

It may be that there is a karmic element that influences the mindset from which they operate. You may view this like a curtain of darkness that veils the Self. When you begin to focus on the Self, and allow it to work with the elements in this field of darkness that shroud it, you can begin to retract this covering. As more and more of the elements of this field of darkness fall away, you gain greater integration and personal effectiveness.

There is no magic in this process. There is not a pill you can take, an incantation or mantra you can say, or a special magic formula that will make these dark elements disappear. You need to work on each element in turn until you solve its riddle, and it finishes.

Operating as your empowered Self is your birthright. May you find your way to reclaim it!

Exploring the Motivational Spectrum

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By George A. Boyd © 2021

Have you ever noticed that people approach their activities with different levels of willingness to engage in them? Here are some examples of different motivational mindsets:

  1. Enthusiastic embrace of an activity – you do it joyfully and freely; you look forward to doing the activity.
  2. Encountering difficulty – you may have an initial enthusiasm for the activity, but you experience disappointment in your results from doing the activity—you discover you are not very good at the activity. You may become self-critical, wary and vigilant that others may criticize you or make fun of you. You may try to find out why you encounter these difficulties and try to improve them.
  3. Trepidation – You have reticence to begin and continue an activity. You may not trust your performance or your ability, and you may do it with some anxiety or fear that you will fail or that you may risk hurting yourself.
  4. Avoidance – You have a resistance to do an activity. You find excuses for not doing it. You procrastinate in starting it. You may sabotage your efforts so people won’t trust you to do activity correctly.
  5. Defiance – You stubbornly and defiantly refuse to do the activity. You cannot be persuaded to consent to participate in the action.
  6. Capitulation – You do the activity only because you are coerced, threatened, or intimidated to do the action. You may have genuine dislike for the activity, but you feel you must do it, or you genuinely face negative consequences: violence, abuse, punishment, incarceration, or death.
  7. Surrender – You carry out in response to an inner command or direction you receive from your Soul, from your spiritual Master, or the Divine. You carry out the activity as your duty in service to your Soul or God, in spite of your personal feelings or the opinions of other people.

You may wish to examine which of your current activities fall into each of these categories. You could do a brief inventory to see what activities your truly enjoy and love to do, and those that being up stress and conflict.

The Role of Desire in Motivation

Positive motivation is founded upon desire: you want to do something. Negative motivation is founded upon aversion: you don’t want to do something, but there are consequences for failing to do the action.

People cope with their desires in different ways, depending on whether they can satisfy them directly, whether they are attainable, whether they or other people approve or forbid them, or whether they are attempting to relinquish desires to achieve a state of spiritual transcendence or enlightenment.

You may wish to notice what you desire, and which of the following strategies you are using to fulfill, suppress, or transcend your desires:

  1. Direct action – You have a desire: you act on the desire. No deeper aspect of your psyche or a “Higher Power” hinders you from taking direct action. You bear the full responsibility for the consequences.
  2. Fantasy – You cannot act on your desire due to your circumstances. You may fantasize about achieving what you desire. You may feel envy or jealousy for those who are able to enjoy the desire, but you can’t. You may feel something is wrong with you, because you can’t have what you want, when others can have it. You may engage in a symbolic or substitute activity to vicariously enact the desire. For example, someone might resort to masturbation instead of having a regular sexual partner. In this strategy, you feel frustration and unhappiness.
  3. Taboo – Your conscience forbids you from enacting certain activity. Alternately, those around you may forbid the activity. You may attempt to indulge in the activity secretly. This inner conflict may make you split your perception of yourself into a good, obedient self and a bad, defiant self. You may find that part of your psyche aligns with your values of goodness, truth, and righteousness; part aligns with rebellion and to the sense of entitlement to do forbidden things. Your conscience may criticize, argue with, and punish your bad side; your bad side may feel it is persecuted or under attack, and may redouble its defense of what it desires and its right to have it.
  4. Dissociation – In this strategy, you enter an altered state of consciousness through prayer, meditation, or hypnosis, and identify with a spiritual essence. While you are in this altered state of consciousness, your bad side’s activities may be temporarily suspended. You may disidentify with your ego and your personality, and re-identify with this spiritual essence—you may distance yourself from your former behavior through regarding the part of you that did bad behavior in the past as your sinful self, but now you have abandoned that sinful self, because you have been saved and reborn.

If you remain in these altered states of consciousness for extended periods of time, you may experience dissociation, where you can no longer feel your authentic feelings; depersonalization, where your life no longer seems real; or de-motivation, where your personal desires no longer seem worthwhile pursuing anymore. Instead of acting on your desires, you may instead enact a prescribed lifestyle. If your authentic desires emerge, you may attempt to meditate or pray them away.

  1. Decompensation – At this stage, you experience vivid hallucinations and projection of your repressed desires as intrapsychic demons and devils, which appear to attack you. You are engaged in a pitched inner battle to overcome these resurgences of your desires, which appear to personify in the depths of your mind. It may be difficult at this stage to identify these demons and devils as your own desires, because you have disowned them. Instead, these personifications appear to be part of a universal force of evil—Kal or Satan. Some people may adopt severe austerities at this stage to attempt to suppress this evil they see within them. Some people become psychotic at this stage.
  2. Monastic surrender – You surrender your desire for wealth, sex and sensual pleasure, and to pursue your personal dreams or desires. You may take a monastic vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience. You live a life according to the dictates of the scriptures of your faith at this stage; you may belong to a monastic community. You may engage in isolation to avoid temptations; you may become a hermit or holy wanderer. You spend you day in prayer, contemplation, and meditation. In some religious communities, you may carry out service or ministry. You submit yourself to the guidance of a spiritual mentor, who gives you regular guidance and direction for what you must do.
  3. Agya – Your life, desires, mind, and will are completely surrendered to the Will Divine. You enact this Divine direction in your daily life. Those who become Gurus, Prophets, and spiritual Masters operate from this platform. When you function from this level, you allow yourself to become the instrument for Divine Light, Grace, Love, and Wisdom to express through you. This inner Divinity fully overshadows and controls your life.

You may wish to examine which of these strategies you are using to avoid fulfilling your desires; through psychotherapy and coaching you can sometimes free yourself to embrace your natural desires and let go of the self-torment of strategies two and three—fantasy and taboo.

Those of you who are trying to avoid your desires through strategy four, dissociation—and you have gotten involved in a religious or political cult—can often benefit from a structured program such as our Cult Recovery Coaching Program, which can walk you through the steps to re-own your life, your sanity, and your genuine desires.

Those of you who have moved onto the platform of decompensation—strategy five—may frankly not be reachable though psychotherapy, coaching, or spiritual intervention. If you are functioning at this level, your challenge is to determine whether you seek to dedicate your life completely to God, in which case, you may opt for the wraparound support of a monastic community, or whether you will embrace your authentic human life and its desires again, and come back down to earth.

It may be valuable to determine which of your desires could be satisfied through direct action, and which legitimately need to be deferred—or outright jettisoned; for not every desire of the human heart is noble, worthy, and good. As you reflect upon the motivational spectrum, you may wish to identify healthier ways to achieve your dreams: psychotherapy may help those of you who are deeply entangled in the throes of self-torture and self-sabotage.