Career Success

“I define career success as using your work to advance yourself spiritually.”

Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz

Career success is using your career or your daily work as a way of advancing your mental state. This can be any kind of work: schoolwork, work in the world, work at home, doing anything, your career itself or all physical tasks, cleaning the car, doing the laundry.

Also career success means making enough money to lead the kind of life you’d like to lead as a practicing Buddhist. The purpose of work is to make enough money to live well, happily and successfully in a material sense, to be able to live in the kind of house in the right energy area, to have the kind of car, or whatever it is that you need to shelter yourself from the abrasive forces of life that would be draining to you and would keep you in lower states of mind. Money buys you space, it buys you protection in this world. So you need to find something that will give you enough money to make you independent. You can also make money to assist others – if you enjoy that.

“If you have an old car and it breaks down on the freeway in the middle of the night and you never know who’s going to come along, you don’t want that sort of thing to happen. We live in the world of violence, there’s an astounding crime rate, and you need to be able to buy a little space around yourself so you can lead a more refined life and keep yourself in good shape so you can then do more for others. ”

Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz

If you use work as meditation, if work becomes meditation, then eight hours of work is eight hours of meditation. It’s still important to do a morning and evening silent, sitting meditation, because it’s an entirely different level of experience…and by doing it you will open yourself up to the planes of light and that will enable you to do a strong work meditation all day, just to be in high states all day. And then, if you do that, when you come home, you’ll be able to meditate well again because you won’t be as exhausted as everyone else is because you’ve been gaining a kind of internal chi or power from your work. That’s the secret.

Meditation comes in different forms. The best form of meditation is the sitting meditation, that one makes you smile the most. The next one is work.

“Work is a great way to meditate. There is a particular form of work that I recommend to people who practice meditation, that is computer science.”