By Lazaris

The Two Major Focuses of Every Lifetime …

When Lazaris has spoken of Life Focuses he has always said that people have seven of them in every lifetime, varying from person to person and from lifetime to lifetime, depending upon what they want to be doing any particular time. There are two focuses, however, that are part of every lifetime we have: Learning To Have Fun and Learning To Consciously Create Success. This excerpt from Lazaris Interviews: Book II (out of print) is about these two, which are always part of every incarnation.

Learning To Have Fun

"What is the purpose of life? … What is my task? Why am I here? … Why am I physical? What is my mission?"

You are haunted by this desire to know. Deep within your brain stirs the thought that if you just knew the answer to one of these questions, then everything else would make sense. Your heart echoes with feelings that a satisfactory answer would make everything … absolutely everything … all right.

Your purpose, your mission, your task – or, as we prefer to say, your focus – can be stated with disarming ease. The prime reason you are here: To learn to have fun.

Yes. That’s it. You are here to learn to have fun! You have created a physical form and a physical world to put it in. You have created all of your reality to give yourself the opportunity to learn – to learn to have fun.

The critics and detractors pounce upon that statement as proof of the shallowness and hedonism of the New Age. They either get angry at the apparent lack of social responsibility, or they dismiss the idea as the emptyheaded "fad philosophy" of this yuppie "sport" called the New Age.

Many who consider themselves part of the alternative spirituality of the New Age want the purpose, the task, the mission to be more serious or to at least sound more spiritual. Missions should be loftier. A purpose of connecting with your Higher Self or becoming one with the Source sounds much more reasonable. It sounds much more valuable and viable.

At first glance, these criticisms seem to have merit. Upon further investigation the kind of fun we are talking about, the kind of fun you are attempting to learn, is valuable and totally viable. We are talking about the kind of fun derived from accomplishing the lessons you have selected to experience and fulfilling the destinies you have chosen to explore. Your spiritual focus — your spirituality — is all about your living, breathing, loving, embracing relationship with God/Goddess/All That Is. This is what learning to have fun is all about.

Your purpose, mission, task — your focus — is not only about achievement; it is also about the means of achieving. It is not just about succeeding — it is also about the way in which you succeed. You can grow through the struggles and hardships of life. Some of you needed to do that. Some still feel the need to struggle and suffer. However, you also have the choice to grow through the love and the laughter.

Which is going to be more fun? Both of them will "get you there," but which is going to be more fun? Everyone, regardless of their spirituality or their claimed lack of it, has the same purpose, task, mission, the same focus: Learning to have fun.

Certainly the desire to reach a heaven, whether it is a literal place or a state of mind, is a desire to have fun. Certainly a desire to connect with your Higher Self or with the Source is a desire to have fun – a postponed desire perhaps, but still a desire to have fun. For the Christian, certainly being on the right side of the rapture is a goal of having fun. No matter how much struggle you think is required – no matter how painful the path you decide you must have, the goal, the culmination of your learning, is to reach a state of peace. Peace. That’s fun!

There are four keys to understanding this primary focus.

First, learn. The focus is not just "to have fun" – it’s to learn. It is: To learn to have fun. Learning means recognizing and acknowledging that you are the creator of all the possibilities, probabilities, and actualities of your reality. It involves figuring out what you did "right" and "wrong." Learning to have fun means being responsible for what "works" in your life. It means figuring out the "why’s" and the "how’s" of reality creation so that the fun you have is the fun you know you created. It is self-generated fun. You never have to wonder if it will last, because you create it — you are the source of the fun, then the happiness, and finally the joy you are having in your life.

Second, define. Define fun continuously. Fun is not static. Being fluid, it always changes. When you were six, you had very distinct ideas of what a fun day was all about. Now those same ideas would seem ridiculous. Your current concepts of fun are unique. As you unfold your future, your current pictures of fun will also change. It is vital that you define and redefine what you mean by "fun" and what you mean by having it.

Third, balance. Despite the parental "tape-loops" inside your head mumbling something about beds that you must sleep in and cakes you cannot eat, it is important to balance. It is up to you to choose and decide not only what’s fun, but when it’s fun. For some, a "pizza and a six-pack" may not only sound like a fun idea — at the time, it might be the essence of fun! Yet, at another time it would be the antithesis. It is up to you to balance the long-term fun and the short-term pleasures. It is up to you to distinguish among the inner-child’s, adolescent’s, young-adult’s, and the spiritual adult’s sense of: "What’s fun?"

Learning to have fun is not just about being at the right place at the right time, knowing where the best parties are on a Friday night, or about knowing the right people. It is about learning, defining, and balancing self-generated fun. It is about creating your own reality and being positively responsible for that creation.

Fourth, deserve. The final key to understanding the prime focus of having fun is also the major blockage to its fulfillment.

You can learn, define, and even balance what is fun for you. You can process and program. You can work with a myriad of techniques. You can be responsible and enjoy the power implicit within that responsibility. You can learn and work through the psychological and metaphysical obstacles that separate you from the reality you ask for.

However, if you don’t think you deserve, all the above are intellectual exercises fast becoming exercises in frustration and futility. The lack of deserving permeates your beliefs and attitudes, your thoughts and feelings, and your choices and decisions. You do not feel you deserve. A primary focus that seems easy enough to accomplish has just been moved out of reach. Because it is beyond your belief and therefore your choice, "you can’t get there from here."

There are several powerful reasons why deserving is outside the belief-choice matrix.

1. You were taught. You were taught by parents, teachers, spiritual leaders, and peers that you do not deserve — especially you do not deserve to have fun. These sources of learning were not necessarily ill-intentioned. Much of what they taught you was what they learned and what they thought would "protect" you from a world they didn’t understand and therefore a world that seemed to be "the enemy." They did not want you to get your hopes up and have them dashed. They did not want you to get hurt, so they taught you that you did not deserve. Sometimes, they were ill-intentioned. Out of jealousy, possessiveness, and fear, some did intend to imprison you in their limitations. Whichever, you were taught, and you can "un-teach" yourself now.

2. You are haunted by angers, hurts, and resentments of the past. Separate from what you were innocently or maliciously taught, many are followed by the specter of the past. As a child you were so angry you wished your mother was dead. You numbed your hurt with hate. You harnessed the anguish with resentment. Lonely, you punished yourself. You decided you did not deserve to be happy. Ever! You still live by that decision. You are haunted by the past.

3. You feel guilty. The guilt you may feel can be sourced in fact and fantasy, or it can be unsourced in the belief that you are guilty just by being alive. Perhaps you were taught; perhaps you were conditioned. Now you feel guilty. According to you, you do not deserve. The possibility of happiness, the possibility of having fun, is frightening. It is a threat. This is where your lack of deserving lies if you find yourself feeling guilty when things go wrong and even worse — guiltier — when things go right. Are you constantly apologizing for being here — for being alive?

4. You are caught in a "catch-22" of deserving. You come to realize that the lack of deserving is the problem. You are eloquent and articulate about all the reasons you don’t deserve. You have even worked at relearning what the inner-child erroneously learned. You have released the haunting angers, hurts, resentments, and you have freed yourself from guilt. Yet you still don’t feel you deserve. Why?

Because, you tell yourself, if you deserved, you’d have figured it out long ago! You say you don’t deserve because you still feel undeserving. You continue by telling yourself that if you were a person who was meant to feel deserving, you would have done it already. Wrapped in a negative ego of, "I’d hate to admit it," you are caught in a "catch-22" reality.

Often, there is a feeling of foolishness: "I should already know this. I should already have done this." Believe us, you will only feel more foolish to wait even another month. If you feel foolish now, how much more foolish are you going to feel a year from now?

Admit your foolishness and your embarrassment. Break the "catch- 22" by realizing you are not alone. Everyone feels the lack of deserving. It is part of your human condition. It is part of what you are learning through the lens, through the focus, of learning to have fun.

5. You are depressed. Depression is anger that you fear you will get in trouble for having. Many who are depressed in their marriages or relationships are often angry, but fear reprisals should they talk about it. Many who dread going to work because their jobs depress them are really saying they are angry, but actualization carries intolerable consequences. The anger that seeds depression can build over many months or many years, or it can come from quick and sudden change. One of the ways you suppress — repress — depress — that anger is by denying fun. You deny it by refusing it, or by choosing to believe that it is outside the realms of possibility or probability. Either way, it is beyond your reach.

6. You lack perfection. You have made mistakes, and you have not forgiven yourself. Perhaps you are waiting for others to forgive you or to apologize to you. Perhaps you have decided that you are unforgivable. Whatever you tell yourself, you have concluded that you do not deserve to have fun. Erroneously, you have decided that you can have fun once you are perfect, and not before. Since you already have made a mistake, you are doomed. If you can discover the arrogance rather than feel the self-pity of this position, you can be free of it.

7. You decided you do not love "good enough." Like the lack of deserving you were taught, many of you have concluded that you simply do not love "good enough." In many situations, the Human Potential Movement and the ensuing metaphysics have fostered that conditioning. Many have decided that humankind as well as they, individually, have a fatal flaw — an original sin of sorts — of an inability to love. Because they can’t love, or can’t love "good enough," they do not deserve anything — especially, they do not deserve to have fun. Nor, according to them, does anyone else.

We realize we have not offered concrete solutions and resolutions to these obstacles to your deserving. Knowing what stops you — knowing the hurdles and where they are — can be the first step in finding your own solutions.

Having fun is not the glib and shallow concept so many want to think it is. It sounds simple enough, yet your reality belies that suspected simplicity. After so many lifetimes, fun and learning how to have it seem as elusive as ever.

Having fun involves learning to create your reality, defining the means and the ends you wish to achieve and acquire, balancing the future and the present against the backdrop of the past, and most of all it involves allowing yourself to feel, and then be, deserving.
Learning To Consciously Create Success

The other essential purpose, mission, or task — or, as we call it, focus — is as important and as illusive as the first. The second focus: To learn to consciously create success.

You see, it is not just about being successful. It is about learning. It is about being conscious. It is about defining exactly what success is for you.

Creating your own reality is something you do whether you are conscious of it or not. Everyone consciously creates their own reality. Some, lost in the labyrinth of ignorance or naivete, do not know it. Others, caught in the web of fear and ridicule, deny it. Many, trapped in the paralysis of being in potentia, wish it were true. Regardless, you do create your own reality.

Conscious creation of reality is how you function. Conscious creation of success is where you focus.

We do not want to examine the entire arena of creating success. That has been done. The bookshelves of your reality are replete with the "how-to’s" of success.

We want to plant seeds of consideration to help you more clearly understand what success really is for you, and how to more concretely be able to consciously create it for yourself. To begin, we must look at what success isn’t. Many of you don’t really know what success is. It is one of those concepts that you are supposed to "just know." Potential humiliation overrules curiosity. Without clear understanding you continuously seek and never find success.

In lieu of clarity you accept the consensus reality definitions thinking that success means greater intelligence, more deserving, and "better than." You assume success entails competing with others and conquering scarcity. Success is concomitant with perfection in action and intention.

Initially, this sounds acceptable — even preferable. In time, you realize that you are not meeting these standards. No matter how intelligent you are, there are those who are smarter. You don’t feel deserving. No matter how persuasive you are, no matter how many others you convince, you cannot convince yourself that you deserve — that you really deserve. No matter how tightly you hold on to your "better thans," they keep slipping through your fingers. Competing and conquering are not only exhaustive, they’re boring. You are not perfect. You are not perfect. No, you’re not.

To stop the erosion, you simplify your consensus reality definitions. Success means having more and better than, being more and better than, doing more and better than. Success means more … !

Shuddering at the prospect of failure, you take a deep breath, you steel yourself, and you dive in again. Rather than realizing that the definitions are incorrect, you try again to make them work for you. Some will spend their whole lives on this me
ry-go-round reaching for a brass ring that isn’t there. Never was, never will be.

"Um-pa-pa, Um-pa-pa." There is no end. What success you do create feels like a fluke that can be snatched away at any moment. As much as failure is painful, success is more frightening. There is not real success on the merry-go-round.

Some reluctantly get off the carousel by being knocked off with the hard edge of failure. They judge, punish, and conclude that they are no good. They feel and are convinced that they "blew it — it’s too late."

Then there are those who are forced off the carousel by getting caught in the soft voice of self-delusion or by getting lost in the mirrored maze of grandeur. They convince themselves that they have met the criteria. The euphoria is eventually replaced with the haunting hollowness: "Is this all there is?"

A few, a very few, consciously climb off the merry-go-round by releasing the consensus reality definitions. Admitting that they do not know what success is, they then search for new meaning and create their own definitions of success — of their success.

The most effective way to define success in a way that the definition can be your definition, is to lay forth the core — the backbone — the backbone of what success is. The skeleton of success is just that: a skeleton. You must give it life by adding the flesh and blood, the muscle and nerve, and the thinking and feeling of success. You must breathe life into these pieces of the puzzle called success.

Not surprisingly, there are seven basic components to being successful. You all know these seven pieces of the puzzle. Often, you just don’t know how they fit together.

1. First is power. The most elegant definition of power is the ability and the willingness to act. Power, in truth, has nothing to do with intimidation, control, or manipulation. It has nothing to do with the desire or the attempts to overpower.

"Power" has become a euphemism for fear. When you confront a scary person you often call them powerful. When you encounter a powerful person you often call them scary! Very strange.

True power is being both able and willing to choose and decide, and to act on those choices and decisions. It is being able and willing to think and feel and act on those thoughts and emotions. It is being able and willing to admit to having attitudes (opinions, evaluations, and discernments) and beliefs and then acting consciously on those attitudes and beliefs.

2. The second puzzle piece is creativity and productivity. Creativity is generating and stimulating conception and perception in yourself and/or in others. Creativity is not defined by career or label. The artist and the non-artist, by whatever definition, are creative if they generate and stimulate conception and perception.

Levels of productivity are measured by the amount you learn about yourself. Whatever you are doing, if you learn a great deal about you and who you are, then it is productive. If you learn little or nothing, then it is nonproductive. Productivity is a quality, not a quantity.

3. Then there is awareness, and there is aliveness. Many look for lofty esoteric meanings for these two concepts. In their search they lose sight of success. To be aware, concisely, means knowing you have impact. Some believe that it is impossible to have impact on each other. Yet others will concede and deal with impact. Whether they are supposed to have it or not, they actually do have impact on the people around them. Regardless, everyone agrees that you have impact, at least on yourself. When you know this — really know this — you become aware.

When you combine four very special ingredients, something very special happens. You create the synergy of aliveness. Synergy means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and in this case the aliveness is more than just equal parts of love, trust, expectancy, and enthusiasm.

To become really alive it is important to combine the flexibility and fluidity of love with the fragility and rigidity of trust. Then it is vital to stir in the wonder of expectancy and the sparkle of enthusiasm. Mix well. Be alive.

4. Happiness is the fulfillment of your needs. Joy is the fulfillment of your preferences. Enjoyment is the elegance with which you do both.

5. Many make the mistake of assuming that success means having resources. In truth, success means having access to resources. There are those who have money, but no real access to it or to what it can buy them. They do not experience success. Others have loads of access to money as their only resource. They often experience limited or shallow success. The truly successful person will have expansive access to physical and metaphysical resources. Success is within the grasp of anyone who can close their eyes, alter their state of consciousness, visualize, and manifest in their reality. If you are willing, each of you has unlimited potentials for success.

6. Critical to being successful: the willingness to adventure.

In your "old age" world you learn to be a warrior. You learn to confront, to battle, to conquer, and you dominate. In the "New Age" world you can learn to be an adventurer. You can learn to encounter, to understand, to befriend, and to transmute with dominion. Consciously created success involves – integrally involves — being willing to adventure in your reality and in your world.

7. Dominion is an attitude and a belief. Dominion is a point of view. When you are willing to co-create your success with God/Goddess/All That Is rather than expecting someone to do it for you, you are on your way. When you are willing to stretch and reach for the future rather than grovel in the past, you begin to feel the excitement and the wonder of dominion. when you are able to see and demonstrate that first your world — and then the world-at-large — is a friendly place ready to support you rather than out to get you, then you have dominion.

With dominion, you have the final piece of the puzzle called success.

The secret of being successful — of learning to be successful? Begin by owning each of the seven puzzle pieces as an attitude first. Feel. Feel powerful, creative/productive, aware/alive. Feel happiness and joy in an enjoying way. Feel that you have access to resources, a willingness to adventure. Feel dominion.

Do not expect to be successful first and then to have the feeling. Feel it first. Feel it first.

Do not aim at being successful. Do not make success the bull’s eye of your target. Don’t "shoot for success." Ironically, the secret to consciously creating success is not to make it the central target of your desire, expectation, or imagination. Rather, accomplish the means. Aim to be powerful, creative/productive, etc. Aim at the means and allow the ends to follow.

Don’t shoot for the ends. Accomplish the means, the ends will follow.

With love and peace … LAZARIS