I always knew that Will Smith was a great actor…and a pretty good musician too. I’ve also always admired the positive down-to-earth spirit that he conveyed on and off camera–a rare quality among Hollywood megastars. But I never knew what made the Fresh Prince so fresh until this week when I came across this video compilation of TV interviews with Smith in which he waxes eloquent on his spiritual philosophy towards life. He’s a true self master. Check it out:
If you’d like to read an in-depth exploration of self-mastery, including interviews with fitness guru Jack LaLanne, heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, human potential movement pioneer Michael Murphy, and Mr. Self-Mastery himself, Tony Robbins, take a look at Issue #15 of EnlightenNext magazine (Spring/Summer 1999).
Friday, February 5, 2010 at 12:04pm
The Fresh Prince of Self-Mastery
by Joel Pitney • 12 Comments
Categories:Evolutionary Spirituality • Pop Culture • Spirituality Tags: fresh prince·inspiration·new thought·self mastery·video·Will Smith·Wisdom
Andrew Cohen, Editor in Chief
Carter Phipps, Executive Editor
Elizabeth Debold, Senior Editor
Ross Robertson, Senior Editor
Tom Huston, Senior Assoc. Editor
Joel Pitney, Associate Editor
Great to find out what lies behind what we see on the screens: a great spirit! That makes me appreciate his work even more. And also who he is – as someone who, as an example, inspiers people to focus and raise up.
Maybe we should have a Will Smith Day.
Contemporary head centered people hanker for success, for achievements. Harder it is to get succesful more striving they are, more motivated.
Because the ego wants challenges.
It lives through challenge.
Why have so few people been able to have a glimpse of the truth? ? because it is not a challenge; it is not there, it is here within you. It does not need any way, you are already it.
Hankering for success and willing to be always successful is like willing to permanently stand on the sunny peak and never to look down to see also the beauty of the valleys around. It is tiresome to always stand on the peack, trying to balance against the blowing winds, burnt by the strong hot sun. Valleys also have their beauty, their calm and serenity, their cool breeze and refreshing shadows.
What would have happened to the ocean if the ocean wave wanted to remain only a wave for ever and refused to merge with the deep water, to taste the beauty and the mystery of the ocean depths?
People struggling for success at any price, devoting all their energy to success miss to understand one very basic existential law – the law of the energy. All is energy. Success and failure are the same energy with two different ends. Bringing success into your life, you immediately drag behind the failure, because it is all the same energy. At the moment success smiles to you, failure is also showing its face behind the success’s back. And what will happen to you, if you have invested all yourslef into success pursuit and then success has gone, is no more? You will be left behind totally devastated and ruined, because you invested all your energy into the desire for success. And desires are like balloons, artificial, non existential – the moment they explode you explode with them, too.
That is why the true Masters like Buddha, Bodhidharma, Osho and all the other enlightened beings insist on transcending all your desires and ambitions – for success, respectability, recognition. By simply understanding that success and failure, love and hate are the two ends of one and the same energy, you desidentify yourself from all your projetions and desires and you come back to your real nature, your inner being, where blissfulness and contentment are already yours forever.
Contemporary people, of course, do not feel attracted to such true masters, because they promise you nothing – neither success, nor prestige, money and power in society. They only invite you to go on a spiritual journey inwards, where your real Master, your inner being is. Spiritual Masters do not teach you how to become richer, more successful, more achieving, they only promise you a better You, a more beautiful, joyous, blissful You.
Aliya,
You carve up reality into your artificial black and white compartments because it suits your superior “I AM NOT THAT” position. The falsity of it all is so clear to me that I am not going to let you off the hook. You know why? Because it’s all coming from ego and its important that the truth of that be revealed. You’d be surprised, the ego hides in the most “spiritual” of places. It can be found anywhere, and, babe, I’m on the hunt for it. Consider me a concerned citizen that wants our “everyman humanity” to be able to come to the fore. However, you’ve got such blinders on that you would probably never be capable of seeing that. And you talk of awareness….
Most of the times, what we hunt is our own projection. The hunter hunts himSelf.
There is, however, another kind of hunting, the true hunting. It is when the hunter hunts the musk of the deer, the released fragrance of the Unknown yet so longued for. This longuing for the Beloved is so strong, that even if there is no path made, the hunter will make one – the path of the devoted lover.
Yeah!!! What Passion!!! No mealy-mouthed celebrity, he. Thanks for sharing. It’s a real pointer, as well, to the type of people we need as leaders–people whose soul is filled with content. Isn’t that what passion is, meaningful content?
I like the simplicity of “I Can, You Can”. It’s quite basic, as though all we are are points of either, I Can, or I Can’t, energy. When we love ourselves, others and the world we are saying I Can, when we fear the same, we are saying I Can’t. Think about it.
For me it sounds amazing to claim loudly “I can” for someone who even CANNOT notice the alive being all around – the birds, the trees, the ordinary human beings not always so succesful but always so authentic and alive!
Or we have to claim back to God and tell him: Please take back all your birds, trees, sun and moon, ordinary human beings, they are not showing us any examples for achieving. They are so prosaic, what use is there from them? Instead give us more Will Smiths, only Will Smiths. Anything less then that will not do.
Aliya,
I love nature more than anything else in life. That includes trees, birds, plants, animals of all kinds, bees, lizards, mice and everything! I’ve always felt this way. When I was in the third grade, a pinata was hung from one of the trees in the playground at school. This was a papier-mâché covered clay figure of a donkey with candy inside. All of the kids were to take turns with a stick trying to crack the donkey open. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it, seeing that the stick represented beating. As I grew up I noticed that most kids were mostly concerned with being popular and well liked–they wanted the social goods of society, much as they wanted the candy earlier. To make a long story short, I’ve studied the phenomena of human insecurity all my life. Insecurity makes people thrive on being accepted by a group. The downside of that is that the whole world out there is in need of TLC but most people can only see themselves and their own needs.
That’s the gist of it. God, or Existence, doesn’t just swoop down and wave his wand and the aching, starving donkey gets a blanket and taken to an owner that won’t beat it. People must begin to see past their personal little dramas into the reality of a sensate world and act in the manner of, “what would Jesus do”; for example.
But, regarding human insecurity, I think that what’s really amazing is that there are so many people out there that are inwardly saying to themselves, “I can’t”–I can’t stand up for something I believe in; I can’t be anything other than a siphon on society; I can’t make a difference; I can’t be a hero to someone, only a victim; I can’t even learn how to respect my own self, etc. This is the sickness of our time. It’s a time of learned helplessness.
Aliya, I know that you think the ego is the problem, but here’s the deal. We all have a sense of self which includes our memories, the stories we keep telling ourselves, our feelings about things and our ideas. All this is not completely unreal. It’s a working hypothesis that is challenged by life daily. What is necessary here is our ability to relate to life, to work with it and to become a part of it. None of this is possible without some sense of self–an Alzheimer’s patient on the other hand is incapable of making any such connections.
Where the ego goes wrong is only in the wish to be more significant than what it actually is–this includes the wish to be more significant than others and the wish that one’s life be somehow permanent. We are not that. We are not more significant, one to the other. Even when people vote someone in to represent them, that person’s value lies only in their being the same self as those they lead. And concerning the significance of our lives, irrespective of others, there is no life after death in any configuration, reincarnation or otherwise. We are utterly transient. And this is a blessing because it is only through that fact that we can find our connection to our source.
But, back to my description of 1) people who have an overriding need to belong to a group, who haven’t much sense of self empowerment, who don’t develop courage in themselves and who feel insecure, and 2) people whose primary wish is to feel secure by any means (ego permanence)–can you not see that these are all one and the same?
Yes, Caroline,
Little people with “little dramas”. They do not really deserve to be themselves; they are not worthy enough to be true to themselves, to be authentic alive human beings. Instead, let us make them part of a “”sensate world”" (whatever the meaning may be) full of Jesuses or if not Jesus in original, at least Jesus’ replicas (doing the way “”Jesus would do”").
But existence does not believe in poverty, Caroline. Otherwise, what would have been the purpose for existence to create so much diversity all around? Only white marigolds in the fields would have been plenty enough. Why bother to create roses, for instance? White marigolds everywhere would do perfectly well. Truth is, Caroline, Existence believes in abundance, infinite abundance and diversity. That is why existence has created each one of us so unique and irreplaceable. Imagine the whole world full only with Jesuses or Will Smiths. Boring, is not it?
But no, little people are not of significance, you say.
Therefore, howsoever little little people are, let us leave with them some “”self”" called ego for preserving their dignity. The condition we put however (because we cannot give little people anything without conditions imposing) is their ego to never try “”to be more significant than what it actually is”". And what ego actually is, Caroline? Ego has no “”isness”", no existential reality. How can an illusion, a false mind projection have an “”isness”"? Ego is not, the same way a dream is not. All we need is to awake out of our self created dream or better call it nightmare. Once awakened, all our cowardice and insecurity simply fade away, because they too, were part of the nightmare.
Get real, Aliya, that above inane statement of yours only points to your immaturity and insecurity. Besides, everything in Nature achieves, including birds, trees, sun and moon and ordinary human beings–you’d be surprised to learn to what extent. What if you were to realize that all life forms that you see around you today evolved over millions of eons from a single cell? The achievements of development that have ensued since the early beginnings of life are such that were we sufficiently aware of them, our hearts would be swelling with appreciation for the legions of life forms that have gone before us. We are only here because of them. But we (humans) are only a tiny slice of the forward flow of the whole thrust of existence. And it is a thrust; it is not a “consciousness without an object” reality for us–we leave that part to God (the One). Our part (the many) is to align our dual reality with it.
Another WOW! Check out the interview that Joel has attached to this week’s blog where Anthony Robbins is interviewed by Craig Hamilton. Along with many other fine points, I liked Anthony’s statement that “”what most spiritual traditions call “ego,” I would call “fear.” So what most refer to as “destroying the ego,” I would say is breaking through the fear.”"
Very cool, very helpful! (The video I mean, not the ridiculously long posts which I didn’t read.) :)