Maybe You Did Get What You Wanted

Pondering my failure to manifest something I wanted, I felt the familiar feeling of frustration rising. Then a different thought came to mind: the memory of something improbable I had successfully manifested. Then another such remembrance came, and another! Perhaps, I thought, I haven't done so badly after all.

The fact is that I have gotten the vast majority of the things I have wanted in life. They didn't always appear in the way I had expected, and often not the time frame I preferred, but they did show up.

Looking at my life from a surface perspective, most people would not be particularly impressed. I don't have 20 million dollars, a post-graduate degree, a designer wardrobe, or a palatial mansion. But the truth is that I haven't ever wanted any of these things. (No, not even the 20 million dollars, which would carry too much responsibility for my tastes.)

Here is an eclectic selection of improbable things I wanted and have manifested:

The sleek, pocket size, wire-free phone, which I envisioned at age five and was told did not exist (it didn't, then), is something I now use daily.

As a 12-year-old who lived in Virginia and had little opportunity to travel, I heard the song Ventura Highway (by the group America) and yearned to visit Ventura, California. Three years later, my dad moved there and bought my first-ever airline ticket so I could visit him. We rode on Ventura Highway many times.

In 2009 I felt a strong impulse to get to know some of the members of my favorite (moderately well-known) rock band. Through a series of unexpected events, this happened. One of them offhandedly suggested I write a song, which turned out to be the first of many – thereby fulfilling my childhood desire to write songs.

As a young adult, my worst fear was that I would end up staying in my hometown and not have any real adventures. My circuitous life path has led me to reside in nine different US states, with adventures galore! I now live almost 3000 miles from my hometown.

Of the major desires I've had that did not manifest, I now understand why they would not have been beneficial in the long run. I was, for instance, highly motivated to become a special-agent investigator for the US government. I came close to being accepted into the training programs of two organizations, but it seemed like my timing was always out of sync with their hiring. In the 1990s, such a career seemed like a good idea. As the 2000s progressed, it clearly did not, at least not for me. Mid-career, I likely would have found myself engaged in endeavors that are counter to my values and intent.

Regarding several romantic relationships that I thought I couldn't live without, I've noticed a direct correlation between the strength of my (past) desire for them to work and my present relief that they did not.

And here's the important point: I'm not so special! My guess is the most everyone has actually manifested the majority of what they have desired. The things we haven't created yet and still want, we very likely can have. And they probably will show up faster if we give ourselves credit for our accomplishments.

Alexi Paulina's ebooks are available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/alexi3

What Do You Do?

The forthright question, "What do you do?" was the first thing a woman said when someone introduced her to a friend of mine. She may as well have asked, "What social-status ranking should I assign to you?" or "What box can I put you in?"

My friend works in information technology as a software developer, but that is not what he does. What he does could be more accurately described with a statement like, "I collaborate with a group of like-minded people to achieve common goals, using my skills to accomplish endeavors I have chosen to participate in. I support my colleagues, company, and clients, making everyone's day a little brighter with everything I do." Someone else with the same job description might (if they were honest) have a very different answer, such as, "I grudgingly show up for work and perform my assigned tasks adequately enough so that I don't get fired. I endeavor to spread my misery to everyone I come in contact with."

If you examine a person's roles and actions from the perspective of what they actually are doing – with energy – it may be very different from what it seems like they are doing, from a superficial perspective. I have no doubt that there are organizations in which the custodian or receptionist does more valuable "work" than the company's officers.

I am acquainted with a number of people who don't engage in conventional jobs, yet contribute a great deal to the collective. There's the stay-at-home mom whose explorations into self-awareness and the nature of consciousness rival those of renowned spiritual masters. She doesn't have a title, yet freely shares her knowledge and insights with others, just for the joy of it. There's the college student who is the unofficial "spiritual coach" and counselor to numerous acquaintances. His part-time job is shoveling horse manure! I would love to see the face of the woman who asked that challenging question, if she received the answer this young man undoubtedly would give: "I'm a poo shoveler."

The actually are a lot of "poo shovelers" out there, but most of them would not claim the title.

Alexi Paulina's ebooks are available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/alexi3

The Dream Stream

Most of us assume that our life consists of a waking reality filled with people, locations, and objects, interspersed with a dream reality in which we create this type of imagery in more malleable form. We assume that the dream reality disappears when we wake up. I’m not so sure it does.

One night in 1995-09, I was meditating and reached a state in which my body was totally still, to the point that it felt immobile. Had someone walked into the room and yelled, "Fire," I am reasonably certain I would have been able to willfully reanimate my body, but otherwise it was as if it were paralyzed. My mind, however, became highly active, with images running like a slideshow. I realized these were images from dreams I'd had that I had never before remembered in the waking state. I knew they weren't necessarily recent dreams, but ones I'd had throughout my life. This "dream stream" continued to run for what seemed like a long time, until I decided I had better get some sleep because I had to rise early the next morning.

After that experience, the dream stream would start running at random times during the day, interrupting my train of thought with a seemingly endless array of previously unremembered dream images. I recall one time I was at my job, eating a piece of birthday cake while talking to a coworker. The dream stream started up, and I discovered that I could allow it to run in the background while I continued the conversation. (This might be a good time to mention that I have never used mind-altering or hallucinogenic drugs or substances of any kind, nor do I have tendencies toward psychosis. I wasn't having flashbacks or hallucinations.)

Over time, my spontaneous accessing of the dream stream became less frequent and eventually almost ceased. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2011-04, it started up again. It doesn't happen every day, but on some days it occurs a lot. It is as if I am closer to this "layer of consciousness" at certain times and under certain conditions.

I've realized that I am not necessarily accessing images from "past" dreams, but am tapping into different layers of consciousness that exist all the time. It's just that I usually am not aware of them during my waking day, when I am focused on other things.

The dream reality is, in many ways, richer, more complex, and certainly more flexible than my waking reality. Increasingly, I am getting the sense that more of my "real life" occurs in these areas of consciousness than in the more solid-appearing waking world. It has occurred to me that at some point, I might lose interest and stop coming here entirely. To others it would seem as if I had died, but that would not be my perception. This may explain why many of the best sources of nature-of-reality information say that physical death is not a big deal to the person who has died. They simply stop hanging out in this area of town, so to speak.

Alexi Paulina's ebooks are available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/alexi3

In Your Own Movie

No doubt you've heard it is possible for people to be living different lives, side by side. I am seeing direct evidence that this is the case. Recently, for instance, I met a friend at the juice bar in a large grocery store. My experience included a congenial exchange with the lively barista, a wonderful fresh-fruit concoction, and a drive home that included seeing a big rainbow over a lake.

Conferring with my friend later, it turned out that his experience that evening had some additional features. As he was leaving the parking lot, he had an unfriendly exchange with an aggressive man who claimed that my friend had almost backed into him and his child. I've been in a car with this man many times and have seen him be unfailingly polite in allowing people to cross in front of or behind his vehicle. It seemed odd that he would draw to him a person like this, someone who obviously was looking for a fight for no apparent reason. This isn't the first time my friend has encountered this sort of person, seemingly inexplicably. He was genuinely puzzled and requested insight into these occurrences.

I thought about it for a minute before carefully pointing out that my friend has issues with military people. For reasons I won't go into, he has a strongly negative response even to just seeing a military person in uniform. In several such instances, I have seen him project so much oppositional energy (even without saying a word) that it is palpable. When I mentioned this, he asked me, "Did you see that tall guy in army fatigues walking out of the store?"

I had not seen the man; my mentioning military people had been purely an intuition. How I had managed to miss seeing a six-and-a-half foot tall man in uniform, I do not know. I also tend to notice military personnel, though not for the same reasons as my friend. If such a person had been in visual range, I surely would have seen him. It also seemed odd that I had not seen the other man and his child walking across the parking lot when I was on the way to my car.

Apparently what had occurred was that my friend, seeing the military person, had projected strong oppositional energy. About 20 minutes later, a similar person (of approximately the same height and age) had been drawn to my friend and became angry at him, seemingly for no reason. Had the military man at the juice bar been cognizant of my friend, he would have been equally perplexed by his anger! It all made sense.

The truly curious piece for me was that I had not seen either of those tall men – they did not exist in my reality. Those "characters" were not necessary in my scene, apparently.

Recently I also have had occurrences where a person whose attention I was trying to engage did not see or hear me, even though they were literally looking right at me. Each of us truly is living in our own, individually created world. Sometimes they sync, sometimes they don't.

Alexi Paulina's ebooks are available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/alexi3

Tearing Off Labels

What would happen, I wondered, if I discarded all the external labels I define myself by? What if I dispensed with my astrological designations, Myers-Briggs type indicator, Enneagram type, birth order placement, family history, cultural and genetic background, and (less widely known) perceptual type and families of consciousness? What if I could not even remember what year I was born? All I would have to go on would be who I am right now, in this moment.

My physical body would provide some clues about my genetic background; the language I know best and my habits of expression would reveal something about my cultural background. But how the heck would I know my sun sign? If I forgot that I was a Libra, might I find myself acting like an Aries or a Scorpio? What if I retook the Myers-Briggs test when I was in a different mood from the first time – would I then define my personality differently?

The truth is that every one of those designations was a just a snapshot in time, assumed at the moment I was born or when I took a test or consulted an expert in a particular system. Even a person's time of birth, which seems so fixed, actually is not. For every event, a multitude of probabilities exists. In one probability, I was born on the date I accept as my birthday. In another probability, I may have been born weeks earlier. In another probability, it could have been a week later. Astrologers assert that even minutes can make a significant difference in one's chart, and therefore in one's personality and life events. If my birth records were to disappear, who would I be now? If I forgot everything I had accepted to be true about myself, what might I be like?

Perhaps, rather than trying to change ourselves, we could just drop our assumptions and discover who we really are – now.

Alexi Paulina's ebooks are available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/alexi3

Striking a Balance

We live in a world where, at least presently, people visibly change throughout life, revealing to some degree how long they've been on the planet. Individuals vary in how much they express this belief. It would not surprise me if in the future people en masse choose to remain much more youthful-looking throughout their lives, even if those lives last significantly longer than they do now. It certainly is possible, as we (energetically) recreate our bodies in every moment.

Some folks reach a certain stage of life, breathe a sigh of relief that they aren't expected to look attractive anymore, and then chop off their hair and start wearing caftans. Personally, I wouldn’t do this even if I lived 100 more years! It simply is not representative of who I am.

Neither do I want to fight with the idea of growing older. The frozen faced, duck-lipped look is not one I aspire to. I see nothing wrong with cosmetic procedures; it's just that (at least in my perception), most of them don't truly make people look young. A friend of mine used to enjoy having me accompany him on trips to an upscale grocery store because I would surreptitiously point out to him the cosmetic work various customers had had done. My eagle eye could instantly spot everything from face lifts to breast implants to lip augmentation to cosmetic dentistry. The youth-enhancing procedures were the most obvious. The people who'd had a lot of this type of work done indeed did not look old, nor did they look young. They just didn't look quite…human.

Is it possible to strike a balance between not caring about one's appearance and trying every trick in the dermatologist's before-and-after book? If our inner self is perennially young, can't we look young without trying to look young?

I believe we can. This doesn't mean we won't change throughout life. Our inner self is continuously morphing, and our physical body is a manifestation of who we are. It makes sense that our appearance would change, but it doesn't have to change in ways we find objectionable. It also is likely that cosmetic procedures will improve, so those who want to use physical methods can do so more effectively.

A key to physical or any other kind of change seems to be accepting what we have created already. As a teenager, I strongly disliked having a round face and a thin body. If I could have magically transferred some of the fat from my facial cheeks to my butt cheeks, I would have done it in a heartbeat! Eventually I reached a place of moderate acceptance about my dichotomous face and body, and my face got a bit thinner. Yet I was incredulous when I read recently that a trend for female celebrities is to lose weight from their bodies and plump out their faces artificially.

Apparently it's true that if you live long enough, eventually everything comes into style.

Alexi Paulina's ebooks are available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/alexi3

Getting By on – What?

People that are perceived to "get by on their looks" tend to elicit a mix of awe and derision from others. Awe, because it takes a lot of confidence to be so self-assured in these days of cosmetically and technologically enhanced models and movie stars. Derision, because employing such advantages seems both shallow and unfair.

My take on the matter is that, particularly for women, it isn't smart to put all your eggs into the beauty basket. In our culture, the perception of female beauty is closely tied to youth, which is ephemeral. I'm a strong believer that humans can be attractive, healthy, and youthful-looking throughout life. Nevertheless, everyone grows older chronologically. It's a fact of life.

If a person's "value currency" is based primarily on their physical appearance, their perceived self-value is likely to diminish year by year, at least if they align with mass beliefs about youth and beauty. Every year there is a whole new crop of young people reaching adulthood. There are a fair number of men who will choose an average-looking 25-year-old over a gorgeous 50-year-old, even if they themselves are older. I've seen this happen many times. (I've also seen the opposite occur. One time at a social gathering, a youngish man approached me nervously, and I thought he was going to ask for a date. No, that wasn't it – he wanted to know if the radiant, silver-haired friend I had just been talking to was single! Alas, she was not, but I found it notable that he had been drawn to her more than to the numerous younger women in the room.)

By the time I reached my teens (after comparing my late-bloomer self to the models in slick fashion magazines), I concluded that I would not be able to get by on my looks and therefore needed to develop other qualities. In college classes, a broad range of jobs, volunteer work, and (later) an array of creative endeavors, I aimed for excellence. Just getting by was never enough; I had to be exceptional at anything I did.

In retrospect, I see that I could have been a little easier on myself. Most of the rest of the world does not expect a person to look like a model or movie star! But perhaps it is just as well that my "main thing" was not my looks. Having never considered myself the belle of the ball, I need not be concerned about relinquishing the crown.

The truth is that assessing a person's value by any "stratified" system (looks, money, or social status) promotes separation. The point of living is to express one's talents and add value to the world, not to "get by" through exploiting one's perceived advantages. Perhaps, as a teen, I was just a bit ahead of my time.

Alexi Paulina's ebooks are available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/alexi3