Developing skills in deliberate creation
Do you ever wonder why certain themes seem to re-occur in your life? Perhaps you seem to create the same types of relationships with the people you date or you somehow find you’ve replaced one unhealthy friendship with another unhealthy friendship? Or you swap one illness for another? Perhaps you finally overcome one financial hardship only to find yourself immersed in yet another?
The more I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, the more peaceful I become. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s the truth. In the last week I had a very upsetting episode with someone I’d known all my life. I won’t go into the details of it, but suffice it to say that if I’d had this situation occur before I’d read The Power of Now, I’d probably still be stewing about it. I would still be angry, I’d still be justifying my righteousness. But because of the new perspective I received from The Power of Now, it’s almost like I don’t even care who was right or wrong or even what happened. I’ve made a decision about it and I am really not very interested in wasting anymore time about it, or any more thought or feeling about it.
If you’ve been able to explore some of Eckhart Tolle’s work, you’ll be more familiar with the shift in awareness I speak of in this post. If you haven’t explored Tolle yet, I invite you to do that, and particularly to explore that shift between ego identification and broader identification with Awareness so that you can better grasp what this post is offering.
I’ve been having house dreams lately—you know those dreams where you find yourself in a house with dozens of undiscovered rooms? For me, such dreams always foretell of a spiritual leap into new understanding and discovery. Influenced by Eckhart Tolle’s fascinating work on consciousness, I’ve been thinking a lot about the space beyond thought.
My husband retired two years ago at 59 ½. When he decided to do that, he withdrew some money from his savings to help get us through what we both figured was going to be a tight squeeze until he could start drawing his social security.
Did you ever notice that when you seem to be making the most progress on your spiritual path, the external world seems to conspire to confound your progress with all sorts of obstacles. I could come up with a number of theories to explain this phenomenon, but I suspect what’s really going on is the ego is simply asserting its bogus authority over our lives.
Grandmother’s age old wisdom told us if you can’t say anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Now Grandmother knew how to get along in the world, and her words are helpful. But she left out something vital to those of us who understand Law of Attraction. She never told us that our thoughts could be as detrimental to our well being as our words if they are not in alignment with what we desire.
In a word: No. While movies like The Secret have characterized Law of Attraction as a kind of universal Amazon.com—place your order and wait for the US Postal Service to deliver it to your doorstep—the truth is Law of Attraction is merely a law of the universe much the same as Ohm’s Law, which governs the flow of electricity, or Newton’s laws of matter. The difference is, we know a great deal about the laws of matter and electricity, but Law of Attraction is best understood as a phenomenon of Quantum Mechanics, a subject we have much more to learn about.
There is a scene in The Wizard of Oz where I’d really like to slap Wendy, the “Good” Witch. It’s the last scene of Dorothy in Oz. Poor Dorothy has gone through all the trials and terrors of her journey through Oz only to find out the Wizard of Oz is a fraud and all her friends are up the creek without a paddle, or in this case, a brain, a heart, and courage and that she can’t get back home to Kansas. She’s distraught with this information, especially since she’s been through hell and back to find this so-called Wonderful Wizard. Little Dorothy is just about to throw her hands up in the air and say, “Well, to hell with it, guys. I guess I’m staying,” when up steps Ms. Wendy the Good Witch to tell Dorothy she’s had the power to go back home all along simply by clicking together her ruby-slipper-clad heels.
One of the most interesting things about Law of Attraction is how things we strive the hardest to create almost always manifest from unexpected sources and always at some time in the future—sometimes far in the future. It’s true these manifestations always seem to arrive from a natural unfolding of events, a “next, logical step.” But these events are almost never foreseeable at the time you were consciously working to manifest them.