In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill calls this “burning desire” and he’s right when he says it’s absolutely essential.

When you are out to create something, the thing you desire must feel thoroughly good to you, on every level. It has to feel good all through your body. If any part of your body disagrees with you having this thing, it will be harder to create.

If you have ambivalence, your desire will be thwarted. You need to desire it enough right from the start to be certain you will overcome all obstacles, before you even know what they are. Your desire must be strong enough to burn away anything that tries to stop you.

How’s Your Havingness?

“Havingness” is your ability to have. It includes your ability to receive and hold in your life things that you want. Havingness takes on the appearance of external circumstances, but often those are just a symptom of what’s going on inside a person. Someone who drinks away all their money has a low havingness for money and has not learned how to keep money around them. A person who spends profligately when they get a little surplus will not be able to hold onto the money they get. They also don’t currently have the resources to know how to turn some money into more money and ultimately into lots of money. Instead it bleeds through their fingers because they don’t understand leverage.

People have high havingness in some areas and low havingness in others. A person may have a low havingness for money, but a high havingness for books. Where do you have low and high havingness?

Can You Let Yourself Have It?

If you’re having the experience that what you are focused on manifesting is not coming to you, it may be because you are fending it off. Possibly you can’t let yourself have it. (This is why a manifestation practice is so valuable for personal growth—if it was just easy all the time, there would be no growth and one would never exceed oneself.) You may have habits of thought and action that drive away the very things that you are attempting to create. Do you make it unappealing for the thing to come to you? Do you prefer the satisfaction of being right about not getting the thing to the satisfaction of actually getting it? Take a look at the ways this might be true—what you uncover might empower you.

If you think you can’t have a thing, you will be quickly stopped when obstacles come up along the way, which of course they will. You will grasp at obstacles as reasons why you can’t have the thing, and the obstacles will cement your reluctance. More and more obstacles will appear and finally you will give up in disgust, thinking “maybe the thing wasn’t for me after all.” If you are willing to give up instead of being galvanized by obstacles, then yes, perhaps the thing wasn’t for you. Your desire has to outlive all obstacles.

Self-Sabotage

Everyone has self-sabotage in some area—it is an entirely human preoccupation. Don’t get caught up in blaming yourself once you find the area in which you sabotage yourself. To blame yourself is to continue with, and pour energy into, the sabotage. It’s impractical and unnecessary. Just let any self-blame go, realize that you are human like the rest of us, and move on to eliminating the habit.

Ask yourself some questions about the thing you desire to create.
Can you allow yourself to have this thing?
Do you think you don’t deserve it?
Do you think perhaps no one should have it?
Do you think it’s impossible to have it?
Do you think it’s not possible for someone like you to have it?

Perhaps you need to start smaller so your body and being can tolerate having the thing. Really, the universe is happy to throw anything at you that you can imagine. It’s not limited by what you’ll allow yourself to have. So go ahead and daydream—the universe will give you things too big for your arms to hold. Take what you can and let the rest go. You can create it again tomorrow. Let yourself get used to holding onto what you have created. Let your body get used to it.

Your Senses Will Tell You

Your body will let you know if it’s uncomfortable with what you are created. Your senses will let you know.

Have you ever had something so good happen that it caused an adrenaline panic in your gut? It’s very hard not to act on such a sensation by pulling back and retreating from success. Fear elicits animal responses in us: panic, run, freeze. This may be your gut’s way of telling you that something better than you are familiar with is on the way.

Have you ever listened to the litany of reasons why “this can’t happen” that goes on in your head in such a moment? If you listen closely, some of them will amaze you. Some will be very familiar, recorded and played back by your brain in your parents’ voices. Other will utterly surprise you, so that you may wonder where that notion came from. Argue back, or just shut off the sound and tune back in to your desire. Don’t let the inner voices stop you.

Have you ever watched the disaster-movie of negative pictures your mind sometimes creates when you are on the verge of having something you have been creating for a long while? Don’t give these negative images any room. Go back to your desire. It is your touchstone—return to it when you get lost in the obstacles.

Expand Your Havingness Gradually

Try successive approximations to your goal. Create a small, immediate version of the big thing you are really wanting. Every time a small thing comes to you it confirms your belief that such things are possible and it stokes your ability to desire more. Run through the cycle of imagine-manifest-receive over and over again to build up your faith in the process itself. This will make the feeling of desire more comfortable for you.

To have what you want, start by wanting what you have. “Love the one you’re with.” If there is someone/something in your life that you don’t want there, plan to graduate from it, rather than kicking it out forcibly (as people usually do). The more force you use to push something you don’t want away, the more gravity that thing will have for you in the future and the more likely you are to create it again in a new form, as a seemingly new obstacle on the way to getting what you do want.

Hope Helps and Disappointment Denies

Voice of Desire: I want this!
Voice of Disappointment: Getting “this” is impossible. Just give up. It’s not worth hoping for. You’ll only be disappointed. Why not put your attention on something you can actually have instead?
You (caught between the two): Gee, that sounds so reasonable. . .

Fear of disappointment is one of the most insidious energy-stealers there is. And unfortunately, humans pass it to each other like a virus. Do not let fear of disappointment stop you. Do not let the fear of disappointment in others around you stop you either. Keep your plans to yourself if you have to.

Accustom yourself to disappointment. Hope for the impossible on a daily basis and experience small disappointments. Small disappointments are a sign you are playing big in your life. You’ll never get anywhere playing small and never feeling disappointed. Get used to feeling let down and then moving on. There’s no reason to let a feeling like this stop you.

No human being has died of disappointment (at least, not without other factors involved too!). The fear of disappointment will keep you mediocre. When others attempt to remind you that you may experience disappointment on the way to your goal, take a hard look at their lives and ask yourself, “is this person extraordinary enough, powerful enough to offer me advice about creating?” If they are, then listen. If not, smile to the person and ignore the advice.

The most powerful way to learn to create the “impossible” is to learn to ignore what other people say is impossible. “Impossible” is just other people’s word for obstacles they can’t see how to get around. You can be the one to see how, and hope and desire can propel you to that epiphany.

Hope is what leads to desire—cultivate it. Miracles happen everyday. People cure their own certain-death cancer, lives are saved that doctors believed lost, babies born to people diagnosed infertile, lifespans increased, money made that wasn’t there to make, jobs attained that “didn’t exist.” If not for our capacity for the extraordinary, we wouldn’t have longing for excellence in our human souls. But we do. Not only is the “impossible” possible, with burning desire it becomes downright probable. Certainly such miracles do not happen by accident.

Why Affirmations Alone Are Not Enough

Affirmations are not enough by themselves. Affirmations are statements of what you want. You write them out and then read them over to yourself before sleep or when you awake every day. Affirmations can be embedded into a self-hypnosis cd. Affirmations are intended to be delivered in a time when the mind is pliable and receptive, so that core beliefs may be changed. This is good, but there’s no emotion, no passion in the technique of affirmations. Affirmations are all content with no form; they are like packing your car with everything you want on your trip, and then not bothering to put gas in the tank of your car. Without the gas (passion, desire), your affirmations can be the best stuff in the world but they will go nowhere. If you’ve been using affirmations and wondering why they don’t seem to have a lot of power, you’d best go fill up your engine. Fuel your desires and then you and your affirmations can get somewhere.

What is a “burning desire?” It is a desire so strong that it burns in your heart and soul. It tolerates no argument, brooks no obstacle, and carries such force that it refuses to be stopped. A burning desire will always find a way.

Desiring is powerful because it naturally leads you to fantasize about the thing or condition in question and inject positive feelings into it. When you are longing for something deeply, don’t you daydream about it all the time? Don’t you rehearse all its possible scenarios? Don’t you hypnotize yourself into a bliss-state every time you think about it? There is tremendous power in desire’s ability to shut out every evidence of its failure. Harness all these qualities of desire: the bliss, the sheer emotional force, the purposeful ignoring of “hard reality” and you’ve got a real power-tool for manifestation. (Remember, if you hold a powerful desire and pour it into what you are manifesting for only five minutes a day, even that small bit should make a difference.)

Desire is what you come back to when everything else has failed. When people say what you want is impossible, desire is the thing that can overcome that. Desire is inexplicable and unreasonable. It cannot be explained. It responds poorly to logic and brilliantly to passion. Desire is the only motivation left when you shout to the universe: “to hell with the reasons why not! I just want it!”

Think carefully, because this is not a rhetorical question. There are many benefits to both. Let’s take the real estate analogy further, shall we?

Life As A Renter
If you rent your house, you are paying rent in exchange for space provided by the owner, your landlord. Your landlord and your rental contract limit what you can do in and with the house. You live there at his sufferance. You have rights under the law, but when those rights are challenged, you have to fight for them. You often feel helpless and in the control of your landlord and if s/he is someone you don’t get along with, this can be intolerable.

I don’t know if you realize it, but as a renter you also have privileges. In some ways, the situation could be viewed very differently. In some ways, the landlord is actually your servant. Whether you know it or not, in paying rent you are also paying for the privilege of being buffered from a large set of responsibilities that you don’t have to think about, or even be aware of, because your landlord just handles them.

It’s your landlord’s job to pay the mortgage and to pay it on time. Your landlord had to come up with the downpayment to be able to get the building in the first place—you didn’t, but you get to live there anyway. Then there are property taxes and all the utility bills on the building. The building will need maintenance and repairs; you don’t have to pay for those repairs, keep track of them, decide whether you can do them yourself, learn how to do them or search for contractors to do them for you. The landlord shields you from having to respond to disasters and unexpected occurrences, like a storm sending a tree through your window. Hopefully the landlord also maintains the general orderliness of the building’s common areas and the yard, so you don’t have to. All these are things you’ve come to expect from a landlord in exchange for your rent and if your landlord’s any good at all, you probably don’t think about them anymore, and you probably don’t view them as privileges. In addition to these concrete duties that the landlord is doing for you, he or she is also absorbing a lot of worry and paying in psychological cost as well as financial.

Frequently a renter doesn’t get contact with the actual landlord, but deals with a management company instead. Often this will leave a renter frustrated because the company (whatever they may say) cares little about the renter’s experience of living in the building and is there to protect the landlord from the renter’s wrath. So repairs happen slowly or not at all and there’s no human face on the landlord for the renter to connect with.

The Renter Attitude
What do most people do with the privileges associated with renting? They squander them. They complain and whine about conditions and focus on their rights. They do not bother to educate themselves about the things their landlord is insulating them from—if they did, they would be getting into position to become owners themselves. But their energy is going into maintaining and strengthening their position as renters who deserve to be taken care of. The relationship bears some similarity to a parent-child relationship. A child, even an adult child has no comprehension of what even the worst parent is shielding them from until they become a parent themselves.

Now, I am not saying that as a renter you should not stand up for your rights, or that all landlords are blameless. I am also not saying that landlords should be allowed free rein for all the many forms of neglect they are capable of. I am saying that if you find yourself focusing unduly on complaints and your rights, perhaps you are ready to graduate from renting and to buy your own place. If you have that much energy for complaining, writing letters, and so forth, perhaps your energy would be better used in doing the paperwork and jumping-through-hoops necessary to buy a home. You’d be amazed how easy it is for a first-time home-buyer to buy their own home. If your credit is anything better than crappy (and sometimes even if it’s not) banks will throw money at you as soon as they get a hint of your interest. I am also saying that until you bite the bullet and buy your own place, you will have no idea of what you are being protected from and no more ability to appreciate it than a child does when their parent goes to a hell of a lot of trouble to preserve the innocent belief in Santa Claus.

Life As An Owner
If you own, you own a whole set of troubles along with your property. For many people, the good feeling of ownership, and the knowledge that your home is yours to do WHATever you want to with, is ample compensation for those troubles. There is a tremendous sense of freedom in knowing that you can have a direct and immediate effect on your environment and that you can dictate what happens in and to your home. A major plumbing break that renders your sink unusable and floods your kitchen with dishwasher water is experienced completely differently by an owner than it is by a renter. The renter experiences a sense of helplessness and frustration that is simply not present for the owner, who is free to make his own decisions about how to handle the situation, while the renter has to wait around for someone else to deal with it and to funnel the message through several people before something finally gets done. The renter has to live with a flooded kitchen in the meanwhile, and perhaps damage to property of his own. When the situation finally does get handled, it’s probably not at a time of the renter’s choosing and may be at a great inconvenience.

The things I’ve said above might not perfectly describe your situation, (in fact, I’m quite sure they don’t) but please don’t have that as a reason to miss my point. My point is: your rental situation makes it hard for you to understand what it takes to be an owner and that you and only you have control over what you do about that. You’re not a victim. Choosing to remain one will only keep you renting. Similarly, if you own, as long as you are complaining and not using the privilege of action you possess, you are just as much a victim as if you were only renting.

So What’s Your Preferred Deal?
So let’s get back to your life. Would you rather rent or own your life? Have you ever thought about whether you rent or own your life in the first place? Do you really possess your life or do you just occupy it?

Do you expect that things you don’t want to look at will just be handled by some magical agency or do you take them on and handle them yourself? Do you want the added responsibility of being aware of all your resources? Do you really want to know and take responsibility for what’s in every dark corner of yourself, knowing you and only you are the one to clean it up? Or are you content to leave the dark corners dark and not look too closely at them?

In a home, as well as in a human psyche, there are often things we inherit and would prefer to be without. The house was built before you got there and unless you have crawled underneath it and put a microscopic camera inside every wall, it will be full of surprises. Perhaps the last owner made a cheap repair. Perhaps the remodel is nothing more than a pretty face. How about that hairline crack in the foundation? When will pipes need to be replaced? And what about the roof? These are all, ultimately, mysteries until you start living with the house.

Similarly, your psyche contains mysterious relics from your childhood, left there by experiences had before you were a conscious adult. You inherited your psyche and much of its contents, but when did you start to own it? Are you whining like a renter? Who is there to send a letter of complaint to?

You have much more choice about your life than you’re exercising. Your parents may have set up the décor, but you can always choose to repaint. Paint is a good start perhaps, but it also only a superficial change. At some point you’re going to have to crawl under the house (read: your psyche) and take a look at what’s really go on. Either that or tolerate a periodic unexpected bursting of pipes and backing up of toilet. Or perhaps you cannot run the dishwasher and clothes washer at the same time because the plumbing can’t handle it. You see where I’m going with this?

An unconsidered life is not worth living.
–Socrates

Whose Life Is It Anyway?
It’s yours. Even though you inherited it, even though you walked in and the décor wasn’t yours from the start. Even though it’s not your choice of architectural style. Even though, once you discover the termite damage, you realize you paid far too much for this house, you have GOT to own your life. That’s the only way you can make a change. You certainly can’t sell it.

What To Do About It?
Assume the mortgage. I mean this. Start making the payments on your life. And the coin you are paying in? Attention. Pay attention to your life. And this is a case where the old saw “take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves” really applies: pay attention to your life in minute detail, noticing the small things, and the large things will work themselves out.

Remember that there’s more than just mortgage. There may be a second mortgage, property taxes and a thousand small fees. Start paying them willingly. Stop fighting it because this is your house. It sure as hell ain’t nobody else’s.

Paying attention is the best possible start you could make to change your life. If there is some aspect of your life that really needs a change (that unfinished attic? the roof leak into that spare room?), all you need to do to begin powerful change is simply to begin paying attention. Hosts of information will come to you that you never saw before. This is because people quickly become accustomed to aspects of their environment that don’t change and after awhile, fail to notice them at all. Perhaps it is the predator in us, which notices movement and ignores stillness. The longer you’ve dwelt in your life, the less you will likely notice about it, at least without help.

Get A Fresh Look At Your Life
Ask your friends and people new to you. Ask people who are not yet accustomed to you, who have not yet acclimated to all the stains and leaks and curling bits of paint in your personality. They are not the ones who “love you unconditionally” but they are the ones who will still be able to see things that your older friends and family members have been ignoring for years. Ask them to be gentle with you, but to tell you the truth about what they see. What you hear from them will amaze you. If you listen with an open, curious mind, your response will amaze them and it will amaze your family even more. Imagine your wife’s surprise, upon entering conversation with you, to find that old annoying conversational habit . . . simply gone. Gone because someone reminded you that it existed and you were open to hearing about it and making a change. Now that’s a miracle.

I apologize. I lied at the beginning of this entry when I said, “This isn’t a rhetorical question.” Obviously I am in favor of you owning your life. Renting has its benefits, but it means being a lot less conscious, having a lot less control and ultimately it means living quite small. Is that what you really want?

I didn’t think so.

How do you know when you’ve reached clarity? The key to clarity is certainty.  You are certain.

Certainty is a sense, a knowing, and as such, it is often tagged to the physical senses.  How do you know you are certain?  You see it, hear it or feel it, or sometimes a combination of two of these, or even all three.

You can experience certainty via having your mental picture of the thing come into focus.  You may be trying to get to clarity about what you are creating and you may be struggling with the mental picture.  Then suddenly—voila!  The picture you have formed of it in your mind comes into sharp, clear focus and you know that you are certain:  this is, in fact, what you want.  You know because you’ve seen it.

Similarly, you may hear certainty.  You may be developing what you want by telling yourself a story about it.  You may hear the finale of the story and get clarity that yes, this is indeed, what you want.  Or, you may hear a sort of ring or other sound in your head that lets you know when you’ve got it right.

And similarly also, you may feel certainty in your body.  It can be internal, like butterflies in the stomach, or external, like the hair standing up on the back of your neck.  It may be a wonderful, warm feeling in the pit of your gut or it may be a feeling of being solidly rooted to the ground when you think about this thing you are creating.  For some it is a sensation of something clicking into place, the feeling of a perfect fit.

Some people experience certainty in two of these sense modes at once, or will use one mode to confirm another.  For some it is a matter of making a mental picture that then comes into focus and is confirmed by the sound of a bell in their head.  For others it may be a mental picture followed by a kinesthetic “click.”  And some people will wait for all three modes of internal sensory experience to agree before they feel certain of a thing.

I highly recommend becoming aware of how you use these internal sense modes to arrive at a sense of certainty, because it can speed the process tremendously.   (Neuro-linguistic programming is the best tool I know of for studying yourself this way and here is a link to the site of a group in Marin County, California who are doing wonderful things with it.)

Coming up soon, a look at the second Power Tool of Manifestation.

This is part of a series about manifestation, which begins here.

Clarity means knowing what you want. It is another word for focus. When you are clear on what you want, it stands out sharply in your mind. It’s distinct.

Clarity also means knowing what you don’t want. It means being willing to take your attention off of what you don’t want, because if you focus unduly on what you don’t want, you’ll create that instead of what you do want. Don’t let yourself get sucked into the fear that you’ll get what you don’t want, which will certainly create that condition, because fear is a feeling and thus it is an engine of creation. Fear creates as readily as love. The unfortunate side-effect of creating from fear is that the end result of what you create from fear, when it finally comes to you, will be saturated with the very fear you created it with. You cannot create an end experience filled with beauty and love by using the driving power of fear; it is simply a mechanical impossibility. With manifestation it is an incontrovertible rule that the medium and message are one.

You will sometimes have to wrench your attention away from what you don’t want. The human mind tends to gravitate towards what we don’t want and have, rather than what we do want and don’t have. It can sometimes be very hard to stop thinking about how annoying it is that things are still this way when you really want them that way. The very annoyance is the glue that keeps your attention attached to the negative and perpetuates it.

This is why complaining drains your power. When you complain, you are focusing on the negative and thus creating it. What you get is more of the same: negative stuff only worth complaining about. Break the cycle of complaint and focus on what you actually do want and you’re on your way to creating it. Then all you need is practice and patience.

Your knowledge of what you want doesn’t have to be perfect, but your clarity about what you do know does. It’s fine to start with what you know you don’t want, and work outward from there, as long as you don’t get stuck before arriving at what you do want.

If you quite simply don’t know what you want, try just deciding on something to want. Decide arbitrarily if you have to. It’s just to get you over the hump, to get you started. Start small. Focus on something small long enough to receive it and see how you like it. Then refine your request and ask again. The universe is an infinite ocean for your fishing pleasure; there is no limit to the number of times you can fish something out of it, decide not to keep the fish and toss it back. You don’t ever need to feel guilty or to feel that you are wasting time (yours or the universe’s) by tossing back the fish. You can continue the process until you have caught exactly the right fish. In fact, the more you practice, the better.

Allow yourself to come to clarity by a process of conversing with the universe. “I think I want chocolate ice cream. I’m focusing on chocolate ice cream with great clarity.” The universe hands you a pint of Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. Hmm, you say, “I really want it in a waffle cone.” Then you focus on NYSFC in a waffle cone. The universe hands you a waffle cone with some miscellaneous chocolate ice cream in it and you realize you forgot to continue focusing on the NYSFC. But maybe this other flavor is pretty good . . . And on it goes. It is a refinement process that only ends when you say it does.

Don’t get stuck in whether or not what you want is possible. All that time spent arguing about whether and how it could happen could be much better spent actually visualizing, learning from the universe’s response to the visualization and refining the visualization.

To use the tool of clarity is to be willing to be clear even when you are in process. To focus your mind clearly on what you are creating and to be willing to receive what the universe throws at you, to respond to that, clear your mind and start again.

I’ll say a bit more about clarity tomorrow.

Not all of these are required for every manifestation to come into being, but if you do get all of these right, what you wish will come to pass. You will likely be astonished how quickly. Here they are:

1. Clarity. Know what you want. Your knowledge of what you want doesn’t have to be perfect, but your clarity about what you do know does. It’s fine to start with what you know you don’t want, and work outward from there, as long as you don’t get stuck before arriving at what you do want.

2. Desire. Napoleon Hill calls this “burning desire” and he’s right when he says it’s absolutely essential. The thing you desire must feel thoroughly good to you, on every level. If you have ambivalence, your desire will be thwarted. You need to desire it enough right from the start to be certain you will overcome all obstacles, before you even know what they are. Your desire must be strong enough to burn away anything that tries to stop you.

3. Imagination. To be precise, you must be able to create detailed, realistic, internal sensory experience of the thing or state you want. This comes with practice and it helps if you use as many sensory modes (sight, sound, touch, etc.) as possible. What you are imagining must feel real and possible, and it’s best to place yourself inside your vision.

4. Passion. You need to feel great in your body while imagining this thing. Feelings are the engine that brings the thing into existence, so clamping down on hope to avoid disappointment will only hamstring you. You’ve got to let yourself feel it.

5. Detachment. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? You have to pour your passion into this thing and then let go of attachment to the outcome. Funny thing is, it works. Stop caring how the thing looks or what path it takes to get to you, and it will come to you faster, and from unexpected quarters.

6. Persistence. Figure out how you want to manifest this thing. What is your process? Exactly how will you focus your attention? Then do that every day, several times a day. Do it into the ground. Become unstoppable.

7. Will. That is to say, you are actively, not passively, involved in what you are creating. You are committed to action. You follow up on the synchronicities and leads that are generated by your creating. Every action you take toward it strengthens it and provides more avenues for opportunities that can help you.

8. Certainty. You must know what certainty feels like in your body and in your heart. Certainty is the feeling or knowing that you get when you’ve gotten each of the other steps right. Be certain about your clarity, your passion, your will, your persistence and so on. This is the linchpin that holds the other tools together.

9. Inclusion. You build right into your manifestation practice the belief and expectation that what you create is and shall be perfect for everyone. People other than you benefit from what you create. Your wish is also a gift for others, in ways you cannot now anticipate (and don’t need to). No matter how selfish what you want may seem, if you build this in, your creation will gather steam from the goodwill of others who also stand to benefit from it.

I don’t think all of these tools need to be used each time you set out to create something with the power of your imagination; some of them may be more pertinent to the specific content of what you are creating, while others may be irrelevant. But if you practice all of them they become tools in your toolkit and you can draw on them whenever you need to. Then you’ll be unstoppable, because manifesting absolutely anything, no matter how big or “impossible” is simply a matter of “lather, rinse, repeat.” Apply these tools again, again, again, again and again until you have arrived at your destination.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be going into each of these principles in detail. In the meantime, have at it and change your world!

The ability to create a place to park your car is a wonderful, basic manifestation skill that is well-worth developing.  I’ll tell you how I did it.

Some years ago, I discovered that I had spirit guides.  Or rather, that pretty much everyone has spirit guides and that I was no exception.  Most people have at least one being watching over them, perhaps an ancestor or a spirit that owes them karma from previous interactions.  These spirits are usually out to be helpful, in my experience.  My particular batch, at it turned out, have never been in a body on this planet, some of them never in a body at all, and so they are not very familiar with some of the mundane details of life in a body.  I wanted them to be able to create parking places for me and so I set out to train them in this.  I wanted them also to help me to speed on the freeway without getting tickets and to help keep my car safe and in good repair.  So most of my early uses of them were in the automotive department.

One in particular emerged, whom I came to name “Gorky.”  Don’t know why—that’s just what he wanted to be called.  Gorky appeared as a sort of imaginary creature who looked like a gargoyle, kind of dark gray and winged and ugly as sin, but with a playful and sweet disposition.  I have come to see Gorky as the marshal of the team and I address my requests to him, without bothering to name or distinguish the others.

You should understand that “seeing” a creature like Gorky doesn’t happen with the physical eye.  It is more like a strong imagining.  I could tell you exactly where Gorky is and what he is doing right now—it is the first thing that comes into my mind when I turn my attention to him.  The very first, uncensored thing is usually the strongest intuitive hit, and should be taken as such.  After you’ve had more than a few seconds to think about it, your left (logical) brain has already taken over and it’s too late for your intuitive (right) brain to speak.  And as for whether the existence of creatures like Gorky is the truth, it doesn’t really matter.  My “seeing” him and our “conversations” are likely just figments of my imagination; however the imagination is the doorway to the hindbrain’s power over the physical world.  Perhaps internal images, sensations and the like are nothing but the language I use to communicate with my own hindbrain.  I don’t really care what the “truth” is, because frankly, seeing Gorky works, and seems historically to have provided me with some abilities not commonly accepted as normal.  And if you’ve discovered an access like that, why linger on the threshold arguing when you can instead enter a whole new, fascinating world?

Right now, Gorky is sitting on the edge of my desk flapping his wings and laughing at the idea that I am describing him to you.  He thinks it’s crazy of me to try.  His English is not so good.  He sounds rather like a seal barking.

So after “meeting” Gorky many years ago, I set out to learn how to create parking and to teach this important skill to Gorky so that I wouldn’t always have to do it for myself.

I would like to point out here that parking in the San Francisco Bay Area is a total bitch.  This is a crowded, urban area of the country, filled with locals, immigrants and travelers, and it’s a mix of just about every kind of domestic and international driving style you can imagine.  Somehow people still manage to only hit each other a minimum of the time.  Parking presents problems because frequently garages are arranged such that curb area is chopped up into smaller-than-carsize pieces, rendering much of a residential block unparkable.  Metered spots have gotten harder and harder to find on a regular basis in the 18 years I’ve lived here, and more expensive too (as are the accompanying tickets should your meter run out before you return).  It is common to be 10 or 15 minutes late after arriving in an area on time, simply because you were unable to find parking.  I’ve known people to cancel appointments and leave an area in disgust after an unfruitful search.  Parking predators are a common sight, slowly trawling the streets and lurking after a pedestrian who seems likely to be going to their vehicle.  It is also common to see a driver pull a u-turn in the middle of the street in order to catch a spot on the other side because he knows damn well that if he goes around the block like a good boy, the spot will not be there when he gets back.  I have even had a spot taken from under my very nose by an aggressive SUV driver as I staged my car to enter the spot.  He slipped into it behind me, entering frontward before I could back into the spot.  Who enters a parking place frontward?  I never expected it.  He then refused to budge and grinned proudly at me from behind his driver’s door glass.  I thought long and hard about ramming him with my less-expensive car.  Don’t worry—I got him back.  I came back later with a dozen eggs.

So this gives you an idea of the parking conditions in the Bay Area.  If they are anything like the conditions in your area, then I hope you make good use of the methods I’m about to explain.

My first parking method was also the most complex.  It went something like this:  begin by imagining the area where you are going to park.  I literally could not use this method if I couldn’t visualize the block I’d be parking on.  So, visualize the area in detail.  Find the place where you’d like parking, say “right in front of Restaurant B, where we have a reservation.”  Imagine that, as you are approaching, someone is just about to go to their car.  I would imagine this quite vividly.  “Someone is about to go to their car,” I’d tell myself.  “Someone really needs to leave the area now, and they are going to their car.  They are getting in their car and it’s timed perfectly with my arrival.  In fact, it’s as if there’s a connection, a link between the back of their car and the front of mine, so that the parking place they leave is just for me.  It’s perfect for the person leaving and it’s perfect for me.”

The element of “it’s perfect for everybody” is crucial in a good visualization; it’s so important that I’ll write about it in another post soon.

I can’t tell you how many times doing this visualization, and injecting a strong dose of positive feeling into it, resulted in me arriving on the scene just in time to catch a parking place opening up.  I liked the method and it worked, so I taught it to Gorky.  He used it, to my benefit, and he seemed to enjoy doing so.

I want to mention here that my guides did then and do now seem to take a great interest in things of the physical world.  For them it’s all theory, because they’ve never had bodies.  They enjoy the mechanics of it and they don’t seem to be as frustrated by the slowness of the effects of intention as I am, which is nice.  They help me be patient.

After some training, I began turning the parking over to Gorky.  All I had to do was ask him to create parking for me and show him a mental picture of the layout of the block I was targeting.  This did not, however, deal with the situation of first-time parking in an area new to me, an area I had no mental picture of.  Also, the method was cumbersome and worked best when it was begun a good ten minutes ahead of time.  It didn’t work well for last-minute parking needs.  I ultimately needed a simpler method.

I got around the problem of being unfamiliar with the target area by asking Gorky to search the minds of people who knew the block in question.  That worked too.  After some time of refining and even complexifying the method I had created (so I could account for its flaws), I finally stripped it way down.

Here’s what I do today:  I am approaching an area where I want parking.  I start to generate a really good feeling in my body.  I draw from any good sensations I can call up in order to make myself feel good.  I then imagine myself arriving, evoking the feeling of arrival, the sensation of knowing that I have arrived.  I mix the feeling of arrival and the really-good-feeling together.  I associate them.  I amp it up a little.  If I don’t know the area, I don’t bother making mental pictures, because I know they will just get in the way.  So instead I hear myself exclaiming “wow—what a perfect parking space!  And it was so easy!”  I drive relaxedly, sometimes even slowing down, especially if I had begun to panic a little and speed up at the thought of possibly not being able to park.  I force my mind entirely off thoughts of failure and allow only thoughts of success.

Holding positive feelings in your body and positive thoughts in your mind is crucial.  You will find that if you are not successful quickly, your brain will start complaining.  “It always goes this way,” you’ll say, or “I’m never going to find a spot.”  And if that’s what you think, the universe will make it so, even if only because you talk yourself into quitting before you have time to succeed.  You must eject all negativity from your mind while creating.  Be ruthless.

If I do know the area, I design my search pattern in my mind, for example, “I will turn left onto Allston and start looking for parking in the first block.  If I have to go around the block, I will turn right onto Milvia and come back around the school.”  It is very rare that I have to go through my search pattern more than twice and in fact quite rare that I have to go through it more than once.  If I do have to go around the block, usually a spot has become free by the time I return, even if there was no sign of that happening on the first pass.

Finding parking spaces, even in the difficult Bay Area, has become easy.  It’s also become a small, everyday way to practice manifestation and to validate the powers of the mind over the physical universe, when that mind is radiating good feeling and love.  It works best when I’m either in a good mood or willing to get myself into one.  Every time I create parking, I am forced to put myself in a good-feeling place (if I wasn’t before) and I am reminded that the world is a good place and that what I do with my mind impacts it powerfully.

My thoughts matter.  Yours do too.  Go out and think some good ones today.

I was raised almost entirely without religion.  My mother was raised Irish Catholic and by the time I was growing up she was a practicing Buddhist.  My father was raised German Lutheran but ultimately ended up somewhere around the atheistic end of the religious continuum, but with a healthy dose of reverence for nature.  Neither parent gave much conventional religious training.  The lack of it gave me a perspective on life that was often very unlike the people around me.

When I was still a fairly small child, I noticed that one of the differences between my family and my friends’ families was that they went to church and we didn’t.  This seemed like a very important difference at the time and I visited my friends’ churches with great interest.  This was rural Pennsylvania, so yes, they were churches.  Not many synagogues and definitely no mosques or temples.  I saw that there were many religions in the world and many varieties within each religion, and that each of them believed that they had the capital-T truth.  This was odd because their “truths” often contradicted each other—sometimes severely.

Followers of each religion believed in an afterlife, and were certain of who would welcome them when they died.  Good Christians expected to go to a place they called “heaven,” to be greeted by St. Peter, led through the Pearly Gates and taken to Jesus, or Mary or perhaps God himself.  Others believed in Allah, Buddha, or more abstract things like nirvana, and so forth.  I was fascinated by the depth of their belief in these stories.

I never quite believed any one of the stories myself.  I did believe in some sort of continuation after death—the difference between a living body and a dead one is quite profound and I figured that there had to be something in the body that left at death.  I just didn’t know what that something was or what it could expect.  How was it all handled after people died?  Did people all go to different heavens?  Or the same heaven?  Was there someone there to debrief them when they arrived, to tell them, “No, I’m sorry, everything they taught you was wrong.  There’s no Christ here, and this isn’t the heaven they told you about in Sunday school”?  Somehow I didn’t think so.  In fact, I thought that would be terribly cruel.  For me, the sheer variety of religious beliefs and the very intensity with which they were embraced by people who were all quite certain that their beliefs were the only correct ones, while all others were flat-out wrong, and the very willingness of generations upon generations to die and kill for something as insubstantial as a belief—all this put together was sufficient proof to me that in fact, none of them could possibly be right.  Only a reality large enough to hold all the other realities could possibly be the “real” one.  And that it must in fact be so large that a human brain could not even think about it fully, or hold the concept in her mind.  It had to be, strictly speaking, unknowable.  So I gave up on knowing, but continued speculating, realizing all the while that whatever understanding I apprehended would be, at best, a substitute for the actual thing, and should be viewed as such.  At the very least I had grasped that true religion must necessarily be incomprehensible or it would not be large enough to be true.

I decided, in my own childish way, that somewhere up in the sky (which is where I vaguely located things metaphysical) there was a Great Cosmic Machine, a sort of generator that generated all the heavens for all the people who believed in them.  I decided that, when a person died, his spirit would fly into a manufactured world that matched his expectations.  Everything he expected would be there.  Sometimes I thought this afterworld would be manufactured by his own imagination, like a dream you never wake from.  There the person would remain as long as he wished to—perhaps until he grew bored of playing a harp and wearing white.

After the boredom set in, a person would figure out that the heaven they were in was not all there was, and would go looking for something more.  At that point they could be taken to the One Who Ran The Machine.  I had very vague ideas of this person, but I was certain that this One was a being of very great compassion and patience to go to the trouble of creating all these illusory heavens for people to go to, so that they could be let down easy. As if dying itself is enough of a shock, so why compound it with a grand disillusionment of everything you’ve ever believed?

Because I didn’t believe in any heaven in the first place, I figured that when I died, the dream would try to form around me, and it would fail.  Rather than getting caught in any of the false afterworlds, I would bypass them all, and go straight to the One Behind It All.

After seeing The Wizard of Oz, I think I drew a parallel between those illusory heavens and the great pomp and display of the Wizard.  The Wizard appears to be large, all-knowing and all-wise, but all those amazing pyrotechnics were actually being run by the little man behind the curtain, himself rather mortal and drab.  “Pay no attention to the Man Behind the Curtain!” bawled the phony, pompous Wizard.  I wanted to head straight for the curtain.  I knew that was where I could find out what was really going on.

Over the years since then, I have found astrology and engaged in years of study, observation and experience using my birth chart and applying the information it contained to my life.  I have found in astrology the very mechanism I was seeking—the Great Machine I had fondly imagined, knowing it was also not the absolute truth, but gleaning more from the metaphor than I could from anything that pretended to absolute truth.  Unlike religions, astrology asks not for your faith.  To those who will learn how to look, it withholds no facts.  And we are free to make use of those facts as we will, employing our imaginations and our human artistry to discover what the symbols say about how to live.  Astrology does not require worship in order to work—it is consummately a science and an art, but it is not a religion.  This is only part of why I love it so.

Astrology shows us the workings of the universe, its very mechanism.  With astrology, we are able to see unfolding before us the cycles and rhythms of nature, the organic patterns.  We are able to see in those patterns a parallel to our own lives, on many levels: on the physical, the emotional, the mental, the spiritual, the eternal.  By watching the heavens and watching our lives, we are able to draw correspondences, and because we see parallels between the patterns of our lives and the cycles of the heavens, we are able to see ourselves within the larger design, we are able to predict the future and also to alter it.  We can see trends, likelihoods, possibilities, and change our paths accordingly.

The Machine I imagined is not God, or nature, or even the Mind of God.  It is something more than, and inclusive of these things.  It plays out all patterns over time.  To have the ability to read these patterns through astrology is the greatest gift I can imagine—and one laden with responsibility.

While I was growing up, one of the hardest things to watch my friends endure was the way their religions couldn’t explain tragedy.  Why do terrible things happen to good people?  Why do murderers exist?  How can there be so much suffering in a world watched over by a theoretically benevolent deity?  And if God isn’t benevolent, why is he so angry and selfish?  When human beings are angry and selfish, it’s because something went wrong somewhere.  But if God is all-powerful, how can he allow something to go wrong?  It seems that either God is powerless, but good or he is all-powerful and mean.  And why conceive of God as a person anyway?  These simple questions demand answering and come out of the mouths of babes the world over.  No adult can explain these things to a child, so they prevaricate and make up stories to inculcate a simplified moral system.  But nothing that can’t be explained in language simple enough for a child to understand can possibly be true and children know this.  It’s why religions require force.

Everyone who has ever prayed knows the frustration of lacking a two-way conversation with God.  Everyone who believes in a God will desire, at some point, to speak to him and to get a clear response.  Even those folks who believe that God speaks to them do not hear him as often as they would like to.  This lack of a clear response drives humans crazy.  Humans invent reasons why God can’t talk back and none of them are good reasons.  Anthropomorphizing a deity only makes this worse.  I understand that most adults view the concept of God as a place-marker for a bigger, more unknowable concept, however even adults fall prey to the trap of mistaking the metaphor for the meaning.  An anthropomorphic god is a child’s view of reality, but without a child’s clarity.  I guess I’d just rather do without, even if it means continually being reminded that I don’t really understand the universe and facing uncertainty every day.

But a lack of belief in an anthropomorphic god has not stopped me from searching for that quality I was looking for:  “the two-way radio to God.” (you see how easy it is to resort to the place-marker again?)  In studying astrology over many years, I have come to understand that the movements of the planets and signs and the way they correlate to human events constitute the very conversation I was looking for.  These things are God talking back.  Where the Bible says, “God sees every sparrow fall,” I would say “God is every sparrow falling, as well as the air the sparrow falls through and the earth it lands upon.”  Except that I would somehow get the word God out of the sentence too.  It is ineffable and boggles the mind very quickly, so I generally don’t bother.

It is a great power, this being able to read the language of the stars.  Through astrology, we draw nearer to an understanding of the workings of the universe.  The natural cycles of the universe are the cycles of our lives.  The cycles, us living them and the events that play out are all God-in-motion.  The buds of spring are a message from God, a message of hope and renewal.  The autumn leaves are a message of impending death and loss, tinged with beautiful sorrow.  The moon speaks to us of how we can light our own darkness and how changeable we are.  When we observe the similarities among people born when Venus was rising in the east, we understand that such people are messengers of love, relatedness and sexuality, while people similarly marked by Mars rising are messengers of strength, drive and forcefulness.  All these messages, taken together, are God.  Sometimes you are the recipient of the message, sometimes you are the messenger, sometimes the message itself.  When the whole thing clicks together in your mind you realize you are inextricably connected to everything.  It’s a wonderful cure for modern existential loneliness (and a permanent one).

Astrology allows us to read these messages, to break them down into pieces a puny human brain can understand.  An understanding of the cycles of nature leads to an examination of the corresponding cycles of our own lives and thus leads us to an understanding of our most inner, divine selves.  Through astrology, we are in conversation with God.  And when “he” speaks, we can “listen” and we can actually “hear” him.