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What Is Success And How To Achieve It

Thursday, April 21st, 2022

Success seems to be the most important thing in our lives, or certainly the media would have us see it that way; that seems to be the way our culture thinks. So what is success?Is it actually worth it? How do we harness it? And why would we even bother? Let’s discuss!

Hi there, I’m James Blacker, I’m an Integral Philosopher, Life Coach and the Founder and Author of Kissing Consciousness, and today I’m going to be talking about what success is and how we achieve it. And before we get into that, I would like to give you something that’s going to really help with that anyway, which is a gift of the first two chapters of the Kissing Consciousness handbook. Today we’re going to be talking about stuff that is really covered in chapter three. And chapters one and two are really the prequel to how we arrive at some of the conclusions that we do about what success is. And that’s going to help you get into Kissing Consciousness as a way of seeing, primarily, success, but also every other aspect of your life. It’s a very simple approach. Chapters one and two will get you there. Chapter one is about living in the flow versus living in stuckness, so that’s very much related to that. And chapter two is about The Power of Love, which is the big prequel to why we think about success the way we do, in this philosophy, at least.

And so that’ll get you a good background to it and give you a complement, so when you add this video to it as the third (element) then you get the whole picture, all the way through chapter two. We’ll fill in some of some of the detail for you there.

So we start after the prequel with the definition of success. The basis of Kissing Consciousness is that we take from The Power of Love, a concept. We divide love into three different types. First of all we identify three different types and then we take ‘Love as Acceptance and Allowance’ as the basis of The Power of Love that we’re then going to use to define what success actually is, because before we get into the world of achieving goals and working towards success, we first of all need to work out what success is and whether we’re on the right track with that.

So what Kissing Consciousness does is to divide every moment of our lives into one of two different states. The first is Love Consciousness and the second is Fear Consciousness. So if we just get those up there as a table – this is what we call a Kissing Consciousness Binary Table. So on the left we’ve got Love Consciousness – and then Fear Consciousness on the right. So the left hand column is all about self-acceptance and the right-hand column is about self-judgement and/or self-constriction. So bearing in mind that we’re using words to try and create a concept, or to represent a concept, these are about the best two words that I can find to define what this Fear Consciousness is.

And it won’t always seem like self-judgement in the head, but it might also be self-constriction and physiology – you know you get that sense sometimes where – your gut feelings – you don’t feel you can succeed in something or achieve something. That is also part of that. So using the Fear Consciousness concept to get a sense of that. So if we get that up there’s a table as well, so you can see on the Love Consciousness we’ve got self-acceptance, and on the Fear Consciousness side we’ve got self-constriction and self-judgement.

So then if we think about those two as our lives being, in any moment, expressed through one of those two states, then we start to think about success… you’ve got two different possibilities for what success is. The first is that success is based on self-acceptance and the second is that success is based on self-judgement and self-constriction, and what this really amounts to is gaining other people’s approval.

So success based on self-judgement, self-constriction is really not going to fulfill us. This is a phenomenon that you might have experienced – I’m sure you have – where people are aware of (that)the concept of success doesn’t necessarily bring them fulfillment. So what society thinks of us as success might be completely different to how you define it; what’s important for you. If you’re being true to yourself, what are the goals that you want to achieve? And, in addition to the goals, how do you want to even *BE*, moment to moment, because life isn’t just about achieving the goals? It’s about the moment as well. So you’re experiencing and enjoying the journey.

For example if you’ve got a business, hopefully you enjoy the the process of it as well. Otherwise you could wait 30 years for what you might call success and then think; “Well, actually I could have enjoyed that along the way!”

And so then we can bring in another concept here, called Permissions. ‘Human File Permissions’ is a Kissing Consciousness concept, and this is exactly the same thing. Love Consciousness is essentially a ‘Yes’ Permission: You’re allowed to be you!. And a ‘No’ Permission is what happens under Fear Consciousness: You’re not allowed to be you! And that sounds like a really strange thing.

When we’re born, we have total ‘Yes’ Permissions around everything. It’s kind of almost as if the concept of ‘No’ Permissions doesn’t exist. But as we grow in childhood and in teenage years and all those kind of stages in between, what we find is that the way we *are*, and the things we want to do, aren’t always acceptable to the people around us.

And depending on those people, they might seek to control us, to deny us what it is that we want to achieve… possibly even to repress us, because… let’s say that makes them uncomfortable, i.e.the fact that we might achieve something or be good at something, or even be charming, it could be a simple thing… If we’re lucky, they’re a conscious, aware, responsible person and they can recognize that that triggers them and go away and deal with that feeling responsibly in their own time. Now if you lived on this planet for any length of time you’ll probably be aware that that doesn’t always happen. Most people don’t think that way. More of the time what you’re dealing with is people who get triggered, react unconsciously, and typically this is what a lot of our childhood experiences can be. They’re essentially a way of learning ‘No’ Permissions.

So the things that are great and beautiful and true about us become dangerous to express. So we have to deny them, to push them down into the unconscious – what Carl Jung would call the shadow – and they get denied. So then our very nature is being constricted. So therefore our very definition of success is being constricted.

And so at this point I’m going to work on the basis that you’re with me on the fact that we want to pursue success based on self-acceptance, rather than based on self-constriction and self-judgment. Essentially, what Fear Consciousness does when we are repressed by others, is they’re saying… what they’re saying to us is, “Here’s my truth, make it yours!”, and of course in such circumstances, often they have physical power over us or economic or domestic or social power over us, and possibly also psychological as well . All these kind of things come into play.

The upside of that, though, the good thing, is that once we move away from that – perhaps we become adults, we live in our own place, or maybe it was a school bully or a crap teacher at school – we go beyond that then we no longer have that fear that if we don’t do what they want we’re gonna get problems – negative consequences.

If we then recognize that’s what’s happened we can start to reclaim those parts of us that have been denied and reclaim, essentially, what is our success. So we start to define success or think of it in two different ways:

The first is as goals or achievements… A few years ago I was part of a group and somebody got into trouble… they were giving a speech and they got confused around the concept of there being no such thing as failure. And they were talking about a boxing match, actually, and the guy had lost a boxing match and the speaker was trying to explain that there’s no such thing as failure. And his audience quite rightly pointed out that the guy *had* failed to win that boxing match.

We don’t need to be afraid of the word failure, but if we’re going to use quotes like “There’s no such thing as failure”, what we need to understand is what we’re talking about in terms of being true to ourselves moment to moment. We can, of course there’s such things as failure in terms of whether we… any goal we set to achieve, if we either don’t achieve it in time, or we don’t achieve it fully then there’s a certain degree of failure there, and we don’t need to be afraid to say that.

So you’re talking about goal setting between this moment now, something in the future that you’re going to achieve or you set it like a finish line for your race; either you’re going to achieve that or you’re not. So that’s goal setting and achievement. But prior to that, what we have is, as I say, you’ve got success based on the actual moment; whether in this current moment you’re in state of self-acceptance, i.e. Love Consciousness, or whether you’re in a state of Fear Consciousness, self-constriction.

And so really that quality of Love Consciousness and success as a state in the moment is the primary form of love, the primary power of love. And also it should inform the goal setting.

So it doesn’t work the other way around. It’s not like we pursue our goals and try and achieve our goals, but in the meantime we don’t worry if we’re not being true to ourselves, or if we’re in the state of Fear Consciousness or self-constriction. That’s not really going to work. We’re going to be aligning our achievement of our goals by primarily, and in the first instance, getting this moment right where we’re in self-acceptance, which is the state of success.

The opposite of that is the state of frustration. So we can get those up on the screen again in a Binary Table. So we have success on the left, under Love Consciousness and frustration (rather than failure) in the moment under the Fear Consciousness column, because that’s what’s actually happening there… in that moment where we’re not in self-acceptance, we’re trying, we’re struggling to become something and we’re simply having frustration because we’ve got that ‘No’ Permission from our conditioned past that we need to release.

And so this brings us onto The Kissing Consciousness Tool.

It’s very simple tool, based in pragmatic reality. Whenever we find that we’ve got a self-constriction or we suspect that we have, we simply asked ourselves two questions.

The first is; “Would you like to let that go?” And this is an instruction, or an invitation to your conscious mind and your free will, recognizing that you’ve been operating under the effect of some self-sabotage, or self-judgement or self-constriction. You think to yourself, “Yeah, absolutely I would like to let that go! Thank you.”

And then the second question is, “If so, would you like to ask your body if it would like to let that go?” And normally when I talk about such things I get a physiological reaction from my body, because it’s kind of … I equate the … Kissing Consciousness equates the body and the subconscious mind is essentially being the same thing. And when I start to talk to my body then I get a reaction and it says it’s gratefully … it’s thankful to be appreciated and acknowledged.

And the point is, let’s say you want to achieve a million pounds, a million dollars, whatever currency you’re working with. Getting a millionaire mindset isn’t enough to achieve that. You need a millionaire physiology. There are plenty of people who can intellectualize the concept that, in theory, they should be able to allow themselves to earn a million pounds, a million dollars if that’s what it is they want to achieve. But to actually be comfortable in that skin, physiologically, and go out and achieve it is a different thing entirely.

So success, in in terms of Love Consciousness, we can recognize that Love Consciousness exists in both our conscious mind and in our subconscious, and in our body and our physiology and our flesh.

And so when these ‘No’ Permissions are created they’re actually created in the body as well as in the mind, so that your mind … let’s see how this would happen, so you’re a child of eight years old maybe, and you’re excited and enthusiastic, and somebody reprimands you and says; “What a stupid thing you’re doing there!” Maybe it’s not stupid, but maybe they can’t handle what it is that you’re doing. So you sort of constrict.

So mentally, that gets shut down; “Well, I won’t do that again!” There are problems, but physiologically also the nervous system shuts down. And you see that, if you see people who have had really terrible childhoods where they’re repressed a lot, the nervous system is just down here, completely shriveled up.

So actually when you’re using The Kissing Consciousness Tool, as well as freeing up the mind, the consciousness, to become aware of your possibility to achieve what it is that you’re capable of achieving, there’s also the sort of physiological release. The constriction in the body unclenches, releases, diffuses, all of that kind of thing. It might be physiology that’s been trapped in your body for 30 years – you can just invite it to release and … start to gain some freedom from it.

So that’s that’s the tool and then what we have then is our primary version of success, which is just based on self-acceptance in the moment. And that’s also the same thing as being at one with ourselves, rather than being at odds with ourselves, and you could also call that congruence, so you’re congruent with yourself, rather than incongruent, so we can see those also displayed in the Binary Table, if we can show those…

And so what I recommend is that you make this the starting point of everything that you’re doing. Whatever moment you’re in now, that’s your point of power for how you can influence your life. You can’t change the future in the future. If you’re going to influence the future it has to be done in the present moment.

So therefore first thing to always do if you want to achieve success, and if you want to achieve your goals, is to become aware if you’re operating from a state of Fear Consciousness and self-constriction, self-judgement.

If you’re not, there’s no problem, just flow naturally with what you’re doing. There’s nothing that is required to do because everything happens spontaneously.

But if you are, and you can notice that you are in the Fear Consciousness state, then you can ask yourself to release that. First of all, the very fact that you notice it changes things, because you go from having negative thoughts, let’s say, in your head and in your body, rather than … if you’re thinking those you’re going to be identifying with them, but if you become aware of them, actually what you do is you create some perspective on your own thoughts. So you become the *observer* of the negative thoughts, rather than *being* the negative thoughts. I hope that makes some sense.

And actually that gets a degree of control back, and then you can recognize; “Oh, hang on, I was operating under conditioned, negative effects there!” And you can change your approach when you realize that that’s the case.

So that’s why you would then bring in the Tool – ask ourselves to let go of that kind of rubbish.

And then also, by definition, if you’re asking to let go of self-judgement and a self-constriction from maybe 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, by definition what you’re also doing is you’re asking yourself – your deeper self – to step into the new you! …The new you who you would have been had that self-constriction event never happened in the first place!

So that’s going to be more confident, even if it’s only by a small degree, that’s gonna be more confident, more relaxed body, more aware, more intuitive. So you’re actually reclaiming that.

And again, once we have that Love Consciousness state then success actually flows naturally from that. If you’re capable of something – and an opportunity for it to be achieved arises – and it’s something that you wish to choose – it’s your truth that it’s your choice – then as long as you have a ‘Yes’ Permission around that, i.e. you’re in the state of Love Consciousness around that particular topic or concept, you will automatically and spontaneously go and achieve it.

So what we what we’re really doing is not necessarily finding things that we have to gain in terms of psychology and consciousness and physiology. What we’re doing is we’re removing the negatives.

And then that frees us up. Of course, yes, we might have to study academically to achieve something, or we might have to train physically – all these kind of things. Or we might have to find out how we might launch a business or how we might market a business, and such like.

We do have to do these things, but if we’ve got ‘Yes’ Permissions around them then they’re going to happen spontaneously as a result.

They don’t happen without us doing anything, but they do happen essentially automatically and spontaneously and they flow from that state.

So primarily what Kissing Consciousness is all about is recognizing that all of what I’ve been talking about leads to the simple practice in the moment: If you’re in the Love Consciousness, self-acceptance state; no worries – there’s nothing you need to do because everything’s flowing. Or, if you’re not, you can notice that and just let it go and invite a release so you can get back to being who you are, being true to yourself and let everything flow from there.

So essentially that’s like undamming a dam. If there’s a block of a river you’re removing the block and letting things flow again.

So let’s go to some questions…

What does success look like?

This is very important because in our culture we have a conventional concept of success which probably involves a red Ferrari, a beautiful wife or husband or whatever it is, family, lots of money, all that kind of thing.

Now that could be someone’s definition of success and actually some of those things are quite nice. I quite like the idea of most of that. But for every individual it’s going to be whatever is real for them. So it doesn’t have to be that at all. It doesn’t have to be any of that. It’s nothing whatever to do with what other people decide is success. It’s entirely what makes you happy, what you want to do, what’s your choice.

And this is where 90% of the failure and confusion around success comes from, because people… and this is quite remarkable to the degree… I find this remarkable how much people do this; they get unconsciously dragged into running their lives and operating their lives robotically assuming that what society decide defines is success is A) the only version of success there is, B) wise and sensible and C) to be followed by everybody as if we’re all homogeneous, and that this is what one person’s success is, so therefore it should be and has to be for everything for everyone else.

This is the biggest problem that human beings have with success, is trying to live up to something which is a concept of a collection of ideas of what success represents, whilst at the same time, deep down there’s a sense that that doesn’t necessarily reflect who we are.

And certainly if we adhere too strictly to that, then that’s really going to constrict what we allow ourselves to do and how we allow ourselves to pursue success with fulfillment. And the obvious quotes that come to mind are; “Success without fulfillment is failure” or “Success without fulfillment is nothing”. And quite right! So we want to remove that.

And so what success looks like almost has no rules to how, what what a successful life might look like. You might see somebody and think; “Wow, that really looks like the opposite of success!” But to them it might be success. So there are almost no clues.

Almost the only thing you can look for, in terms of what success looks like, is whether a person looks congruent – whether they look at one with themselves. Are they comfortable with their own choices? And you can kind of get a vibe or a sense of that.

People who have that tend to be magnetically attractive to other people because A) there’s a recognition that someone isn’t needily looking for outside, external approval for what they’re doing, and B) is that they’re they’re aligning with nature. They’re aligning with reality. So there’s something attractive to that quality as well.

So yeah, great question, you have to be mindful not to worry too much about what success looks like, and, of course, tragically we’ve seen a lot of people who, on the outside have what we would consider to be the trappings of success; money, awards, fame and all that kind of thing, and there are any number of stories of famous people we know of where, sadly, we’ve found out that that hasn’t been the case.

Can success be measured?

This is a great question, I love this question.

One of the things that Kissing Consciousness does is uses Integral Theory’s Four Quadrants … if I ever talk about the Four Quadrants, automatically I’ll do something like that … to get a rough sense of what can be achieved in life, in terms of success.

So we’re talking about … and I like to apply our very own kind of flavor of what the best or the most fulfilling of those Four Quadrants might look like. And again this is down to your own interpretation.

So the first quadrant is the upper left quadrant, so maybe I’ll get a … let’s get a diagram up on the screen there so we can see how that is working. So the first quadrant, the upper left quadrant, is the individual interior.

So the way the quadrants work is that the left hand side is the interior, the intangible, non-physical. And the right hand quadrants are the physical, external quadrants. So they’re things you can touch physically.

And to complete that, the top two quadrants are the individual quadrants and the bottom two quadrants are the collective quadrants.

So essentially what you have is the individual, non-physical mind, so that’s your mental health, emotions, thoughts, feelings.

Second quadrant would be your physical body – there we go – plus the brain, because that’s a physical thing as well. You could, in theory, touch it physically. That’s the second quadrant.

And then third is interior again, so you talk about relationships, and the fourth is social systems, and the way I like to interpret that for success and life coaching kind of concepts, is prosperity. And we could call it money, but actually it’s something a bit broader than that, it’s sort of all of the prosperity that we have socially and the quality of life around fulfilling our potential.

So we have the first quadrant, ideally would be deep, unselfconscious joy and happiness. Second quadrant would be an ecstatic, liberated body. Third quadrant would be blissful, harmonious relationships. And the fourth one would be fulfilled creative potential, so that whatever economically, financially is going on for you that’s a reflection of the fact that you’re allowing yourself to engage with all your creative potential. So again, what we’re talking about there is ‘Yes’ Permissions, rather than ‘No’ Permissions.

So anyway, we’ve got our four quadrants and I said I would explain how we measure that. What’s interesting about this, something that I pointed out to a colleague in Integral Theory a few years ago, about 15 years ago … we were talking about this, because I noticed a temptation in life coaches that they like to have their clients focus on things that they themselves can measure, because then they can make claims about how good they are as a life coach.

So let’s say I help my client double their income from 100,000 to 200,000. Or I helped my client lose 30 lbs of unwanted weight from their body.

Well this is the key. On the physical side, the the external quadrants, the right hand quadrants, what we’re talking about there are physical things, so they can be more easily measured. So you can measure someone’s finances by looking at their bank account. You can measure someone’s body lots of ways. You can put them on the scale and weigh them. Also there’s actually other things you can do, you can measure qualities of lung capacity, arterial elasticity, there’s all kind of things that can empirically be measured physically with those two quadrants, the body and especially money.

So that’s how you measure success there.

Now that doesn’t apply to the other two quadrants, because they’re intangible, they’re interior. So what we need to understand there is that doesn’t make it impossible to measure success there, but what it does mean is that we have to be a little more creative in how we measure success, because there’s nothing physical – we can’t bean count – two, four, six, eight, ten…

So the way we do that is we might give ourselves assessments. So I say to you, “Well, out of 10, how happy would you say you are?”

Let’s say you say “Seven!” Okay, great. So if I then say, “How happy were you ten years ago?” So “Five!” Okay, so you’re doing well. Or you might say “Nine!” Okay, so what’s happened?

You’ve now got some measurements for what’s happening A) now and B) where you were, and perhaps also where you’d like to be, so you can start to see some direction to the measurements.

So if you were 9/10 happy a few years ago and then you’re 7/10 happy now, then we might want to ask the question; “Well what’s happened and can we address that?”

And if you were 2/10 and you’ve gone to 5/10, rather than saying, “Well, 5/10 isn’t great”, you might think; “Well hang on, you’ve gone from two to five! That’s a real achievement. That’s fantastic.

In fact, you could go from minus five to two! You could have a happiness rating, self-rating of 2/10, and that would be fantastic (in that context). So that’s how you measure that.

And the same applies to the lower left quadrant as well, which is relationships. So you say, “How happy … how would you assess the quality of your relationship – give it a score out of 10!” And you say “Nine!” Great! Or you might say, “Three!” Oh okay, there’s a problem, you’ve got a relationship that you’re measuring 3/10, so that’s how you measure success in the right hand quadrants and in left-hand quadrants.

How does success come? How can success be achieved and how does success happen?

So they’re essentially, again, they’re all the same questions … similar questions. And again the point there is that it comes spontaneously if you are already in a state of Love Consciousness and self-acceptance around whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. And if you’re not then you release the blocks first of all and then … so you’re removing not just psychology but also the physiology, so you’re removing the blocks to those, and then what we call the ‘mechanics’ of success, like the things you actually going and do to achieve success, kind of tend to flow from there.

And as part of that is the kind of feedback loop process, so you might, if you started, let’s say you start a business to run a restaurant, it’s not failure if it’s struggling the first few months or you’re learning the ropes. That’s natural, that’s part of the process, that’s part of the journey of success to learn the ropes, refine what you’re doing, change things, tweak things, iterate, improve as you go, learn from people who’ve done it before maybe.

And so that’s part of the natural process. So that doesn’t necessarily mean… you’re still gonna be in the state of self-acceptance while that’s going on. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of Fear Consciousness.

Where success is a burden?

Yeah, absolutely, and one of the things I was thinking about earlier is that, because we have this binary of self-acceptance and self-constriction, we can then integrate our achievement of our goals by making sure that we’re always in this state of self-acceptance.

So let’s say you have a financial career goal that you want to achieve success in. And that’s probably an ongoing thing year after year, decade after decade. Well almost certainly that’s not going to be the only goal that you want to achieve in life. You probably have goals around relationships, and I would hope goals around your health, and so what the checking in with your state in the moment will help you to integrate is to integrate one goal with another, because you could be damaging a relationship if you’re focusing everything too much into the career. And people will damage their health as well, and some people will damage both.

So actually, if you’re tuning into your awareness you can go the extra mile at work, but then you might tune into the awareness and your physiological response is giving you that instinct, that gut instinct, intuition, saying; “Okay, I’ve gone the extra mile but I’m not going to go the (second) extra mile. i’m going to do something different and invest some time in the relationship or look after the body or something like that. And I hate the word ‘balance’ but I love the word ‘integration’ – you integrate the goals naturally by always being in your instinct and in your wisdom to make sure that’s going well.

Where success comes before work?

Yes, success should always come before work, because: What is the work for?!

Unless you’re enjoying the work for its own sake and you’d do it regardless of whether it was paid, things like work, money, essentially they are means to an end. They’re not the end. So the end is happiness, fulfillment, quality of life, so always we want to be thinking about whether any work that we do… does it align with where we want to be going and what we want to experience and the outcomes we want. So if it doesn’t why do the work?

Can success and happiness coexist?

This is really a question that brings up compassion in me because it kind of implies that the person asking the question is struggling with the idea that they can coexist.

And absolutely, there’s a certain alignment that we’d hope to be naturally there; rather than success being something that you have to sacrifice your happiness for in order to get, really what we’re looking for is something that aligns with what’s true for us, and therefore will naturally, effortlessly align with our happiness.

There’s a caveat I want to put to that, though, which is that there are essentially two ways to define happiness.

The first is that you can think of it as an extreme emotional state, something like that. So that isn’t going to be the case all the time, but if you think of a second form of happiness, in terms of Love Consciousness, so you’re in self-acceptance then you’ve got, essentially, happiness as contentment.

So you might not be happy with the way everything’s going, but you might be content in the sense that you can be an acceptance with yourself, whatever is arising, so there’s a certain internal composure there, and we might even start referring to the Kipling poem to get a sense of what that’s about.

So if you’re aligning with your success in terms of Love Consciousness, you’re also going to be aligning with your happiness as contentment. Or essentially what we’re talking about there is happiness as a reflection of the fact that we’re in self-acceptance.

And then happiness, whether we’re on an emotional scale, we don’t want to worry quite so much about that, because we don’t want things to… we don’t want to get attached to the idea that we’re always going to be in that elated happy state, because we’re not. And there might be times when we’re unhappy, sad, or even grieving, but you can be grieving from a state of Love Consciousness and self-acceptance.

So the point is to recognize that emotions are just emotions. It’s kind of like the sky – beautiful clear day today, the clouds are passing through the sky – it’s a clear day. There’s blue skies and clouds, so there’s no rain. The sky doesn’t have any resistance to whether it’s filled with sun or clouds or snow or what have you.

And it’s the same for human emotions, so we can be in that state of self-acceptance and just let the emotions come and go. And the more we do that, the more the ones that we don’t want are just going to arise, be experienced; we get what we need from them and then we can let them go.

Why success is a journey, not a destination?

Well first of all, success isn’t just a journey, it is also a destination. Success as… in terms of Love Consciousness is a journey in the sense that we’re always measuring it in the present moment, the current moment.

But also you have success in terms of the goals and the achievements. These are sort of landmarks along the way in life. So you want to be combining a contentment in the moment with a modest and reasonable achievement of the goals that are realistic for you to achieve as you go, just to keep that going forward, make sure you’re not stagnating. So we do actually want a bit of both there.

The reason why we consider success a journey, in part, is, as I say, so that we don’t have that aspect where we’re worrying too much about the future. If we’re always worrying about the future then the future never arrives and we’ll never enjoy the moment. So we really want to appreciate that the miracle of life is is always right here now.

Can success be attributed to profitability only?

Well for the last forty years we’ve had a global economic system running the world called Neoliberal economics, which states that “Only money matters”, so from that point of view all that system cares about its profitability, but absolutely not in terms of the wider context of your life, as I’ve explained a few times now, you really want to be thinking first and foremost about your quality of life and what it is you want to achieve, and then have money serve that.

So if you’re… if you’re only prioritizing money and that causes you to think or treat people dishonestly or not worry about any influence on the environment or anything else like that, it might be very difficult for you to then go home and have a happy family life and be comfortable in your body, because you might know that deep down you’re not aligning with all of your deeper values and possibly even values that you’ve never even considered, but just as a wider context and appreciation for what your life can be.

And primarily we talk about… people talk about their Inner Guide; they don’t talk about the conscience quite so much, but they’re actually the same thing. So if you can live an alignment with your own conscience then that’s a great way to achieve success, as a journey as a success, because your conscience is essentially – a true conscience, not your conditioned conscience, about what you’ve been told is right and wrong – but your own internal sense of conscience, is actually the… the compass, the guide for what’s true for you. So that is essentially the same thing as your true success.

Can success be bad or harmful? Can success make you happy? Can success lead to failure?

Yes, again, depending on how we’re considering them, but there’s nothing inherent in success that should lead to failure. In terms of whether it can be bad or harmful, then that depends also what we’re putting on it. So in itself there’s nothing inherently wrong with the success but of course we do want to make sure what’s motivating it… is it aligning with our our internal values and what what we think is the difference between right and wrong? And whether we are keeping the kind of lid on it, not getting too big headed in our ego.

There’s another question I had. If I can find it a moment ago.. Here it is, yeah, so what happens when success goes to your head?

So what happens when success goes to our heads, and we’ve all been there, is that we gain achievement in a certain area and we actually overplay it. And the reason we do that is because we subconsciously or deep down we have fears that we won’t achieve in other areas.

We know that there are other aspects that we’re trying to achieve and we’re trying to fulfill our basic, genuine, healthy desire to have our needs met and if we have some ‘No’ Permission, some Fear Consciousness around that – people have blocked us in the past so we’ve got constrictions – there can be this tendency when we get success in a different area, to overplay the hand, and to try and compensate.

So again this is an unconscious reaction, it’s not particularly healthy. Well it’s not healthy at all. It’s just sort of covering over insecurity. So actually, when we do that we might realize that we’re avoiding something that we could perhaps face up to.

Okay, so I hope that’s been really helpful for you. There are linking concepts there, I’ll do a video at some point on The Power of Love, and also do one on positive thinking and go into a bit of detail there.

If you haven’t already, as I say you can click the link at the top of the description and get chapters one and two from the Kissing Consciousness handbook. Chapter one is going to talk to you about being in the flow and chapter two will really give you the prequel to what I’ve talked about today in The Power of Love and will allow you to really get into how Kissing Consciousness works, get familiar with The Binary; the two states of Love Consciousness and Fear Consciousness; how that links up to success, how that links up to The Power of Love that we identify, and then all the various other aspects that it can lead on to, and there’s, goodness, I mean there’s 430 pages there, so there’s quite a lot of stuff in terms of … well let’s have a look, shall we? … how that plays out with regard to timing, positive thinking, creativity, genius, trusting our knowing – all these things are reflections of either self-acceptance or self-constriction, so once we get that basic framework there then you can really start to take that further and open up all kinds of areas like your creativity, your genius, your positive thinking, and really get your life working.

So good luck with that, thanks for listening and I’ll see you again.