True Success

The mind tells us many things. The one thing it always bugs us about is the need to be “successful”. The need to do something. The need to always become…something other than what we are now. We are then haunted by mind making us regret the past and fear the future.
What would success be from the perspective of the “Self”, “Buddha Nature” or our true reality?
It would be helpful to first understand our “normal” reality. It is one that is controlled by the mind. It is unconscious and mechanical.

Gurdjeiff described the levels of our consciousness pretty well: “Gurdjieff maintains that man as he is asleep, but can awaken with super effort. The greatest obstacle to awakening is the fact that we think we are awake. According to Gurdjieff, there are four levels of consciousness, sleep, waking sleep, self-consciousness, and objective consciousness. In sleep, there is very little consciousness of the outside world though there is some. In waking sleep, we think we are fully conscious, but we are so conditioned and identified that we do not see things as they really are. In self-consciousness, we remember ourselves and are aware of our relationship to the inner and outer worlds. In objective consciousness, we see things as they really are.”

To have a meaningful life we need to rise above the waking-sleep state and become self-conscious. A waking-sleep life that appears successful in the conventional sense has no meaning. Its like calling a machine such as a computer successful. It has no meaning to the machine. To be truly human is first to just BE. To awaken. To be self aware. Aware of the “I AM”. We can then claim true success in life. So we could call an unemployed homeless person successful. As long as they can know in every moment that “I AM”.