Then, that time at low tide, I thought to myself, if one were to be found whole, it would likely be here at low tide. Almost instantly, one appeared. It was nearly unbroken, was still a whole disk, but it had a small hole in the front. I presented it to him. He said, I should keep looking for a perfect one. I told him not to be greedy, that we were lucky to find this one.
Then, 10 minutes or so later, after pondering my response, I decided it was silly to dismiss the possibility of finding a perfect sand dollar. I started to expect that I would find one, and that I just needed to walk ‘over there’. I walked ‘over there’ for about a minute and it appeared: the perfectly whole and unbroken sand dollar.
Was it just a coincidence all of this internal dialog that I had, or did I manifest the shell as in ‘The Secret’. I hate to think it was the later because magical thinking is simply delusional (my grandmother was practicing magical thinking when she decided she was recovering from her brain tumor days before her death). On the other hand, a part of me likes to think that perhaps we do have a way of influencing the physical with our beliefs.
Or, perhaps, and I’d like to think this is most likely: I just needed to keep looking.
I would put magical thinking in the same category as the philosophy of non-violence, in that there is a time and place for both, and whether it serves you or not is based on your attachment to an outcome.
ReplyDeleteIf I practice non-violence, ideally I will psychically repel violent elements from my life. It's not a Magic Shield. If someone is firing a gun at me, non-violence won't stop the bullet. If I allow the bullet to remove me from the physical world, I've held to my philosophy, but seemingly "lost" this physical encounter, but that's purely physical thinking. If we extend that action (i.e. "what if everyone did what I did?") the outcome, in the larger sense, is different. Would the world be different if, confronted with violence, we never returned with violence? Absolutely it would.
I'm not advocating dying, I'm saying sometimes physical actions with a spiritual component have a delayed effect in the physical world. If your grandmother was practicing magical thinking, maybe the ultimate spiritual purpose (On her part, or God/her Divinity/the Universe's part) wasn't to save her physical body. Maybe there's something in play we don't consciously know yet.
I'm merely tilting at windmills here, though. I agree with your basic tenet that, for the most part, we should just "keep looking."
So on to Miami, then...?