The morning of our lives, the early part of our lives we are almost conditioned to believe that who we are is what we are able to collect, and what we do, and what other people think of us, and to evaluate our essence and who we are as human beings on the basis of how well we are received by others, how much we accumulate, how far ahead we get and so on, but there is something that is very missing in that and that is what we call meaning. The great hunger. The real great hunger that tribesmen said is the hunger for meaning, to know that your life is on purpose.
And if your life is all about what you accumulate and how much you win and what other people think of you, you get a great reputation. The problem with that is that if you are what you do then when you don’t you aren’t and when you are what you have when it disappears your essence as a human being disappears as well. The Shift is really an attempt to teach people what Carl Jung called, “What happens to you when you move into the afternoon of your life.” Which is you begin to focus, not so much on what the ego says, which is what’s in it for me and how much can I get and how far ahead am I than everybody else versus the mantra of the higher self, the spiritual self, is how may I serve, you know god realization, thinking like god thinks.
Interviewer: This all sounds great. I’m sure that everybody around me, for example, would love for me to have a smaller ego, but how do you do it practically?
Dyer: You know, the Dalai Lama once said that if we could take every child on this planet and teach them to meditate on compassion for one hour a week, just one hour a week, in one generation we could eliminate all violence on the planet. Just teaching people to put their focus on reaching out and having compassion for others. And that’s really what happens as you begin to leave the ego behind.
Interviewer: I have and a lot of people who are watching this have very competitive jobs. Are you advising that we should quit our jobs? Or, how do we make this shift that you are talking about and stay in the lives that we have thus far?
Dyer: I would advise anyone to quit a job that doesn’t give them fulfillment and doesn’t make them feel like they are living their life on purpose. I think that if you don’t quit it, it will quit you. It will take you down.
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About THE SHIFT (Book)
The Shift illustrates how and why to make the move From Ambition To Meaning. Such a shift eliminates our feelings of separateness, illuminates our spiritual connectedness, and involves moving from the ego-directed morning into the afternoon of life where everything is primarily influenced by purpose. The Shift doesn’t mean that we lose our drive and Ambition; it signifies that we become ambitious about something new. We make a commitment to living a life based on experiencing Meaning and feeling purposeful, rather than never-ending demands and false promises that are the trademark of the ego’s agenda. As Wayne so eloquently reveals in these pages, we all have the choice to shift our lives From Ambition To Meaning . . . and thereby complete our return to the Source that created us.
