The Five Spiritual Laws to Success

One day while I was attempting to meditate but failing to take drastic measures, I came across a video suggestion from my previous guided meditation searches on youtube. It was a video titled “Loving and Dying: Ram Dass Here And Now” I tactlessly clicked on the video and within seconds I was quickly captivated by this man who went by “Ram Dass”. The teachings of spirituality felt similar to psychology except that it had a light at the end of the tunnel. It was as if these spiritual teachers came on earth to guide us towards living a life of peace and harmony, to nudge us and say, “Hey! This is what you’re doing wrong, and this is how you can change it.” I felt less of the burden of life's woes once I started my long and treacherous journey toward spiritual enlightenment. 

As Ram Dass so often said, “The spiritual journey is not about acquiring something outside of yourself, but rather, you are penetrating deep layers and veils to return to the deepest truth of your own being.”

What if I told you reaching nirvana is not a transcendental, out-of-body psychedelic experience? If everything you were fed on how the only individuals truly in tranquil balance with themselves and the universe are Janis Joplin fanatic hippies was simply false? What if I told you I completely figured out how to be truly happy no matter what circumstances occurred during a revelation in my Nissan Rogue on a Tuesday afternoon? 

So here I give you the 5 secret sauces to complete peace that have helped me live a much happier life. And no, you will not have to throw up a peace sign and trip on LSD on a beach with a long-haired man to embrace this new lifestyle. 

1. The Universe Isn’t Here to Only Uplift You 

The universe is not molded to give you whatever you want. To transform yourself into a badass beautiful unicorn, you must come to that realization. This big beautiful world is created for us to uncover what we lack and then urges us to look deeper beneath the surface of who we think you are. Spiritual teachings invite you to face the huge 5-headed grotesque serpent that is your deepest trigger and slice all 5 heads right off, karate style. 

We as human beings tend to be disappointed if life doesn’t go exactly how we want it to. We kick and drag our feet through the mud, cursing out whatever god we think ruined our days, and wonder why others seem so much more put together than us. Life’s just not fair!

Or is your unwillingness to face your flaws and triggers what’s making it not fair? 

The universe isn’t some magical motherland that will have you drowning in gold if you buy a deck of tarot cards. It does not grant you a gray Mercedes Benz outside your doorstep because your 2008 Mitsubishi is easily susceptible to potholes. 

Life’s a bitch and then we die. Maybe life’s a bitch because we’re its bitches. 

We need to get uncomfortable to finally feel comfortable. We need to stare at vulnerability in the eyes and give it a big ole’ kiss because we aren’t afraid to get sentimental. 

If you spend your life on the tip of the surface, never reaching below or above, you will never reach the lowest lows to reach the highest of highs. To know deep pain is to know joyous pleasure and to feel immense grief means we loved someone deeply enough to feel physically pained. Our present awareness is our most abundant and eternal state of being and we should nourish any emotion that comes up throughout our days, instead of avoiding them due to the fear that emotion may cause us. 

If you were on a seesaw that was bolted to the ground and unable to lift off, you’d never experience the rush of shooting toward the sky. You would just sit on the flat wood, at a standstill watching your friends ambitiously reach the lowest parts of the ground before transcending upwards, skyrocketing with joy. It is near impossible to feel highs without knowing what lows feel like. 

So start embracing pain! Start cheering when you feel anxious before a presentation! It’s so cool to feel joy and grief and anger and happiness and confidence! 

2. There is No Polarity. 

Suffering is beauty, happiness, anxiety, evil, and good. 

I know you’re visibly cringing as sixth-grade science class flashbacks are flooding you right now of lessons on polarity and atoms, but I promise you this will not be any type of science experiment. If, like me, you repressed any memory of science class, here's a brief refresher on the technical definition of polarity: “Polarity is when an entity contains two distinct and opposite poles that can either attract or repel each other.” 

Polarity in spiritual terms is the two components of the same consciousness, each side with a different focus. These areas of consciousness can appear to be opposite from one another. Ram Dass urged this throughout many teachings. Good=evil, loss=gain, wealth=poor, consumption=lack, beauty=ugly. 

It’s just like putting batteries in a flashlight to create light. When putting two negatives in or two positives, it simply won’t work because there’s no balance of energies between the charges. Positive and negative charges create a powerful, blinding light all because there isn’t a power imbalance. Can you love without hate? Can you feel relief without anxiety? Can you embrace gain without loss? The answer is likely no. It is detrimental as human beings to embrace change with open arms. Without contradicting events happening to us, life loses its seasoning, a very flavorful and mildly spicy seasoning. 

We resent certain emotions when we place hierarchy over its opposite, like getting upset because we’re feeling upset. The one goal we as humans should strive for is to remain neutral throughout all tribulations in life. That isn’t to say you should be completely lax over every event that occurs in your life but to create a balance of non surrender so the universe could work its power. Put out all good hope and intention to the universe over something you desire, and let it go into the night with good hope that it will manifest into fruition. And if it doesn’t, remain optimistic that something even greater will come along.
Life is created to suffer, life is created to constantly evolve and change, and holding onto a form of extremist thinking that we must cling to one side of a polarizing thought or emotion will only further our delusions that reality is created to unfold with the same events and outcomes as everyone else. I mean seriously, how boring would that be? This would be how all of our conversations would go if we existed under non-polarity and lived the same lives: 

“Hey, Mom! I just got that News anchor job for GMA I applied to!”

“Yes honey, you never fail, this isn’t shocking. Keep up!”

“Hey, sorry I sound kind of bummed, my dog died today.”

“Yeah, that just happened to me and twenty other people I know this afternoon!”

Exist within duality. Merge the polarities of the universe into one to create an integration of unity and divine duality.

3. Awareness of Your Suffering Without Attachment 

“The root of suffering is attachment,” (Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha).

Fear is an essential part of human biology. The receptors in our brain are quite literally there to sound alarms to alert us when danger is near. If you’ve ever had a gut feeling about something and ended up being right, that was probably your body giving you a hand by pumping a shit ton of cortisol in your body since your brain couldn’t figure out what was going on in the first place. 

It makes sense, we experience pain, anxiety, and sadness. It brings up the point: why do humans suffer more than they need to? Why do we feel like we’re about to be face-to-face with a 7-foot grizzly bear when we have to give a presentation on Microsoft Office tools in front of our boss? The key answer to this is: non-awareness. 

You’re probably wondering right now, “Have I fallen victim to living a life of non-awareness?” Or maybe you’re so deep in the non-awareness city that you’re sitting in your folding chair with an ignorance cocktail in hand with headphones in. 

The one way you can test if you are prone to non-awareness is if you have ever been stuck in a negative headspace or an anxiety-inducing situation and have not once felt yourself breathing or been consciously aware of your breath. You my friend, just joined the population of non-awareness city. 

If you’re ever in intense pain, whether that be emotional or physical, you’ll notice your brain is going overtime to produce thoughts about that pain, and how much it sucks. Oh my god, I’m in so much pain! Ow that hurts! How do we make this stop?? 

Although that big lumpy pink gumball might think it’s trying to help you, it’s actually making you suffer more. 

We tend to catastrophize every single event that occurs in our life and mold a little pink balloon into an atomic bomb. All because we lost awareness of ourselves and volunteered to sit front row in the raft of ignorance sailing down the non-awareness river. Feelings of want, need, and desire will only ever end up in our suffering. We mourn the job we just lost due to overstaffing because we really thought it would be the perfect job to eventually retire from. The pain rarely stems from the actual event but from our expectations of how it was “supposed” to go. 

Awareness takes our anguish and molds it into a beautiful butterfly of freedom and hope. What once was a little caterpillar, shriveled up and hopeless, anxious about when it’ll bloom, now transformed into an enlightened creature, ready to attack any challenges head-on. 

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” (Marcus Aurelius).

4. All We Have is the Here and Now, the Present Moment

“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present,” (Lao Tzu). 

Now, this one might seem a bit more obvious than the others, but you’d realize how rarely little stupid humans live in the here and the now. 

The “Here and now” is a phrase essentially coined by Eckhart Tolle and used to define this very present moment, regardless of the past. The present moment where you’re currently laying starfish on your couch with Cheeto dust still on your fingers mindlessly watching TikTok productive day-in-my-life videos, that here and now. 

Hey, I never said the present moment was always pretty. But it’s a staple to our happiness. It’s a permanent measure of our current reality and how sufficiently we’re living it. The past is inherently only a sequence of memories on bits and pieces of our life up until now, the reality we have full conscious awareness of. 

We aren’t Michael J. Fox for a reason, we have absolutely no space in the past and future, we only take up space here, right now. Every action and decision you make now will create a ripple effect to future events and actions that may or may not occur in the future. That’s why choosing to get up from your Cheeto coma and park your butt in front of your computer to finish your article on the dating advice column you write for matters. It all matters. That one decision you decided to take action on is now setting up habits for your future, stable habits. And before you know it, you’re a kickass dating advice guru who just got a sweet office job at a cushy Magazine with a skyline view of the city. 

Would a professional runner have made it first to the finish line if he shifted his focus away from his present movement and instead got in his head over how fast the other runners were going? Or if he was even good enough to be running next to former Olympic athletes?  The answer is always no. 

Just take that first step and the rest will play out according.

“Accept, then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally; not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life,” (Eckhart Tolle). 

5. To Know, Be in the Flow

If you order a cool new blanket for your couch since your dog used your last one as a chew toy, we rarely ever obsess about the old item we are going to discard once the package comes; we instead tune into the object of desire: the new and improved blanket. 

We feel that zing of excitement over the thought of our order coming then we kind of forget about it until it does come. We don't ruminate as to when it's arriving, how it's arriving, or what carrier route it's taking. Unless the tracking information has disappeared deep into the black hole of the parcel system, then we have a warrant to obsessively stress. But most of the time we allow it to flow in the postal sea of boxes and rest assured it’ll be here soon. 

Now on the other hand, have you ever had a really terrible day that seemed like it was only getting worse and worse? The cat got out so you went on a rage search looking for it only to find him perched on the neighbor's front lawn, then you spilled the pound of mocha java grinds you just spent a mini fortune on all over the floor and now you’re so behind on your work, you’ve received two passive-aggressive emails from your boss. The shit pile of your day seems to be racking up even more shit. What started off as your cat simply wandering outside has turned into you sitting on your kitchen floor in a self-destructive breakdown about how you have no friends and you’ll forever be alone. See how quickly our days can spin out of control? Because of us? 

We are in complete control of how we react to situations that happen to us. Either we rule the day or the day rules us. By practicing mindful awareness and allowing life to flow through us rather than into us, everything will feel much easier. Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese Philosopher heavily preached the methods of not acting when one shouldn’t frequently in his work Tao Te Ching.

“That which offers no resistance overcomes the hardest substances. That which offers no resistance can enter where there is no space,” (Lao Tzu). We as humans often see “the flow” as a single moment of tranquility and sudden euphoria. But the flow is always in us, waiting to be unveiled by you and practiced throughout our daily life. Honing in on a hobby you like, following a cooking recipe, solving a puzzle, and braiding your daughter's hair are all examples of being so concentrated on a task at hand, we simply have shut out the mental chatter going on in our heads. Our brains are calm and invest in a specific focus. 

This is how we should act throughout our life. Giving into life's challenges and cracking under pressure is a surefire way to further your agitation. Whatever we resist, persists. 

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever they like.”

“The more we value things outside of our control, the less control we have,”

-Marcus Aurelius

“The entire universe is conspiring to give you everything you want,”

-Abraham Hicks

“You may have expected the enlightenment would come to ZAP! Instantaneous and permanent. This is unlikely. After the first ah-ha experience, it can be thought of as a thinning of a layer of clouds,”

“I was no longer needing to be special because I was no longer caught up in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was a part of the universe, like a tree, or grass, or water. Like storms, like roses, I was a part of it all,”

-Ram Dass