| What is Success and Failure? |
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| Written by Ozodi Thomas Osuji | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 10 January 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In this world, many people want to be successful and fear failing. Society, by and large, tends to reward those it considers successful and ignore those it considers failed persons. The average human being admires successful persons, whom he wants to be like, and has little or no use for failing persons. So what exactly is success and failure?
Let us begin with the seeming positive, success. There are two types of success. There is the success of normal persons. Here, a chap goes through the expected schooling, acquires relevant job skills and obtains a job and works his way from entry level positions to the top of his profession (game). This type of person has normal self concept and is not motivated to be a grandiose self. He is happy to be alive and does his share in the work place and is rewarded with good pay and promotions. The normal person provides decently for his family and contributes to social well being. He is successful if he is what Americans call a middle class person, say, a medical doctor, income over $150, 000 a year, married with two children; a lawyer, income over $50, 000 a year, married with two children; an engineer, income $65,000 a year, married with two children; a teacher, income $45, 000 a year, married to another teacher with two children; an auto mechanic, or an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter etc making good hourly wages, married with four or more children and adequately supports them.
The other type of success is the success of those doing what they really, really want to do with their lives. This type of person may or may not be making too much money. For example, a scientific researcher studying the human brain and helping us understand the nature of the brain, I think, is a truly successful person. A person who dedicates his life to understanding human psychology, such as the early psychologists (Freud, Adler, Jung, Fromm, Sullivan, Horney, Maslow, Rogers, R.D Laing, George Kelly, Pavlov, Watson, Skinner etc) I think, is a successful person. If the individual studies something and uses the information he obtains from it to make human living a bit pleasant, I think that he is a successful person.
There are two types of failures. There is failure from the normal perspective. Here a person fails to make a good living for himself and his family (if he has one). Society calls such persons never do well. A man who is unemployed and is unable to support his family, all over the world, is considered a failure. The other type of failure is failure to do what one likes doing. If a person who would like to write novels finds himself working as a salesman of books, he is probably not a success (even if he makes tons of money). As Abraham Maslow tells us, the best lived life is life dedicated to self actualization. Maslow had posited what he called hierarchy of needs: physiological, safety, social, esteem and self actualization. At the base people need food, clothes and shelter; when that physical necessity for survival is satisfied they need to feel secure in their persons, to know that other people would not harm them, that is, they need to live in a safe society; they need to feel that they are worthwhile and have positive social and self esteem and, finally, they need to be doing what they have interest and aptitude for doing. As Maslow sees it, if a person is not doing what he likes doing he is not a successful person. Success is defined by doing what one enjoys doing and, hopefully, using it to contribute to the world’s good.
What I am interested in is the type of failure found in those gifted human beings, neurotics, who fail. By way of definition, I accept Karen Horney’s definition of neurosis. As she sees it, a neurotic is a person who, for reasons, rejects his real self, other people’s real selves and the real world and seeks to bring about an ideal self, ideal other people and ideal world. (See her seminal work, Neurosis and Human Growth.) Obviously, Horney’s definition is built on Alfred Adler’s definition. Adler had defined the neurotic as a person who feels inferior and attempts to seem superior; a person who feels powerless and tries to feel powerful. As Adler sees it, the neurotic lives a life of “As if” he is his desired (compensatory) superior, powerful self. Sigmund Freud defined neurosis in a funny manner. Freud sees neurosis as a result of intra-psychic conflicts, the tension arising from the Id (instincts of sex and aggressive) Superego (internalized social norms) and ego (reason, referee) struggles. In Freudian categories, the superego represses the Id into the unconscious and from there it still exercise influence on the conscious mind, the ego, and the result is the confusion of neurotics. Freud’s view is interesting but has nothing to do with the actual neurotics that I have worked with. Actual neurotics do not report wanting to have sex with their parents of same sex and failed resolution of the so-called oedipal complex. Freud made useful contribution to our understanding of human beings unconscious, which, by the way, is not only populated by instincts but by Jung’s spirits and other matters. As I will presently argue, all human beings are living unconscious lives; they are sleeping and dreaming and take their dreams as their truth; they need to awaken from their dreams, they need to become conscious and live consciously.
(Contemporary psychiatry has gone beyond the early psychoanalysts and seldom employ the term neurotic; it now employs terms like personality disorders. In this light, those judged to have personality disorders can be considered as neurotic. I prefer the term neurotic for it is an omnibus term and a short-hand for talking about the various personality disorders. One does not always have the time to explain all the ten accepted personality disorders: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal; narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, antisocial; avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive and passive aggressive. By employing the term neurotic one covers all of them.)
Neurotics are different from psychotics in that they are operating in reality but do not like that reality. That is, they have not completely escaped from reality; they test reality well but resent it and want to change it and make it better. All persons have a bit of neurosis, hence the term: normal neurotic. Psychotics, on the other hand, escaped from reality and live in their own fantasy world. Neurotics are found in the world, he could be your medical doctor, engineer, lawyer, teacher, professor etc, whereas psychotics have dropped out from society. Neurotics make it to the top of society; psychotics make it to the bottom of society.
The neurotic, as is presented to me, is a person who rejects his real self and attempts to become a different person, a better person. Generally, he considers his real self as not good enough and uses his imagination to construct an ideal alternative self. He then feels an inner compulsion to become that assumed ideal self. All his thinking and behaviors are motivated by his desire to become the ideal, perfect self and to make the world an ideal perfect place. The neurotic uses his ideal mental constructs (ideal standards) to judge his real self, judge other people’s real selves, judge social institutions and naturally finds none of them good enough and rejects them. The neurotic’s life can be summed up thus: a person who struggles to become ideal and make people and the world ideal. (Why did the neurotic hate and reject his real self and aspire after ideal self? This is a theoretical question that I have addressed elsewhere. It invariably has to do with his biological constitution. Generally, he inherited a body that is prone to high arousal, to high pain and anxiety. Isaac Marks and other neuroscientists are gradually showing that anxiety disorder is rooted in a problematic biochemistry: inadequacy of certain inhibitory neurotransmitters, such as GABA, for example.)
Nobody likes to be subjected to constant evaluation. Human beings want to be accepted, as they are, in Carl Rogers’s terms, in an unconditional positive regarding manner. People tend to resent the judgmental neurotic who is forever judging them and finding fault with them. If you want to get along with people, tell them that they are great, even if it is not true (flattery), but if you want to make enemies tell them about their faults, and exaggerate those faults. The neurotic is the world’s most critical and judgmental person; he criticizes himself, other people, social institutions, the world, everything. He does not accept what is, as what is, but wants to make whatever is, even animals, trees, houses etc, better than they are. Adolf Hitler, a paranoid personality, neurotic, rejected his real self, rejected other people’s real selves and rejected the real world and wanted to recreate people and the world; he wanted people to be tall, six footers, athletic and blond. Hitler was five feet- seven inches tall, a dark, Middle Eastern looking man in blondish Germany; his body was wracked by pain; all sorts of food caused him stomach pain and he became a vegetarian, to ease the pain he experienced after eating; he could not smoke or drink coffee without fainting; therefore he imagined an ideal, compensatory body, and worked to make people become it. That is, he was a neurotic on a quest to make people become his conception of how they ought to be; he rejected himself and people as they are; such persons are dangerous persons for they can kill in their misguided efforts to make people and the world become ideal. David Duke, an American racist, hates himself and projects his self hatred to blacks and wants to kill off blacks, so as not to see those who remind him of his self hatred. Please pay close attention to neurotics, for in pursuit of their ideals, they do damage to mankind. In mental health, people are accepted as they are. If you accept yourself as you are, and accept other people, people of all races and genders, as they are, you are relatively mentally healthy.
What is at work in the neurotic is power quest. He wants to recreate himself, recreate other people, recreate social institutions and recreate the world to his liking. The ability to create is powerful, so the neurotic really wants to be a very powerful person ala Adler; he wants to be his own creator, the creator of every body and the creator of the world. He wants to be the author of reality. This is grandiose power, indeed. (This quest for power may be unconscious in the neurotic; unanalyzed neurotics may deny that they are pursuing power. Adolf Hitler denied that he was seeking power. See his Mein Kampf and Table talks.)
The neurotic (say paranoid and or narcissistic personality) is on a power trip. He has a grandiose self concept; he sees himself as a very important person, so important that it is up to him to recreate himself, other people and every thing. (Please note that neurosis may be disguised with religion. Arab Muslim neurotics on a personal power quest claim to act for Allah; they kill people for their insane concept of God. These neurotics actually want to conquer and rule the world. Osama Ben Laden is a paranoid personality out to convert the world to his idea of what is ideal, Islamic Caliphate, which he hopes to rule from
SCHUCMAN’S RELIGIOUS METAPHOR
What the paranoid personality (neurotic) really wants to do is kill God (who created him) and become God by creating himself and creating all people and the world. In Helen Schucman’s colorful metaphors (see A Course in miracles), the ego (her term for what I have been calling the neurotic) wants to kill God and or chase him out of his creator throne and usurp it and proceed to create himself and create the world. In her view, God created his Son (her name for the collective us) but we resent been created by God and want to create God and create ourselves. The part wants to create the whole and create itself. We are in competition with our father, to be more powerful than our father. It is impossible for us to kill God or become more powerful than him. Our father is the author of reality and has already created us, his son, and the son, us, cannot create himself or create his father. God’s son does the next best thing: cast a magical spell on him, and, as it were, goes to sleep and in his sleep dreams that he is the creator of his father, himself and his brothers. According to Dr Schucman, our empirical world is a dream and in it we each construct our self concepts. Our self concepts are our false selves. Our true self is beyond concepts, it is spirit. The self concept, the human personality, the ego, the lady clinical psychologist says, is a substitutory self, a replacement self, a self we made to replace the real self God created us as. God created us as unified self, as one with him and all people, as unified spirit, as the same and equal. We invented selves that are the opposite of the self that God created. Where God created unified self we invented separated self. God created us changeless, permanent, immortal, eternal and all knowing but we made ourselves to be the opposite of those attributes: changeable, transitory, ignorant, in body etc. God created us as unified, the same and equal but we made ourselves separated, different from other selves and seem better or inferior to other selves. We hide our false ego selves in bodies. The ego separated self housed in body is the self the son of God made to replace the unified spirit self his father created him as, Dr Schucman says.
And here is a point that many of the fellows running around and calling themselves students of Dr Schuman’s book, A course in miracles, do not seem to grasp. She said, in effect, that the normal person is like animals, is unconscious, is in deep sleep and takes his dreams as real and defends them (and defense makes what is defended, ego, body, seem real to people). Normal persons are in deep sleep and take their sleep dream world as real. They are at the beginning stages of separation from God, separation from their true self. Like animals, they are not yet beginning to awaken from the sleep. They are enjoying the sleep. They should not be disturbed for they are having pleasant dreams. (Dr Schucman did not expect normal persons to understand her book; she expects only neurotics like herself, folks with superior intelligence to comprehend her book; even then, she doubted that more than a handful of them could! What a proud lady. Karen Horney saw pride as the hallmark of neurosis; the neurotic is a proud person and sees himself as superior to other persons.)
Moving on, the neurotic and psychotic, Helen Schucman says, are beginning to awaken from the sleep-dream (this world). They have become aware that the world is an illusion, is false, and is not real. They are aware that their bodies are worthless and valueless and that life as an ego is meaningless and purposeless. In existentialist terms, they have recognized the utter meaninglessness of this world. They generally come to this point before puberty.
As Helen Schucman sees it, the abnormal personality is beginning to awaken from the sleep that we are separated from God, whereas the normal person is still in deep sleep and takes his sleep-dream world as real. The normal person is slightly above animals in his consciousness; both are unconscious, asleep and take their dream selves and dream events as real. (Dr Schucman was existentialist and nihilistic in philosophy; she hated this world with venom. She was world wary and wanted to escape from this world to a world she believed is better, a spiritual world.)
Unfortunately, the neurotic and or psychotic, in Schucman’s terms, is still unwilling to awaken from the dream of self forgetfulness; he is not yet ready to let go of his separated self and the separated world and awaken from the dream that separation is possible. (Mystics awaken from the dream.
Instead, the neurotic attempts to improve his ego, improve other people egos and improve the world. He seeks to make a world he sees as meaningless meaningful, a world he sees as purposeless purposeful, and a body he sees as worthless beautiful. In short, the neurotic wants to be in the world of separation and improve it. His idealism, an obsessive compulsive trait, is his efforts to change himself, people and the world and make them better. He wants to accept the world on improved terms.
As R. D. Laing (see Politics of experience) recognized, mystics are like neurotics and psychotics in that they see the same rotten world the neurotic sees, but instead of trying to improve it via ideation and imagination, they escape from the world. The mystic makes one judgment: the world is meaningless and not worth his efforts to adapt to it. He seeks a better world, not in the world of his own invention, as neurotics do, but by relinquishing the world as a whole. The mystic goes into meditation and, as Gautama Buddha said, sees nothing his ego thinking could come up with as real. Neti, neti, the Upanishads said. Truth is not this or that, it is beyond the world. The mystic tunes out the empirical self, gives up his self concept, gives up his concepts for other people, gives up his concepts for everything, gives up whatever he thinks that the world and events means and simply stays silent. In the silence of his mind, God reveals himself to the mystic. God is unknowable to our separated, conceptual minds but is known to our unified mind. God is impersonal spirit force that is simultaneously one and everything. God is in each of us, animals, trees, everything, as we are in him. Where God ends and his creations begin is nowhere. God is us and we are God. In God there is no I, you, seer and seen, subject and object, all are literally one self, one mind. For our present purposes, as Professor Schucman sees it, (she taught psychology at
While the mystic (Meister Eckhart, for example) negates his ego and this world and escapes from it, the neurotic affirms his ego and this world. The neurotic wants to improve his ego and this world. He sees his self and the world with clarity: as awful, but wants to use his mind and thinking to improve it, hence his tendency to ideational living (living in his mind, thinking a lot).
The neurotic is different from the psychotic, for he still retains the awareness that his imaginary ideals may not be true. The psychotic invents an alternative self and world and believes that his fantasy is actually real. Most people do not realize why it is difficult to heal the schizophrenic, manic and deluded person; it is because the mad man prefers his fantasy ideal self and world to our screwed up world! (From my clinical experience here are some examples. A white man who claims to be John Lennon of the Beatles. He attires as Lenon did, and behaves like him. Diagnosis: bipolar affective disorder, with delusional traits. He denies his identity and identifies with another person, John Lennon. Psychoanalytically speaking, he finds his real self not good enough and takes on an identity he thinks is better, the famous Beatle. In his manic phase, he actually believes himself John Lennon. When he recognizes that he is not Lennon, that he is an ordinary John Doe, he becomes depressed; he cycles between euphoric moods and depressed moods. Another case. A young black man. He claims to be Zeus, the Greek God. He is a black man in
The relevant point is that many persons see their true selves as not good enough and use their imaginations to invent ideal, powerful and grandiose selves and wish to be those false selves. Psychotherapists tell these people that they are not their imaginary big selves and ask them to return to being like all of us: ordinary human beings and they refuse to-do so. They want to be the grandiose selves they invented for themselves and with which they replaced their imperfect selves.
TO THY SELF BE TRUE
You may be wondering what all these have to do with being a failure? Have patience, my friend. I tend to want to cover all bases before I get to the point. The neurotic sees an imperfect humanity and wants to replace it with an ideational perfect humanity. In the world of work he tends to want to use his profession to improve people, to make them perfect. He wants to make everything perfect. In the mental health profession, for example, young neurotic therapists, and many psychiatrists and psychologist I know of, especially the brilliant ones, are neurotic, want to change their patients, change them and make them better. R.D. Laing was one such brilliant psychiatrist. He could not handle the waste of the human mind found in psychotics. He did his best to change them. Alas, the mentally ill cannot be that easily healed. As noted, they see our world as evil and check out of it, and check into an imaginary ideal world. They live in their fantasy land. Psychotropic medications do reduce the gross symptoms of psychosis, such as reduce hallucinations and delusions but do not heal psychosis. What heals psychosis is mysticism. The psychotic, in my view, is a person on the path to mysticism but whose development was arrested.
If a person rejects his real self and identifies with a different self he is a failure, is he not? If you reject who you are and try to be somebody else, you are, in my opinion, a failure. The manic chap trying to be Bill Gates or any other famous person he could think of is a pathetic person. The deluded person trying to seem important is a miserable person. Common sense would tell him that courage lies in being himself, whatever that is. Igbo Nigerians have a serious psychological problem. Their culture is very achievement oriented and accepts them mostly when they seem successful. To be accepted by their conditionally accepting culture, they strive to become successful. They are always striving to seem successful. Those of them who are not, as the world sees it, successful, will present themselves “as if” they are successful. They will make up tall tales; they tell lies about their supposed high social positions. They would do everything to seem important and successful. Generally, many of them are paranoid, narcissistic personalities.
Is success becoming what the world considers successful? If one is motivated to seem successful, as the world defines success to be, one has a problem. Sooner or later, each of us reaches a fork in the road, to a place where the road branches into two: left and right. The individual must at that point make an existential decision, to go left or right. To go left is to continue doing what he had done before, seek ego ideals, be neurotic, or turn right and walk a different path. The turn to the right often entails giving up all that the world considers important. Right thinking and right behavior might entail doing what mystics do, give up the separated self, the ego, normal or neurotic or psychotic and simply acknowledge that one does not know who one is, does not know who other people are and does not know what any thing means. The right thinking person rejects all ego conceptual categories and remains silent and lets the universe, in its time, tell him what is true.
What is failure? Failure is not defined by the world but by the individual. Only you know what constitutes success for you. What the world considers failure may, in fact, be success for you and what the world considers success may be great failure for you. If you keep doing what you have always done and received the same results, conflicts, tension and lack of inner peace, even if you are materially successful, you are a failure (in spiritual terms, any way). As Sister Helen Schucman puts it, man’s idea of success is not God’s idea of success and man’s idea of failure is not God’s idea of failure. To God you are successful if you see through the ego and its world as tinsel and relinquish them. If you see things as chimerical, and pass through this world without disturbing your peace, you are a success.
How can you live without disturbing your peace? It is by knowing what you are interested in doing, what you are good at, and studying them and practicing them; it is by loving and forgiving most of those who wronged you. Love and forgiveness and not bearing grievances against others are what give us inner peace. In terms of vocation, doing what one likes to do is success, even if one makes no money from doing it. (If one does something out of love, one is happy doing it and somehow the universe gives one ones living. As Goethe said, do what you like, commit to something and the universe would be committed to you and doors would open for you. The universe hates uncommitted persons.)
You know that you are successful if you feel peaceful and happy most of the time. If you can honestly say that you are in peace and joy, you are a successful person. You are most likely to be peaceful and happy when you are doing what you truly enjoy doing and do it for social good. Making money should be incidental. Of course, it is good to have money to pay ones bills and support ones family, but making money should not be ones primary motivation; ones primary motivation should be doing something one likes doing and doing it well.
Another component of success is losing self consciousness. We all have separated ego self consciousness. We perceive attacks on our bodies (and our egos fragile esteems) and fight back. This is the world we live in, a world of attack, offense and defense. The result is tension and conflict. If you can truly forget your separated ego self, even for a moment, you are peaceful and happy. When I am writing, I generally forget that I have an ego self. Alas, after such momentary and peaceful loss of self awareness, my old ego self returns and disturbs my peace. I wish that I could get rid of my ego self entirely. But I know that as long as I live in body and on earth I am condemned to being an ego and body. As I pointed out elsewhere, as long as we are alive we must have egos and the best that we can do is redirect our egos to egos of love and egos of knowledge. One can understand the nature of ego power quests and make sure that one is not on an ego power trip and has no deluded sense of importance to defend. One should see ones self as a unit of life with no grandiosity in ones self concept, no false sense of importance. All life is the same. One should never look down on another human being for that is indicative of pursuit of a false self, which gives one tension.
LOOKING FOR JOBS IN THE IDEAL WORLD, CASTLE IN THE SKY
The real world, which I understand too well, did not make sense to me, so I sought an ideal world. I did not really seek work in the real world, for it was not good enough for me. I was seeking an ideal work in an ideal world and, of course, could not get it (I quit college teaching, for I considered it humdrum.) Look for work in the real world and you would get it and give up your dreams of ideal self, ideal people, for those do not exist in this world. If you opt for mysticism then drop out of this world and live in the world of hope for heaven, unified state, but it is not this world. Live like the Hindu mystic and escape from this world and not care for this world and be poor (or get others to go work in this world and support you, as they support parasitic priests.)
SECULAR MYSTICS WORK
Clearly, not too many people are ready to awaken, yet. Not more than one percent of the population is interested in giving up the ego self, the egos world and egos work. The mystic has no delusion that he has a large market. He knows that only a few people constitute his audience, for mot people are asleep, dreaming, unconscious of their real self, finding worth and value, meaning and purpose in the egos animal level state of being. The mystic rejected the normal world but does not aim at replacing it with imaginary ideal self and world and satisfies himself with impersonal spiritual world, and lives in peace and joy. He does work in that area, teaching harmony, peace and joy, aware that normal persons find worth in the sleep, and are unconscious, so he does not feel disappointed that they are not listening to him, for it is not their fault, they are asleep and unconscious and those sleeping, unconscious, cannot listen to true reason but the lies of the dream.
GRANDIOSITY
The grandiose person invented an ideal self for him and wants to make it seem real, when, in fact, the ideal self does not exist and cannot exist. One of the means he employs in his efforts to make his ideal self seem real is ideas of reference. Here, he thinks that what other people are doing refers to him (to his ideal self that is). The false ideal self pursues false ideal goals, false big jobs, and other grandiose goals that would never come into being. Give them up, give up false big selves and wake up to peace and joy and teach others how to do so.
A person fails because of his character. But his failure is meant to be, for it is in failing to (1) adapt to the normal world and (2) make his ideal world become real. The idealist fails and in failing learn to seek what is real, love, aka God.
FAILURE OF THE IDEAL SELF IS A PRECONDITION FOR TURNING TO GOD
A human being must reach a point where he knows that there is no hope for him, that is, no hope for him to realize his ego ideals or return to normal ego functioning and then seek real success, in unified self. But as long as he thinks that he can attain his ego goals, his idealism, he cannot turn to God yet. Total failure from the world is a precondition for turning to love, God. So be glad that you failed in the world for it leads to awakening from the unconscious state people live in. However, when folks realize that there is no hope in the ideal or real world, they tend to think of killing themselves because they cannot attain their ego ideals and life seems bleak. Suicide is not the solution; the solution is turning to God, where joy is. One does not leave the world by killing ones self but by loving ones self and loving the world.
CONCLUSION
Are you are a failure or are you a successful person? Who defines success or failure for you? Other people, society, or yourself? If you accept the world’s definition of success and pursue it, at best, you live as a normal-neurotic. Your life would be filled with anxiety, conflict and tension, for you would fear failing to meet other people’s expectations from you. You are like an Igbo person (I employ Igbos as my example for I am motivated to help them overcome their group neurosis, this is my social service for them) who has no real individuality. The Igbo is scared of having a separated self from the Igbo group; he fears social rejection. His group members manipulate his desire for belonging and threaten to withdraw his acceptance by the group if he does not do as they please. Machiavellian Igbo leaders use threat of ostracism to get Igbos to conform to what they want them to do. As members of a traditional society, Igbos are developmentally not individuated (ala Carl Jung) enough to withstand such political manipulation by shrewd leaders who exploit the human desire for membership in groups. Igbos conform to each others pathological expectations. When I began pointing out the pathologies in the Igbo culture, many of them jumped on me and called me all sorts of names. The poor things thought that I am like one of them, a person who fears social rejection hence would give up stating the truth, as I see it, and conform to their group and in doing so become like one of them, neurotic. Poor things, no force on this planet can make me not state the truth as I see it. I am one of those forces that pass through this world once in a thousand years; forces that insist on the truth and nothing but the truth. Life is not worth living if it has to be lived on the basis of lies. The Igbo does everything he does to conform to his group and to be liked by his group. He literally panics if he thinks that his group members would reject him. Since his group accepts persons conditionally, when they are successful, he strives to be successful so as to be accepted by his society. He is generally successful but pays a heavy psychological price: he is almost always a neurotic person. I have not seen one psychologically healthy Igbo person, man or woman; they are always going places, striving after some goals external to them, and are almost always dissatisfied and malcontented persons; they are an unhappy breed of humanity. From a psychological perspective, they are slaves, slaves to seeking other people’s approval, to living up to society’s pathological values. They are yet to be born to true humanity: independence. We are here to seem separated from God and from each other. We ought to be separated from other people. It is only when we accept our separation without apologies to other people that we can then seek ways to doing what serves our and other peoples self interests and in doing so obtain healthy sense of belonging. (Eric Fromm made this point in the Art of Love and Man for himself.)
Success is figuring out who you are, what you like doing, and throwing yourself to doing it (hopefully, for social good). Ultimately, success is recognizing that animal as he may seen, man is at root a spiritual being having physical experience. Spirit is not some convoluted religious conception. Spirit is love. Man, at base, despite Hobbes correct empirical perception of him as selfish, is love. Love yourself, love other people. Forgive yourself and forgive those who wronged you, as much as it is possible to do so and you are a successful person. I must say that some sins are not forgivable…defend against physical attacks and, if necessary, kill those who want to kill you. But make sure that your perception of others attack is real, not paranoid. Fight Arab Muslim terrorists, for they are neurotics and or psychotics on an ego power trip; they are trying to convert the rest of the world to their misguided sense of ego idealism, which they project to Allah. (None of us has been talked to by Allah, so whatever we say Allah asks us to do is our own idea. Men think and project their thoughts to God hence are crazy.)
Do what you like doing and money will come your way.
Doing what one likes doing that is not egoistic is my definition of success.
Doing something to obtain social approval and attention; doing something for money, only; doing something that one does not like doing is my definition of being a failure. What is your definition of success and failure? Let us hear from you.
* My vocation is to study and write about mental health or lack of it, at the secular and spiritual levels. What is your vocation? Do you have clarity as to what you are here on earth to do? There must be a goal before we can judge whether it is attained or not.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji January 10, 2007
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Posted by Robot| 10.01.2007 09:12