This is a sequel to First 10 of the 60 Lessons in the Marketing Seminar by Seth Godin. Here are my answers to the prompts from two of the lessons in Lessons 11-26:
Status Roles and Tension
One of the most important messages I would like to deliver through my practice of Jewish life coaching as well as my teaching of Jewish spirituality, on which this practice is based, is the importance of the awareness that status of any kind is an illusion of the individual and collective egos and we have to go beyond it to have a meaningful life true to our higher self. I'm fully aware that this message won't be understood except by a small number of people.
When I was still a prisoner of my own egoic mind, I was also trapped in this illusion. Since I became aware of this, I have been trying to tame my ego. I have absolutely no intension of manipulating my potential clients with this illusion.
Please allow me to quote one passage about the higher self from a new book by Wayne Dyer entitled The Power of Awakening, which I happened to read yesterday:
Your ego tells you that you have to compete and consume. In order to prove yourself, you must have more toys. You need to accumulate more. You must achieve more. Your ego tells you that how good your body looks and how you smell and how much jewelry you have is important. There is a whole world of egos dealing with egos out there, everybody telling everybody how important they are. But you don't have to give in to that! You don't have to say, "Yes, but you should have heard what I did! Let me tell you.
The less self-absorbed you are, the more freedom you have. When you're so hung up on everything having to be a certain way, your freedom is taken away from you. The ego promotes that sort of attachment, while the higher self is unattached to it.
It can be helpful to think of the ego like a shadow: When you go out into the light, you cast a shadow. The shadow, like your ego, is not real. You can't get hold of it. It's an illusion. Your higher self, of course, is what is real. It's wonderful to know your real self because then you don't live with the illusory shadow, which is always changing.
Similarly, you look at this packaging you're in, and every gray hair and wrinkle that appears is like a little notification that reminds you of your death. The ego wants you to believe that your body is where you should attach your primary identification. For the ego, the most embarrassing event in the world is death. But you know you are not this body; you are that which is observing it. Your real self is eternal and changeless.
The most fundemental tension in our life is between our ego and our higher self. We have to tame our ego before it tames our higher self.
Existential Needs vs. Dreams and Desires
The first and most vivid image of my target clientele - prisoners of their own egoic mind - that comes into my mind is that of cavemen in Plato's famous (and my favorite) allegory of the cave.
I myself am a former caveman. Until I had the luck to take a glimpse of the world outside the cave through a crack that suddenly opened by some unexpected suffering, which I came to consider "Divine grace" later, I never imagined that another world existed. Somehow I've successfully escaped from this cave and started enjoying a totally different life that is also aligned with my soul purpose.
Though I've already left the cave, I still keep visiting it without entering it and whispering to those who come with curiosity to this small crack from which I escaped about the outside world, hoping to convince them to follow me. Their existential needs may be fully met in this cave, but a totally different life filled with joy is possible outside the cave.
Some of my former fellow cavemen start realizing for the first time that they have been in the cave their entire life and even start dreaming of escaping from it. But not many of them have the courage to leave this cave. Even the most courageous still seem to hesitate to fully trust me. They seem to be desiring to have some external confirmation that will push them into water.
This is where I am now. I have been trying in vain to convince many cavemen to trust what I've been telling them in various ways. What else should or can I tell them and in what other ways should or can I tell them so that they may allow me to help them escape from their cave?