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Sunday, February 3, 2013

Manifest

Do you sometimes wonder if you can really make your dreams come true with nothing more than just wishing it?  Sometimes we might want to believe that the world is this place where you have to get out there and MAKE things happen, and certainly we are here with hands to shape and feet that move us in the day to day.  It seems like magic that we might be able to do something as simple as just wishing to bring about our greatest dreams.  Maybe you have heard the tone in someone's voice who showed some sense of skepticism about magic, that maybe its all a bunch of silly thinking.

And if you followed this way of thinking, it just might be that way for you.  Belief is itself an interesting thing.  We blind ourselves to the possibilities through belief just as much as we open ourselves up to what could be.  It really just depends on what it is we believe is possible.  It is interesting, though, what happens when we begin to remove the bias we might have about the possibility of something taking place in our lives.  What it does is it leave little room in the magic that is your own energy, for it to happen.  Tip the balance far enough and the world will conspire to make it happen.

I will give you an example of something that I discovered recently while looking back at some old notebooks of mine that I keep in my business practice.

In 2004 while working in a rented studio that was all of 750 square feet, I sat down and drew out what I would do if I could be given the ideal studio space.  The small space I had worked, but it was not optimal.  In that small of a space there was just enough room to breathe and get it all done.  Back then, I had no idea what the future might be, but I dreamed big and considered what would be the best for me.

In this notebook along with firing schedules and construction notes for equipment and furnace rebuilds, I had this drawing of my ideal studio.  I thought it all out and gave myself the space that I felt like I needed.  There was enough space for all equipment and a gallery to boot.

Then, in 2006, I was presented with an opportunity to buy new property.  They way this happened, I only had 45 days to find some property that would serve my uses.  Otherwise, I would have to consider the sale of land that was taking place and pay taxes on that sale.  This opportunity allowed me to defer those taxes for the time being but the catch was I had to act fast and in a limited time frame.  When I began to look at the market, I had no idea what I would find.  At first, I was looking at houses, apartment buildings, something that would allow me to sell one piece of land and buy another that would be more suitable. The catch was I had to buy what was available on the market THEN.  As I looked at countless houses and other buildings, I noticed that there were two properties that looked like they might be suitable for my business.  One would up not being suitable and the other was the only one in the region that was up for sale.  I considered this like you might consider a larger puzzle being put together and it was decided that I would go ahead and buy this building.

The building wound up being only 150 square feet different from that drawing I had made.  The universe had managed to bring me a building that was about as close to that old forgotten sketch from 2004. I marveled at how close everything just happened to coincide with one idle wish made a couple years earlier.  Now maybe you could say that this sketch was somewhere in the back of my mind informing me of my choices, and certainly that is a consideration to bear in mind.  That there was nothing but this one building on the market within the area that had been chosen as the new home for me and my family, the subliminal or subconscious becomes less a factor as how the events two years later would seem to form themselves around the choices that I would wind up making.

When you do wish for something and it comes to pass, take a moment to think about how you made that wish.  THink about how you felt when you made that wish, and examine your beliefs about how you felt about what it might be like to have that wish come true.  Do some wishes sneak past some of our competing beliefs of "Oh I wish I could land that job, but I am sure there will be better candidates than I!" or "I sure would love to win the lottery, but I don't ever win anything."????  Is it possible that your wish is stronger than your belief that you won't win the lottery or land that job?  Is it strong enough to overcome any competing belief that is to the contrary?  My heart tells me that when the balance of the scales is tipped in the right direction, it is only a matter of time.  The less resistance, the faster the energy can form as events.  Sometimes, the results are difficult at first to believe. But in believing, you open the door.

I once had a friend who was a gifted psychologist who wanted to work with the local football team to help them go from losing games to winning games.  he explained what he would do would be to begin by teaching the team how to visualize their goals as if they had already happened. he explained that when people open themselves up to the possibility of something happen, it makes it that much easier for the goal to be realized.  If you just can't see it, then most likely you won't even if you give it your best.  Somewhere, slipped between the pages of our awareness is a world of energy.  Physicists all say that everything is energy operating at different vibrations.  if your own thought and feelings are vibratory, then it seems we are just that much closer to a realization that our own thoughts may well have a very real impact on the physical.  it seems to the skeptical mind that it is impossible that something could come along in such an effortless and perfect way, but perhaps that is itself a bias or belief that this aspect of our lives here just isn't possible.  And perhaps in believing it is so, it never is for that person, so long as the energy of that belief is sending out such differing pulses of creative energy (a yes and a no are both equally creative, just in different directions!).  Perhaps that belief is so strong that even when they hear of someone getting a building that was so close to a drawing or wish made a few years prior, they still resist the possibility of it beginning to gnaw away at the edifice of their belief.  Perhaps they discount it, or in some way turn a blind eye to it and say, "that was just very lucky" or, "what an interesting coincidence!"  But nothing more than that.

I was talking this weekend with my daughter about how we often turn a blind eye to things in our lives, that we do not see the world as it is, but as we are.  It was a tricky thing, I explained, because we are always doing this.  We ALL do this, and it makes it hard to know what IS.  In Buddhism, for example, this is one of the central tenets for reaching an enlightened state.  We move from what we are to what is, and by removing the things that sabotage us, we also remove what causes suffering and returns us to a place where we are better able to just feel the flow of the universe.  And yet, so often, we are always interpreting what someone has said to us with our own level of understanding and awareness.  I can say something to five people, and we can wind up with five very different interpretations of what is said.  IN the same way there is this exercise where people sit in a circle and you start off with one person whispering in the ear of the person next tot hem something like "His pants are blue" and once each person has repeated what they have heard to each person in turn, the last person then says out loud what s/he was told, and often they come up with something like "They sky is blue!"

Reaching a place of clarity is not so simple. I don't see evidence that we reach it all in one big leap but in layers, in degrees.  All along, I do think we have the capacity to reach it in one go, but I don't see that this happens all that much with people.  The loss of all that they knew as familiar seems too much for our tender egos which seems to need something to hold onto, a kind of piece of the wreckage that winds up at the bottom of the sea in the process of becoming clear in ourselves (which is both our new boat fashioned for these new waters as much as it is the waters themselves!)  It seems we reach it in stages, in pieces as like a puzzle, it slowly gets put into place the way it really is instead of our seeking to shoe-horn things into place that we think are right but may just be slightly out of whack.  Have you ever had a puzzle piece that LOOKED like it was a perfect fit and almost did and all you wanted to do was to just push that piece into place just a little harder and tell yourself maybe the fault was in the puzzle maker? Sometimes, its just our wish and belief that makes it seem as though something is a fit when it is not.  In this way we can come up with all kinds of theories or ideas about how we think the world is or how our lives are.

By removing competing belief and clearing the way in our feelings, we make the path clearer for the energy that is the universe to move all around us and support us in whatever it is that we need.  And maybe we don't have a perfectly clear path, but just enough for the way to be for the thing most needed or desired to emerge into our lives.  Sometimes, it means not even lifting a finger.  That is just how powerful all of this is.  There is a genie inside of you, I say, and we do so much to keep it bottled up.  We are so concerned about how we get int he way of ourselves that we forget that the world isn't conspiring against us, but that we conspire in sheer disbelief that anything could be just that incredible. Like blind spiders, we weave the web without realizing we are doing it all along and then looking back upon what we sense is an imperfect web, we shake our fists at it and complain how it never seems to conform to what it is we think it should be.  Perhaps it can really be anything....

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