Welcome
to my Private Planet
Carl Jung believed that every person,
object, action and event in the dreams that we have represent the dreamer’s innermost
wish and the resistance or opposition to it. He believed each element of the
dream to be an aspect of the dreamer’s own personality. Now, it’s not my intention to talk about
dreams today, though we will be talking about vision. But what I will be speaking about today is
this: What if you were the only person
in the world? What if, just as in Jung’s
idea of the dream, everything was an aspect of your very own personality? You would have your very own private planet.
So,
what if you made all the choices
regarding the outcome of everything you experienced? What if you could have it your way
everywhere, not only at Burger King?
Think about the possibilities of what you could have. Think about something and voila! There it is!
Would you like that? And think
about the fact that the only other living things on your private planet would
be the things that you created because you wanted them there.
Now
maybe this is a kind of lofty idea. And
maybe we would be putting ourselves on the same footing as G_d. But think for a minute what it would be like. Would it be a fantasy come true? We think of having this power when we
experience lucid dreaming, so why not in our waking lives?
Well,
let’s go back for a moment to before the Universe existed. What was there? G_d, right? The initial thought of existence. Intellect in its purest,
most pristine form. Well, after a
while, when thought begins to reflect a little, it wants something to occupy
itself with. Maybe it gets bored. Wouldn’t you?
Right! So
just as you would do, if you were the only person on the planet, G_d decided to
create something. He made a paintbrush,
so to speak, and began painting the world, full of all kinds of exciting
landscapes, plants, animals and human beings.
But there was something different about the human beings, because not
only did they have a spark of life within them, they also had the capacity for
intelligent thought. G_d knew that they
would have needs to fulfill their hunger and thirst, a place for shelter from
the elements, a means of procreation, and something to occupy their meager
mental abilities. He had to come up with
a way, though, to get them to go after the things they needed for
themselves. Animals had their
instincts. But humans, with their
reasoning ability, didn’t have that. So
G_d gifted humans with the ego: the part
of the mental makeup that says, “me first.”
Now
the ego serves us well as we are growing up, so that we can get our diapers
changed, be fed, kept warm, fit in socially, and so forth. But developmentally, if we don’t learn to set
the ego aside, because we aren’t really the only person on the planet, we get
into little wars with others who also want things “their way.” We feel that we have to have the best of the
best—keeping up with the Joneses. We
feel that we have to be better looking, better fed, better talented—an endless
list of betters. Our motto is “me first.” And we do this because the ego drives us to
it.
But
let’s think about this for a minute.
Once we have gotten to the point of being able to provide for our own
needs, does the ego really serve us? It
causes arguments, jealousy, self-loathing if we can’t
get what we want, and in the end, our self-esteem takes a beating when we find
out that we really can’t always be first.
So just what good is this ego anyway?
We have to get to a point with our consciousness that we can say, “It’s
of no good.”
Now
I’m not suggesting that you can’t have a healthy opinion of yourself. You should.
You need to like who you are and what you do and the way in which you
contribute to the world. But a healthy
self-concept is not reliant on the ego.
In the grown-up world, to achieve the greatest happiness, we need to be
able to reach out to others and raise them up as well.
Now
what do I mean by this? I mean that
rather than expressing the singularity and separation caused by ego, that we are better served by participating in the unification,
the connection between ourselves and others.
Some
of you may have heard of the movie, The
Secret, which talks about the Law of Attraction. We can do a great deal by focusing on the
positive aspects of any given situation, through the use of affirmations. But what is even more powerful in moving our
lives toward the direction of total happiness, is the use of our combined power
to establish what we want in the world.
So it is our connection to others that activates
metaphysical—unseen—energy to bring about positive things in our world. We aren’t on our own private planet, we’re not the only person in the world, so it
doesn’t serve us to behave as if we are.
And until we set the ego aside, we are only setting ourselves up for
disappointment.
Let’s
look at the concept of connection. If we
think of this concept in terms of the worlds great religions, think about what
is happening in our world today. The
most powerful religion is Islam. Why is
this? Because Muslims pray prescribed
prayers (try saying that ten times fast) five times a day. Jews pray in a similar fashion three times a
day. The average Christian says the Lord’s Prayer a couple of times a week on
average. So guess where the power is and
try to understand how it got there. It
got there through unified thought and practice—connection.
There
is no right or wrong to this situation.
It just is. And we can see what
direction the energy is going to flow in if we are a day late and a dollar
short when it comes to acting on the metaphysical level. The saving grace, however, is that the
action, what grounds the metaphysical, needs to be positive. And we have the ability to see that from a
much better vantage point than our Islamic brothers and sisters. That is why we need to think in terms of the
Spiritual, the metaphysical, the unseen and not the physical which is part and
parcel of the separatist ego.
What
can we do with our connectedness? We can
heal, we can create harmony, we can influence matter
and energy. We can certainly have all of
our needs met with a lot less physical work.
This doesn’t mean there isn’t work to be done. That is surely not true. And that doesn’t mean it is easy. Mental work, as most people who have had
challenges in mathematics will tell you, is hard. It can be exhausting. But it can be done as surely as we can train
the body to run a marathon.
So
what we need to do is think of the number 1, not in
terms of the ego, rather than in terms of our connectedness, our one-ness with
all of humanity.
Some
of you know that one of my favorite books of all time is Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. Horton, the elephant hears voices coming from
a ball of clover. It contains a
settlement of creatures called Whos. He
vows to protect the inhabitants, but his nemesis, the crow, pokes fun at
Horton, eventually stealing the clover and dropping it in a field of
clovers. Horton hunts diligently until
he has found the one that houses the Whos. Then he tells them they must make as much
noise as they can so that his friends will hear them and help take care of
them. Only when the very last little Who, hiding away,
adds his voice to the cries, do the kangaroos and the crow hear their voices
and accept them as real.
This
story is all about connectedness. We are
our brother’s keeper. It’s time to move
beyond the Joneses, and realize that what exists for us on the metaphysical,
unseen level, is what really counts. So
think of the number 1, but think of it as All-in-One.