A Modern View: Where your feelings meet your pocketbook - Compassion, Empathy, Bliss, and Value

(photocredit: oddsock)

Just what you always thought - how you feel determines how rich you can get. Or - the riches you have are determined by how much you are worth to others - through their feelings.

Sure, you can bet I'm working to find an underlying four-way system to this - but I'll tell you the logical bits which woke me up this am, having to write this all up for you. (Hang on, it's a thrill ride.)

I told you I've been doing a study of copywriting. In this, there is a little known book called "Breakthrough Advertising" by Gene Schwartz that Gary Halbert set me on to. In this, he really starts tying the various stages of product awareness and market maturity into a nice package.

He starts to point, unknowingly, toward there being a connection between the story and the customer-client being attracted. This brings in Joseph Campbell ("Hero with a Thousand Faces") and his Monomyth. The general idea is that there is one story plot which runs through all of our lives, and all of the legends and myths of history. We live multiple versions of this story every day, as do the people around us. The general theory of entertainment is the interaction of these story lines, that we are entertained by others' stories which we use to evaluate our own. And so we learn to live better lives.

Much earlier on, Earl Nightingale's "Strangest Secret" recording gave us clues to a common point which was handed down in al the major writings of history - "we become what we think about." And in this recording, he mentions another key fact: your monetary value is determined by the value you provide to others.

Now, this statement was one Nightingale got from Napoleon Hill in his "Think and Grow Rich." But it goes earlier, to a then-unknown philosophy of Huna which Max Freedom Long was bringing back to the Western Culture which had suppressed it. The first principle is a version of that, "The World is What You Think it Is." What is even more interesting is the second principle, "There are no limits - we are all connected."

You've heard me say how this is why the Golden Rule works. And also the Law of Attraction. How you treat others is how you are treated.

Scwartz made a point of using empathy to discover what your customer-clients are looking for. Dan Kennedy (a currently popular copywriter and marketer) puts a great stock in Maxwell Maltz' "Psycho-Cybernetics" - which Kennedy had updated and re-written with the later works Maltz came up with. Kennedy referred to the "Theatre of the Mind" where one could go and "see" the movies others were living out.

Interestingly, this is also a technique in Jose Silva's system, which he calls the Mental Laboratory. Much earlier, Huna shamans would tell people to go to a spiritual garden, where they would be told the data they needed - and would be able to change things on this level by changing things there.

All of this comes back to these points of Empathy and Compassion for others - which is determined by how much you can see the direct connection between how you act and others around you. The more you start being others, the more your own life improves.

"Follow Your Bliss" is what Joseph Campbell is quoted as saying. This is the point which Rhonda Byrne makes in "The Secret" DVD - continually seek what feels good. And in this, you will have good things come back to you - as those are the vibrations you are emanating, and so will come back to you via the Law of Attraction.

Your purpose here on this earth is easy to find when you let go of all the "Now your supposed to's" which you've swallowed every day of your life up to this point.

When you start living for and through others, your own life becomes increasingly more simple and more peaceful. You create more value for others and your own income rises proportionately. Rick Warren wrote "The Purpose-Driven Life" and became inundated with money - so much so that he became a "reverse-tither" where he lives on 10% and gives the rest to charity.

You see this in the ultra-rich, Gates, Buffett, Rockefeller, and earlier ones, such as Andrew Carnegie (who set Napoleon Hill's feet on their path to fame.) At some point, they have more than they could ever spend and start giving it away as a key purpose. Our public libraries almost all have their start with Carnegie's donations - while Gates, and Buffett are working to cure and eradicate illnesses unsolved before now.

But you don't have to wait before you get rich to start.