CHAPTER 16
MUST HAVE AND CAN’T HAVE
When you want something too much, it tends to run away from you. When you want to avoid something too strongly, it tends to seek you out.
Think of being in the water and reaching too hard for something so that you make a wave which pushes it away. And then think of pulling back from something so hard that it creates a suction which draws it to you.
It is not that you can’t like something and get it and have it, it is that you can’t crave something and cling to it without getting into trouble. It calls for a lightness of touch rather than desperation. The more desperate you are, the harder it will be.
You might say that your energy is behaving in a backwards fashion. Your attempts to draw in what you “must have” and to push away what you “can’t have” between them create a sort of unpleasant vacuum. It is similar to the “ridges” formed by the opposing forces of a problem (two things pushing against each other forming a sort of wall) but it is more dynamic in nature with love, fame, and fortune rushing away from you and undesirable things continually landing on your plate.
If you can reach a level of acceptance, of being willing to have or not have, if you can like and enjoy without craving and compulsion, if you can be disinterested or walk away from something without rejection and revulsion, then you can rise above this mechanism and dissolve it. That is the real secret of success. That is how to lead a charmed life where good things come your way instead of studiously avoiding you.
One of the best ways to break down a “must have” is to visualize wasting the item. Sometimes it might feel like you are feeding things into a vacuum for a few commands. And then the barrier will break down and you will find that its easy to have something if you will give a little bit of it away.
Then you can go further by visualizing giving it to others and others giving it to you.
We will run this on a number of common “buttons” (a button is something you push or that somebody else pushes on you to bring about a reaction, in other words, a hot topic).
In some cases, the item might be one that you are trying to avoid instead of something that you are trying to have. In that case, instead of “wasting” the item, you should run “having more of” the item as the first process (the other processes remain the same). We will discuss that variation further in the next chapter. For now, if one of these seems like something you want to get away from rather than have, use “have more of” instead of “waste” as the first process in the area.

