day 23: success

the chord strikes, a voice comes on: when you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, you'll be successful, a man says, inspirational and outraged at our laziness. how hungry are you for success? he posits like your mother after seeing your failing grades, after getting a call from the authorities again, after being fed up with your waywardness. you gotta be willing to give up sleep and some of you like to sleep too much.

success, happiness, health, are ads in the papers, are every other sit on the internet, are a pass to the club where you can feel vip if you spend enough at the bar. 1000 people will get you on the guest list to to the road to happiness, lean that fat, shed that pout, breathe that health.

at the isha ashram at the foot of the vallanigiri mountians in tamil nadu, a bubbly man i met there gifted me a book by the resident master - sadhguru. guru's are highly sought after by the dis-spirited and hungry. sadhguru seems to know that. many in india are hip and many more grow keen on this need.

he's who he is and i'm who i am, monica, a kindred spirit i met there, and i concluded, on sadguru, in our conversation in the cafeteria that lasted for hours, until we moved into talk of home life and music on a patch of grass under the clear blueberry skies. i thought of her as i read the book weeks later.

the sadhguru book was in a q n a format. the western interviewer asked sadhguru about purpose - what is one's purpose? how does one know?

your Purpose, everyone's Purpose is a spiritual one. if it is not, then it is not your Purpose. word. that's what muhammad (s.a.w) said, that's what rumi extrapolated from the teachings of the prophet, that's what my pops taught me by his example, in his humble service to community. all the great teachers have shown me this.

the purpose is to be nothing, the sheik hisham said in a kutbah he delivered in a small mosque, to an attentive audience. to be the number zero is the goal, in islamic numerology. when you are nothing you have everything, and thus become the number one.

made sense to me, the 1ness of Air Land Liquid Atmosphere Heat (ALLAH), to realize God-consciousness through humility, through moving away from this skin and these features and the attachments to false gods - what the prophet referred to as idol worshipping.

i stopped believing in jay z and sharukh khan, and johnny depp and method man, and others i idolized, after it became clear to me that they were becoming gurus i didn't choose, but were handed to me by the pressures to be accepted, to fit in, to be part of what everyone was talking and dressing about. my worship of these idols led me straight into the shopping centers, into donna karen's and h&m and even the thrift shops to buy buy buy and be an individual and dismember from community and do you and chase that leprechaun and join a gym, cause "image is everything" the heart-throb tennis giant, andre aggassi, once said, and i liked him, thought he was cool, so, i took his words to be the book of paul.

image is everything in babylon and success is the road to purchasing imagery - house, lawn, beamer, travel, dinners in paris lunches in jaipur. soon the image becomes you and it feels so good to have everything at your fingertips - toasted shrimp wrapped in wild walnut crusted salmon with a nepali chutney and glass of abruzzo wine, and the people who are joyous in eating out and sharing space without communication for one hour.

my uncle who got fat with benjamins, attributed his monetary successes to God. it must've been ordained, he said, afterall, look at everyone else in my village, they are all still poor and broke.

maybe it's because his desire to get rich, was aligned with what the established system promotes, rewards. maybe if he valued community and fishing and growing crops, and respecting the land and not manipulating people into buying stuff they didn't need, he would still be broke in the village too. maybe.

what is success? are you driven by it? i am driven by the volition to complete this fast, to see it through, to cleanse and reset and get Deeper, in working towards being a medicine man by way of my written word, by way of herbs, of yogic movement, ayurvedic touch, divine tilling of land and community like a love supreme.

"success is my only muthafu@#%n option, failure's not," eminem said, in his song lose yourself. he's right. the trailer park of misery has got to go. poverty is not a path i chose. but my drive is beyond diamonds and rings. my drive is to be in Union, to facilitate Union with those in my path, so that we are closer.

implicit in success is work, and work, the prophet reminds us, is worship.

worship the path you are on towards your Success. if you are not on the path, get on. stop talking, thinking, worrying, configuring about it. get on and work like you have just got the word from your fellow inmate that there is an exit out of the prison you've been trapped in for the past 20 plus years. that there's going to be a lot of people who are going to try to stop you, lots of barbed wire to climb and lots of media that will portray you as the worst possible being and rumors will fly, and it's a long road, but you can get there if you put in the work. hustle and flow. my success is tied into yours.