When you are ready for it, this blog will facilitate the transformation of your approach to marketing from ego- to soul-centered, encouraging you to go beyond skillfully manipulating people's fears or cleverly seducing them with false hopes into buying stuff they don't need, just to turn a buck. To shift your marketing approach from fulfilling your ego needs to manifesting your soul concerns. http://instantblogsubscribers.com/?w=rainweb en-us Webligo BlogHoster In this video the teacher demonstrates how, within minutes, people can be trained to be helpless. If you apply this to society as a whole, what are the implications? Take, for example, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. These are the people frustrated with the individualistic "greed is great" crowd of dysfunctional investment bankers playing monopoly with people's life savings, just because they can do it. They have access to incredible amounts of money and social influence with which they can easily destroy the financial credibility of entire nations. But what happens when people start to occupy Wall Street? They get ignored, then ridiculed by the media and tear gassed, beaten and thrown into prison by the police. To you guys and gals preaching individual freedom, did you ever consider the effects of this entrainment of individual and collective helplessness and resignation? If society's institutions i.e. the "free" press, the politicians, and the police - to name a few - teach you that you cannot question the "greed is great" mentality ruling Wall Street, by ignoring, ridiculing, tear gassing, beating and throwing you into prison, will you not start to question your motivation? Will you not learn to resign in front of massive collective ignorance and power? If your parents live and breathe fear of collective ignorance, government and police authority how are you going to grow up? The video suggests that most if not all of us will grow up with learned helplessness and resignation when it comes to questioning government or any other authority. One step deeper, if your fledgling soul concerns get ignored, ridiculed, suppressed, and punished by parents, teachers, and society's institutions (government, police, FDA, press, school system, you name it..) how are you going to grow up? How are you going to be even able to listen to the voice of your soul yearnings and intuitions, let alone understand and manifest them? In other words, stop making it sound as if individuals could make everything happen they can think or dream of. This is a great myth thoroughly exploited by the ego marketing crowd. There are collective forces and influences, the biggest being ignorance - the not knowing that one does not know - that thwart most individual attempts to "live their dreams". To tell people that they can live their dream lives with just a few hours of online marketing, buying into this money cycler or that forced matrix, signing up for that automatic money machine, achieving effortless riches with the next hot product or service, is how ego marketing exploits our soul yearning for freedom and creative self-expression. It is not enough to throw around with quotes like: "Only in the dictionary comes success before work". If we don't dig much deeper than the individualistic positive thinking crowd, that is mostly stuck in denial of the power individual and collective ignorance and negativity, there is no chance in hell that we will be able to live our dream lives. If we keep preaching the gospel of "You create your own reality" we will create a society of psychotics, because only psychotics create their own reality. Sane people take into account all the forces of individual and collective ignorance - and yes, the rampant learned helplessness and resignation about manifesting our soul concerns. I guess what I am trying to say here is that if we don't dig a lot deeper into our own inner awareness, finding, embracing and dissolving more and more of our own learned helplessness and resignation, we will never live the life of our dreams. We will run behind the next offer of great riches and even if we manage to accumulate these great outside riches, we will end up with an impoverished soul life, accumulating money and power for its own sake. In other words, soul marketing is about stopping to lie about how easy it is to live one's dream life - just because these promises sell well. It is about genuine concern with people's evolution not the rampant pretense of "I have been blessed with a dream life, now I want to give back to you sorry slobs" only to sell the next ego marketing system, training, or product. Soul marketing is for grown ups, not for kids pretending to be grown up - even if they make millions, waste their money on luxury cars and vacations, flaunt their "wealth", not to show off, of course, but to prove to us that we too, can enjoy their success - if we buy their products and services. Soul marketing is about learning to make fine distinctions between soul concerns and ego concerns. Virtually all that gets marketed online or offline is meeting ego-needs and helps to fulfill ego concerns - like financial success and security. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing bad about meeting ego-needs with ego-products and services. It gets "bad" only when soul needs and soul concerns are exploited to sell ego products and services. When we bait and switch. In other words, when we promise inner fulfillment but only empower outside financial success. When we promise inner freedom but only deliver the outside freedom money can buy. When we promise a rich dream lifestyle but only offer an ego nightmare full of meaningless compensations for deeply entrenched deficiency convictions. We all long for freedom, fulfillment, and a meaningful and creative life. Legitimately so. But because of the society-wide learned helplessness and resignation we settle for the symbols of freedom, fulfillment and a meaningful life. As Werner Erhard used to say: we eat the menu, not the meal. And ego-marketing sells us the menu - not the meal. Sugar coated with promises it can't keep. And as online marketers we are all "guilty" of selling sugar coated menus as long as we don't know the difference between our soul and our ego concerns. Between what is close to our hearts and what we do simply to survive, what of our actions are motivated by loving kindness and what are motivated by the pretense of loving kindness - to sell more of our ego products and services. In short, as long as we don't know the difference between soul and ego concerns we will continue to eat the menu not the meal and we will offer and promise people the meal and deliver the menu. In this way we will create a market of jaded, disillusioned, suspicious, spoiled, entitled and overly demanding childish customers, to be tricked by yet more ego-centered marketing tricks into buying our ego-products and services ad nauseam. We will continue to abuse legitimate soul concerns to secure our ego survival. In short, we will continue to create our own hell on earth - pretending to ourselves and to everyone who will listen to us that the menu, sugar coated with positive thinking, tastes great. Bon appetit. Is this what you want?  http://instantblogsubscribers.com/entry.php?w=rainweb&e_id=143935 Take a look at this Versativa product promo video and tell me if you think this might be a taste of what soul marketing could look like. And NO I am not affiliated with Versativa. http://instantblogsubscribers.com/entry.php?w=rainweb&e_id=103656 The intention of my blog posts is to touch your soul and possibly move you to what I call tears of recognition. This is impossible in the frame of mind in which we live our daily lives. To help you relax into a more subtle frame of mind that will allow you to eventually open your heart and begin to feel the tears of recognition rising up into your throat and eyes I invite you to listen to the music in the video below. Enjoy. http://instantblogsubscribers.com/entry.php?w=rainweb&e_id=99867 Talking to a 18th century slave trader about human rights, or discussing women's liberation with a 19th century patriarch must have sounded to them like talking about soul marketing to a 21st century online marketer: wishful thinking at best and outright idiocy at worst. Even though modern slave trade is still rampant and there are still lots of inequalities between men and women, a considerable part of humanity has outgrown the world views that cemented these practices. And I think it's time to outgrow the world view that gives rise to today's ego-marketing approach, firmly grounded in the belief that people need to be manipulated and seduced by ever more sophisticated psychological tricks into buying stuff they don't really need. In this blog I will examine the underlying assumptions driving virtually all of the online marketing approaches from power selling, to soft selling, to attraction marketing. However, I am fully aware that soul marketing is more a vision than a reality, an impossibility to most, an interesting but illusory claim to most of the rest, and an evolutionary perspective to only a few daring online marketing pioneers. People who cannot sell crap just to turn a buck. People with enough soul awareness to be unable to use manipulative ad copy. People weary of seductive hype catering to people's most infantile needs and wants. Who won't bribe people into their mailing lists because it demeans themselves and their customers. Online marketers addressing people's evolutionary needs rather than their basic survival instincts.  If you are one of them I congratulate you on finding this blog and I invite you to an ongoing dialogue out of which we will co-create soul marketing as a path and practice of soul evolution for online marketers, transcending yet including the ego development. centered marketing approach so rampant in today's online world. http://instantblogsubscribers.com/entry.php?w=rainweb&e_id=4971