Careful What You Wish For…

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/careful/

Very true, I think. I say this because we are often at our most vulnerable – I’d even go as far as to say deluded! – when we feel the need to rub the Lamp and summons Abdul, the testy Genie of said Receptacle, for the obligatory three wishes.

Why vulnerable? Easy peasy: Because we are in the grip of an emotion so strong that our usual rational minds are in temporary (or permanent!) abeyance. Love, lust, fear, pain, poverty, despair; you name it – and the effects are the same. The Rose-Tinted Spectacles of love and lust, and the panic most of the others bring in their wake allow us to mistake the infatuation/terror of the moment for the more sensible and long-term ability to think things through and be careful.

Like children, we want that toy NOW. Trouble is, the toy often turns out to be someone we have developed a crush on; someone we do not know; someone who belongs to another; someone everyone else can see is wildly unsuitable, even toxic, for us.

Like children, we want the universal Mother to heal our sickness, comfort our pain, sort out our money problems and turn the light on so that all the scary things in the dark are shown to be normal, inanimate objects. But the protective Mother (or Father) does not allow us to grow up; to learn important life lessons; to face the dark by ourselves; to pay attention to danger and get into the habit of being careful.

If we wish hard enough to get off with that person we really fancy, the chances are that our wish will be granted, one way or another – because predatory and unscrupulous animals of both sexes can follow the spoor of aroused interest, and have no compunction about taking advantage.

The same is true of so much of what we wish for in the material world, be it the infamous million on the Lottery, the house of our dreams, fame and fortune, or immortality. Only instead of thinking with our genitals (as we do when we are in season!), we ‘think’ with the Greed Centre and the Keeping up with the Joneses one.

Even altruistic wishes are open to question. Many people, for example, wish for World Peace – a highly laudable use of the Lamp, on the surface at least. But we need to be careful: Until such time as we have defined peace rather more exactly than the absence of war, the getting of it could turn out to be anything but a long-term answer to the problem.

Wishing depends upon an external other. In it, we are essentially passive. I think this is why it is dangerous to become reliant upon the illusory power of the wish.

Visualisation and manifestation, both of which have careful habit as part of their structure, seem, to me, a much safer, more active and, ultimately, more satisfying way of creating situations which will work for us without harming anyone/thing else.

With active participation, and careful judgement, we can create without needing Genies, lamps and trios of wishes!