Turned ON

The Art of Passionate Living
An excerpt from the book by Bill Lamond

The Hidden Costs of Winning
In the last two decades in business as a self-employed person, I have found that success-based thinking is really what I call winning at a discount. It is okay to ruin your health, have lousy relationships, harden your heart and other ridiculous things as long as you get “successful.” It’s really a “success at any price model.”

This model presumes you are living in a state of war or emergency. It is a way of operating to get a particular result at any cost. In times of war, it may be necessary. It is also a way of operating that will burn out your adrenals and never give you full enjoyment. It certainly is not a way to live everyday life. It burns out the body and deadens the soul.

Experientially, what is frightening about the model of success we live in today is that at the very moment of winning, you can already feel the discount. It makes most people bitter and crazy. Yes, they have won, but at what cost? You need only look at the latest disaster to befall the rich and famous in the tabloids – drugs addictions, marital scandals, mental illness, even murder – to see what the “success at any price” model produces. It’s not pretty.

When something is achieved at a ruinous cost, it is called a Pyrrhic victory. It is empty.

Success-based thinking is a pyrrhic victory. It forgets that at the heart of every human endeavor is the very human desire to be happy. Even if you want to be rich and famous, more powerful, better in bed or fully enlightened, you must somewhere in yourself think that these things will make you happy.

What seems wired in all life everywhere is evolution and flourishing. If you have not grown into more of the person you want to be while achieving your goals, if you are not flourishing inside as well as outside, you may have missed the whole point of being human.

For ten years I was a psychotherapist. I worked with people who were what psychotherapists call “normal neurotic.” About two years into my practice, I discovered something that changed everything. I discovered that the basic problem most people have is that they are living lives that are too small for them. Either their visions and desires were too small to have a really great life or they had compromised their visions and desires and were living at a discount. Sometimes they had the vision and desire and only needed to be trained and coached to have what they wanted.

I told my clients that I was unwilling to work on their problems anymore and that all I wanted to speak with them about was their aspirations and coach them to have their aspirations happen. They were relieved. Miraculously, many of the problems for which they had come to therapy disappeared.

Fulfillment-based Living

For nearly ten years, I have taught a high-level strategy course called THE PLEASURE OF BUSINESS. Don’t be fooled by the title. Though I have taught it to hundreds of business professionals, the business I am speaking about is not commerce and industry. What I really mean by “business” is the entrepreneurial endeavor of your life.

If you could see your life as a conglomerate, you would see that you have many holdings, ventures, and departments that all work together and must be in harmony for your life to be “profitable.” Your body is that way. There are myriad parts that operate together for you to stay alive and go about the business of your life. Any simple action requires the simultaneous coordination of brain, nerves, organs, and muscles, not to mention the underlying processes of the body that you take for granted all your life, like breathing, blood flow, and digestion.

Imagine a life where your spirit, intelligence, body, sexuality, emotion, and energy were engaged and operating harmoniously and with full profitability. There’s a life worth living.

The Pleasure of Business is a course in what I call “fulfillment-based” living (also referred to as “erotically-based,” “turn-on-based” living). The difference between this kind of thinking and success-based thinking is that in fulfillment-based thinking we are not playing just for the tangible result. The result by itself is not enough and never justifies the means we use to get it. We are playing for a style of life we want, as well as things in it. We want a style that is pleasurable, cooperative, and that actually requires us to open more in order to have results we’ve never had.

Fulfillment-based living is my own attempt to reach my goals and make my dreams come true in ways that do not discount them. I want the freedom to learn new things and make mistakes. I want to have as much fun and enjoyment and happiness while I am going through life. Also, I want to arrive in style, not feeling as if I been through the wringer.

Suffering, on the other hand, is a mental state that often has nothing to do with the physical pain. Suffering is a psychological phenomenon, not a physical one. You are preoccupied and fall down the stairs. There is certainly pain, but you also tell yourself things like, “Oh, I’m so clumsy,” “This is all my fault for not watching where I was going,” “Now I’ve ruined everything.” You speak to yourself and begin to experience strong emotions about your interpretation of the event, which makes you feel bad about yourself. As you do this, the physical pain often begins to intensify, causing you to speak more negatively to yourself and spiraling you down.

People are also said to suffer when pain is protracted and there is no escape, as in chronic conditions where the pain cannot adequately be managed. In cases of acute, severe physical injury, where the pain is overwhelming the central nervous system, the body “blows a fuse” and short-circuits the pain. We call this “shock.” It is the body’s way of shutting down physical pain responses from which we cannot escape. It is a dangerous state. The body gets cold and begins to harden. Left in physical shock for more than a few hours, people die.

Much of the suffering we do is not physically based. It is the result of the interpretation of painful life events in ways that keep us locked up emotionally and prevent escape – sometimes, long after the actual physical pain has ceased. And, because the body and the mind are interconnected, the body will shut down where the suffering is perceived.

Now, the Good News…

Here is some really good news. Pleasure is definitely stronger than pain. In research studies, it has been shown that when human beings are in highly sexually aroused states, their pain threshold elevates. To put it in plain language, you can do things to people who are very happy or very turned on that in an ordinary state of awareness would be painful.

You are standing in the grocery check out line. You are happy and radiating your joy. The person in front of you accidentally steps on your toe. They turn around and say, “I’m sorry.” You laugh and say, “Don’t worry. It’s all right.” It never crosses your mind again.

You are standing the in same line. You are upset and worried about something. The person in front or you accidentally steps on your toe. They turn around and say, “I’m sorry.” You glare at the them and say, “Watch where you’re going.” You are annoyed the whole time they are being checked out and walk out of the store mumbling to yourself at stupid, clumsy people. Your toe hurts.

When you increase your pleasure and have it at higher and higher levels, at lot of what you would ordinarily find painful disappears off the screen. You can not only tolerate more stimulation and pressure without pain, but the miracle is that things that used to feel painful are neutralized or can even feel good. In the last fifteen years I have had more than one thousand hours of massage. When my body is tense, everything the masseur does hurts. When my body is relaxed and open, the same things feel good.

Why Pleasure Rules

Pleasure and adrenaline produce the same result around pain. The difference is that to produce adrenaline sufficient to dull the pain, you have to put yourself in high-stress situations. Adrenaline dries the mouth and produces a strong odor in the body. Not great side effects. Also, prolonged stress will cause adrenal failure, a dangerous medical condition that takes a long time to reverse.

The choice is clear. Pleasure rules. It is the best way to go through life with the minimum amount of pain and the very best side effects, like happiness, well-being, appetite for more, and a feeling of freedom and safety.

More importantly the act that creates most living things is an act of pleasure. If nature is to be trusted, then one of the hallmarks of creation is that it is a pleasure, sexual or not. If you align your life in microcosm with the way life works in macrocosm, it stands to reason that you have a better chance of winning. The Taoists call this being in the Tao. Get in the flow, so to speak, and you do not have to paddle so hard.

Expanded Capacity

The secret of everyday happiness is to make up your mind that you will let go of what you are doing based on obligation and go for the things that really turn you on. Then you will be doing what is natural to you. How can you give your all and do your best otherwise? Also know that some things that turn you on will require you to grow in new ways. As a matter of fact, I would advise you to pick goals that turn you on and require you to grow, as the smartest tactic you can employ to have your life be great.

At the heart of expanding our capacity for a great life is getting way more sexually turned on - more on this later - and to use this sacred energy as a pump for opening up the brain and central nervous system in a quantum way. We can actually “pleasure up” the brain and have powers and gifts come on, and new visions occur, that previously were impossible.

I’m not the first one to say so.

Napoleon Hill in his multi-million selling classic of many decades ago, Think and Grow Rich, said that people who do well use their sexual energy as fuel. Except for advising us to have a great sexual relationship with our spouse, he didn’t have a technology or practice to offer for erotic turn on. You’ll get that in this book.

At the heart of this way of living is the idea that you can trust your pleasure. It is good and healthy. Many people have careers that have no “juice” for them. They live in commitment, obligation and duty. They live the same way in intimate relationships. I believe that when you do what is really your pleasure, everyone wins. You do your best. You get the best result for everyone. There is true success and joy.

The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, said that the deepest spiritual path is to follow your bliss. It is the practice of being in heaven, not going there. The material in this book will show you how to do that in a real, practical way.

Spiritual people say there are two paths to God or Enlightenment. One, the traditional path of Western thinking, is to give up everything, sacrifice yourself and empty yourself, so that the Divine can pour itself into you. The other is the path of filling until you include everything and everyone in the entire Universe. Both paths work.

When I examined these two paths more closely, the first path, what I now call the starve-yourself model, is, for me, another version of “success at any price.” It is the model that we men use in war, in business, and frankly, in most of our important affairs. It values sacrifice and suffering and loves heroes who can do it alone.

The second path, that I now call fulfillment-based or erotically-based living, is a path of nourishment. It is a path I see women taking. They grow to include the next child, the neighbors, and the schools that their children attend, while watching the pot on the stove, keeping an eye on the dog and listening for the phone. This path values inclusion, cooperation, and connectedness.

As a man, I find it a relief from what I’ve been taught about doing it alone, but also really challenging because it requires me to have my focus on many things at once and to really open to be contributed to – not something I was trained to feel comfortable with or be good at.

As I’ve said, when I use “business,” as in The Pleasure of Business, what I really mean is the entrepreneurial endeavor of your life. Yes, it includes career, but is certainly not limited to it. Fulfillment-based living has as its goal to create a unified strategy. We want a strategy that simultaneously creates nourishment in every area of our lives, not just the one we are working on at the moment.

We want a strategy with a style that leaves us more energized and turned on, and still has our eye on the results that are important to us.

If you want first-class results you also need a first-class style or way of getting them. You wouldn’t get dressed up and go out on Saturday night without making sure that everything matched – hair combed, clothes clean, car washed, gas in the tank, happy to be going, interesting things to talk about, money enough to have a good time. It’s a good idea to live as if every day of your life is Saturday night.

Walk it before you talk it. Insight in this system comes after you have experimented and discovered what you discovered. Conversely give up talking about what you don’t walk. All the insights in the world are useless if you have not obtained them from your own personal life experience.

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