Three Steps to Success

1. Appreciate Everything.
2. Lack Nothing.
3. Gain More.

Life gets better when we start appreciating and cultivating gratitude for life.

But this is only the first step.

Once you have the capacity for gratitude, you can step into a place where you recognize that you have everything.

There is nothing more to obtain.

Nothing in the outside world can give you what you do not already have.
Once you step into this,
you become that which has everything and lacks nothing.

This is how the poor become rich.

This is why the poor become poorer, because they continue to expend energy to try to obtain more, investing in the outside world with every whim and desire that might be able to complete them.

The rich have nothing more to gain. For the rich person, they seek nothing. Everything instead begins to come to them.

Everyone wants what the rich person has, but they don't know what it is.
What the rich person has is everything.

The entire world gives everything to the one who has everything.

This is why the one who lacks nothing is blessed.

When you need nothing,

Desire loses some of its grip, some of its power.
You can focus on your priorities. You're less distracted by momentary desires.

The majority of the desires I am referring to desires in relation to other people.

In social games, people entice you, make offers for your attention,
they pull you this way and that with what they have to sell

It happens every day on a micro level, and it isn't a big deal,
but over time, you become poorer and poorer; you have given more and more, trying to get what you want and do not have.
It means you are pulled this way or that and manipulated often.

When you lack nothing,

The world can still enchant you, desire will still pull at you, but it will be less of a pull, less of a grip.

A strong distraction can fully absorb you, it is built into the experience. Strong experience captivates us,
we are pulled from experience to experience.

Our eye is a moth to flame. We focus on the most sensational experience in our field of view, and it sucks us in.

Then, we pull back out of the frame, and it pulls us into another.

Once a new focus captures your attention, you lose all else.

For the one who lacks nothing,
as the pull for desires weakens,
the person becomes aware that all of those desires are in the same picture frame.

The focus on the picture frame pulls back, and what is left over?

What is left over is the inner state,

a new large experience, a new focus.

The most sensational experience is the one that captures your attention.

The inner state is the most sensational experience, when we notice it.

Once it captures the attention,
you come home.

Once you come home, you become unphased by the smaller experiences passing by in the outside world.
You are more concerned with the enormous inner experience that has captured your attention.

The Tao says,
"Once you stop wanting to help others,
You can help others.
True words are paradoxical."
- Verse 78 - Stephen Mitchell
https://goodreads.com/quotes/11916284-tao-te-ching-verse-78-nothing-in-the-world…

This explains the concept of the Movers and the Moved.

The movers move the present reality.
The forces of reality move the moved.

The outside world moves the one who wants to help others.
The one who doesn't want to help others is no longer moved by the outside world,

So now they can move the outside world, now they can help others.

You can only make moves when you are home,
when you are still.

You can only change the picture when you have pulled back from the picture.

From the inner state, you can observe. You can see the moving picture in clarity.

The concept that "I cannot focus" is a concept that only exists when the picture frame has you stuck within it.

It misrepresents the very nature of the experience of life, in which life pulls you from strong experience to strong experience.

You are that which gets absorbed into experience.
You are that which gets absorbed by the experience of the world.

The problem of not being able to focus is not due to an inability and weakness to pull away from strong experiences.

The problem of not being able to focus is that you do not have a large enough focus to capture your constant attention.

The one who has everything can focus on self-refinement of the inner state.

On the outside,
this is the cultivation of developing skills to help others and make oneself more perfected,

As Christ says,
'Be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.'
- Matthew 5:48
https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-48.htm…

There is terrible advice going around.
It is true advice, but it is terrible for those it is sold to.

The terrible advice is,
"If you want to change your world, what you get,
you have to change who you are. This is how you manifest; you change who you are, and then different things come to you because you're now the kind of person those things come to."

It's terrible advice if you are a poor person. If you don't have everything, it's terrible advice,

as you are a poor person looking to the outside world to change yourself to become complete.

It is terrible advice because it is step 3 before steps 1 and 2.

Steps 1 and 2 are required to make you rich.
Step 3 is only worthwhile if you are rich.

When you are rich,
when you have everything,

Then, changing who you are into who you could be is an incredible investment.

There is a perspective that can open that is more.
Once you catch a glimpse of it,
you become aware that you might be in the ultimate reality, the ultimate story.

How so?
You have a specific kind of personality.
Now imagine the fully realized version of that personality.

The fully realized version of that personality would be the archetypal personality in the human drama.

If you look at the mythological stories, the extraordinary adventures of the Greeks,
these are the archetypal images.

Imagine if you were the archetypal image of your kind of character,
if your personality matched with the best role it could play in the story.

Then who would you be? And what would your life would be like?
It's hard to picture it without having a glimpse of it,
but it would be like having the adventure of that archetype, and that would be as grand as it can get.