Mental Exercise 1 : The Vision

(Excerpt from "Are You Ready to Succeed" page 23, 34)

Consider this vision:

You wake up in the morning suffused with an ineffable feeling of joy, a deep sense of well-being. You go to work, to a job you love so much that you would pay for the privilege of doing it. You labor intently but are so focused that time flies by unnoticed. At the end of the day, you are invigorated, brimming with more energy than when you started. You have a penetrating awareness of the course you are charting, a clear knowledge of your place in the scheme of the universe. Your work feeds this, is congruent with it, and brings great contentment and peace.

You face obstacles, big ones, small ones, perhaps more than your fair share of them. You understand very clearly their purpose is to test your mettle, to bring out the best in you even as the abrasive whetstone serves to finely hone the knife. So you plow on indomitably, sure of what you want to achieve and yet unconcerned about results. At times it seems as if you are riding the crest of a powerful tidal wave, as if the universe itself is helping you, working with you and through you.

Locked doors open mysteriously. Incredibly fortuitous coincidences occur. You accomplish prodigious feats, feats you would never have imagined yourself capable of. Yet it would have been perfectly okay if you had not accomplished them. you accept accolades gracefully but are not swayed by them because you march to the beat of your own drummer.

Your personal life is intensely fulfilling. You are active in a variety of civic, charitable, and political causes and successful in all of them. Your spouse is perfectly compatible with you, a true helpmate in every sense of the word. You beget progeny and your offspring bring great satisfaction. You have a sense of trusteeship toward them. You know that they will chart their own paths and that much of these paths will be forever veiled from your eyes. You are the springboard from which they are launched, and you are glad to bend and provide the greatest thrust that you can. And then you watch with a full heart as they wend their own ways.

So it goes on year after year, each day more perfect than the one before. Your gratitude is so intense that at times it is like a physical ache. Your heart bursts as you thank the universe. What have you done to deserve such good fortune? And when the time comes for you to depart, you do so joyfully and in peace, achieving identification with the Cosmic Primciple. that incredible merging that has been called many things by many people but is ultimately indescribable, far beyond the feeble capabilities of language.

A life such as described above is your birthright. You have to reach out and claim it. Will you succeed? I do not know. I do know that the firt step toward getting there is recognising that you want to get there...