Category Archives: Practical Meditation

The Spectrum of Earning Your Income

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By George A. Boyd ©2021

People often limit their possibilities for earning their income, and will take any gig to survive. There are a variety of approaches that might allow you to earn money in ways you might not have thought about. Here is the spectrum of how people earn their living:

Get any job to survive – this is the fallback for most of us… much of my working life was spent gigging it in the early ‘70s and middle ‘80s.

Prepare for work and work in that profession – this is the time-honored tradition of going to vocational school or college, getting your certificate, diploma, or degree, and then working in your field. This works when the economy is functioning well; this becomes a challenge during a recession. It becomes extra stressful when you are carrying a lot of student debt you used to earn that certificate, degree, or diploma.

I used this approach to get my first career-related job as a drug counselor: I earned my bachelors degree in Psychology and a certificate in Alcohol Drug Counseling. Was there a downside of this? Yes, I didn’t start my career until about halfway through my regular working years.

Entrepreneurship – this is starting your own business and selling a product or service. Even while I was employed at my more regular jobs after 1983, I was running my own little company to earn extra money.

If you are successful at this way of earning your money, you can become wealthy—and not just little extra cash, as I did. I’m beginning to believe now that the key to this is targeted marketing and sales.

Trusting in God and living a life of surrender and service – In this scenario, you allow Providence to take care of your needs.

This was the approach I used during the Summer of Love in 1967, when I “crashed” in different people’s houses and “panhandled” for some change to get my favorite, fish and chips. [This was in my pre-vegetarian period.]

I have some friends who have traveled across the country and the world giving lectures, and sleeping where people invite them—and sometimes in their van—and accepting whatever donations people gave them, using this strategy. This is not for the faint of heart—you need to have a lot of faith and chutzpah to make this work.

Using your creative or athletic genius to earn money – you can use this if you are particularly gifted in your art or athletic prowess. You are hired on a sports team or your acting and public speaking skill lands you a job as an actor or media celebrity. This also includes the writers, artists, and musicians, who gather a large following. When you are successful in this type, you can earn a lot of money.

I have written and published 18 books. For me, this has not been my ticket to great wealth.

Climbing the mountain of the world – You can rise to the top of corporations and politics through getting in touch with the people, whose circle of influence gives you the inside track to promotion and power. Those who work this approach in corporations and government gain access to the positions of great wealth. If you notice what C-suite officers make, you will see this can earn you a lot of money.

This never appealed to me. Plus, the professions in which I worked didn’t have ladders to great wealth.

Selling your way to the top – While many sales people are essentially gig workers, there are those that rise in their companies to become managers can make a great living. Real estate agents and brokers, big-ticket item sales people, and stockbrokers can make a lot of money.

I never was attracted to sales positions. In my weak foray into multi-level marketing at the behest and with the support of my friends, I never got anywhere: I got to a screaming five people under me. I didn’t even make enough to pay for my monthly blue green algae supplements this company was hawking.

Earning money through expressing your Soul’s mission – To tap this level, you need to be in touch with your Soul, and it has to have something it wants to share with the world. This happens when your Soul has a purpose, and it lets you know about it. If this operates in you, your career choices are, well, settled. You do what your Soul wants 24/7.

Since 2010, when I boldly stepped away from my job as an academic vocational counselor—yes, Virginia, I was actually working in my career for 19 years—I have been doing my Soul’s work full time. I have been doing metavisional readings, meditation consultations, meditation teaching and meditation teacher training, webinars, and coaching.

This has not yet brought me fame and fortune, but the joy and satisfaction I feel doing this is priceless.

If you are struggling with working in the gig economy, and taking any job you can get to survive, I would encourage you to do some visualization and imagine what it might be like to be working in one of these alternate tracks.

Sometimes, this little discovery exercise can spark an insight that will lead you uncover to what you were born to do, and you can move your working life to a whole new level—and with it, often increase your income.

How the Ego Generates Behavior

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By George A. Boyd ©2021

Q: If the ego is a state of identity, how does it interface with actual behavior?

A: If you carefully analyze the structure of the ego’s identity and how this extends to actual behavior, you find the following layers, from the innermost to the outermost:

  1. Life narrative or story – Your ego is identified with your unique life experience, which spans from your first conscious memory to the present.
  2. Ownership – Your ego’s awareness of what it has or possesses. This includes both wealth and possessions.
  3. Ability – Your ego’s awareness of the skills it has practiced in its life. These are resources that the ego can draw upon, depending on what each situation requires.
  4. Esteem – Your ego’s assessment of how well it is doing in your life. In people who are depressed, esteem will be very low. In people who are narcissistic, esteem will be exaggerated.
  5. Support – Your ego’s assignment of people to zones of intimacy on your life, according to their importance to you. For example, your spouse or partner and your children might occupy the innermost ring; your close friends, the next ring; relatives and friends, the next ring; and co-workers and neighbors, the outer ring. Your rules for disclosure of what you deem sensitive or secret is based on which intimacy zone you have currently assigned them.
  6. Dreams and desires – This is what your ego tells other people what it wants be, to do, and to have. This is the ego’s reservoir of motivation that fuels your actions.
  7. Life organization – These are twelve areas in which you play different roles. [In my book, The Practical Applications of Meditation in Daily Life and Education, I suggest ways that you can inventory what you want to achieve in each of these areas of your life.]
  8. Roles – These are the major activities that you carry out in your life. For example, in the area of home, you might play the role of a homemaker. Your thinking, feeling, and behavior related to this role are integrated into this identity state. In the I Am statement Vipassana meditation, we teach in our Introduction to Meditation class to contemplate the ego, you tap into this level: you note the identity state in which you are currently operating, and what you are thinking and feeling while you are in this identity state. So, for example, if you were contemplating this I am statement for your role of homemaker, you might be thinking about what you need to clean in the house, what laundry needs to be done, and what supplies are getting low that you need to purchase the next time you go shopping; you might be feeling irritated with your teenaged son, who always leaves his bathroom in a mess—and you wind up having to clean it.
  9. Sub-roles – The ego groups each related activity associated with a major role under this main identity, and assigns these sub-roles unique I Am statements. For example, under homemaker, you might have the activity identification, “I am a dishwasher,” “I am a carpet cleaner,” or “I am a floor washer.”
  10. Direction of individual behavior – This is the egoic octave of volition. This carries out the individual behavior required to enact the activities of a sub-role—one action at a time. For your dishwasher sub-role, this might look like: pick up the white cup… clean it with the sponge… rinse it under the sink… place it on the fourth peg on the top shelf of the dishwashing machine… [And then you would repeat this behavioral chain for each item that needs to be washed in the dishwashing machine.]
  11. Translation of behavioral command into neurological interface – Similar to machine language in a computer, behavioral command is translated on the information ether into signals that produce the neural electrical cascade that generates physical action.
  12. Neurological response – with each behavioral command and its subsequent translation into “brain recognizable directions,” you would detect specific areas of the brain light up and neural signals are sent to the appropriate body parts to carry out the specific action. This is the aspect of behavior that we can measure with technology and testing.

Your desire or motivation for action at the egoic level springs from level 6. You adopt the role (level 8), and operate through sub-role (level 9) that contains the behavior you are aim to perform. The egoic octave of volition (level 10) translates this behavior into the individual actions that others can witness you do (level 12).

That’s how your identity can give rise to action: your actual observable behavior is predicated upon your desire. No desire; no action.

Factors that Influence Poverty and Prosperity

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By George A. Boyd © 2021

Q: What allows some people to struggle with wealth and live forever in poverty, whereas others seem to have no problem earning great money and building wealth?

A: When we look at the factors that hold people in poverty, we find:

  • No opportunity – there are no jobs, there are no apparent ways to make money
  • No capital – unable to make an investment in inventory, tools, and labor to sustain a business enterprise and to enable it to earn steady income
  • No education, no knowledge of using technology limits what you can do
  • No marketable skills limit the jobs you could do
  • No track record of success to market skills to potential employers (job) or customers (entrepreneurial)
  • Very high competition for available jobs
  • Corruption and criminal hegemony make job seekers or would be business owners subject to an environment where they must pay to play; they are extorted and threatened
  • Members of government and political leaders use their positions to enrich themselves and do not invest in education and career development to improve the lot of the people
  • The wealthy elite use their money, power, and influence to enact policies that will enable them to accrue even more wealth, power, and influence— while suppressing the opportunities of those who are poor.
  • Religion and culture instill beliefs that it is destiny or God’s will that they are supposed to be poor, and to accept their lot in life.
  • Karmic factors lead individuals to sabotage their options to become wealthy or not have access to the factors that would enable them to earn a good livelihood or accrue wealth

Factors that promote wealth include:

  • Creative matrix—the Soul takes charge—dissolving the limiting factors of the past, decreed in the present you shall manifest wealth and abundance, and to visualize that for the future.
  • Alignment with the Law of Attraction and the Divine Law of Prosperity—you create and set up the conditions that allow you to make money and accrue wealth
  • The wisdom to make the right choices to earn money and accrue wealth
  • Blessings of the Divine in response to prayer, charity, and tithing
  • Activating the power of the Mighty I AM presence to manifest wealth and abundance
  • Merit, good karma from past lives, sets up birth in opulent and wealthy families
  • You create or invent something that has mass appeal; many people buying your product or service makes you wealthy

Environment plays a role in many people’s lives, seemingly limiting what is possible and holding them down in patterns of lack and poverty. This is one of the reasons why people migrate to wealthier countries, where greater opportunity exists.

Those who practice prayer and meditation can learn to access to the dynamic matrix that creates wealth and abundance, and actively change the conditions of their lives. Training in using the Law of Attraction, for example, can change the way people relate to money and wealth, and can connect them with the source of unlimited abundance.

If earning sufficient money is one of your issues, we encourage you to learn methods to connect with the money-manifesting power of the universe that dwells within you. This, coupled with rectifying your personal deficiencies that limit your employability, can greatly aid in changing your money destiny in your life.

Setting Up the Conditions for Success

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The Interplay of Ability and Control: Setting Up the Conditions for Success

By George A. Boyd © 2020

Q: In our highly competitive and complex world, how do you achieve success? While I find I am quite effective in the areas I can control, there’s a lot that is out of my hands—so even if I am doing all the right things, success seems to evade me. Other people don’t seem to cooperate with my dreams of success!

A: Let’s break this down and examine the strategies through which you can create success, using internal and eternal efforts. First, we need to look at the interplay between ability and control.

The Four Scenarios of Human Functioning

Success is based on the interplay between your ability and control.

Ability is a measure of whether or not you have the knowledge and skills to perform the tasks required to reach your objective.

Control determines whether this is something you can do for yourself without involving other people, and your relative freedom of action in this interpersonal dynamic between you and the other actors.

We can visualize four scenarios for the interplay of ability and control:

Scenario

Ability

Control

Description

Example(s)

A

Yes

Yes

Something you can do without a problem. You get expected and predictable results.

You pick up the newspaper on the lawn each morning.

B

Yes

No

You can set up the conditions for a successful outcome, but the outcome is based on the decisions of other people.

You have a sales conversation with a prospect, but they make the decision as to whether to buy your product or service.

C

No

Yes

You have the accountability and responsibility to do a task, but you lack the knowledge or skills to do the task.

You are asked to do an assignment at school to learn a skill you have never practiced, and you must study the lesson, and then take a test on your proficiency with the new skill. Alternately, you have been given an assignment from management in your company to meet an objective, and you don’t have the ability or knowledge—in this scenario, you might delegate the task to someone who has greater expertise than you to complete it.

D

No

No

You lack the ability to solve your problem or change your situation. You may feel your life is not under your control.

You are imprisoned in a jail. Alternately, you are a member of a totalistic group‐a gang, a cult, or a terrorist cell—and they control all aspects of your life, and there are dangerous consequences for trying to leave. Another example is you are seriously ill in a hospital, and you are too sick to leave—you are completely under the care of your attending medical staff.

So let’s tease out these four scenarios:

In scenario A, you can simply do what you want to do. So, when you want to go out to exercise—you just do it.

In scenario B, you have to change the dynamics of the situation, so others will consent to allow you to reach your objective. You commonly encounter this in a situation where you are trying to make a sale or you are negotiating with someone to obtain what you want.

In scenario C, you have to learn how to do the task or you need to delegate it. You run into these situations in school and at work.

In scenario D, you aren’t able to take action and you don’t control of the situation. If you’re in jail or a totalistic environment, you may look for a way to escape. If you’re sick in a hospital, you have to recover from your illness before the hospital will release you.

It is often in scenario B that you must struggle for success—as you must deal with other people’s desires and decisions. This is the scenario we are going to examine in greater depth in this article.

There are two approaches to dealing with scenario B situations:

  1. You change the situation internally through shifting your perspective how you view the situation, you ask for help, or your work on your internal issues that might be sabotaging your success.
  2. You find ways to work with the elements that aren’t in your control, and modify them, so you change the calculus of your success

Let’s look at these one at a time.

Internal Strategies

We can characterize seven major strategies for working on things you don’t control from the inside.

  1. Blame and shame – For many people, when they are in a situation of interpersonal challenge, they fall back upon blaming others, which leads to anger; or blaming themselves, which leads to shame and depression. When other people have controlled you in the past—e.g., parents, employers, teachers, police, or military officers—they may have blamed you or shamed you. You internalized this and it has become part of your own internal dialog. Other than evoking emotions in you, this strategy does not produce any forward progress towards resolving your problem.
  2. Constructive action – Here you use your intelligence to solve the issue and move ahead. You might do something else that you haven’t tried. Alternately, you might find a mentor, coach, or consultant, who has successfully dealt with this problem—and you can learn from them how to succeed in this situation. In this strategy, you believe your own efforts can produce change, and yield the results you want.
  3. Law of Attraction – In this strategy, you believe that the Law of Attraction is waiting to shower you with abundance and success. You only have to change you thinking and beliefs through visualization and affirmation, and you will succeed.
  4. Providence – When you work at this level, you pray to God, whom you believe is All-Powerful and able to intervene in your situation. You believe in faith that the Divine cares for you and wants you to overcome your challenge, and to be prosperous and successful. Those who follow the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—adopt this approach.
  5. Invocation – In this approach, you pray to a specific god or goddess that specializes in the issue with which you are struggling. If you have money problems, you would invoke the goddess Lakshmi.If you were trying to do well in school, you would call upon the goddess Saraswati. There are mantras and special worship ceremonies (pujas) that you can do, sometimes requiring the assistance of a priest, to persuade the god or goddess to apply his or her miraculous power on your behalf. This is a strategy that Hindus adopt.
  6. Earning merit – In this perspective, good outcomes are synonymous with reaping good karma. To earn merit and produce good karma, you would do good deeds and charity. For example, the Christian prosperity gospel believes, if you tithe one tenth of your income to the Church, God will reward you with financial blessings, wealth, and prosperity. Buddhists also use this strategy to do good deeds, and hope that the Law of Karma will reward them for their actions.
  7. Removing karma from the unconscious mind – In this method, you uproot the issues in your unconscious mind that sabotage your success and might be blocking your path to prosperity.

In scenario (2), you believe your own intelligent activity can create change. In scenarios (3) to (5), you believe an external Power can manifest what you desire. In scenarios (6) and (7), you believe your influence on the deepest levels of your mind can produce the results your want.

In scenario (2), you act within the social world around you to change the outcomes you are experiencing. In scenarios (3) though (7), you are dipping into your subjective world: you attempt to change the results you experience though evoking the powers of the Subconscious and Superconscious mind, or removing the factors in your unconscious mind that limit your success.

External strategies

Internal scenario (2) invites you to segue into external strategies, in which you attempt to solve the problem that is blocking your success through changing you interaction with others. Here are some of the external strategies that sales people and negotiators employ:

  1. The no-brainer deal – You make your offer so compelling that you customer cannot refuse what you are selling. You might have a remarkable low price compared to a customer’s perception of the true value of your product or service. You might add several bonuses to sweeten the deal.
  2. Win through intimidation – Here, you coerce, threaten lawsuits, or intimidate the individuals or companies that block your success to accede to your demands. In criminal enterprises, they may use extortion, threats of violence, or demand bribes to get what they want, or compel you to act in accordance with their wishes. In this external scenario, you attempt to force your competitor or adversary to back down.
  3. Run the script – Those who begin their career in sales are often presented with a script of what to say on their sales calls. This approach tries to identify and skillfully overcome your customer’s objections, so they will buy your product or service.
  4. Become a monopoly – If you are selling within an environment where there are many moving parts—marketers,lawyers, financial brokers, insurance agents, manufacturers, wholesalers, quality assurance inspectors, and shipping providers—to avoid having one of the players in the matrix ruin the deal, you might acquire as many of the aspects of the transaction as you can, so your customers will only have to deal with you. You control the elements of the matrix, so nobody external to your company has any role with your customer.
  5. Make skillful chess moves – In this approach, you analyze the dynamics impacting your situation, and you perturb the system, so it shifts the advantage to you. You might do something unexpected or counter-intuitive that will make the other players in the situation have to react in new ways.
  6. Be the best – You provide such a markedly superior product or service that your customer has no other reasonable choice than to buy your product or service.
  7. Come in the back door – When you utilize this method, you work with your customer’s deepest desires, and you promise to fulfill them through your product or service. This acts like a hypnotic suggestion to directly influence your customers’ subconscious or unconscious mind, so they feel driven to work with you. This approach presumes that people don’t really make rational decisions; they make emotional decisions, and then rationalize them.

Applying Systemic Ju Jitsu

You would utilize external scenario (5), perturbing the system, when:

  • You can’t control all of the parts of the matrix, as in external scenario (4)
  • You have applied whatever sales strategies that you utilize in your company, external strategies (1), (3), (6), or (7) to get your customer interested
  • You have no reason to attempt to force your competitor to back down or there has  been legal malfeasance, as in external scenario (2)

Those who have made major changes in their industry have utilized perturbing the system. We see examples of this in our modern world:

  • Amazon has significantly impacted the sales of brick and mortar stores.
  • Google has eclipsed libraries, when it comes to searching for information.
  • Uber, Lyft, and other ride sharing companies have cut into the business of taxis and shuttles.
  • Wikipedia has replaced the need for buying collections of encyclopedia books.

If you have done your sales and marketing and gotten your customer interested, but you have to deal with players who aren’t in your control—and who can ruin the deal—you may wish to consider how you might perturb the system. To tap this dimension, you could ask:

  • What is the choke point in this system? What can be done to release it?
  • How can you perturb this system, so you will shift the advantage to your team?
  • Who do you need to influence, so the system flows freely?
  • Who has influence over the other players in the system that could get them to fix what they are contributing to the stasis of the system?
  • What incremental changes in your approach might move the other players to come closer to your position?

Through applying the right combination of internal and external strategies, you can up your odds of creating successful outcomes. Reflect on these strategies, and consider what you could tweak to improve your results.

The Spectrum of Belief in Healing Systems

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By George A. Boyd ©2015

Belief in healing systems ranges from total reliance on miraculous healing to repudiation of all healing systems. This scale is listed below:

  1. Belief in the miraculous power of God, angels, or reputed healers is complete; belief in self-efficacy is nil.
  2. There is strong belief in the miraculous power of God, angels, or reputed healers, but the individual begins to adopt some self-help measures, such as dietary changes, exercise, or use of herbal or homeopathic formulas.
  3. There is belief in the miraculous power of God, angels, or reputed healers, but the individual has greater confidence in the use of self-help measures, and uses them to augment prayer and healing sessions.
  4. There is belief in the miraculous power of God, angels, or reputed healers, but there is greater trust in scientific medicine, and the individual will consult allopathic practitioners.
  5. The miraculous power of God, angels, or reputed healers are seen to be based on wishful thinking, superstition, and fantasy, and the individual places his trust fully in allopathic medicine.
  6. The individual sees flaws in both miraculous healing and scientific medicine, and may explore cures from Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, or other alternative healing systems.
  7. The individual sees flaws and deficiencies in miraculous healing, scientific medicine, and alternative healing systems, and resolves to suffer and die, believing there is no hope and no cure.

People seek results from whatever healing system they embrace. Testimonials may lead them to investigate it; results will lead them to maintain their allegiance to that system of healing. When nothing works, people fall into hopelessness and despair (scenario 7).

Over time, individuals may shift their emphasis on this scale. They may predominately rely upon allopathic medicine (scenario 5), but then, when they cannot get healing for a particular condition, they might entertain faith and self-help measures (scenario 4), or go to practitioners of alternative healing systems (scenario 6).

Those that are members of a fundamentalist belief system may rely entirely upon the Divine healing power (scenario 1). For others, while religious faith plays a central role in their lives, there may be a folk medicine tradition associated with their religious group, and they may adopt different self-help measures to augment the healing power of faith and Divine Grace (scenario 2). Yet others may largely rely upon self-help measures, and go to healers or physicians only when they encounter a problem their methods cannot remedy (scenario 3).

We often tell aspirants that each problem has a unique solution, and it is a matter of finding which modality produces that solution. For some, miraculous healing will provide an answer. Others will find it in a variety of self-help measures. Some will receive their cures using modern allopathic medicine. Others will resolve their issues using clinical nutrition, chiropractic treatment, Chinese and Ayurveda methods, or other alternative treatments.

If one system is not working for you, be willing to explore other approaches. It may be that there is a solution to your problem. You just have to discover who is using this, and apply it.

Your beliefs condition what methods you are willing to try. As you receive results from these different modalities, you will see the efficacy of each to promote healing for certain conditions.