This recorded conversation (Dr. Ken Blanchard with Robert J. Strock) discusses how spiritual awareness often emerges during personal crisis rather than during periods of success. The speakers argue that cultural conditioning treats success as a substitute for God and describe this as a kind of hypnosis that only gets questioned when people face a crisis.
You know, Robert, one of the things that I've been interested in is that people, their spiritual life becomes more important than very often when they're really down in life and they're looking for answers and realizing they can't figure out themselves. And there's not as many people who searched for it when they were really successful. I mean, people were amazed because, you know, I started looking at my own spirituality when the one minute manager came out, was so ridiculously successful, I was having trouble taking credit for it. And so people started asking me, you know, why did I think it was so successful? And I started to say, I think God somehow was involved, you know, and my mother was praying for me and all. And people say, God, how rare that is. Most people, when they seem to search, when they're kind of stuck with their own human capabilities to figure, what's your experience on that? When people really kind of get excited about spirituality, where are they in their life? The success end, the test end, or where?
I mean, I think it's 95.5. I think it's 95 exactly the way you're saying that. It's usually much more born out of a crisis. I think that what happens is when people are successful, it usually matches their conditioning perfectly. So what happens is their conditioning said, you want to be sexual, you want to be successful, you want to be powerful, you want to be have a good reputation in the community. Those were the most important things that you could have. And so it's like a drug. You were taught, okay, here's the drug of choice to be having all of these things. And if you have that, it's perfect for helping you fall asleep. And so it's very difficult.
Hypnotizes you.
Yeah, it fulfills the original hypnotism in a way, because we're raised in a way that's hypnotic in the west, where success is the substitute for God. And so the importance of being able to recognize that hypnosis is something that just usually doesn't happen until you have a crisis.
