I put the Pure Potential stone on my kitchen windowsill today and realized I had forgotten to notice its relationship to Higher Purpose yesterday while standing at the Wheel. It’s no accident that Pure Potential sits beside the Law of Higher Purpose.

We don't often use those adjectives, Higher and Pure, when mentioning Purpose and Potential, yet that is where excellence comes from. High and pure come from the North side of the Wheel. They are the spiritual aspects and qualities of these principles.   

Potential without Purpose, or Purpose without Potential, are like stillborn twins. Each lacks the content to animate its form. The energy of the content is as critical as where it originates.

On the Wheel, as in life, the Higher and purer our Purpose and Potential are, the better off all of us will be. We have the Potential to do the right things well, for the right reasons. We just need better methods to get there. The Wheel is my way to encourage excellence.   

Power and control are part of the picture too. Power is Law, #32 and next month I will examine its many aspects, but today the Potential for Power is what interests me.

I find it odd that so few people know about their Purpose, Power or Potential. Either they believe they are Power-less (a convenient excuse for Self-defeating behaviors), or they are naïve, with unrealistic attitudes. New Age mantras, like instant manifestation, are popular because of their convenience not because they are true. Every easy sell ignores unpleasant facts.

Excellence is hard work even when it feels like fun because it is what you love doing. Believing in the Potential is the first of many more steps. To attain excellence, and sustain it, you need more than mantras. Fast food, easy credit, happy pills and other forms of instant (ego) gratification have conditioned us to trade off excellence, in favor of convenience, in many areas of life.

This afternoon I read about John W. Gardner, the author of today’s quote. His life is a testament to the Potential and the Power of principles and high standards. Declaring his enemies were disease, ignorance and poverty, that stunt the individual and prevent fulfillment, Gardner worked as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the 1960’s.

He managed to get two initiatives launched which continue to help millions of people today; Medicare, which guarantees health care to senior citizens, and the implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which redirected millions of Federal education dollars towards poorer students.  

When his conscience could no longer tolerate the war in Vietnam , he protested by refusing to serve in the government. How many would follow his lead today?

Gardner wrote, The impulses to lie, cheat, steal and defraud will never die. The swindlers and charlatans and well-dressed crooks who prey on the citizen by manipulating the political process will always be with us. A cynical community is a corrupt community. Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that people can live above the level of moral squalor.

In 1970, he founded Common Cause, the first non-profit public interest group in the United States . Its mission continues to this day, Holding Power Accountable (see www.commoncause.org). Gardner also helped to create PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with its public good, non-profit examples of Higher Purpose and excellence in action. We could sure use more people with his kind of Potential today.