Extract from The Mystique to the Game of Life (and Unrequited Love) and adapted, in part, from Druid wisdom (ref: Light and Life, a series of booklets written by David Loxley, Chief Druid, The Druid Order, London).

Your purpose is more than to succeed. It is to learn and apply the wisdom needed to succeed.

Success is the goal, but life is the time and space that happens in between now and reaching that goal. You attract the future that comes towards you. The future presents you with what remains incomplete right now in your life. The future presents the present with the opportunity to learn about yourself, (conscious and especially sub-conscious sources of anger, hurt, shame and fear) incomplete wisdom – AND apply the wisdom gleaned to release these ‘incompletions’ – completeness. Should you complete what is incomplete, it travels into the past and need not return.

The game of life was understood by the Egyptians in the time of the Ancient Kingdom (pre 3000BCE).

Whatever travels into the past that remains incomplete ‘returns to the future’. Whatever issues (i.e. unlearned or unapplied wisdom) that remain incomplete, be they business or personal, return again and again until you complete them. You know something is incomplete when you have allowed any residual anger, hurt, shame or fear to control your thoughts, deeds or words.

When you start something, complete it.

The Mystique to the Game of Life

In this earthly realm you cannot have anything without having ‘not-that-thing’ to compare it with. This is the nature of duality. For example, you cannot know what ‘wet’ is without knowing what not-wet, ‘dry’, is. Tall/short, wide/narrow, hot/cold, light/dark: anything you come up with has its dual. Some things are directly opposed as such with a continuum of gradualness between them, e.g. cold – warm – hot, negative – neutral – positive. Some things are binary: on/off, male/female, truth/illusion, love/fear.

As you journey through life, who teaches you love? How do you know what love is? You start with a definition of love given to you by your parents. From adolescence onwards you shape that definition through the relationships that come towards you (from the future).

If you listen, relationships tell you what you don’t love about yourself.

The future presents you with what is incomplete in your wisdom of love; the opportunity to discern love from not-love (fear). Whether you choose to learn – and more importantly apply – that wisdom, is up to you.

When you are presented with not-love in a relationship that is precious to you, in an indirect way, you are being given the opportunity to learn to love regardless of what the other person does: real love, unconditional love. The best example of unconditional love, I can think of, is the kind of love a grandparent can have for their grandchild.

Should you choose to apply not-love, i.e. you choose to ignore (not-learn) the wisdom of love, then the ‘opportunity to learn and apply love’ passes into past only to return to the future. You appreciate this when you notice that you attract a series of repeating patterns in relationship after relationship.

The next bit took me a wee while to figure out. It’s subtle. You may want to read it a few times because I didn’t get it first, second or even the third time around.

In the context of this book, let’s say that you’re in love with someone. You define success as having a long term loving and intimate relationship with that person. (Success can be any outcome you want in life by the way, e.g. a big house, a job, health, a sales victory, anything.) Alongside success, in the future, sits not-success (I am deliberately avoiding the f-word).

For example, if you’re going to ask someone to marry you, they may decline. If your outcome is to win a sales campaign, you may lose. The closer you get to the decision, the closer you get to success and not-success. Herein lies the mystique to the law of attraction, the law of reversibility and magic. In order to appreciate this mystique I need to explain life’s purpose. (See Appendix 1 for glossary of terms. You can read all about the aforementioned laws, magic and life’s purpose in my book, Defrag your Soul.)

Your purpose in life is to find, open, become and express your true nature, the ‘real you’, the hu-man (= light being) in you. Outcomes, goals and targets are, by comparison, external things in life that we set out to achieve that we feel will give us a sense of fulfilment or security.

Yet, for example, there is nothing intrinsically of value with money, diamonds or gold. We can’t do anything with these things unless there is common agreement that they are valued by others and can be used to barter for things we want.

Money doesn’t teach us per se about love or light. It does equip us to have a materially comfortable lifestyle but it doesn’t, of itself, do anything for us spiritually. Yet the journey to achieving money (or anything for that matter) is a spiritual journey because life (the future) will present (in every given moment, the present tense) you with what is incomplete in your life – people, events situations that reflect those ‘parts’ within you that stand in the way of you becoming your true nature. You manifest these ‘parts’ in the form of anger, hurt, shame and fear. When you define and go for future success in terms of love, money or wellbeing then not-love, not money, not-wellbeing exists in the future as well.

There is what seems a natural and logical tendency to avoid not-success and this is why and where you attract it.

Let’s get commercial for a paragraph. Take sales for example. Let’s say you’re in a competitive bid to win a sales campaign and the customer has objections, some of which might be hidden, to your proposal. If you attempt to deny the customer’s right to air their objections by ignoring them or arguing with the customer about the fallacy of their logic or perception, you undervalue your bid. If on the other hand you seek out any hidden objection but fear to handle it, (i.e. you fear to… reframe any misperceptions or resolve genuine problems with and counterbalance genuine drawbacks to your proposal) then you allow the objection to take control of the sales situation, i.e. you allow fear to control your actions and that fear can spread to the customer. If you allow fear to seize control, you can end up doing nothing, perhaps like ‘a rabbit caught in headlights’. Your sales proposal may thus be regarded as ‘incomplete’ in the value it offers.

Let’s cover wealth and not-wealth, i.e. poverty (something I was very fearful of for most of my life). Most people I meet fear poverty. When you seek wealth through actions borne of the fear of poverty, you may well succeed. You may earn a vast fortune and distance yourself materially from poverty; by more than you could expect to spend in a lifetime. Do you feel secure? You may well do. Have you released yourself from the fear of poverty? No: if by some chance you lost your fortune, the fear of poverty may well return.

Actions borne of fear, even when hugely successful, do not release that fear. They simply keep that fear in abeyance. The journey to your true nature remains incomplete.

Let’s get back to the relationship you want. If you apply and only apply love, enthusiasm, compassion, patience and completeness to your quest then you are on the right track to success. What do I mean by completeness?

Completeness means acknowledgement of any anger, hurt, shame and fear that the image of not-success presents you. If you attempt to avoid not-success through thoughts, deeds and words borne of anger, hurt, shame or fear; you are denying yourself the opportunity to release these negative emotions; they control you. But they are not the ‘real you’, they are a shadow that hides the ‘real you’ from you – and those who love you and whom you love.

Nor does it serve your life purpose to deny  or banish these negative feelings. For you cannot ‘release’ what you do not acknowledge to possess.

Update: Just this last year I have discovered that negative feelings are not there for ‘releasing’ in the sense of ‘let-them-go-elsewhere’. Instead, release them into the void, the space above (and between) the mental and emotional worlds within you and below the supernal you. Instead of the word ‘release’, these days, I prefer to use the term, ‘integrate’.

To be explored in a future blog….

Shine on…!

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Paul C Burr

Business/Personal Performance Coach & Author Facebook: Beowulf (>16,000 followers) Follow @paulburr