"Make It So"

"Make It So"

When the Captain of Starship Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard makes a decision he follows it with the words: "Make it so".  Impressive stuff. Jean-Luc is so, well, commanding! And he's convincing. It's the conviction, the certainty that gives resonance to his voice.  In a nutshell, "Make it so" is the New Age recipe for manifesting what you want in your life. But we can really "command" the Universe to carry out our wishes? I say, no, we can't. The problem with "Make it so" is that too often originates from the part of our psyches that we call "Will" or "Will Power".  The habitual abuse of the human Will has caused so much suffering in the world that discussion of  the Will is a thorny subject. 

Human history is replete with examples of the use of the Will to overcome whole populations and hold them in thrall in order to satisfy some group’s or individual’s Ego needs.  Most of the great "Will-ers" have been men who imposed their individual will with overwhelming military force. The historic exercise of Will has been more about conquering than liberating, more about destroying than creating. Despite their protestations, neither the French nor the Russian revolutions actually freed people. They imposed a new form of tyranny instead. Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Bokassa, Taylor, el Bashir, Karodjic, Mugabe, Castro...They all imposed their personal Will upon whole populations under the guise of "liberation".  This is why the "Will" has such a bad rep in the field of depth psychology and  “New Age” circles.

However, there is a creative side to Willing, one that is more about creating than controlling. The creative side of the Will is actually our imaginative ability to Wish.  Wishing, too, got a bad rep through association with the highly unlikely or highly improbable outcome.  We tend to fall back on Wishing when we don't know how to -or we lack the means to - create the outcome we want. But just as Will doesn't have to be about the acquisition of power or the subjection of others, Wishing doesn't have to be about powerlessness or ineffectiveness.

The Marriage of Desire With Outcome

Both Willing and Wishing are about Desire. Even infants are capable of making their desires known. They are attracted to one toy and not another. They want to be held by one person and not another. These preferences are largely opaque to adults who look on in bafflement as baby makes its wishes clear. It could be a particular sound or smell, the way one colour captures the baby's attention, or it could be that babies, like all animals except adult humans, can sense or even see the energy that things and people have around them. Certain energies make baby feel happy and others do not. For baby, it's simple: get closer to what feels good and safe, get away from what feels uncomfortable or dangerous. That is how we all started out in life but somewhere along the line we were socialized to disguise our preferences under a mask of "politeness" and in some cases we get so out of touch with what makes us genuinely happy or fulfilled, that we don't recognize it anymore!   So, how do we re-discover what our true selves desire from life?

Perhaps the most direct and effective way is through doing something you probably do every day: writing. But not writing of the utilitarian kind.  The writing I refer to is more like mining except that instead of gold or silver we need to mine our wants and needs. And, as any miner will tell you, before you hit the vein of gold, you have clear away a lot surface stuff. So oddly enough the first step toward effective wishing and willing, is doing neither!  Instead, we need to recognize the excess material that hides the vein of gold and get rid of it. This isn't as difficult as you might think because you were born with the tools you need to do the job: your mind and your heart. Both parts of you have a voice and all you have to do is ask your heart what it would most like you to know. Then pick up your pen or pencil and write down whatever comes to mind. All of it! The point is to let it come out, not to censor it because it would be considered rude or nasty or unbecoming if someone else were to read it. No one will because you always have the option to destroy what you write when you're finished or to save it to re-read in six months and decide then whether to destroy it. The most important thing is that you will not use any device other than a pen or pencil to write with! There is a world of difference between actually hand-writing something and producing it on an electronic device. For one thing, it's difficult to remove things permanently from any hard-drive and dead easy to burn paper! For another, what you'll be writing will come from your mind and your heart through your writing hand. This is personal. Intimate. And no one's business but yours so go to any lengths you deem necessary to insure your privacy. Create a writing nook in a closet if you have to but create a space in which you feel SAFE emotionally and physically. Leonardo da Vinci was so security conscious that he wrote his notes in code and backwards!  Most of us will not have to go to such extremes but protecting our thoughts and feelings is an essential first step in uncovering what we really need and want at this stage in our lives.  When we have written ourselves out, we will find the vein of gold that contains our deepest selves, intact and waiting to be acknowledged. Then, we can begin the alchemical process of formulating our deepest wants and needs, the raw materials that will move us into the next phase of our lives and at that point we can introduce the healthy application of Will to achieve what we need to add to or change our lives.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

More to follow in up-coming articles.

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