If you’ve got an hour and a half to spare, you can listen to Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Laws of Spiritual Success: A Practical Guide to Fulfilling Your Dreams in its entirety. Over the next seven Fridays, I’ll break down the seven spiritual laws of success and discuss ways to implement them. The first spiritual law of success is the Law of Pure Potentiality.
What does success look like to you?
A fat bank account? A log cabin in the woods? A mansion by the sea? A yacht filled with bikini-clad supermodels? A loving family sitting around you at the dinner table? Your face on the one-dollar bill?
In The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (affiliate, and below), Deepak Chopra defines success as “the continued expansion of happiness, and the progressive realization of worthy goals.” Therefore, success can also mean things like good health, energy and enthusiasm for life, fulfilling relationships, creative freedom, emotional and psychological stability, a sense of well-being and peace of mind.
Success is a journey, he says, not a destination, and while wealth makes for a more enjoyable journey – especially if you’re travelling by yacht – Chopra tells us that we won’t know success until we experience each day of our life as the true miracle that it is. This success comes from the nurturing and the unfolding of the divine inner essence inside each of us.
That divinity, or spirit, is the source of all creation, so the physical laws of the universe can be seen as divinity in motion. According to Chopra, everything that exists is a result of the unmanifest transforming into the manifest; all that we know comes from the unknown. The physical universe is nothing more than the Self curving back within itself to experience itself as spirit, mind and physical matter, which includes the body. These three components of reality – spirit, mind and body (or observer, the process of observing and the observed) – are essentially the same and come from the same place, what Chopra calls the field of pure potentiality.
Pure potentiality is the unmanifest, where all possibilities and infinite creativity lie. It is perfect balance, infinite silence, invincibility, simplicity, bliss, and pure consciousness.
In your essential nature, you are pure consciousness. Therefore, you are – at your essence – pure potentiality. When you discover this, you are able to fulfill any dream you have because you are the eternal possibility; you are the immeasurable potential of all that was, is and will be.
We are closer to the field of potentiality the more often we come from the experience of the Self; Chopra calls this Self-referral. Self-referral is when our reference point is our own spirit or consciousness as opposed object-referral, which sets the ego as the reference point.
I’ve said before, we are not our egos. The ego is just a social mask, as Chopra says, and it is this mask that wants approval, control and power, because it lives in fear. When we’re in a state of object-referral our thinking and behavior are always anticipating a response. We constantly seek validation from the objects of our experience – people, things, situations, circumstances, yachts. As this behavior is fear-based, the power and control can never be real; it lasts only as long as the object is there, like a job title or fat bank account. Because it is not real it can never come from the field of pure potentiality.
In Self-referral you experience your true being. You, at your essence, are love and light and there is no place for fear in this. In the absence of fear, there is no need to control or struggle to have power over others. Your true Self is humble because it knows that everyone is the same Self – has the same spirit – just in different disguises. It feels beneath no one. This is true power, and this Self-power is permanent. It draws people, situations and circumstances to you to support what you want. This is the support of divinity.
4 WAYS TO ACCESS THE FIELD OF PURE POTENTIALITY
As you gain more access to the field of pure potentiality, you will spontaneously receive creative thoughts because it is also the field of infinite creativity and pure knowledge. So how do we get there? Chopra gives four steps to access this field.
Practice Silence
Practicing silence is making a commitment to simply be. This includes not only not speaking or engaging in conversation, but also not listening to or reading or watching anything. Even reading a book is having a conversation with an author. Chopra recommends starting with one or two hours, then building up to a day and then a week.
At first, your internal dialogue will become even more turbulent. Truth be told, my internal dialogue thinks being silent for a week sounds maddening, but also lovely. Ugh, the tumult of my mind! However, if you can stay with it, Chopra says the internal dialogue begins to quiet down and profound silence enters the space where all those thoughts used to be. Eventually, the mind gives up its constant chatter and you can experience the stillness of the field of pure potentiality.
Practice Nonjudgement
The second step to accessing the field of pure potentiality is to practice nonjudgement. When you’re judging, you’re constantly labeling, classifying and evaluating everything as right and wrong, good and bad. The ego loves its labels; it’s how it makes sense of the world. However, this constant classification creates turbulence in your brain, which restricts the flow of energy between you and the field of pure potentiality. The gap between thoughts – that sweet silence – is the connection to pure potentiality. When you squeeze that gap with extraneous thoughts, you squeeze that connection.
To jumpstart your nonjudgement, Chopra recommends beginning your day with a mantra from A Course in Miracles: Today, I shall judge nothing that occurs.
Remind yourself of it throughout the day. Set an alarm in your phone, or write it on sticky notes and hide them around your house. If the whole day seems daunting, commit to doing it for the next hour or two, then gradually extend it.
Practice Meditation
The third step is to meditate. The benefits of meditation are multitudinous, and I’ve actually never written about them just because so much has already been said.
According to Chopra, 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening is ideal. I know that might seem like a bit much; the most I’ve ever done at a stretch is something like 15 minutes, but, hey, it’s a global pandemic! What else do you have to do? I tried for 30 minutes before I sat down to write this and dozed off. This book really resonated with me tho so I’m going to give these steps a shot.
Spend Time Communing With Nature
Once you’ve got these three steps down (silence, nonjudgement and meditation), Chopra advises spending regular time communing with the intelligence of nature. The more tuned in you are to what Chopra refers to as the creative mind of nature, the more you have access to the infinite, unbounded creativity of nature’s mind. I’ve spoken before about how time in nature recharges and inspires me, so it’s nice to have this confirmation that I’ve been on the right track so far, albeit backward. I’d expect nothing less from a goofball like me.
Out beyond the turbulence of your own mind you can connect with that infinite creative mind. Here you will find the perfect balance of simultaneous stillness and movement that will create whatever you want. Stillness alone is the potentiality for creativity. Dynamic activity alone is creative movement restricted to a certain aspect of its expression. Think of it like the medium through which art is conveyed. A piece of poetry and a piece of modern dance could both be about love, but the expression is restricted by the medium, in this case written word or literal movement, dancing.
When you can carry stillness within you, whatever happens around you will never overshadow your access to the field of pure potentiality. You will become sturdy and unshakable.
BONUS TIP: THE MIRROR OF RELATIONSHIP
Access to this field of pure potentiality also offers insight into what Chopra calls the mirror of relationship. He claims that all relationships are a mirror of your relationship with yourself. If you have guilt, fear or insecurity over anything – money, for example – then these feelings are a reflection of guilt, fear or insecurity of basic aspects of your personality. Money won’t heal these aspects, only intimacy with the true Self can do that.
Remember, this true Self is beyond the ego, and it is fearless and free, immune to criticism, fearless of any challenge. It is beneath no one and yet it is humble. When you know your true Self and understand your true nature, you can’t feel guilty, fearful or insecure about money, affluence or fulfilling your desires because the essence of wealth is pure potentiality, and pure potentiality is your intrinsic nature.
You need not leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
You need not even listen, simply wait.
You need not even wait, just learn to be quiet
And still and solitary.The world will freely offer itself to you
Franz Kafka
To be unmasked. It has no choice;
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
Check back next week for a review of the second spiritual law of success, the Law of Giving and Receiving.
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