Tend The Soil, Not The Flowers

In life, things get messy when you start to view the effect for the cause, the symptom for the illness, the light for the electricity, etc. Most of the struggles people tell me about boil down to one thing and one thing only:

A clear and consistent inability to recognize patterns of behavior, outcome, and even general “energy,” before they come to expression and manifestation.

Though we could go down a rabbit hole of “hows” and “whys,” — I could, for sake of explanation, launch into a diatribe about neoplatonic metaphysics, systems of emanation, and more — I’m not sure there’s anything to gain (right now, at least) by making things more complex than they have to be. We have a clear-cut problem and, so, a clear-cut solution is in order. Or, as clear-cut a solution as is possible, is in order.

Here’s the issue: You cannot, and should not, view the events that occur in your life as A. independent from all other events and B. arising in a vacuum with no underlying metaphysical “cause.”

The analogy I’d use to relate the way most people analyze and assess their thinking is that it’s like the way the earliest astronomers analyzed the night sky. The way they saw it, there are lots of objects out there; some are tiny and twinkle, others are bigger/brighter and don’t seem to twinkle. Some of the objects always follow the same path through the sky, others follows bizarre and seemingly random paths. There’s a giant glowing sun visible in the day — that’s certainly an outlier — and a smaller, but still quite large moon visible at night — another outlier. All of this “stuff” is out there. We’re here, it’s there. We appear to be at the center of it all, but beyond that, it doesn’t affect our perspective, and we don’t seem to affect it’s movement. And, certainly, each of these individual movements don’t seem to affect each other.

Some thousands of years have passed since people first started analyzing the sky, and a lot of our long-held intuitions about astronomy have been proven outright wrong. Our big outlier sun? Yeah, that’s the same exact thing are all those little twinkly things in the background of the night sky. Our sun and these stars both, are totally unlike those non-twinkly, slightly bigger, slightly brighter things that look a lot closer to the far away stars than our sun. Those are planets, and our big beautiful moon is like a very tiny version of those planets, despite how big it appears in the sky. Who would’ve thought?

And, most significantly of all, we now know that all those different movements we can study aren’t random. We’re orbiting the sun, and the moon is orbiting us. The other planets orbit the sun, too, but because they’re either closer to it or farther away than we are, sometimes we orbit faster/slower than they do and their “paths” look like they’re moving backwards or in other strange ways. Oh yeah, and that thing about us not affecting the celestial objects and them not affecting us? Not true. The reason our oceans have tides is because of the moon. We can’t see the effect that earth-moon relationship is having, but nevertheless, it’s there.

Long, boring astronomy metaphor aside, you have to start recognizing that all the things in your life — the internal thoughts/feelings and the external behaviors and outcomes — are all interconnected, and they’re all “caused” by a deeper, more hidden “metaphysical motion.” You can’t “see” gravity, but if you study the physical world and the night sky long enough, eventually you can infer its existence.

Thus it is for us with “manifestation.” You can’t see directly that higher order force that’s driving things, but you can infer its existence via self-analysis.

Here is the larger point I’m driving at, which I’ll communicate by way of another metaphor:

If you throw a handful of seeds into desert soil, you’ll end up growing desert shrubs and cacti. You can decide you want roses, wish for them all you want, and still, your garden will sprout cacti. You can go to the store and buy rose seeds, plant them with care, water them mindfully, and really, really pray to grow roses, but guess what — no roses are going to grow. The desert shrubs and cacti aren’t appearing randomly; it’s not just luck that you get those plants and someone else gets a garden of roses. Those plants grow where you are because that’s what the soil allows.

No matter how much you may despise desert shrubs and cacti, there’s no point getting mad at the plants. It’s simply the order of things that they grow in this soil.

And, more importantly, you’d be a fool to get mad at your rose seeds, or at yourself, when roses don’t sprout in your desert soil. The problem isn’t your intentions, and it’s not the quality of the seeds, it’s simply that what you intend to grow doesn’t align with the nature of the medium in which you’re planting your intentions.

Okay — back to clear language now:

You want to be healthy, or wealthy, or wise, and you sit down to do a bunch of manifestation techniques in an attempt to trigger those things into experience. You plant your seeds with intention, and yet, all that grows is another bill to be paid, a sprained ankle, and another bad decision that makes you appear as a fool. What’s the deal? What did you do wrong?

Well, you planted your seeds in the wrong soil. You took your intentions and your manifestation techniques, and you planted them in a state that by its very nature has to reject them. If you’ve been in a state that “grows” sickness, poverty, and stupidity, that’s a sign that you’ve been planting in soil conduive to the growth of those things. Why would something different grow just because you threw down some new seed in the old, crappy soil?

Here’s my super broad, top-down advice to you:

You’d get a lot more of what you want from life if you spent more time tending your soil and less time tending plants. Meaning, all of your attention should be toward making subtle but consistent shifts to your baseline psycho-spiritual state of consciousness, and none of your attention should be on “manifesting” this or that.

The harsh reality is, your soil is going to grow whatever it grows. If you’re in a destructive and angry psycho-spiritual state of consciousness, destructive and anger-triggerring events are going to occur. If you’re in a lonely and desparate psycho-spiritual state of consciousness, events are going to occur that highlight your loneliness and make you feel even more desparate. You can break your back potting a single rose — a single instance of pleasant, loving romance, perhaps — and maybe you’ll get that rose to grow. If you try hard enough, I’m sure you can get it to grow actually. But the rest of your garden will keep on growing what it does because the soil you’ve laid down hasn’t changed.

We think, in our short-sightedness, that if we just toil over one flower and get something beautiful to grow this once, that magically the rest of our garden will bloom into perfection. But that’s not how it works. And, if all the time and energy poured into your one fated-not-to-live-long rose had been poured into improving the quality of your soil, you might’ve sprouted ten flourishing roses in the same amount of time it took you bring one barely-alive one into existence.

Stop looking out. Nothing out there is going to help you. No one flower saves your garden. If a rose blooms randomly in a radioactive-wasteland, that’s awesome, but it’s not a means by which one can say, “Wow, what fertile soil I’m growing on.”

You must focus on you — on what’s going on inside. That’s the only measure. That’s the soil. Just ask yourself day-to-day, what am I filled up with? Am I filled with love and comfort and feelings of abundance? Or, am I filled with anger and apathy and jealously amongst other things.

It’s not a game. You don’t get to “try” to hold a good state of consciousness for a day, a week, a month, or even a year, so that you can manifest a car, and then, if the car doesn’t come soon enough say, “Ah, what the hell I’ve been doing everything I was supposed to!” You are your soil; things will always grow. Set yourself up so that what grows in the garden of your life are beautiful and pleasant things.

As always, good luck.