The Secret: A Cautionary Tale
A friend just read The Secret, the latest blockbuster New Agey book making the rounds on Oprah and Ellen. Just after that, he came upon an opportunity to buy a cottage in his favorite vacation place, where he had nostalgic memories of good times spent with family. There were a few glitches, though: it was not built to code, had to be bought for cash, and was in a somewhat dangerous location. He took it as a sign that the law of attraction was working in his life and got very excited. Yet, he didn't have enough money to buy it outright, his consulting work had fallen off, and the place was halfway around the world. We talked and I pointed out that there were inherent drawbacks, possibly for good reasons — perhaps to slow him down. The synchronicity might not have been to encourage him to buy this particular place, but to rethink his whole life structure right now, to see where he wanted to live, what he wanted to do for work, how conscious he wanted to be about his finances, and how he wanted to be involved with his family and friends.

This has happened to me before, often with what I took to be prophetic dreams telling me of a new person coming into my life. In the end, the dreams turned out to be warnings, not gleeful announcements, but my mind colored the information with my own inclinations at the time. A string of synchronicities I thought were pointing out a path of action turned out to be alerting me to a situation that was going to trigger my deepest subconscious blocks, and eventually free me from those fears, but all was not what it seemed!

It seems we are all hungry for the magic solutions to our stuck places. The Secret tells us: Ask, Believe, Receive. But, Wow! There's so much more to it. Not everything comes to us in physical form, not all godsends are materialistic. Anyway, my friend may indeed continue on his path to purchasing his little cottage, but at least now he's looking at a bigger, more complex picture in which to fit it.