Hello and welcome to the next session.
I invite you to take a seat or lay down and get yourself comfortable.
You can close down the eyes if you wish,
Take a deep slow breath in through the nose and out through the mouth.
In today's session we're going to be contemplating a quote from the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
This book tells about the story of a journey of a boy from humble beginnings who ventures out into the world in search of an external treasure but ends up discovering what could be said to be the meaning of life.
The act of reading this book is itself inspiring and enlightening.
So beyond just the contemplation of this quote I strongly suggest that you pick up a copy of this book and read it through and then read it through again.
The Alchemist has inspired millions of people to take steps towards positivity,
Growth and their deepest potential and purposes.
So with that in mind I invite you to sit in contemplation of the quote.
When you want something all of the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
When you want something all of the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
To this quote,
When you want something all of the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it,
Points towards something that a lot of spiritual books suggest,
A lot of religious books suggest.
It's an act of prayer,
An act of creation,
An act of manifestation.
You know other iterations come to this in the form for example of the secret and other sort of things like down this path.
And whilst some people will interpret this as a mystical claim,
The universe,
God,
The world conspires to help you achieve something.
I think you can look upon this quote from a completely secular perspective.
Religion,
Spirituality,
God need not apply for this quote to be true.
When you want something the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
Provided of course that we change the word want to think about.
If you have a mindset about something,
If you're thinking about something,
You're projecting an energy outwards.
People see the tone that you speak with,
How you hold your body,
The way in which you move,
The things that you pay attention to.
If you've got a fearful mindset,
You're going to project that fearful mindset outwardly.
So what then will someone think when they interact with you?
They're going to feel fearful.
Humans are community-based creatures.
We see and respond to the people around us.
If someone seems hesitant and wary,
We too become hesitant and wary.
If someone seems happy,
We too become happy.
This isn't a,
You know,
A hundred percent strong correlation,
But the connection is there.
It's very hard to be upset around someone who is genuinely,
Thoroughly connected and happy and present.
Similarly,
It's hard not to feel a little bit nervous when someone themselves is going through a panic attack or seems fearful or on edge.
We take up the cues of those around us.
So if you're thinking down the terms of finding joy or happiness in the moment,
Chances are the people around you will resonate with that feeling and project it back to you.
Thus,
You fall into a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
But I think it goes deeper.
This idea of the secret,
Of manifestation,
Of the whole universe conspiring to help you to achieve something,
I think is a mindset.
Let's say,
For example,
You're looking for an opportunity in relation to money,
In relationship to a partner,
In relationship to anything.
If you're open to that possibility arising,
Every moment of your life you're going to be aware and considering of it.
You will see opportunities where other people only see problems.
Where there is a ten percent chance,
You will take it.
Where other people won't,
They'll move on.
And over time,
These probabilities add up until it feels like the universe is conspiring,
Until it feels like you're achieving these amazing things,
Until it seems like you're lucky.
You're not lucky,
You're just rolling the dice more.
You're not lucky,
You're just taking the opportunities.
Maybe you only have a ten percent chance of success,
But if you try and try and try again,
You're guaranteed to have more success than the person who doesn't try at all.
To this quote,
When you want something,
All the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
When we look at it in that perspective,
That the way we project ourselves outwardly will be reflected back to us from the world.
And if we are looking for opportunities,
We're more likely to see them and thus take them,
And thus accomplish what we are aiming to accomplish.
We can see that from a secular perspective,
This holds.
And in the same way,
If you're looking for negativity,
If you're looking for reasons that the world is conspiring against you,
If you have a negative outlook on life,
You're more likely to interpret ambiguity negatively.
You know,
Someone says something to you with a tone,
Or body language,
Or confusing wording that you could take positively,
Negatively,
Or neutrally.
Someone that is in a bad mental state,
Someone that is thinking negatively,
What are they more likely to assume about that statement?
They're going to assume it's an attack,
A personal affront.
You could play the same scene,
The same words,
The same passage from a book,
To ten different people,
And they will all get different meanings from it.
But if you split those people into optimists and pessimists,
The optimists are more likely to take that same scene or passage positively.
Their worldview,
Their inner worldview,
Shapes the external world around them.
Nothing externally actually changes,
But how they perceive and respond to it,
And thus how the external world responds to them in turn,
Is impacted.
So this quote pushes us down the path of figuring out first what we want,
And then holding that in our souls,
In our essences,
In our hearts,
And walking towards it.
Because the universe will begin to conspire in helping us to achieve it.
I have goals and dreams and aspirations around poetry,
And creation,
And mental health,
And a variety of different things that I'm working on.
The more that I sit with those opportunities in mind,
The more I see those opportunities to take steps and actions.
If you are struggling down this path,
There's either one of two issues.
One is a value issue,
You're not quite sure what your deepest,
Truest value is,
And the other one potentially is a mindset issue.
On the topic of values,
There are various activities that you can do,
But if you sit and meditate and go,
What is my truest,
Highest calling?
It might be far away,
But that,
If you can sit and work it out,
What you're actually trying to achieve,
What you want,
Beyond the physical,
Beyond the small things,
You know,
Take away all the impacts of conditioning,
Of society,
Of parents,
Of religions,
Of school,
Of education,
Of advertisements,
Of all of this sort of stuff,
What do you want?
What do you want to be and bring to this world?
That's your distant mountaintop,
Head towards that.
And then the second one comes in,
Oh I can't do it.
Why?
Why can't you do it?
If you step back and you look at everyone,
Every successful person,
They all had blocks,
They all had reasons not to do something,
There was always something stopping them,
Barriers.
But in this book,
The Alchemist,
You discover that some of those barriers are actually helpful.
What seems like a hindrance becomes a feature,
Because it heads the character in a direction that they never would have traveled in the first place,
But they find and discover and embody so much more because of that barrier.
The obstacle becomes the way.
So I encourage you to contemplate with me the quote,
When you want something,
All the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
When you want something,
All the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
So,
How did you go?
I invite you to share the results of your contemplation or any questions you may have in the classroom,
And I invite you to check out the responses of other people and respond to their questions,
As I will be doing every day.
Together we can form a sort of synergy in which we're helping to elevate each other,
To grow and to share deeper and further insights in relation to these contemplations,
Practices and other things that we're discovering in this course.
I look forward to seeing you there.
This track was taken from the course,
Finding Enlightenment Through Fiction.
It's out now via my profile on Insight Dhamma,
And I invite you to check it out.
