ASPECTOS GENERALES

We now come to the most exciting part of this book. Now we can start to re-build ourselves in a way that will automatically create the kind of life we want. We are at the gateway to a new world. It is a magical world filled with pleasure enchantment and freedom from want. To step through this gate, we must be willing to abandon the paradigm of success in favour of the paradigm of pleasure.

You have already begun to do this by simply understanding what the paradigm of success is actually doing. However, this is not enough. If you are to walk through the gate and begin to experience the garden of pleasure, you must also understand a second illusion. This is the illusion that has kept us prisoner in the paradigm of success for thousands of years. It is the illusion of emotion.

The illusion of emotion is the belief that emotions are connected to life events. It is the idea that we can only feel certain ways when certain events happen. We think that the only way we can feel pleasure is to be loved, have enough money, or travel, or… any other number of excuses. We begin to believe that these outside factors cause our

emotions. This is how we are trapped by the advertisers and the sellers of need and want. They teach us that our wants and needs will be fulfilled if only we "purchase" what they sell. We believe that we will feel better about ourselves as soon as we can get more, but then we want more and more.

This is the illusion that the paradigm of success uses to keep us prisoner. It teaches us that outside factors control the energy that we put out. We're taught that having a new car or a better relationship will cause us to put out positive energy. It is this illusion that makes us say we cannot be happy until something else happens. This is why

be think that we cannot put into the universe the energy that will manifest what we want, because we do not yet have want we want. It is the height of insanity and yet we embrace it as if it was a truth.

We must learn our emotions are not connected to experiences. They are connected to the paradigm we live in. Our emotions are based on the way that we think!

For example, some people can be ecstatic just by getting up and being able to see the sunrise. There are others that cannot be happy unless a litany of criteria is met. When these two kinds of people meet and discuss what makes them happy, the second group fails to realise that they have given themselves and their power over to outside events and situations. Only when situations are "just right" can they feel happy.

When you think that outside experiences or forces control your emotions, you are firmly in the grasp of the paradigm of success and--of course--you will want and need. You will believe that getting what you want and need will free you from the fear and negative thoughts and energy. But, it will not. It simply feeds the negative energy.

Let me relate a story of two young boys. The two boys lived on a farm and were at the age that they felt they should be allowed to try driving the car. One day the parents went out and left the boys alone. They knew that their parents would be gone for at least an hour or two so; they conspired to drive the car while their parents were out.

The first boy got in the car and began to drive it around. As he drove the car, it sputtered and jerked as he attempted to control the clutch and the gas. With each jump of the car his heart beat faster and the pleasure rose in his chest until he was laughing out loud. Each stall was a chance to start the car again and practice starting. Driving was the most fun he had ever had.

Soon it was his brother’s turn. His brother got in the car. The experience itself was identical. Again the car shook and stalled, but this brother found himself cursing under his breath. At each jerk of the car and inappropriate clutch release, his anger at himself and the car rose. He compared himself to others he had seen driving. As he did, his longing to be able to drive like them turned his emotions from frustration to red hot anger. As he continued around the farmyard, his lack of control of the car was magnified by his anger. With each jerk of the car, his confidence dwindled. By the time he pulled up in front of the barn to let his brother have another turn, he was ready to quit. He stomped out of the car, kicking the door as he went.

How many of us approach life like the second brother approached driving? Many of us diminish ourselves when we try something new. When we see what some else has manifested into their lives, don't we often feel angry and jealous? Is it any wonder that we fill our universe with anger and resentment daily?

So many of us live our lives like the second brother. We put into the universe emotions not connected to the event at all. They are emotions we have learned from the paradigm of success: Emotions like anger, jealousy, arrogance, hate and perfectionism. Emotions that when expressed create negative energy. Is it any wonder that so many of us who experience these emotions on a daily basis also have health problems or life problems? The universe will only return and magnify the energy that is given to it. That is the law of the universe

Without the belief that he must be successful, the second boy would have enjoyed the ride as much as his brother. The first boy simply experienced the pleasure of driving, of stalling, and of having to restart the car. The second boy drove with the want and need

of success as his goal. In doing so, he robbed himself of his pleasure in driving just as we rob ourselves of our pleasure in life. By living in the paradigm of success the boy prevented the magic that swirls around him from happening. He put out want, fear and failure for the universe to return to him, and it did.

How many of you have created problems in your lives because you tried to be successful instead of using the experience to create pleasure for yourselves? At the heart of every failure is the illusion that there can be success through want and need! As long as want and need are the criteria there will always be failure.

We have come to believe that we cannot have success unless we have want and need. That we can not set goals and enjoy the goal setting, that we can not enjoy where we are and be motivated to move ahead to become better. Failure and success are two sides of the same coin. That is why it is so hard for us to relinquish the idea of failure in our lives. We understand unconsciously that if we release failure we must also release the want and need of success. We don’t understand that failure and want and need are the same illusion, and that illusion is created by the paradigm of success.

But what if we are unable to make even the first move from the paradigm of success? What if want and need is so important to us that we cannot bring ourselves to even consider abandoning them?

Let's begin by understanding how the illusion is created that want and need are so important.

For us to choose success over pleasure, we our minds must determine that success is more important. Let's examine for a moment how this came to be and why it seems so natural for us to believe that the paradigm of success is the correct one. The reason for this, like so many things, is that it is the way things have been. To better understand

what I mean let's go back to the roots of want and need conditioning, to the roots of the success paradigm and how it became linked to our idea that wanting and success go together.

Since the dawn of time, we as a species have had to have ways of determining what is important in our lives. I would assume that in the beginning we all had a pretty good idea of what was important our own survival, such as food, shelter, warmth, and procreation. During this time, our dominance in the group was dictated by strength and expertise in hunting and gathering. But as time went on we shifted to a more agrarian way of life.

Once we no longer were hunter-gathers, our ancestors had to find other ways of deciding who was most important in the community. Who would be leader? Who would get the choicest mate, or the best home site? As violent conflict could (and probably did) result in injury and even death, it became obvious that the community shouldn't lose its best and strongest in internal conflicts. (This is evident in most other species, which rarely fight to the death.) Some other methods of proving dominance had to be found.

At first, size and strength were the obvious choices, but as we evolved we began to use other symbols of dominance. Birthright became a way of determining who would be leader. In some societies this method flourished.

If you were not the king or chief, property became a medium of determining your position in society. How many pigs or cows you had became more important than how tall you were.

This has continued today. Almost everyone would agree that obtaining and showing ownership of dominance markers determines status for most people today. Ownership of things like money, late model cars, and the ability to travel, places the holder of these markers higher in status.

Those that hold these status markers are held in higher esteem. So, it soon became obvious that there was a huge market in selling the dominance markers

themselves. It was also apparent that people would purchase any instructional material that claimed to tell them how to achieve the money necessary to buy these dominance markers.

As we have adopted wealth and success rather than happiness as our dominance markers, those without wealth (and thus success) have developed deep wants and needs. This is the reason so many people feel so impotent in our modern world. Even those that are rich are not immune. Although they have acquired symbols of dominance, someone else always has a higher level and more dominance. There is no longer any safety in the pecking order.

Each of us has an innate knowing in regard to these symbols of dominance and their impotency. This is why we strive to improve our dominance factor (success)

through continued acquisition of money and belongings. We hope to create for ourselves a sense of shelter and thus arrive at some level of security in our lives. Success though want and need will never give us the pleasure and safety that we crave. No matter what we get, as long as we choose the paradigm of success, we will always want more and create negative energy by doing so.

Because this negative energy comes back to us, often destroying what we have built, we worry that what we have may be taken from us. The energy that we put out almost guarantees it.

In our quiet moments, each of us dreams and desires for the magic of childhood to return. We long for our wishes to be fulfilled and our lives to be exciting and happy. But we have been brainwashed into believing that this magical life is a myth. We left it behind, and trudge through our lives with a sense of fear and pain.

So what can we do about this? How can we change what we do and how we do it? The answer lies in how we experience life. It's all in how we learn to give off the magic sparks that will automatically attract into our lives what we desire, including more pleasure, more money, and better relationships.

To live your life from the pleasure paradigm, you must understand that the way you have been attempting to get your life to work is wrong. It is not wrong to want to live in pleasure, to have as much money as you want, and as much love and contentment as you want. What is wrong is the way you have been attempting to get these things. As I said earlier, if the success gurus were right, then anyone who could read would already be rich and happy. Clearly, they are not.

The bag of dirt

There is an old story of a magician who told farmers that he could magically transform their crops if they would buy his bag of magic dirt. The instructions were plain once a person bought the dirt. They were to walk around their field each day sprinkling a small amount of the magic dirt with them. The magician prospered as the dirt seemed to work until one day a boy noticed the magician collecting ordinary dirt and putting it into his bags ready to sell. When confronted as to how the magic worked the magician simply shrugged and said, "They are farmers. When they walk around the field they

automatically pull weeds and tend their crops. The magic is in getting them to want to walk around the fields each day".

Our modern fields are the offices and businesses of today. They are where the magicians offer us bags of dirt to keep doing what we don’t want to do. But unlike the farmers of yesteryear, we don’t want to farm these modern buildings. We do it because we have been sold a bag of dirt called the need for success. We strive for success while denying ourselves the joy of living in the moment and experiencing joy and wonder.

Our inherent need for security, love, possession, in short, dominance, has been turned against us to aid the corporate sales machine in selling us what we don’t want and what will ultimately destroy our lives and our world. We are kept so stressed and busy that our relationships fail, our health fails and our lives become hollow and hopeless. The sellers of success know that if a product can be redefined to be a dominance symbol, people will pay a far greater price for it. All of this has taught us that we need a

constantly escalating income to purchase dominance symbols if we are to stay ahead of the others in the pack and of course a high income in itself becomes the most important dominance symbol.

The myth that success is based on behaviour

To sell success, it became important for the success marketers to be able to accomplish two things. First they had to convince people that everyone who wanted to could achieve dominance. To do this effectively, they knew they must define new

differences between people to account for some of them having dominance and some not. They could not tell the truth that manifestation was the result of energy. They had to create a new myth that they could sell.

In our modern world as we previously mentioned, something other than size and strength had to be created as the "key to dominance" and thus pleasure. This something had to be available to everyone and it had to be sold to us as the single thing that--if possessed--would give us dominance. This "something else" was behaviour. It was postulated that if the same behaviour a "successful person" used could be adopted, then the outcome of success would be a sure thing and all the symbols of success could be purchased.

This of course sounds very good on paper, but like so many other myths surrounding the success paradigm it simply is not true. That most people in North America still believe it is a true testament to the sales job that the marketers of this myth have done.

Because so many of us believe that behaviour--not energy--creates our

environment, we have created a trap for ourselves. We have concentrated on behaviour instead of energy.

Let me give you an example of how behaviour can be so easily mistaken as the key to success.

In the late 1980s in Central British Columbia, Canada there was a housing boom. Every house was going up in price. Every person who bought and sold a house could make money, and they did.

I knew one particular person who became a very successful Realtor and earned substantial income (dominance points). Soon he was convinced of his own "success" and began examining his behaviour to discover the secret of his success. He wanted to become a success trainer and had decided that his own behaviour--considering how well he was doing--would be a great model.

I would like to point out that this is not at all unusual. Often when a person perceives themselves to be successful, they attribute it to their behaviour alone and spend a great deal of time and energy trying to figure out what behaviour they have that makes them superior.

Soon, the Realtor had everything ready and he opened up a shop teaching others to adopt his behaviours. Unfortunately, by the time he had opened his training business the housing boom had ceased. Not only did his students not succeed, but soon his own Real Estate business was in serious trouble. Within a year he was out of the Real Estate business altogether.

This story illustrates that success is not created by behaviours. The person who always seems to be in the right place at the right time, and effortlessly achieves what they want, has puzzled us all. These people are examples of living in pleasure. Their outflow of pleasure energy is returned to them, multiplied by the universe.

The great news is that this type of experience