Lately I’ve been noticing something pretty typical yet always poignant rising up around me, in work and in life. With worldly success comes many challenges. The biggest one, I think, is the ability to remember, or even have an awareness of what is important. If you didn’t hold many values going into your cultivation of worldly success, you are naturally more susceptible to it’s psychological perils. If you were prepared with some sort of armor in the form of things like humility, a desire to be kind, to be selfless, to be loving, truthful, giving, forgiving, etc., you might have an easier time at battle.

But what I see happening so much more often and so much more easily than I would normally guess to see…is worldly success in the form of status, money, praise, place in ‘society’, or success whether it be personally or professionally – causing a sort of zombified state of tunnel vision to occur amongst people. A fog that falls over their vision, causing them to see things in a different way. I don’t think that this happens with our permission – I think it happens without us even being aware of it, and by the time we do, its usually deep in a conversation with someone who knows us well telling us that we need to re-evaluate. (IF we are lucky enough to have a person willing to say those words to us!).

The rise to success, where you find yourself in a place where you have things that other people want, or where you walk into a room feeling ‘important’, where the sound of others constantly giving you praise drowns out the sound of the small voice trying to get you to look at yourself. A place where you use your money or status to make yourself feel even MORE important, accomplished, or perhaps to pay for and feed addictions that even moreso snuff out that small voice that is tugging at you about ‘something’ that you just can’t stop to look at right now because it would tear your train completely off the tracks.

Humility is something that a person who is lost in this place sees as another thing that will lift up their status in the crowd. When in fact, true humility brings them down. Not down to a bad place, but down to a real place. A place free of delusion, and self-induced, world encouraged hypnosis. A place where you are forced to ask yourself, “WHY am I doing what I am doing?”. Also a place where you are forced to acknowledge that you, yourself, being successful, accomplished and important – is not the point. A place where you feel motivated to look around you on that bottom tier at all of the innocent suffering that happens there…and ask yourself if your daily actions and treatment of others is contributing to righting what is wrong through leading by example of both your behavior and your vision.

This includes how we treat people. Looking at people as “lesser than”, whether that be on the street, in your workplace, in your family, in your circles of friends – in any way is one of the most dangerous positions a person can ever be in, in life. Why? Because it officially marks your state of being and perception of reality as not only deluded…but as controlled by something that seeks to destroy.

Don’t allow this to happen to you – and if it does, re-evaluate, and figure out what you need to do to change this. Because to be honest, the entire world rests and teeters on a cliff that could go one way or another with something as small as a tiny wind to give more weight to one side rather than the other. Figure out what side you want to be on, and use things like humility to help get yourself, and all of us, there.

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