Touching the sacred

While riding the bus today (Mar 4 '07) I happened on the CBC Radio One program "Tapestry", a "weekly exploration of spirituality, religion and the search for meaning". "Tapestry" happens to be one of the CBC radio shows I really like, because their guests often get me thinking.

This week's guest was Bo Lozoff of the Prison Ashram Project and the Human Kindness Institute. Bo Lozoff dedicates his life to promoting the practice of human kindness, especially in prison populations around the world.

At one point he mentions the "Sanatana Dharma", or the central teachings of Hinduism. Mr. Lozoff has a beautifully succinct way of describing it, which I found later on the net in a sermon he gave:

(...) There's something in the East called Sanatana Dharma, which roughly means "Eternal, Universal Truth," and it consists of only three principles:

1. There is indeed something transcendent, beyond comprehension, something divine. It's real. It exists.

2. Each of us -- you and I, not just the Dalai Lama, St. Francis, Mother Teresa -- but you and I, can and must directly experience this divinity.

3. That is the only purpose of life. Everything else, who we are, what we look like, how old, how wealthy, how poor, how much or how little we suffer or find happiness, what we do for a living, what we do in the world, how many children we have, EVERYTHING else is a support system toward our direct experience of the eternal Great Mystery. [emphasis mine] (...)

Bo Lozoff then goes on to say on the radio program "if we do not strive to touch the sacred, then we are wasting our lives" (this is the part where I grabbed my pen and paper and scribbled it down)

Where am I going with this?

It was the "touch the sacred" part that really connected with me. This is a powerful reminder to me about the importance of discovering my life mission, vision and permission, to use it to ignite my passion and to live it through everything that I do.

Being a solopreneur, being an entrepreneur, the whole point of this way of life called "business" is about creating a means to channel our passion and make a difference in the world. In business we have the freedom to choose our direction and the initiative to move into action. This is why I believe entrepreneuring is such a high calling...

Business is more than just making money to survive... if that's all that I'm doing (surviving), then I am not really living, I am just existing. What Bo Lozoff is reminding me is that it is my duty to live a bigger picture, to strive towards a higher vision.

Bottom line? If what I am doing right now does not fire up my passion and make this world a better place, it's time to change what I'm doing!

This is why I put so much emphasis on exploring mission (who I am), vision (what I want) and permission (why I want it), to ignite passion and channel it to power oneself "from passion to profit", where profit is about the intangible experience as much (or more) than the tangible financial impact.

If "success" is creating an experience of living that fully expresses "Who I Really Am", and if this transcendant, higher, sacred energy as described in the Sanatana Dharma infuses this "Who I Really Am", then as a solopreneur, channelling my passion through my livelihood to make the world around me a better place, I can think of no higher calling, no better way to "touch the sacred".