What I Added to Lose Weight & Restore Health

This com­ment is a gen­eral one in which I want to share how enrich­ing the web can be and the bless­ing of serendipity.

I am a real­tor in NJ and a blog site I belong to named ActiveRain car­ried a post from a writer who ref­er­enced Baba Ram Dass. I came across his teach­ings back in the 1970s and I think, to one degree or another, they led to my intro­duc­tion to Baba Muk­tananda and, ulti­mately, to a very dif­fer­ent kind of spir­i­tu­al­ist, Car­los Cas­taneda. Are you fol­low­ing this?

Well, after read­ing the post about Baba Ram Dass, I saw fit to com­ment but wanted to check the spelling of Yaqui, as in Yaqui war­rior. I searched Yaqui war­rior on Google and, lo and behold, found your essay enti­tled “Dying to Live,” which I absolutely loved. My thought and your inter­est­ing per­spec­tive prompted me to post the fol­low­ing to my blog, http://westessexneighborhoods.com.
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I came across this while brows­ing around the ActiveRain site:

“The qui­eter you become the more you hear.”

Posted by Lou Lud­wig of Boca Raton, Florida, it trig­gered two mem­o­ries. The first was a busi­ness train­ing ini­tia­tive, spon­sored by Xerox Cor­po­ra­tion, the sub­ject of which was the devel­op­ment of lis­ten­ing skills. After all, a good lis­tener knows far more about a client’s needs than does a good talker. And, the fact that Xerox sales peo­ple had been trained to listen…Xerox built an entire ad cam­paign around the theme…made it a good com­pany with which to do business.

The other mem­ory con­cerned the writer of the quote, Baba Ram Dass, a well known and much beloved spir­i­tual teacher with whom I became acquainted in the 1970s.

Well, Lou’s quote set me to think­ing because wis­dom and under­stand­ing comes to each of us through dif­fer­ent chan­nels and no sin­gle chan­nel has a monop­oly on it. And, most assuredly, any­one in the stress­ful busi­ness of sales can use a lit­tle wis­dom and under­stand­ing from time to time. I know I do.

Back in the 1970s, the author of Lou’s quote, Baba Ram Dass, opened the door to Baba Muk­tananda which led to a much deeper under­stand­ing of myself and what I do for a liv­ing. In the same vain, I also looked to the teach­ings of the Yaqui war­rior, Don Juan, who was immor­tal­ized by Car­los Cas­taneda in his book The Teach­ings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.

Ref­er­enc­ing Don Juan in “Dying to Live,” Lynne For­rest writes: “War­riors of the Yaqui Tribe in Mex­ico, as described by Car­los Cas­taneda in his writ­ings, develop an inti­mate rela­tion­ship with death. A Yaqui war­rior learns to enter fully into life by stay­ing ever alert to the pos­si­bil­ity of his own demise. Not with mor­bid pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, or with con­stant back­ward glances caused by anxiety-induced hyper-vigilance, but instead with a steadi­ness of pur­pose that comes from liv­ing every moment as if it were his last. Here there is a resolve; a calm accep­tance that comes from hav­ing learned to view Death as a friend or advi­sor, as an “ally”. In this way ones every action is per­formed with what Don Juan (the old Sor­cerer from Casteneda’s books) calls “impec­ca­bil­ity”. From the under­stand­ing that life offers no guar­an­tees; that this could well be one’s final moment, every act becomes infused with con­scious­ness. If we were to allow our­selves the aware­ness, as Don Juan said, that death stands, ever present and ready to claim us, there would be lit­tle, if any, thought­less words, or action. What an awe­some way to live! Can you imag­ine how much less regret there might be if we all gave this kind of atten­tion to our lives?”

Hav­ing spent a life­time in sales and mar­ket­ing, I believe that the pro­fes­sion bares a strik­ing con­nec­tion to Don Juan’s notion of the war­rior. It is, after all, a sym­bolic death that we suf­fer when a sale is lost. It is also impor­tant that we face loss as would the Yaqui war­rior who resides within us all. With that over­ar­ch­ing phi­los­o­phy it is also easy to embrace the value of work­ing hard for our clients because, for the true war­rior, hard work has no mean­ing. It is, quite sim­ply, some­thing a war­rior does.

Now, to bring this around to the value of silence, I think the first step towards ones embrace of silence is not to be afraid of it. A silent place is where we learn about our­selves and where we learn about our clients’ needs and wants. It makes sense, then, that we, as true war­riors, should allow our silence to act as a vac­uum to be filled with infor­ma­tion that our clients give us…information that will help us serve them bet­ter and, in the process, win our sym­bolic bat­tles by doing the right thing.
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So, thank you for hav­ing such a valu­able web site and, if you start hear­ing from a bunch of real­tors, please be gen­tle to them .

Brian McCabe