I should be cleaning or chopping melon for tomorrow’s festivities but The Secret has crossed my path again and I am so pissed, again. Sort of.
Look, I, like most human beings, want to believe and really pretty much do believe in a lot of intangible things. I have experienced love that is powerful in my life – powerful like a force of nature, sweeping away old things and leaving bare new shores. I don’t personally believe that can be explained solely as brain chemistry + tribal behaviour. I also have experienced times in my life where I felt incredibly nudged by intuition or drawn to new things that have really worked out (I think of those times as flow, like suddenly getting in a current that takes you somewhere fine).
And I have experienced the reverse. Betrayals that left scars that love still can’t touch. And dark times when everything I touched seemed to turn to disaster.
So it’s not that I don’t believe in the truth of something beyond the explainable, ordinary, physical world. And I think, sometimes, I can even believe in forces like a push to be more/better/caring and a force that is destructive/hateful/negatory. And sometimes I could even personify the first. I have a hard time believing in someone like a Satan; I don’t know why but it’s just not quite in me.
And I sort of believe in the power of prayer and meditation to connect to a sort of – amorphous body of knowledge, something just a little deeper than intuition. A pool of human goodness, sort of.
But.
Jesus fuck, the idea that if you wish hard enough/pray hard enough for something then it will come true just drives me batty. Around the bend insane angry.
Do these new age people really think that if mothers in Ethiopia loved their children enough that there would be food for them? Do they really think that people who die of cancer weren’t able to imagine themselves well? Do they really think that the universe is just waiting for you to visualize that beautiful (planet-choking) SUV in order to hand it to you?
Please.
Can you not see beyond the tips of your toes?
Yes, your powers of visualization made you a wealthy person! Well, on an everyday level, I can see how that works. Because it helps you get over hurdles other people sometimes get stopped at. But come on; do you really think that your imaging to become rich and powerful were just that much better than a father in Rwanda’s prayers that his son come home safe and not end up in an unmarked grave with other genocide victims?
This stuff makes me feel physically ill. I want to be very unenlightened towards the people who forward this shit to me.
What is it in ordinarily sensitive and intelligent people that makes them be such idiots every time some cutsey key to the universe bullshit goes around? It makes plenary indulgences (the practice of paying the Church so that you get a free pass on a sin) look positively brilliant in comparison. And I hate how people who have experienced true despair and unfairness – abuse victims for example; do you really think the abuse continued when you were a kid because you didn’t want to have an ordinary life hard enough!! – still buy into this crap.
I know it is fear that drives it. Here’s my new-age guru thing for you: the beauty of the universe is that we don’t control it; it is not ebbing and flowing according to the petty desires and dark despairs of each tiny human being.
People suffer. Some people go through horrendous things, not because they deserve not, not because they lack faith, but because they were in a particular place at a particular time. Perhaps the point is to be present for that.
I believe in the power of imagination to show a way to address reality. But I do not believe that it changes that reality.
“We are all something, but none of us are everything.” – Blaise Pascal
