In a culture in which we are programmed to complete ourselves through getting “stuff”, whether it is a new car, house, partner, educational diploma or status, to offer the secret of not getting what you want is a leap into the abyss of unpopularity.
Let’s go for it.
I can’t remember which psychopath once told me “be careful what you want”. It sounded true at the time, and now it feels like it came from a treasure house of hard-earned wisdom about what happens when you find you actually are running your own show.
That is where the successful movie The Secret ends – with the universal law of attraction that uses some science and a lot of tales to show how it is possible for us to create our own realities, in fact that we are constantly creating the universe which is who we are.
So let’s buy into The Secret. Anything you want, you can get it.
But what do you truly want?
Do we even have an idea. and would we trust that idea more than what is given in the miracle of our lives moment by moment?
Would we agree to let that idea define who we are, to let it be absolute?
If we were truly wise, would we really want to “get” what we want?
In wanting a thing, we create with a limited imagination. We see the house, we feel the fantasy, we position ourselves firmly in the status or safety we believe it would give us – a status or safety we apparently lack, or we wouldn’t be wanting it more than universal peace, love and unity in the first place.
And that is what we get; the shell – embodying all the lessons we are anyway here for – lessons we could hardly imagine – they arise so authentically out of the unspoken depths of who we are.
The Secret Journey of a Bottle Green Landrover Discovery
This is a shameful secret, which I offer as a humble example.
When I was in my early 20s, I was a newcomer in Israel and had just come together with my future husband.
Early on, he was already raging towards me for “eating his salary” – as it was very hard for me to get permission to work and still less to find a job in the early stages in what was then a foreign land.
In despair, I began buying lottery tickets, as if a win would make the situation good. He did not lack money, the problem was more that I lacked money. He even resented the price of the lottery ticket, so I would sneakily scrape together shekles from down the sofa to afford to fill out a few boxes.
The lonely, covert buying of the tickets would create periods of fantasy in which I would imagine what we would do with the money I could win (until the Tuesday came when I would find I had not won). Perhaps, overcome by his belief systems, I believed that the money would bring me respect within the relationship and within his family.
One day, in a flurry of glory on a hot street in Tel aviv, there passed a bottle green Landrover Discovery. The glove fit. I wanted that car. I could see me and my future husband together in that car – in the city, on the farm, with the life-style, with the kids.
I did something I have rarely done for “stuff”. In desperation, I blew into the air with my heart and soul a wish and prayer to the universe to bring me… a bottle green LANDROVER.
A few years later, some car accidents, twisted insurance claims and immigration documents behind us, my husband suddenly decided he wanted to buy a Landrover Discovery. I had pushed the wish to the back of my mind – having been long diverted by conversion, a wedding and a new baby. Then one day, I returned from a rare trip to England with our son and there he was – in a Landrover Discovery.
Magic.
But the secret was not fulfilled. This car was burgandy wine red. Still, it was close.
A week later we went to test drive the new baby on the beach. My husband got hysterical in the sand and – with the spinning wheels digging us deeper and deeper and with the tide coming up – heated the engine until it burst into flames. The doors failed to open, and 7 months pregnant, it was hard to get out with our one year old son. Finally released, I struggled away from the car with the baby and looked back. There was my husband, uselessly pouring sand over the engine of the burgandy wine red landover as a brilliant sun was setting over the sea behind him.
He blamed the company. A few weeks later, they delivered a replacement Landrover Discovery, almost apologetically, as now the colour was bottle green.
The surface secret was fulfilled.
But what was the real secret?
Over ten years of marriage, that dear British car embodied all that was broken, unbalanced and abusive in the relationship between us. Without going into every nasty, possessive twist, which included an invasion of flies as my alcoholic brother showed up on a newly revealed path of self-destruction, the Discovery ended up the exclusive property of my ex-husband.
It became decorated with so-called random camoflage blobs for battle (well he was in the war of the world with the mother of his six children); and these blobs partly peeled off in the Middle Eastern sun, creating an appearance of dinosaur vomit. The engine blew up several times being forced too hard up the Carmel Mountain, and in the end I believe the great Discovery was sold illegally on the black market to avoid confiscation and court freezes made due to unpaid child allowance.
There was nothing wrong with the Bottle Green Landrover, or with the wish to have it. There is nothing wrong with The Secret.
In the great play of our eternal beings with the world of form, the Landrover made its journey of Discovery, mirroring our lessons mile by mile. It was a journey we would have made anyway, and which we are still making from distant corners now and perhaps in different directions – about the absurdity of trying to possess what is anyway truly ours.
A loving word of advice: don’t use The Secret to get what you want.
Instead, use it to invite the universe to bring you what is needed in order to fulfill your highest purpose.
The Rolling Stones sniffed it. 🙂 You won’t get what you want, but you WILL get what you need, in whatever form, in such a way that the form itself becomes far less important.
Surrender in invitation to what is needed for the good of the whole.
We are so much more loved by existence than we could ever love ourselves.
