It’s rather surprising, if you stop to think about it, that it’s quite normal for business people to create significant success without ever really becoming clear about their true nature as a human being.
There’s a cost to this ignorance. Firstly, you can end up wealthy and successful, but your life can still lack intrinsic meaning beyond your business goals and taking care of your family. You may have a constant feeling there’s something missing or you’ve missed your potential, even when you’re close to the top level of achievement.
The other cost is wider. It’s the cost to everyone else when you’re disconnected from your true self. There’s a lack of inner peace and coherence that radiates out from you and affects everyone around you. You may be totally unaware of this and the other people are probably unaware of it too. Sadly, it’s become quite acceptable for us to live with a high level of inner turmoil and disorder, which may manifest as anger, depression, addiction, anxiety and other negative states.
Since we’re all vibrational beings, our vibration actually matters. Being out of alignment with your true self is like vibrating an inharmonious energy, or playing discordant music. You get away with it only because the vast majority of people have never come across harmonious energy so they take it as normal.
We’re really talking here about spirituality, which has two aspects to it. It’s your direct personal experience of spiritual states of consciousness and it’s also an enquiry into the true nature of life. It’s not necessarily religious, as it can be purely personal, but it could also come through religion if you’re that way inclined.
If you want to expand your experience of the higher states of consciousness you will need to develop a daily spiritual practice. This doesn’t need to be difficult or fluffy. You could start to meditate daily or try another spiritual practice such as prayer or chanting.
Meditation has been shown to be hugely beneficial in raising our level of development, so I recommend including it, whatever else you might choose. Even 10 to 15 minutes per day will be highly valuable over time. The key is to make time for it daily and to keep going for the long term. It’s a lifelong habit, not a phase or a temporary experiment.
The other part is to explore the great questions of life, such as…
Who are you really?
What is life?
Why are you here?
What are you doing about it?
It’s good to spend some time alone, pondering these questions, even asking them every day for a period, or for the rest of your life. You will always come up with new and deeper answers the more you explore.
It’s also very valuable to discuss the questions with other people who are genuinely interested. This is not an intellectual pursuit for showing off how much you know. That’s a very empty experience and misses the whole point. But to spend time in sincere, lighthearted contemplation of important questions about life is one of the most uplifting, opening and connecting experiences for human beings.
It can be a bit daunting if you’ve never done it before, but it’s surprising how people open up if you have the courage to raise the topic. I’ve been amazed at how interested people are as long as I lead the way and talk openly. It gives people permission to speak, sometimes about things they’ve never shared with anyone else, and it’s a beautiful experience. It happens a lot more easily than you might expect, and you come to realise that most people are much more interested in the nature of life than they ever let on.
One of the great advantages of this exploration is that you gradually discover your true purpose for being alive and it brings coherence into the core of your life. This gives you inner peace and allows you to drop all your defences and pretenses. It’s an enormous relief when you no longer have to be someone special or prove yourself to others, but can give yourself permission simply to be who you are.
You no longer push yourself to be somewhere else and you can allow yourself to learn, to fail along the way and to make as many mistakes as you need to. You take your time for life and gradually let go of the struggle and suffering that comes from pretending to be someone else.
All this comes from spiritual exploration. It’s at the heart of life and the heart of business.