Money is where magical thinking often face-plants. 5000 years ago, it didn’t exist. Then someone came up with the Mesopotamian shekel. And now here we are, thousands of years later, and money is a big effing deal. People have it, or don’t have it, or come up with ways of earning more of it, stealing it, spending it. And manifesting it. Manifesting money is yet another way that people try to have more of it. There’s fabulous stories about how people have manifested money successfully just by meditating about it. I haven’t met one of them yet.
But I am going to share a personal story (to add to the world’s collection of tales about manifesting money) to see if we can learn a little from what happened to me, and how it might offer some clues about how the universe works. (Yes, I love trying to solve epic mysteries.)
Let’s begin by taking a moment to acknowledge a concept that I wish we spent more time discussing:
Money exists because the world believes in it.
It’s a way of keeping track of the rather abstract concept of value. Those pieces of colored paper have value because most people agree with this idea. The numbers in your (not so secure, see below) bank account have value because humans are agreeing on that too. Ironic that the greatest collective fiction of all time is so darn real. Now that we’ve all agreed that it exists, it’s suddenly very necessary for survival. Humans managed to survive for 200,000 years before money, but hey, that doesn’t seem to matter these days . . .
So here is my story about attracting income. Actually, it’s more of a story about the opposite of that. Last month I posted an article about how to improve financial health. I was super excited about the idea of using multiple streams of income to up-level my money game.
I’ve often read that one of the rules of manifesting money is that you must totally, completely, with every ounce of your soul believe that what you are calling in is really happening. Or so I hear. With this caveat, it’s easy to say that when someone fails to manifest money (or love or chocolate with cayenne or whatever their heart’s desire is) that they just didn’t really believe enough. That their will wavered for a quantum blip and thus the universe suddenly deleted their agenda from the fabric of reality.
To me, that seems a bit harsh. Human emotions are not a stable mechanism. Personally, I wake up some mornings full of gratitude and optimism, and that same day when I’m tired at night I can feel depressed about my life, even when nothing has actually changed in the previous 14 hours. We aren’t computers. We can’t just install some software in our mind and run it and know that we will achieve a specific outcome as a result. Perhaps in a few years, as technology continues to evolve at a freakish pace . . .
So, back to my story about improving my income. I was feeling fabulous about my plan, oh so very confident, especially because it wasn’t just an untethered plan about manifesting money through meditation or spell casting or some other esoteric method. It was an actual plan, a calculated, organized list of goals and the actions necessary to achieve them. A real solid, geeky, financial plan, not something whimsical from the realms of dream weaving and magical thinking. So of course I totally, completely believed in it, with all the gusto that any sort of money manifesting could possibly require. I not only had a plan, but I also had feeling behind my plan. Yes, I felt like the money was already in my life . . .
Until my debit card suddenly got declined at a gas station.
I figure it is a mistake, as there ought to be several thousand dollars in that account. So I buy half a tank of gas, something I haven’t done since I was about 16, and drive to my destination. Then I settle in to call the bank, thinking that it will take a moment to clear up whatever odd financial hiccup thwarted my purchase of a full tank of gas.
And I find out that all the money is gone. There is nothing in the account. WTF?!
I’m not going to say the name of the bank here, this isn’t some consumer alert website. I don’t want any more strange fall out from what was already a stressful experience. I will say that it is a major financial institution in the United States, and that someone hacked my online account, changed my email and password, and then wired out every single penny I had in there.
All in the same week that I’m eagerly crafting my financial plan and (perhaps slightly arrogantly) blogging about it.
I use fairly cryptic passwords, and I use my computer at home on a secured network. I’m not going to try to figure out how this security breach happened. While it took several weeks to resolve, my claim was ultimately successful and I received all my funds back. But I spent those few weeks pondering what I can learn from this plot twist. I’m a believer in silver lining, so I looked for it. And here are the shiny threads I discovered.
The experience felt like a reality check. In that sense, it was very humbling. What did strike me, quite painfully in the gut, is that I was robbed the exact same week that I was so diligently working on improving my financial health. What sort of dark and twisted feedback is this from life/creation/god/the universe/etc (insert your favorite world here to explain the true nature of reality)?!? Muhahahaha . . .
Or maybe it’s just a coincidence, not in some meaningful way, but in a random chaos sort of way. What’s interesting to me, is that either way (Meaningful or Meaningless) this unfortunate occurrence, and it’s uncanny timing, reveal something. I’m not the only player in this game. I’m not magically in control of everything that happens to me. This one time, total subjective reality strikes out, at least for a moment. I’m not tossing a subjective perspective out the window, but I’m noting the feedback.
I also felt like the stress of the whole thing was potentially an initiation for dealing with larger amounts of money in my financial future. That somehow, this was a chance to practice not completely freaking out while a substantial amount of my saving was in some sort of existential limbo. Perhaps some sort of psychological boot camp for bold future investments.
So consider this my first update on my adventure of improving my money game. It isn’t a pleasant one to share. I wish my first update was about how awesome all my income streams are doing, but that’s not the case, not yet. Over the past few weeks I’ve chipped away at my ideas, and I’m making some progress in what appears to be an overall context of co-creation.
I’m not manifesting money hand over fist just yet, but I’m applying my skills and expect to see results in the near enough future. In the meantime, this experience honed my ability to deal with problems in life, and stress, and the overall uncertainty of life. Resiliency is a great skill for anyone to have.