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The Secret of Real Success by William Whitecloud
William Whitecloud is author of Australia’s best selling metaphysical book, The Magician’s Way, and creator of the self-transformation modality of the same name.
This article is a summary of a speech he gave to The Aware Business Group in Sydney recently.
Who doesn’t remember where they were when they heard about the planes hitting the Twin Towers?
I was out in the garden when one of my neighbours came running across to me, yelling, “Switch on your telly! They’re flying planes into the World Trade Centre.”
Sure enough, there they were, exploding into the tall buildings over and over again. It took me a while to realise that it was two planes, not a whole fleet of them.
Then back out in the garden with all the neighbours leaning over their fences and yabbering hysterically about the monumental horror we were all participating in. Appalling as it was, we were all high on the adrenalin rush one experiences when confronted by something so deadly. And the fact that we could share in such a horror so remotely, untouched by the grim reality of the event, infused us with a god-like sense of power. We were above it all, like passengers on a cruise ship sailing past an island of starving natives.
Even then, as we took the day off work to watch more telly and indulge in spectator speculation to keep the high alive, we knew that 9/11 would touch us. Just how or by how much we could never know at the time. Now, of course, we do.
Many people I know lost their businesses as a direct result of that fateful day. It was a trigger for the whole world to erupt into a seething cauldron of ethnic and religious enmity. Everyone seems to be against everyone. Sovereign nations and embittered factions of society are falling over themselves to acquire the dirtiest, most lethal weapons to attack each other with. The ensuing chaos has pushed the cost of fuel through the roof, and international travel is a pain in the butt, especially to the USA, the so called Home of the Brave and Land of the Free.
These days it seems that we are all much more aware of what only physicists and mystics knew – we are all connected. We are not above the island of starving natives. They are actually on board our cruise ship and our cruise ship makes waves on their island.
When I was at school in Africa in the sixties we were taught that the jungles could never be tamed, that basically the best humans could ever do was live in a stand off with nature, and if ever we turned our backs for a minute, the rapacious vegetation would overrun the slender foothold we had struggled to gain. With three hundred kilometers between me and the nearest city that theory sounded so plausible; nature seemed to go on forever – how could it be depleted?
Well, twenty years later those three hundred kilometers filled up edge to edge with people and the factories in the city spewed acid rain on where I used to live. All the forests began to die and the fish disappeared from the rivers.
Not only are we now aware that we are all connected, we’re aware that we are even more closely connected than we ever suspected. We’re all in the same boat. It used to be a cruise ship – now we realise that it’s more like an over crowded life boat without enough supplies for everyone on board. When you sing, you keep someone else awake, and if you eat, you take the food out of someone else’s mouth.
I’m not trying to lay a guilt trip on anyone, but that’s what it’s like now. Everything is so terribly interconnected and every action has such vast and long reaching repercussions. So many people talk about how they want to make a difference, perhaps not realising that they do anyway. No matter what you do, you are lending your energy to something that has profound consequences. Maybe it’s global warming, maybe it’s intolerance, or mindlessness, or greed, or maybe it’s virtuous and conscious and right. Who can judge? Safe to say though, in these times, everything you do makes a difference – a very big difference.
In the brilliant organisational change book, Presence, the learned authors, Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers, talk about how our bodies stem from identical cells. There are no heart cells or hair cells or retina cells to start with – just the same identical cells. The miracle of our bodies is that each of these generic cells knows where in the body it is and what function it should serve. So they grow into heart cells or hair follicles or retina cells. And that’s how we end up with these amazingly beautiful vehicles that get us about in life.
The really interesting thing is that cancer also stems from the very same cell. Except that cancer is in a sense a rogue cell, one that doesn’t know it’s own place and purpose. And so it grows and expands mindlessly, serving nothing and destroying everything – even itself, ultimately.
What a beautiful (and sobering) metaphor for us humans at this time. For, really, that is our ultimate choice: to know ourselves and our true purpose in life and act in favor of that, or to move mindlessly through life, driven, as Dante put it, by our blind fears and desires.
More and more people are waking up to the fact that it is time they started making a difference in life, one that serves the whole body they belong to. The trap that the awakening soul will fall into, however, is trying to save the world. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
As someone who has worked intimately with thousands of people on their creative process in life, I have become very dubious of big dreams. I remember well the New Age scene of the nineties, where everyone you met was studying some energetic healing modality that they were going to set up a giant healing centre with and liberate the afflicted masses. Hardly any of them sustained their healing practices into the new millennium, let alone went on to create The Enlightenment Centre of the Universe.
My sister-in-law has been a very senior consultant to both the World Health Organisation and the United Nations. I know from her personal account that the billion dollar projects designed to support the underprivileged of the world do very little to solve the problems they attempt to tackle. In fact, grand largesse can be a curse on the Third World. The money and food raised in today’s well meaning super charity appeals rarely ends up with those who need it. Mostly it ends up in the hands of warlords and dictators who use the donated resources to enrich and empower themselves and keep their people down.
Bob Dylan once sang: “You’ve got some big dreams baby, but in order to dream you’ve still got to be asleep. When you gonna wake up?” The grandiose dreams that put you at the centre of the universe are inevitably a delusion. Not that there is anything wrong with thinking big and imagining great possibilities. But where the starting point of your vision is a million miles from the reality that exists now, you can be sure you are divorced from the whole of which you are a part - the collective soul or consciousness of humanity.
In my experience, people who make a big difference for the good rarely start out with global domination in mind – they don’t want to stamp out universal poverty or convert every nation on earth to democracy. They seem to follow their conscience in the moment. Rosa Parks, who is credited with igniting the American civil rights movement in 1955, just refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white man, never mind that she could go to jail. She knew that segregation was wrong, and she wasn’t going to be a part of it.
A childhood friend of mine became the United Nations director of HIV orphans in Swaziland, a country in Southern Africa where over forty percent of the population are HIV positive. She didn’t get the job by being well connected in Washington or Geneva. She simply took in an orphan when one of her farm workers died of Aids. Then when another worker died, my friend took in her children. And then people started bringing her orphans from all over the area, and then all over the country. Her program does an incredible job, providing sustainable and compassionate care, because it is driven by a local who is connected to the heart of each individual within her system.
Small steps lead to big things – because they are real, because they are in touch. My own experiences of this principle came from writing my book, The Magician’s Way. Initially I wrote it with the intention of producing a competent text book for my self-transformation seminars. As someone with no literary background whatsoever, I didn’t have very high expectations of myself. I imagined the audience for my book to be a few hundred people.
As I wrote the introduction to my work, I was quite bewildered when a story began emerging. It was as if someone was standing off to the side of my safe little catalogue of theories, inviting me to journey into a world I knew nothing about. Suddenly I wasn’t merely conveying facts, I was writing. As confronting as it was to take on something I felt so ill-equipped for, I nevertheless followed my heart. I wrote and I wrote, and all the time I wrote, all I wanted was to finish what I had started.
Once I had finished, I didn’t know what I had in my hands. I couldn’t recognise my own premises. My old perspective had been bent out of shape and my ideas translated into what might as well have been another language. Not many of my family or friends were happy with the manuscript. My wife still hasn’t read it.
At no stage was The Magician’s Way meant to shake the earth off it’s axis. Yet it is reckoned that at least one hundred thousand people in Australia have read it. (And, hopefully, soon that will be millions, as preparations are finalized to publish the book internationally.) The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Hundreds of people have personally told me how it’s message has helped them put their lives back on track. Some claim it saved them from suicide, others from bankruptcy. I’ve even had some letters from children testifying how it has helped them cope with illnesses or family break-ups, and, most touching, asking me if I can help them meet the characters from the book.
The power of following your conscience can never be overstated. Conscience isn’t a word you hear used much anymore. It’s been replaced by political correctness, another big idea, this time dictating how everyone should be, so that the world might be a perfect place to live in. Sadly, ideals can be a hollow prescription, a blanket formula that often bears no relationship to the complexities of the moment.
Your conscience, though, is the part of you that is connected to your universal environment. It knows where you are in life and what you need to be serving right here and now. Don’t stand up for the white man, take in that baby, go with the story – your conscience is simply your awareness of the right thing to do.
If you are someone who is keen to make a difference in the world, there is a secret you might want to be let in on. While the small steps that present themselves in a given moment might not be monumental and grand – un- glamouress, even – they unfold an untold world of treasure, serving you and all the world you are a part of at the same time. You can never do better than be real and follow your conscience.
William Whitecloud.
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