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OnManifesting


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As The Muse and I returned from our morning spent measuring room dimensions and overseeing inspections at what we’re prematurely referring to as The New House, I mentioned that I sure am glad that I couldn’t have imagined the place we found to live here. My experience once again proved inadequate to support the kind of envisioning traditional New Agers of the manifesting class espouse. Like most people, my expectations have been completely prejudiced by my experience, so they couldn’t possibly have contributed to foreseeing any but the serendipitous kind, and the Western extents of greater Denver, Colorado seem unique enough to prevent stumbling upon any place alike enough to more than vaguely remind me of any familiar place.

We searched in vain. We were creating our own experience, I guess, frustrating ourselves by holding up our template for what we were looking for and finding only poor comparisons. The ceilings were universally too low, creating cave-like crawl-space halls and suffocating living rooms. I began to walk around with hunched shoulders, expecting to get stuck in some narrow doorframe. ‘House too small, yard to big’ almost became a mantra for these two piss poor monks meditating on the fundamental injustice of this world. We felt locked out. When had we lost the key?

We never had any key to any future, just one to a fondly-remembered past. Looking for then in the here and now might qualify as a lifestyle for us aging boomers, but it’s really no way to live: Looking for life in all the wrong places. For then got all the goody sucked out of it on the way to now. Nothing but desiccation and a slowly evaporating puddle left behind.

What of the future, then? We might have already convinced ourselves that we know almost nothing about it, except for our deep insistences that we might know more than we realistically could. My future began to appear bleak a few short weeks into our manifesting work. My once proud magic wand, limp as a wilting carrot, greens withering toward crisp, I began to close myself off. If I could not manifest even weak examples of what I imagined I needed, what hope could I hold for tomorrow? I depressed myself.

I will forever contend that finding this place was what I should probably call a guided accident. It was not on the agenda that evening, but an ‘as long as we’re in the neighborhood’ afterthought. It neither glowed ethereally when we first saw it nor engendered rapturous squeals of delight. We rather somberly entered, prepared by lengthening experience to leave further disenchanted, but the place would not so easily submit to our demeanor. It offered surprising closet space. The kitchen, while smallish, overlooked about half the known universe through ample glass. The master bedroom seemed designed masterfully; a suite, really, with views. Of course the place was way too new for us, barely drinking age. Most of the houses I’d lived in came from another era, remnants of tastes gone before I was born. My traditionalist palate could never quite relate to new construction.

We left that night with a definite maybe on our minds and woke the next day with possibly emerging. By the time we’d returned for a second more searching look, we were teetering on the edge of inevitability. We might feel like victims of a tragedy if we could not figure out how to live there. Yesterday, we’d already emotionally moved in, inhabiting rather than Just Visiting. No longer shopping for anything, an exhilaration I’d vaguely remembered from prior relocations slipped past my settling discouragements into a living room with one lofty cathedral ceiling. Sunshine was streaming in through every window, as if each side of the place faced South. A fair, sweet breeze wafted through newly opened doors. The manifesting accomplished.

Looking at my template now, I can see just how inadequate it had to be. I was seeking a felt state using physical attributes to inform my choice. Not only didn’t the map agree with the territory, the territory never could have been mapped. My past and my present inhabit Flatland. My future might also hover there, but it need not necessarily exist in the same dimension. It might well manifest like height, but only outside the realm of familiar experience. I quickly labeled The New Place ‘Villa Vatta Schmaltz High’, but perhaps I should call it ‘Villa Vatta Schmaltz Height’ because it represents our deliverance from Flatland.

In Flatland, even gravity seems two-dimensional. All phenomena not directly observable and measurable with two-dimensional geometry gets classified as magic and so cannot muster credible belief or following. The West Coast always seemed like a place where more than two dimensions ruled. It never seemed ludicrous there to imagine many more, and manifesting often became more transcending than simply hitting a target. On the East Coast, the world flattens considerably. The low, endless rolling hills cancel each other out, yielding a flat enough plain to convince anyone that the sky, above, too, is nothing more than a flat extension of the Earth-bound landscape. That world neatly divides into heres and theres; no ups or downs, merely acrosses.

So I suppose it perfectly normal to begin our search here from within the heres and theres, excluding the N other dimensions we used to so casually traverse. Perspective, squished into this tight conformity, couldn’t see any real possibilities. The Front Range must have been chuckling down our shirt collars then, standing so proudly, pointing back to and forward into another way.

I think Golden, this hyphenated place that isn’t really one specific place, also exhibited subtle clues that this is not contiguous space, that other dimensions really do exist here, but we’d had our transcendence sweated out of us passing through a gauntlet of more recent experiences. Our perspective no longer allowed lofty imagining. Our eyes had grown accustomed to not expecting to see much of anything surprising.

Fortunately, our future seemed to have been stalking us a tad more skillfully than we were stalking her. She had our frontside covered while we exposed only our sorry backsides. I entered like a conquering conquistador, intending to turn this feral place into the equivalent of the Spain of my youth. I had, after all, God on my side. I could subdue the local population and never have to change what the world became, hammering it back into Spain, as God clearly intended it to become again. Hubris came before my fall.

Falling transcends the two dimensional, and so represents real if not experienced progress. If one can ‘fall’ here, might one also ‘rise’? Once one falls through the bottom of crawling, one has already begun to learn to fly. The sorry-assed vision I carried as a sacred trust betrayed me, thank heavens. The Power of Attraction spurned my best seduction, thank heavens. Something beyond my meager imaginings improved upon my very best laid plans. Once again. Thank Heavens.

Heaven, it seems to me, must be very like this experience, for it exists in a different plane. We only have these sorry few here to imagine something that nothing here could adequately represent. We carry felt senses, attempting to classify and catalogue, lest we forget. We forget. We always forget.

I swore last time that I would not forget, but I went and forgot anyway. I tried then to chronicle the transcendence, but that map didn’t match this territory and I humbly admit that even this map has scant territory supporting it. The page I’m writing on holds only two dimensions so I can only imply, in language stuck in Flatland, what might exist beyond this realm. We are either here or there, it seems, but this
must be an illusion. Here, on this page, I can be both here and there. In the Villa Vatta Sschmaltz High(t), I can see the Flatland spreading out below me and feel halfway into the sky above and still have a conventional Golden, Colorado Zip code. How unlikely was that?

©2015 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved









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