7 Root Causes Of Bitter Failure

Saleem Rana

There are seven critical features necessary for even moderate
success. Should any of these features be at a low ebb, then you
will find yourself living a life of quiet desperation and bitter
failure. Ironically, these key elements can be healed with some
sustained effort. Alternatively, should you be able to raise all
seven levels of personal power, you will find yourself living in
a whole new world, where success becomes the norm rather
than the exception.

In your efforts to improve your life by healing these symptoms
of failure, do not look around you for much reinforcement,
because most people are in deep denial of their own inadequacies.
In fact, you will find yourself a pioneer. However, if you do
not heal the conditions of failure, you will eventually have
to pay a high price for such negligence.

One: Low physical energy. In our modern day world of constant
struggle to sustain ourselves economically, it is easy to let stress
become predominant, and this in turn, will lead to compromising
the immune system and creating illness, sometimes a fatal illness.
Low physical energy comes from insufficient sleep, little or no
quiet time of restfulness when awake, little or no physical
exercise, and poor eating and digestion. When physical energy is
low, sluggishness is prevalent and little is achieved. Unless this is
healed, a person is heading toward ill health and low moods.

Dysfunctional and addictive behavior, bitter losses, and personal
crises arise from not having enough physical energy to fix things
in our lives when they break down. We succumb before the
smallest of obstacles.

Two: Mental sluggishness. The world is fast moving towards
becoming entirely based on knowledge as a key economic skill.
The industrial revolution, where strenuous labor was sufficient
to pay the bills, is being replaced by knowledge workers.
Machines and sophisticated technology are quickly replacing
manual labor. In a decade or two, robotic intelligence will far
outstrip the most competent human technician.

Yet, all educational systems are still using the archaic factory
methods of mass production and if you wish to have an intelligent
mind, you will have to develop self-reliance. Ignorance, stupidity,
and emotional jingoism and dogmatism have wrecked havoc on
human life…and unless our species learns to value artistic and
intellectualachievement, we will self-exterminate through
overpopulation, pollution, epidemics, the collapse of nations,
or a final war.

Three: Low ideals. All greatness and all examples of cultural heroes
arise from those who have held themselves up to a higher ideal
then what the consensus reality deemed necessary. I am not
talking here about morals, whose values arise from dogmatic
creeds, but about an individual’s desire to better themselves and
the world around them. Egoic desires for wealth, popularity, and
total domination are not high ideals.

Many world dictators have held all three, and they have brought
nothing but misery to their countries and the world at large.
Champions of worthy ideals have been people like Joseph Campbell,
Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and others.
Dipping into the biographies of great souls is the beginning of your
own greatness.

When Buckminster Fuller decided to made the decision to make
his life an example of what one man can do to improve the world,
he created a precedent whose magnitude if replicated will have a
far-reaching effect. A high ideal is one that is good for you, that is
good for others, and that is good for all mankind.

Four: Dogmatic religiosity. Fanaticism is not spiritual. Understanding
the great invisible forces of life can only come from original experience.
Books and teachers may point the way, but ultimately, they do not
light the path to deep understanding, and only make a false
impression of learning. True spirituality consists of acts of kindness,
moments of wisdom, and feelings of high inspiration.

When we learn and absorb the lessons of our own life,
enjoy genuine warmth in relationship to other people
and experience wonder when contemplating the great
scheme of all life, then we may awaken to spiritual
understanding. Institutions, no matter how venerable,
cannot make you spiritual. Gurus, no matter how
advanced, cannot make you spiritual. Only your own
unrelenting efforts at seeking the origins and meaning
of the good, the true, and the beautiful will put your
feet on the path to spiritual understanding. Spirituality,
ultimately, cannot be taught; it can only be learned.

Five: Superficial relationships. The entire fabric of life is based
on relationships between various forms of life. The more
superficial your relationship with other people, the more
manipulative your interactions, and the more self-seeking
your motivations, the more you hurt yourself. We know neither
ourselves nor each other, and the results of this neglect of
interest and affection is that we live lonely lives in a world
where chaotic human behavior appears to be slowly but
inevitably eroding the quality of all human experience.

Six: The unhealed past. All of us have been wounded by our
interactions with the world, and as these psychic scars
accumulate inside our emotional bodies, the more disturbed
we become. Neurotic tendencies originate from psychic
wounds. Over time, they only get worse. Unless effort is
made to heal the experiences of hurt, disappointment,
rejection, and humiliation from the past, then their psychic
force will continue to have a debilitating effect in our lives.
So numbed out are we to our own pain that often it takes
skilled professional intervention to uncover it. All examples
of dysfunctional behavior and poor life conditions arise from
some psychic wound making its silent impression. All acts
of rampant evil arise from a psyche that has completely
deteriorated into psychosis.

Seven: No self-inquiry. Life is complex. Yet we respond with
simple reflexes to what ails us. Rare is the person who takes
time to journal, to walk in nature, or to discuss with others at
a deep level what can be done to improve the quality of life.
When we don’t contemplate the conundrums that face us, we
continue to tread ruts of self-defeat. Reflexive living means a
dearth of proactive solutions, and the more wrong answers we
accumulate on what to do about things, the worse they get.

Quickly enough a lifetime will pass and regret will be the last
emotion experienced. The unlived life arises from the non-reflected
life. It is better to reflect on what is happening in our lives when
we have a chance to correct our course than to do so when it is
too late. Perhaps there is no greater philosophical statement than
that made by Socrates when he said: “The unexamined life is not
worth living.”

It is a rare and wonderful thing to be born a human being.
It is also the most difficult of undertakings. Unless we choose to
heal these seven levels of failure in a consistently committed way,
we will find ourselves impoverished by our own unwillingness to
seek significance. Behind pain is pleasure, behind sorrow joy, and
behind failure success…we have only to effort to turn things around
for ourselves, and in the nobility of saving ourselves, we will look
around and find that where we thought to find an abomination,
we have discovered a god, and where we thought to have been
cast alone, we have found ourselves one with all the world. All
of us have a greatness and splendor that yearns with desperation
to be liberated into the light of experience.

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. Free audio
interviews on the secrets of achievement by some of the greatest
success legends and free e-books on how to get what you want are
available at http://www.theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

Internet Business Review