Success is so eagerly pursued that you would suppose it to be well understood. Certain advantages—being born rich, going to the right college, making social and business connections—are generally seen as keys to success. But research undercuts these factors; they do not predict success very well, and some successful people rise to the top without any external advantages. When asked how they became successful, the most common factor that leading businessmen give is luck; they found themselves in the right place at the right time. This implies that if you want to be successful, your best course might be to throw yourself into the hands of random chance.
If there is a better approach to success, we first have to ask what success actually is. A simple definition that cuts through much confusion is this: success is the result of a series of good decisions. Someone who makes the right choices in life is going to reach a much better result than someone who makes bad choices. This holds true despite setbacks and failures along the way. As every successful person attests, their road to achievement was marked with temporary failures, from which they took positive lessons and thus were able to move forward.
What, then, goes into a good decision? Which choices ensure a positive outcome? Now we come to the heart of the mystery, because there is no formula for good choices. Life is dynamic and constantly changing. Tactics that worked last year or last week often don’t work anymore because circumstances have changed. Hidden variables come into play. No formula can account for the unknown, and despite our best efforts to analyze what is going on today, there is no getting around the fact that tomorrow is unknown. By itself, the unknown constitutes a mystery. Mysteries are entertaining in fiction; in real life they bring a mixture of anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty.
How you deal with the unknown determines how well you make choices. Bad decisions are the result of applying the past to the present, trying to repeat something that once worked. The worst decisions are made by applying the past so rigidly that you are blind to anything else. We can break down bad decisions into specifics. What we see is that each factor is rooted in contracted awareness. By its very nature, contracted awareness is rigid, defensive, limited in scope, and dependent on the past. The past is known, and when people aren’t able to cope with the unknown, they have little choice but to remember the past, using old decisions and habits as their guide—a very fallible guide, as it turns out.
For each factor that holds you back, the solution is to expand your awareness, leaving limitation behind to discover a clearer vision of the problem. Before you read the following list, consider a really bad choice that you made—in relationships, career, finances, or any other critical area—and measure it against the aspects of contracted awareness as applied to decision-making.
Did you have limited vision of the problem you faced?
Did you act on impulse, despite your better judgment?
In the back of your mind, were you panicked by fear of making the wrong decision?
How many obstacles came out of the blue, unforeseen in advance?
Did your ego get in the way, making you the victim of false pride?
Were you unwilling to see how much the situation had changed?
Did you focus too much on seeming to be in control? At a deeper level, did you feel out of control?
Did you ignore other people who tried to stop you or change your mind?
Did you overlook a hidden agenda, such as wanting to fail so that you wouldn’t have to take full responsibility?
This quiz isn’t offered to discourage you. Quite the opposite. Once you bring into view the drawbacks of contracted awareness, the advantage of expanded awareness becomes completely evident. Let’s take each factor one at a time.
In any situation, we never have enough information. Too many variables enter into difficult choices. Since we all make decisions based on less than total knowledge, our limited perspective handicaps us. You can overcome such limitations to a certain extent by learning more about the situation; that is a valuable thing to do, so far as rational solutions go. But imagine choosing your life partner by first reading their past history in complete detail, leaving out not a single day since they were born. Imagine choosing a job by first analyzing every business decision your prospective employer ever made. The more variables you try to take into account, the more ambiguous everything looks.
The solution: Take into account only the information that affects success or failure. No rational model exists for doing this, but at the level of pure awareness, all variables are being computed at the same time. When you expand your awareness, you don’t have to sort out a host of confusing factors. The critical factors for making a good choice come to mind from the source, which is within you, not in the external environment.
Acting on impulse is emotional, and most bad decisions are impulsive. That part is no mystery. (As one popular adage puts it, “Ready, fire, aim.”) Turning decision-making into a rational process is the holy grail of many researchers, who see emotions and personal bias as the enemy of clear-sighted choices. But all such efforts have failed, because emotions are woven into every decision. If you are in a good mood, you are likely to pay too much for an item, buy it on a whim, overestimate how well the future will turn out, and be blinded to the negatives in your situation.
The usual answer to emotional bias is impulse control. Being able to control our impulses is considered a crucial aspect of emotional intelligence. Apparently there are predictors for this from a very early age. In one experiment a child is told that he can have a piece of candy right now, or, if he waits fifteen minutes, he can have two pieces of candy. Only a minor percentage of very young children will take the second option, but those who do are likely to have good impulse control for life. They can tell immediate gratification from delayed gratification and choose the latter. The catch-22 is that the better you are at controlling your impulses, the less you will trust a snap decision, and snap decisions have been shown to be more right than not. Pausing to analyze a decision tends to lead to worse, not better choices.
The solution: Know when to choose now and when to choose later. This isn’t something that fits any model. Some impulses lead to good outcomes, others lead to disappointment. At the level of pure awareness impulses are aligned with future outcomes, which means that what you want to do at this very moment will turn out to be right for the future. With expanded awareness, you spontaneously have the right impulse, and if you don’t, you instinctively recognize that you need to pause and reconsider.
Good decision-makers are considered to be bold and fearless. With that in mind, most of us fake it, trying to appear more confident and sure of ourselves than we really feel. The great frauds in history achieved their success by mastering a look of complete self-confidence. But in reality the most momentous decisions are made in the presence of fear and anxiety; a glance at photographs of Lincoln during the Civil War and of Winston Churchill during the Blitz of World War II testifies to their depression, worry, and sorrow.
When fear is an inescapable factor, the real question is how to keep it from destroying your clarity of mind. Someone who is blinded by fear usually feels at the emotional level that a powerful impulse must be followed; they are too afraid to make any other choice. What is more insidious is hidden fear, because you may make the same bad choice as another person who is full of anxiety, yet you will delude yourself into believing that you are not anxious. The paradox here is that we pick leaders who act the most confident, but such leaders are almost guaranteed to make bad decisions due to lack of self-knowledge.
The solution: Find the level in yourself that is actually fearless. This level lies deep within. On the surface the mind is unruly, agitated with the effects of anxiety. A layer below that, the voice of fear continually talks about risks, failure, and worst-case scenarios. At the next layer, other voices make the case for reality, pointing out that fear is convincing but not always right. Only when you can transcend this level do you reach the true self, which views every situation without fear. This is because fear comes from the past, arising from memory of pain. The true self lives in the present; therefore it has no contact with old hurts and wounds. In clarity it can see that risks and bad scenarios exist—these aren’t shoved aside or denied—yet in seeing the negatives there is no coloration of fear.
In the state of contracted awareness, uncertainty is your enemy. You don’t fully know how other people are going to behave, and even if you got sworn affidavits with promises to act a certain way, other people don’t know how they will behave in the future. Society is in constant flux between things that remain more or less reliable and things that nobody foresees. The so-called black swan theory even holds that history is determined far more by totally surprising, anomalous events than by anything one could have predicted. Individuals seem to feel the same way about their own biographies—as I mentioned above, the most successful among us owe their rise, as they see it, to good luck.
More common than good luck is bad luck or no luck at all. The popularity of Murphy’s Law is due to the inevitability of obstacles, though there may not actually be a natural law that if something can go wrong, it will. Blind pessimism is as unrealistic as blind optimism. But a good deal of success involves the ability to cope with unforeseeable setbacks. The best marriages have nothing to do with being perfect, but with coping skills. Everyone has a right to behave erratically, and when this results in conflicts, demanding that other people get back on track and behave predictably doesn’t work. Still less does it work to retreat from life because you can’t handle the knocks.
The solution: Make uncertainty your ally, not your enemy. All leaps forward depend on reaching into the unknown. Once you see the unknown as the source of creativity, you no longer fear it. Instead, you welcome the fact that life renews itself in unexpected ways. This attitude cannot be applied arbitrarily, however. Unforeseen obstacles reflect a genuine inability to see deeper, and what you cannot see has no power to aid you. It takes expanded awareness to open a channel to the underlying creativity that exists within you.
If you want others to follow you, make yourself look larger than life. The bigger your ego, the more people will use you as an umbrella. Human nature seems to force those who feel weak to give away even more of their power. But ego is almost as bad in decision-making as fear. One overestimates dangers, while the other won’t admit that dangers exist. Under the sway of ego, a person must perform constantly. The one thing the ego is good at is building up an image, and images demand that you put on a show that other people will believe in.
It is exhausting, therefore, to devote so much energy to being a winner, while even more energy must be expended to keeping self-doubt at bay. Anyone who has drawn close to world-famous celebrities senses the unreality that surrounds them, and without reality, there is no basis for good decisions. Ironically, famous people make bad choices because everyone around them says yes to everything. Unbounded freedom is a spiritual state; when the ego pretends to be unbounded, it isn’t free but trapped in illusion.
The solution: Act from the true self, where “I” is no longer personal. Instead, the ego of the true self is simply a focus for perception—you have a unique perspective without investing in it. As awareness expands, the ego doesn’t die, but changes jobs. The old job was to look after number one; the new job is to look out for the whole situation. You no longer have such a personal stake in the world. Our aim is to benefit yourself while causing no harm to others. Ideally, what you want leads to benefits for everyone. That ideal is only attained at the level of pure awareness, however. At every other level there is duality, and with duality there is a clash between “me” and “you,” as we pursue separate self-interests. In expanded awareness you take a closer step toward unifying duality, and as that happens, automatically the conflict between separate selves begins to be resolved.
Adaptation comes naturally to the body, as we have seen. For a cell to survive, it must respond to the messages that arrive this very minute. Our minds, however, are not comfortable living completely in the moment. Like an inchworm, which keeps half its length on one leaf while reaching the other half to a new leaf, we rely on the past to guide the present. This tactic works in situations where you have to remember a skill; it would be futile, for example, to decide that driving a car must be learned every day. Obviously all knowledge is an accumulation; you build on the past in order to know more in the present.
Where the problem arises is psychologically. The past is your psychological enemy when it “teaches” you that old hurts, wounds, humiliations, failures, and obstacles are relevant to the present. Most people know the value of being adaptable. Few of us announce at a meeting that we are rigid; we pay lip service to being flexible. Even so, we find ourselves making decisions based on the past, which means that behind every open mind is a mind firmly closed.
A closed mind isn’t like a clenched fist, which you can open voluntarily. Something inside tells you that you must be closed. This is hard to understand when it isn’t affecting you. If you have no racial, ethnic, or religious bigotry, you can’t easily comprehend that prejudice feels involuntary. Choice isn’t an option. Reality itself is dictated by prejudice, so that the mere sight of a person who comes from a different race, religion, or ethnicity is enmeshed with prejudicial beliefs. In the same way, the fusing of past and present in our minds is occurring unconsciously. Even more insidiously, rigid thinking acts like a defensive wall, turning new ideas into threats for no other reason than that they are new. Giving up your old ways is equated with personal defeat or exposing yourself to an enemy.
The solution: Live from the level of the self that is always present. You cannot will your past to go away. Everyone drags around the burden of memory. Even if you could somehow obliterate your past hurts and failures, it wouldn’t be possible to make your amnesia selective. You would also lose the positive aspects of your past, including your emotional education, personal growth, and accumulated knowledge. Memories, for good and ill, are woven into your personal self. Fortunately the true self does not have to be guilty from personal experience. It exists in and of itself; it is the vehicle for pure awareness. The more your awareness expands, the lighter the burden of the past. You find spontaneously that your attention is focused on the present, from which all creative possibilities emerge.
Being in control is a thorny issue. Some people, who psychologically fall into the category of control types, cannot be comfortable with even small amounts of chaos and imperfection. They go too far in the direction of trying to control other people and their surroundings. Another personality type ignores self-control and creates an environment that has almost no boundaries or structures. Both are examples of contracted awareness, each in a different way.
Problems arise when control is either lost or becomes too dominant. Most of us would never make a choice that takes away self-control. For some that means jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, for others that means putting money into a risky venture like oil wells. Risk and control are closely related. When your tolerance for risk is exceeded, what happens? A rational risk becomes a threat instead, and threats make us feel that we will no longer be in control. The more contracted your awareness is, the less reliable is your sense of risk. Thus you feel overly threatened, even by small risks, and you wind up making decisions within tight boundaries. Paradoxically, when you feel really paralyzed is the moment when you are likely to act recklessly; your sudden decision, almost always a bad one, comes about because you want to escape the stress of not making any decision.
The solution: Replace risk with certainty. You have no worries about losing control if you aren’t threatened. Once you are certain about yourself, external threats don’t exist anymore, because threat is the same as fear, and knowing who you are is a fearless state. Who you are is the true self. Expanded awareness takes you closer to the true self; therefore, fear decreases. When that happens, the issue of control lessens. In its place you experience a state of increased freedom. Reality is allowed to be beyond your control—it always was to begin with—and you feel comfortable joining in.
Bad decisions are made when you don’t know whom to listen to. The worst decisions are made when you can’t even decide whom to trust. There will always be contending voices in the room; total agreement is suspicious whenever it occurs, in fact. Somebody isn’t telling the truth. When faced with widely differing opinions, most people choose the ones they already agree with. If you look back on the times you seriously asked for advice, you’ll probably discover that what you really wanted was permission to act the way you were going to act anyway. Your motive wasn’t to get the best advice; you wanted to feel good about a choice that contained an element of doubt, shame, or guilt.
Contracted awareness is isolating. You are more alone with thoughts and beliefs that are completely private. One effect of being isolated is that other people seem to be far away. You can’t reach out to them; sometimes you can’t even find a way to communicate with them. The most common example is teenagers, who isolate themselves from their parents as they move from childhood dependency to adult independence. Adolescence is the limbo in between those two states, when no one seems to be on your side except other teenagers. But the isolation of old age resembles being an adolescent in the shared attitude of “no one understands me” (one reason that the very old are sometimes the only refuge for adolescents).
The solution: Understand yourself completely. It is futile to seek to be completely understood by others. No one else has the time to understand where you are coming from except in a fairly superficial way. And even if you spent time with the most empathic person in the world, someone who wanted to understand you down to the last detail, what would be achieved? They would have full knowledge of a person who was constructed from the haphazard circumstances of the past, a rickety, jerry-built collection of old experiences. To truly understand yourself is to know the true self. With that knowledge comes complete trust in yourself. Once you have that, the opinions of others can be seen without threat, and you will have a reliable inner guide that allows you to weigh fairly, without undue personal bias, what contending voices are telling you. Even more important, those other voices will be much less contentious. The secret of operating from expanded awareness is that you are already aligned with the right choice. Others can sense that, which makes them more willing to cooperate.
Most adults have enough experience to judge when someone else has an agenda. Usually agendas fall into predictable categories. There are givers and takers. There are the ambitious and the timid, the selfish and the selfless. It’s crucial to society that we wear our agendas on our sleeves. Otherwise, doubt and suspicion play too great a part. Cooperation collapses when you can’t trust other people’s motives. At bottom, your own motives are about getting what you want, making your dreams turn into reality.
The snag is that some agendas are hidden, even from the person who has them. We are trapped between “I must” and “I won’t.” If you have to be liked or to belong, you might not realize how powerfully this “must” affects you, but if you were asked to fire an employee, say no to grown children asking for money, or take an unpopular stand about same-sex marriage, for example, your hidden agenda would make those actions difficult if not impossible. Or consider misers and the habitually stingy. Hidden inside is a fear of lack, and since this fear isn’t being confronted, it gets acted out instead. No amount of hoarding or stinginess will make up for the lack, which is psychological, not material. All hidden agendas are psychological, and whatever they are, they will lead to bad decisions because of the contracted state that they are coming from.
The solution: Renounce personal agendas. This involves bringing them to light first. Then you must turn over the rocks and look at what is hiding underneath, which is almost always fear. Fear is the most powerful force contracting anyone’s awareness; it demands that we retreat, put up barriers, and defend ourselves. But it becomes far easier to renounce your hidden agendas if you expand your awareness. Bringing the light is always better than fighting the darkness. The true self is the source of light, and you need to discover that the true self is available. Nothing is truer than Jesus’ teaching, “You are the light of the world,” and yet it seems easier to believe that the light comes from outside ourselves. Hard as it is to claim your darkness, it is almost as hard to claim your light. Fortunately the light is timeless, and even if you turn away from it, messages from your true self never stop being sent.
The ultimate success is to live in the light permanently. Then there are no rigid boundaries, no fears, no limitations. As with everything, the point of our lives is to realize who we are. Once you are established in your own being, the struggles that hinder success melt away. The next time you succeed at anything, even in bringing a smile to a child or appreciating the sun setting over the sea, remind yourself that you have taken a step closer to the real measure of success, the pure awareness that is your source and the source of every happiness you’ve ever experienced.
By ordinary measures success is unpredictable. So many factors create it, and some, like timing and opportunity, appear to be random. But what is success? A series of decisions that leads to a positive result. If decision-making can be maximized, success is far more likely.
Decisions based on contracted awareness are unlikely to work out well, because of the following drawbacks:
limited perspective
impulsiveness
fear of failure
unforeseen obstacles and setbacks
ego
unwillingness to change and adapt
loss of control
opposition from other people
hidden personal agendas
With the expansion of awareness, each of those drawbacks begins to lessen, and decisions begin to be supported at a deeper level. In pure awareness all decisions are in line with the universe and the underlying laws that govern both the inner and outer worlds.
