Beware Motivation

Plume was living in Daytona Beach, Florida, late in 2003, when he first began to see a glimpse of the truth. His long-time girlfriend, and first love and heartbreak, with whom he had settled down, hours away from both of their families, decided to leave him (the first time). At that time, he was totally entrenched in fear, or should I say, he was completely unconscious, thanks to his innate survival skill that allows for memory creation as a learning aid and a full stock of emotions he and all of us are taught since birth, after Original Sin. He felt a great loss, so he went to Barnes & Noble and, after an hour of sifting through books in the “self-help” department. He came away with Guy Finley’s book, The Secret Of Letting Go.


I was trying to select the right author. I didn’t want a Dr. Phil-type; I don’t trust those high-profile guys. I don’t trust ANYONE who is selling a book. I also didn’t want more Christian nonsense. Oh, no. I was accepting of Buddhism (and Hinduism), but I didn’t want to do anything that may offend Jesus Christ, just in case. Mr. Finley won the gig. He’s just a man, son of a late night talk show host and TV pioneer, who grew up in Hollywood and was a successful songwriter/musician until he turned 30 years old, at which point he took off for India to study the truth.

 He returned to the U.S. a few years later and studied under a metaphysician named Vernon Howard until he broke off and began his own Learning Center, where he is now, teaching and writing, which is all that an enlightened man CAN do. What attracted me to his books (and later his talks), besides the fact that I had never viewed life from that angle before, was his simplicity and the way he tied everything in to the scriptures. That’s when I saw that they were identical religions. It wasn’t until years later that I learned which religion he actually studied, all of them mixed with science and psychology, truth.

 Anyway, since then I’ve basically swallowed whole anything I can find in regards to the truth and have even regurgitated my own opinions, but I still regard Guy as my first teacher and because I’m comfortable with his style, I still listen to his talks on a daily basis. He gave an excellent lesson today, one that I listened to over and over, so that I wouldn’t forget it.

 Motivation = Slave Driver

 He spoke about motivation......and how dangerous it is. Actually, he used the term “slave driver.” Basically, if you have no motivation to do something, then you don’t want to do it! People will say, “But, I have bills to pay.” Yes. We have needs, such as food, shelter, and clothing. When we need to do something, we just do it. There’s no need for motivation in that case, but when we go to work and “do what we gotta do,” when we don’t want to, it’s because we don’t NEED what we are chasing. It is done out of fear. We will say it’s a fear of being homeless or maybe starving to death; that’s the short answer and it’s rather effective, although you are pretty certain that won’t happen, no matter how bad it gets. What we really fear is losing our identity, meaning who we think we are and are trying to become.

As we discussed, human beings long for relationships, with people or things, so that we have something to identify with. That job is a means of forming relationships. I don’t necessarily mean within the workplace, although that is also true (we’ve all seen people who get “attached” to their job), but with everything you believe the job will get for you. People also identify and yearn for relationship with their careers, because they feel that the promotion will elevate their standing within society, for example. This is not done out of love, or else we wouldn’t need a motive.

 Now, Mr. Finley is not saying to quit your job and do nothing. Healthy human beings will do what they have to do for themselves and their family to survive, and enlightened human beings will never just do NOTHING. When we say we are “struggling” to live, we mean we are struggling to maintain, or “improve,” the image of ourselves that we keep in our memory and that tells us what we need to do or be or have to make us happy. In the practical sense, he claims we should do what we have to and do it to the best of our ability. But, don’t motivate yourself to do it so that you’ll receive something or become something that your mind tells you will make things better.

 We have to look at all of this as social conditioning, as well. Emotions are learned. In fact, they are part of our evolution as a species, because the ability to learn, or memory, is a survival tactic, in itself. We are told by our parents and their parents that we need to work, because we will have good bank accounts and a house and that is the way to find happiness. We watched our parents struggle with this; we struggled with this. We say, “That’s life.”

No, it’s not!

I've always challenged the notion that money can’t buy happiness, but I was wrong. It can not. And what sort of life has been spent when you have learned nothing about yourself besides how to work a cash register? Or how to close million dollar deals?