Cultivation is the third step in foundational changes. After you have managed the shift in foundation that resulted in more freedom from your inner bondage, then you went for mental reprogramming which gives you power and helps you be the person who will have great success. This is where you learned the laws of attraction and action.
Now you are ready to begin step three: cultivation.
Cultivation is a concept that has many names and the name I have chosen has its origin in Oriental philosophy...very ancient Oriental philosophy.
The idea is that you are not bound by the life experience that is passed down to you from your family or shared with you and reasoned about with you by your fellow humans. Indeed, you can choose a life pattern and trajectory that is far different...for our purposes, of a far higher nature.
If you could graph the most common life experience of humans today, you would have a graph that looks like a mountain range, it climbs up to a point, then it gradually drops off, signifying dying for the last half of one's life.
On the other hand, the cultivator believes in and therefore creates a life graph that looks like a power curve from statistical science. I call it a crescendo life. This life starts low and slow but gets better and better and as it matures begins to improve faster and faster until it literally leaves behind the diseases, thinking, bondage, failure, weakness and closed-mindedness common to ordinary people.
One of the key concepts of cultivation is that of non-attachment. This is at the root of the Tao Te Ching. One lets go of attachments common to ordinary people and thereby separates from the common bondage and self-defeatism and rises naturally by virtue of the hidden true human nature, to places that are extraordinary and that hold prizes beyond the comprehension and science of ordinary people.
The end of cultivation, and even much of the journey is enlightenment. This is where understanding is reached that sees clearly at each level. This is understanding that steps out of what one is and goes into what really is. It is only in enlightenment that truth has any meaning. To all others, truth is but an attachment of assumptions about right and wrong. This serves them at that level, but to move beyond that level, they must sever that attachment.
Cultivators do not sever the choice to live by the standards they believe in, they still live by moral and ethical guidelines, in fact they do it more so and with gusto, since they grasp a new awareness of rejoicing in guidelines that make them distinct from most ordinary people as those guidelines help sever the attachments common to ordinary people.
Truth, though, is something that ordinary people have no grasp on, nor understanding of what it really is. Many concepts are like this and so literally people write (either in literature or in their own minds) myths and fables to attempt to explain that which cannot be explained until you attain a certain level of enlightenment through the process of cultivation.
How does one cultivate? The ways are myraid, but at least one must believe in the concept and move toward it. One must release attachments common to ordinary people, turn from the disturbed condition of humanity and stay in the light toward which they now move and maintain that focus perpetually. They must do good to the best of their ability for the sake of doing good. They must make choices and pursue them because they are the choices that they have made. They must be able to separate attachments to how they feel and what they feel like doing from their actual performance. They must experience the substance of virtue without stopping to revel, as such stopping takes them out of the flow with which true cultivators are one.
Such is the element of cultivation. It is much more, and in the Tao it is suggested that the true way cannot be discussed. This is because the moment we stop to discuss the way, we are out of it for it is that it is and cannot be for any other thing. In other words, it is dynamic and even to hold static thoughts to ponder it takes us out of it. This makes the way very difficult for ordinary people who revel, get depressed, get angry or happy, delighted and proud, attached and competitive. Ordinary people measure what they are by static attachments and never by faith in action.
This is the most powerful step you can make and it makes my approach unique.
On my website, in either the Freedom from Bondage courses or the Layman's Natural Healing and Freedom from Bondage courses, you will get much more continuing discussion about cultivation and understanding of applying it to your life. Please, if you have not already purchased that series, do so now.