Do You Strive, Thrive, or Come Alive? | VictorSchueller.com

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Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I am in the process of writing a free guide to help people overcome their own personal mediocrity and tap into their unused potential to realize their inner greatness.  Yes, I know that’s a mouthful, but the guide is going to be awesome (and helpful and applicable)!  One of the many things I am going to discuss is what I call the “Hierarchy of Existence,” and while I am developing the idea, I wanted to share it with you to hear your thoughts.

I’ve already discussed with you how our conscious thoughts become our beliefs, and that our beliefs eventually come to fruition by us actually being what we believe.

Depending on our levels of needs, and depending on how well our needs are being fulfilled, we will generally fall into one of three categories, which I call the “strive,” “thrive,” or “alive” levels of existence.  Here’s a rough sketch of the “Hierarchy of Existence:”

You can see that the “strive” level is a level where a person struggles to have their basic needs met.  When a person feels that they are struggling to find security and safety, they are usually in a prolonged state of stress.  They find themselves emotionally fragile and see themselves regularly as victims of circumstance.

If someone is able to transcend this “strive” level of existence and move up to the “thrive” level, they will find that they are better able to meet their needs.  They now can provide for their basic needs and more.  Now, people in this “thrive” level typically buy a home, for example, and have a steady and stable career, and they start to amass material possessions and monetary savings.  People who find themselves in the “thrive” level of existence may be under the impression that they have “arrived,” but this is actually a paradoxical trap; the more possessions one owns, the more they fear losing all they have worked for, and the tighter they hold on to their possessions.  They may find that while they are financially successful and have many possessions, they are unhappy or unfulfilled, realizing that they are a slave to their possessions and the job that allows them to maintain that standard of living.  They still are largely victims of fate — they feel that they control some aspects of their lives, but still they are “limited” to what options they have available to maintain their way of life.

The “strive” and “thrive” levels of existence are enveloped in a belief system based on fear and scarcity.  The fear of losing what they have drives them to work very hard to keep what they have, because their belief system tells them that things like money, power, status, and other similar commodities are limited in quantity, and if they don’t work to keep what they have earned, they will lose it and have no way of getting it back.

This belief system rooted in fear and scarcity is based upon conscious acceptance of stimuli from the five senses, coupled with subconscious programming.  When we were too young to make decisions for ourselves, our parents and teachers made conscious choices for us, and we accepted those choices because we learned to trust the adults who were responsible for teaching us the ways of life.  Through their words and actions, we learned “how to live,” but if our parents and teachers themselves operated on belief systems based on fear and scarcity, then they just passed those beliefs on to us.

Subconscious programming of the conscious stimuli is not questioned.  It is simply carried out by our bodies.  If we are not aware of the programming that was fed to our subconscious over our lifetimes, we operate on autopilot and unknowingly speak and act in ways that are motivated by fear and scarcity.  We are all about the ego, concerned with our status compared to others.  We worry about how much power we have, or how much influence we hold.  We worry about getting our “piece of the pie,” because there aren’t necessarily enough “pieces” to go around.  We engage in negative behaviors like complaining and gossiping, because those emotional areas of our brains are so busy worrying about potential threats to our ego that we are constantly in self-preservation mode.

The key to breaking through our limited belief systems is becoming “alive.”  We become alive when we recognize that our actions and words are driven by fear and scarcity, and then do something to change.  We become alive when we start to become mindful of the present, quiet and still to listen to our inner genius, and we begin to operate out of abundant love and forgiveness.  When we can break through our existing beliefs based on fear and scarcity, we transcend all limits and experience the true bliss of being one with pure potentiality — 100% authentic and in tune with our intuition.  We become fearless and ready to live the lives we want to live, on our own terms.

We no longer are trapped by suffering caused by the fear of losing our possessions.  We live life fully “alive!”

It’s time to vanquish mental mediocrity.  It’s time to come alive and be the compassionate, empathic, loving, and generous being we were born to be!  It’s time!

Photo source: freedigitalphotos.net

Sketch of “Heirarchy of Existence,” by Victor Schueller – Copyright 2012