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How to Avoid Becoming a Monk or Nun and Mix Your Spiritual Pursuits With a Business Career

Discover the truth, the real secret behind successful
businesses. (It may not be what you think!)

On another front, friends have been bugging me to add the cultivation aspect to business because YES YOU DO HAVE TO PULL YOUR CULTIVATION INTO YOUR ORDINARY LIFE.

No, it's not like you go to Church on Sunday and forget your spiritual work the rest of the week. You have to cultivate, gain samadhi and the Tao and then bring it into your ordinary life. The ordinary world and its workings and your social responsibilities just don't go away. You have to be in the world yet your mind is outside it, in the sense that it doesn't cling.

As one sutra said, "No livelihood conflicts with the ultimate reality."

Emperor, general, businessman -- you still have to do all the things you'd have to do in office or your profession and satisfy your responsibilities, but also cultivate. By the way, "wisdom" also means not injecting religion into politics for as my teacher points out, there is no morality in politics but there are consequences (because of karma) for what you do. Screw around with other nations and sooner or later, the karma of your country -- when the fortune changes --is that screwing around will come back to get ya!

Historically, the countries that pull religion into their politics always become weak within, and then ripe for invasion or destruction. So the Emperors in Ching dynasty China, for instance, all were very strict cultivators but they kept religion out of their decisions except when wisdom called for it.

That's hard to explain, so don't misinterpret what he said.

Anyway, you don't just chuck the business field when you cultivate and say it's dirty, etc. Business pays the bills, it pays for social services, it pays for EVERYTHING. The world runs on economics, economics is business. Get over it. Don't lose your brain thinking you've become more spiritual in shunning the world, or that business is dirty. In fact, my teacher always says that today, most of the people who become monks and nuns and go into religion are actually failures at the regular world, and they go into religion because they can't handle it. AFter so many years of experience, I tend to agree. Not in all cases, of course, but there is a very large tendency in that direction.

And you're going to these folks for guidance?

What you have to do is find out how to do things more efficiently, cleaner, better, more serviceful, etc. so you can have more time to meditate or make more money so you can do more charity or have more influence. It's only going to come from hard work, service and discipline and sure enough, money and status will let you have power to make changes. And yes, there is nothing wrong with making more money. It is a function of merit -- you accumulate it from servicing others. The more you have is a function of past merits (not necessary from THIS life), and that enables you to do more things with it.

Even in this life, if you service more people or "do it" better than others ... you get more customers and make more money.

That's a type of merit from work performed in THIS LIFE.

Riches come from doing charity work, making offerings and accumulating merit, and if you can do a better job than others in the business field you will be helping others and getting wealthy in return. All wealth comes from merit ... produce that merit and wealth will arrive. As my teacher says, it's easy to be born rich ... just do lots of charity in this life and next life will be excellent. But as to wisdom cultivation, that's HARD!

That's just the way it is.

Actually, the business life is the way to create new POSITIVE habits also (because you have to), which is part of the road of cultivation, and a way to learn lessons about what I call the SOUL of SERVICE.

It is a way of cultivation itself, if you know how to do cessation-contemplation practice.

Life purpose can even be achieved through entrepreneurship, so where is that not spiritual practice?

If you go off into the mountains and meditate life time after life time you sure enough can attain samadhi ... but you'll also end up becoming a useless samadhi master who doesn't know how to do anything in the world. Samadhi without capability and also without merit because you didn't engage in deeds for other sentient beings.

Same holds true if you are always born an emperor or king -- you'll lose touch with how to do things if that keeps happening life after life. You can develop new habits of arrogance and pride. Most enlightened masters who choose to become a king only do so for a life or so, when the time is right that they can make beneficial changes for a country, and then drop it for something else. You have to keep your skills well rounded, and most countries just don;t have enough good fortune to be ruled by one sage after another another.

The point of meditation or cultivation is to increase your skills at all sorts of activities ... and business, marketing, selling, public relations, diplomacy, etc. are all part of that package. They are necessary skills. They are important. Tell me they are not, I dare you.

You cannot deny they exist in this world, or the universe, so master them. Learn their laws and lessons. If you never develop those skills you'll never have them available for helping to spread the dharma.

What Buddha doesn't have those skills? Do you think you become enlightened and then automatically have them? You have to struggle and practice and the business life actually forces you to do what you wouldn't normally do. That's a big benefit, besides paying the bills.

When you become enlightened, it doesn't mean you automatically have these skills. If you became enlightened this very minute, you'd still be missing gong-fu, too because you have to change your body and energy currents. Habit energies, too, are involved with untransformed energy currents.

My teacher told me he cried after he achieved the Tao because he couldn't fly, and thought it was all a cheat. Why couldn't he do that immediately? He got the Tao at 24 -- such a young age -- because his prajna wisdom was so high and so the gong-fu of his body didn't have time to catch up. Zen master Hui-neng had to go into retreat for ten years to change his body as well.

Other people practice gong-fu for years, develop superpowers, and then maybe they see the Tao but he did it the other way around, which is the Zen school method. Gong-fu, by the way, is just a "function" of the original nature (like ice skating, for instance) rather than the "essence," which is why the Zen school never emphasizes it. Emphasize it and you spend all your time working on the chi of your body, without gaining any spiritual attainments, and you lose it when you die anyway.

With that aside, you'll find various articles on my site about how to improve your business. One is about how to create a stream of automatically referred customers to your business, another teaches how to sell better using the right words, and best of all, how to create a USP unique selling proposition.

If you have your own business, or are a professional (doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc.), are a salesmen or looking for better PR, you need to create a USP.

I took everything that's out there on creating a USP, elevator speech, personal brand, positioning a product ... combined it with my years of management and marketing experience ... and put it in one place for you.

My marketing buddies think I'm nuts to have done it because it's an incredible resource. What would cost you years to learn and thousands of dollars in consulting fees (to them!) is right there ready to skyrocket your business ... and it even has a spiritual twist!

Go read the USP article at the business section of the website, and get that book if you fall into those categories because it's THE NUMBER ONE thing you can do to really generate sales, put more money in your pocket, and gain more free time for life or cultivation .. and more power and status as well to make the world a better place. Be realistic -- if you have money and power and status you can do a lot more than if you don't have them, and so many great things have been done by millionaires and billionaires who devoted their money and energies to what they thought had merit.

Thank God not everything is in the hands of the government, or so much would NOT be done. The world NEEDS rich people, and people with power to do that sort of thing, otherwise nothing gets down in the stew of government molasses.

Do you want to become a millionaire through your business? Then get this book on creating a million dollar USP.

It is a millionaire maker.