Tuesday, May 24, 2011

WHEN ALL YOUR WISHES COME TRUE

Image yourself at an estate sale exploring the items for sale when you run across a brass oil lamp. Immediately your mind begins to manufacture images of an Arabian young man dressed in ragged clothing rubbing the lamp you have in your hand. The scene is from a cartoon that you have watched many times with your children. The images make you smile, and you think about buying the lamp for no other reason than the fond memories it conjures up.

You finally track down the person to give your money to. You know nothing about the people who are conducting the estate sell, nor do you know the person whose estate it is. You have been able to piece together that the person was a history professor at a nearby university. You marvel at the numerous trinkets that the person has accumulated. The pictures on the wall chronicle a life of travel and numerous acquaintances.

When you get home you take the lamp out of the bag and give it a closer inspection. There is no telling how old it is. The brass is tarnished and in bad need of polishing. Does it have some historical value? Why would an object of historical value be sold so cheap? If the price was any indication, the lamp was nothing but a cheap made-in-China dust collector.

You raise the lid and peek into the interior of the lamp just to make sure the resident genie is not inside. You are a little disappointed to find not even a small wisp of smoke. You think: what would I have wished for if the lamp had contained a genie?

The question is a good one: for all of us. What would you wish for? Would you wish for a large home, or a new car, or all the money in the world, or wish to be a monarch and live in a golden palace, or to be marooned on a desert island with the person of your dreams? Would you wish for all your wishes to come true?

Are you still in touch with your dreams and wishes? Are they real to you, or are they on a shelf somewhere collecting dust? Can you describe the dream? Can you put it or them into words? Can you visualize them?

More important, do you have faith in your dream? Do you believe that it will come true? Do you really want it to come true? Could you handle the consequences that the materialization of your dream would bring?

What if you had the power to make every one of your wishes come true? Wouldn't that reality force you to be careful for what you wished for, knowing every wish that came from your brain would materialize whether good or bad. Wouldn't that ability change the way you think?

The immediate reaction is skepticism. Why? Your disbelief betrays your thinking. You don't believe. You have no faith in yourself or your wish, nor do you have the understanding of how to use the lamp that is between your ears.

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