First Sharleen defined success for us in several ways and from various sources: Success is = "continued expansion of happiness and the progressive realization of worthy goals. The ability to fulfill your desires with effortless ease. A journey, not a destination. Material abundance is one component and can make the journey more enjoyable. Success also includes good health, energy and enthusiasm for life, fulfilling relationships, creative freedom, emotional psychological stability, a sense of well being and peace of mind. True success is the experience of the miraculous, the unfolding of the divinity within us. The standard of success in life is not the things or the money, the standard of success is absolutely the amount of joy you feel.
A law is defined by Chopra as a process by which the unmanifest becomes manifest. The dictionary defines a law as --a rule of conduct or procedure established by custom, agreement, or authority. The body of principles held to express the divine will. A code based on morality, conscience, or nature.
Here are the seven laws as outlined by Deepak Chopra:
Sharleen summarized them for us. They can be found online if you enter the title of the book. Dr. Chopra discusses their application to daily life.
1. The Law of Pure Potentiality.
2. Law of Giving and Receiving
3. Law of Karma or Cause and Effect.
4. Law of Least Effort
5. Law of Intention and Desire
6. Law of Detachment
7. The Law of Dharma or Purpose in Life
Summary: The Law of Pure Potentiality is experienced through silence, through meditation, through non-judgement, through communion with nature.
It is activated by the Law of Giving, when you learn to give that which you seek. If you seek money, give money, if you seek love, give love; if you seek peace, give peace.
Through your actions in the Law of Giving, you activate the Law of Karma.
Creating good karma makes life easy and you don't have to expend a lot of effort to fulfill your desires, which leads to an understanding of the Law of Least Effort.
This leads to an understanding of the Law of Intention and Desire, which makes it easy to practice the Law of Detachment.
As you understand the above laws, you begin to focus on your true purpose.
You then "create whatever you want, whenever you want and your life becomes an expression of unbounded love."
Group discussion followed:
Our discussion then branched off into the subject of karma. Some members have a hard time understanding karma when it is defined as a payback for past bad deeds. Paul told of a group of blind kids who climbed Mount Everest. They were Eastern Buddhists and all of those kids and those who knew them thought those kids earned their blindness. But Paul agrees that Western Buddhism has trouble with the idea of karma, and probably most Western Buddhist groups have rejected the idea of a karmic bank account. Those of us in the group who are physicians certainly know that it often seems that good people get bad diseases, and often people whom we regard as bad breeze through life without suffering. But perhaps karma should better be understood as our planting seeds of conscious behavior during our life. We then should not water or nourish the bad seeds. Good karma is watering the good seeds. This can be done in individual consciousness and probably also in collective consciousness.
Todd said that a long meditation retreat makes you face all your emotions and you reach a place of gratitude and peace. Such an experience helps you get to a place where you can empty your mind.
Someone recommended the books of Rich Fields. Here is a short vignette from the Internet on this journalist and poet. Rick Fields, 57, Poet and Expert on Buddhism
By NICK RAVO Published: June 11, 1999
Rick Fields, a journalist, poet and leading authority on Buddhism's history and development in the United States, died on Sunday at his home in Fairfax, Calif. He was 57. he cause was lung cancer, said Helen Tworkov, a longtime friend and the editor in chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, a magazine that Mr. Field helped found in 1991 and that he had worked for as a contributing editor. r. Fields wrote several books, the best known of which is ''How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America'' (Shambhala, 1981). Traces Buddhism's origins in the United States from Chinese railroad workers and American transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau in the mid-19th century, to Japanese immigrants on the West Coast at the turn of the century, to the writer Alan Watts and Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg in the 1950's, to the mass popularity of Zen Buddhism and the introduction of Tibetan Buddhism in the 1960's and 70's.
There is an idea that if you just follow the rules: 1-2-3 etc. you will then be fine. But that doesn't occur. Life is suffering. So these books and even the words of Depok Chopra may be too simplistic. Three ways to have success seem to be: reduce expectations; take joy from little things; and have a good support system. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis states that community of family and friends is the number one correlate of happiness.
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