The Universe has its secrets. It lets me in on very few of them. I know that there is this law of attraction and all I am thinking is that I am attracting loss. Experts say that nothing happens outside of this law—everything attracts something by the virtue of its being. So, if all the experts are to be believed, I myself am an expert at one thing: loss. I am a planetary force emitting powerful magnetic fields drawing loss into my atmosphere. Not something you necessarily want to broadcast to the scientific community or publish in any journal. It’s one thing to attract vibrant life—like the leg of a honeybee attracting pollen—and it’s quite another to attract the black holes of life. It’s an interesting phenomenon, true, but people are afraid to get too close in case it’s contagious. Which, according to the experts, it is.
You build your life inside your mind. You build reality inside your mind. I know: there are mental health experts who might take exception to that statement and think that only people with some mental pathology do such a thing. But that isn’t true. We all construct our own world, the world we inhabit. We do this by the way we interpret the signals that enter our brain. I am not just talking about seeing a man with another woman (not his wife) and having the mental experience of, “You bastard” vs. “No big deal.” I am talking about how that inherent, unbidden response defines reality within our mind. Something happens inside of us that creates an understanding of not only that other person, but ourselves in relation to that other person and in relation to the world, and it all happened without our even knowing it or being an active participant in it.
I am not talking about glasses half full or half empty. I am not talking about keeping on the sunny side of the street. I am just talking about this inherent life view that is seemingly outside our conscious decision making. As one who has had a few decades of practice at letting her thoughts rage out of control, I know that our minds have this exponential potential to build sand castles of thought that are bounded only by our mental energies. After a while, the keeping track of tunnels and secret corridors and hidden entrances and connecting towers gets to be too damn much. You just let the water wash up onto the shore and draw the sand back toward the sea, let the wind carry the turrets and battlements out and away into the nothing.
Trying to figure out how to change the process is money making, have you noticed? Or, rather, coming up with a “sure-fire” method can be money making, especially because so many of us want something other than what we have, but we cannot figure out how to get out of the place we are without a guru’s roadmap. Every best seller that tells you how to harness your spirituality for a better life, how to lose weight for good, how to find a love that is fairy tale in its quality (tip off right there), is simply something that worked for someone at some time -- which is the part we miss, the thing we don’t get: it worked for someone else. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be our panacea, but don’t tell that to the publisher or the author who is convinced that his or her epiphany is the mother of all epiphanies! "Aha moments" are commodities in this modern age. You can become a millionaire if you know how to market your own private aha to enough people who are desperately clamoring for some aha of their own but don’t know how to get it. They’ll take yours; it will be cheaper in paperback, but the hardcover version is available now.
So I was talking about being an expert in loss. Like anybody wants my aha moment about that. After finding out that I am busily at work attracting all sorts of pain into my life so that I can have even more guilt about the lousy job I am doing at living up to my potential and making my life count, I then find out that I am solely responsible for the shit that has happened to me. “If only I’d been this, if only I’d done that,” was already bad enough. Now I have to add, “You must have really wanted that or you wouldn’t have drawn it unto you.” And don’t give me any crap about how I have misunderstood the law of attraction and am blaming it instead of taking responsibility to understand it as the happy people do.
Imagine you have your life’s treasure—who you are—stored on a portable drive. And this little piece of existence is your evolution of the self. You can plug it into a USB port and find out where you’ve been to better understand where you are going and then make adjustments for roads to take, if indeed you have access to those maps. Such maps may not even have been printed, yet. You may have to be the cartographer yourself and title the map Undiscovered Territory of the Self. I am sure there must be cartography software programs available, and I can only imagine that Someone Who Attracts Only Awesomeness into his or her life is even now in negotiations for a contract that will allow such a program to burst forth onto the Self Help scene and make him or her fantastically wealthy. Pity the poor souls who buy that program full of eager anticipation only to get lost on the unmarked roads on their way to the Promised Land. Good luck charting their way out of there without any surveyor’s equipment.
You carry around your portable drive like a rosary or like a worry stone. You pull it out of your pocket every so often and look at it and contemplate its wisdom, its message, its Pioneer 10 Plaque of Who You Are in the Universe. One day, you put your hand into your pocket and it’s not there. You put your hand in even deeper and it’s coming up with nothing but little pieces of lint that got trapped down in the seams of that pocket. You check the other pocket, your purse, your dresser, your countertop, your bathroom, your jewelry box, your car, your—well, you get the idea. It. Is. Gone. Or, more to the point: You. Are. Gone.
You have just discovered how phenomenally good you are at attracting loss. You are so good at it, in fact, that you have even lost yourself. You are in danger of becoming your own personal black hole. Do you like Physics? You better. Because you are going to have to become an expert on Dark Matter, and high time it is, since no one knows what that is, exactly. We need another Einstein who can conceptualize the infinitesimal universe that is Dark Matter. And honey, you just got the job.
