Getting what we wish for

Have you ever wanted some-thing so badly and ended up not getting it? I have, many times. A lot of my wishes have been denied in spite of my invocations, litanies and prayers asking God to grant them. I have tried the intercession of saints and dead relatives. Many times, as I beg God to give me something, I hang on to phrases attributed to Jesus like, “Whatever you ask the Father in My name, it shall be granted.”

I tend to read those words as a kind of ironclad guarantee that my wishes will not be denied. After all, if I can’t believe what He says, who can I trust? I am happy when things turn out my way but each time I am rebuffed, I wonder if I am not worthy. Or is it (again) not meant to be because it is not part of “God’s plan,” cryptic as that might be?

The many times I have been disappointed, my reactions have ranged from anger and questioning the existence of God (when I was much younger) to a deeper understanding of the divine beyond being a kind of powerful tooth fairy or the ultimate Santa Claus who grants us what we want. I cannot say that I have come any closer to a surer, more predictable understanding of an Almighty who I can please enough with incantations to give me what I ask for. But I now realize that asking for something can be both complicated and simple.

Consider this: to have a creative idea or a wish is easy and it does not cost anything. Carolyn Myss, the intuitive healer who believes in chakras or energy points in our bodies, says that these ideas and desires are conceived and enter through the chakras in our head region. It then goes down to the other chakras. The lower it goes, the more it demands that these wishes and desires be made flesh or “birthed” into reality by us. One of the lower chakras is the abdominal area where ideas and desires are felt by the body most physically. Notice that when you have money problems, you feel it in your gut. When the ideas that used to float above our heads are brought down and processed on this lowest level, things often begin to go crazy.

While ideas are free, things can go awry when we bring them down to the lowest chakra where they are supposed  to be implemented. Why? Because this is where we encounter the nitty-gritty or the nuts and bolts that hold together our belief systems and define what to us is really possible or not possible. In other words, this is where we walk the talk. It is where we either implement what we profess to go for or bump into the wall of doubt that stands in the way of what we desire. This is where we decide whether or not we believe in something. That is why, often, it is within this realm, as pointed out by Myss, where we experience the countless “creative abortions” in our lives.

Carolyn Myss says that these “abortions” create as much impact on our cells as real physical ones.

Consider the belief or “thought form” introduced to the world in the 1960s that says “we create our own reality.” Myss says that if people subscribed wholeheartedly to that belief and internalized it all the way down to the lowest chakras, then the world would have experienced spontaneous healings “in the gazillions” by now. 

And yet we know that it is not so because deep down we do not really believe that it can happen in this physical, literal plane. We are instead plugged in to the “reality” that cancer, for example, takes five years to heal with chemo, radiation and other cures. In other words, Myss is saying that our cells behave and heal according to the timeframe suggested by the “reality” we have subscribed to and that rules our first chakras. Healing will happen, but not any sooner, and not any later.

But what about so-called miracles? The word “miracle” is paradoxical. If we do not believe in miracles, they will not happen (and even when they do, we cannot see or accept it). But if we believe it can and that it does happen all the time, in a sense it stops being a miracle but one of many possible events in the reality we are plugged into.

There are times when I desire something and I am able to achieve or acquire it almost effortlessly. That is due to the fact that all my chakras are plugged into the “reality” that says it can happen. From the “idea” stage all the way down to the physical or feeling level, I know it to be true and possible. There is no doubt that stands in the way. There is a unity from my head all the way down. I do not sabotage myself. During such times, it is clear to me that I create my own reality.

I think of Thomas in the Bible saying (I paraphrase), “Lord, I do believe. Help my unbelief.” There is a remark that recognizes the problem of doubt, or the lack of wholehearted acceptance needed for something to become physically real.

This concept of having a unified belief system that rules our chakras on all levels is similar to what the writer Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yes, it’s a real name) talks about when he discusses “flow.” He says that people are in “flow” mode when they do things fully conscious,  which almost always means they do what they do with joy, excellence and effortlessness.

Within this framework, I often wonder what Jesus could have meant when He said, “Ask and ye shall receive,”  in the Sermon on the Mount.

Could it be that simple? I sometimes think it is.

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