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Door

Are You Content To Be Forgotten?

Today you will learn how to get anything you want… by first destroying your attachment to it.

 

Imagine this. You’ve found the cure for cancer, designed the system to relieve world hunger or ended warfare forever.

 

Now see yourself standing on the world stage, Nobel Prize in hand and adoration pouring in from all directions. That high school teacher who said you’d never amount to anything is in the front row, face swollen red like a beetroot. All those people who turned you down for dates are lining up with roses to throw at you.

 

You go outside and a statue of you has been erected in the town square. A mother walks up to you — she’s holding a newborn baby in her arms. She tells you that the child will be named after you, given you’re such an inspiration.

 

If that weren’t enough, the President announces that a public holiday will be created in your honour, to celebrate your greatness once a year.

 

Now imagine handing it all over to someone else

 

Picture giving your idea away to your best friend, your sibling… or better yet, someone you actively despise. Instead of getting all the glory, they take all the TV interviews and fanfare! For your idea!

 

What sort of picture is this, where you sit in the shadows remaining unknown and unheralded, never being celebrated.

 

Can you fathom it?

 

Here is a challenging place to get to — finding something that needs to exist in the world so badly that your own credit and recognition cease to matter.

 

It is one of my favourite questions — what would you do, that you never got credit for or saw the end results of in your lifetime? What is worth doing anyway?

 

A broader audience, community, following or sphere of influence should be like friendship on steroids

 

Where inputs are divorced from outputs. It’s more efficient — you don’t have to be there to act as a friend to them — to open a Door, relieve their suffering or give them support and belief. It’s not the same as being with them in company, but sometimes people just need a nudge.

 

A friend is the person you help for no reason other than your friendship. You don’t expect a favor to be traded back, you don’t expect to be glorified, praised or worshipped by them — that’s not friendship or relationship, it’s attachment to an image of yourself. And every moment you spend attached to your image is a moment you spend unable to see others.

 

Real relationships are born out of non-attachment and very basic expectations of mutual respect. They are symbiotic.

 

But see! You’re not ‘giving up’ anything!

 

Don’t think you’re getting nothing for your trouble. I’m not asking you to go without! Remember, the thing you do get is everything. It’s joy. The joy of doing it — the joy of sharing and giving.

 

And people who know joy need nothing else. People who have been barred from joy, need the other things — like credit, recognition, praise and glory.

 

When your compensation is joy, you are content to be forgotten.

 

Could you achieve more if you were content to be forgotten?

 

Would you make more money, help more people and reach greater heights, if you were content to be forgotten?

 

What if the only real freedom comes if you’re content to be forgotten? ****

 

Where you might end up ‘having it all’ but find yourself needing none of it, being so content with your own company and the peacefulness of that.

 

This will liberate you to do things that really matter, things that are really yours. When you have nothing left to prove, what remains to be done will be the will of something far greater.

 

A Doorman is not paid in any of the traditional ways.

 

No true Doorman wants to be cherished or worshiped. They open the Door, and their reward is simply watching you walk through.

I’ve spent long periods of time not earning money, but it’s been a very long time since I wasn’t paid.

 

What a gift it truly is…

Being content to be forgotten.

 

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