PSIII 12 Relationships With Things

12 - Relationships With Things

Can you have relationships with things? Well, of course I can't know if you can have relationships with things, but I well remember completely identifying one year with the Christmas tree who had served its purpose and now, brownish and needles drooping, stripped of all it's finery, was unceremoniously thrown from the upstairs sitting room window to lie in the snow below.

At age three, I WAS the Christmas tree and I went from having grown happily and strong in a sunlit forest to the shock of being in a house, the joy of being admired, to being discarded carelessly and without a thought, to lying broken and unloved in the snow, in a deep and complete identification flash-through that lasted all of a heartbeat long.

My parents used to tell the story of how I was in hysterics for nearly a week and had nightmares for many months afterwards - and from that year on, kindly bought Christmas trees with roots in pots and planted them in the garden to avoid a re-occurrence.

A hypnosis client once had developed a long lasting phobia of extreme proportions as a result of his mother having ripped up the favourite teddy bear right before his eyes - and frankly, if my Christmas tree experience was anything to go by, she might as well have ripped this man's intestines out for real, so deep can this identification become in imaginative children.

Relationships with things, however, need not be confined to childhood toys and objects, although there is often tremendous emotion tied up with such things.

Quite a number of people have brought old toys of theirs into the sanctuary in some form or other - one was absolutely delighted to have discovered an old handmade patchwork quilt which he had spent looking at, imagining about and dreaming over, for years as a child, and which his mother had carelessly thrown away one day when he was at school.

Natalie mentioned, with some embarrassment, that she was obsessed by a ring she had lost as a teenager - it had been her very first gemstone and gold ring, and she had been so very proud of it until one day she'd carelessly lost it at the beach. She didn't like the way she kept thinking and dreaming about it, especially since she was now living a subsistence style New Age Traveller life and had decided that earthly possessions were basically evil and would stop one from being a truly spiritual person.

There's two things I have to say to that.

Firstly, if everything in the Universe has been created by God, Goddess, All There Is, The Universe, that means by definition that Natalie's gold ring was also created by the same, and carrying with it in every atom, every electron, and every quantum particle of it's very being the essence of spirit. From that point of view, it's ok to have a relationship with it anyway, and in fact it could be said that if one was truly enlightened, one should have a relationship with every aspect of creation, including golden rings.

The other thing that springs to mind is the old story of the two monks who met a beautiful young woman by the side of a river. The older monk picked her up, carried her across, set her down and graciously received her thanks. Some miles down the road, the younger monk said, "Why did you do that back there? You know we're not supposed to touch women.", upon which the other replied, "I put her down an hour ago. Why are you still carrying her?"

"Carrying" any kind of issue, be it a golden ring, an old patchwork quilt, or a disembowelled teddy bear in the form of thinking about it, worrying about, dreaming about it, grieving for it, debating with yourself about it, means that the issue is an issue that is crying out for some sort of resolution. And, if it comes to that, what do these objects truly represent? That's a rhetorical question, so don't worry about hallucinating whether Natalie might have lost her virginity that same night on that same beach where she lost her precious ring - although, in fact, she did. Simply accept the fact that there's something that needs to be resolved, and go ahead and resolve it now, easily, practically and once and for all.

How?

The simple answer is to bring these and any object you have a relationship with, home to you.

Let them come home and be with you and provide for you whatever it is that they provide; and the beauty of it is that it doesn't matter whether they were destroyed many years ago in real life, or stolen from you, or damaged or simply lost in the river of time; in your sanctuary they can come to life, be with you until such time as you are ready to let go of them, if you should ever want to.

Natalie found her treasured gemstone ring in a little jewellery box in one of the subterranean levels below her house. She put it on her finger, it's been with her in thought ever since, and I'm glad for her.

12/1 – The Red Bicycle

Here we come to a very important principle of relationship with things – namely, that when you have wanted and desired something at some point in your life most intensely but did not get it then, that this sets up a form of injury that can haunt someone a lifetime.

We call this the Red Bicycle principle, named after the gentleman who, in his seventies, bought a red bicycle for his granddaughter for Christmas. The little girl wanted no such thing and was very disappointed as she had hoped for a computer game; he watched her reluctantly riding it around outside the drive for a bit to please him and felt a huge wave of sadness descend upon him “from nowhere”.

The fact was of course that he had once wanted a red bicycle, wanted it so much that it nearly became an obsession, but he never received it then.

We all have our own red bicycles and the tragedy is that no matter how many of them we buy when we’re 25, 35, 55, 85; no matter if we buy whole warehouses full of them and sleep there, bury ourselves beneath them, dedicate our lives to them, we can never fulfil that original need because that moment, that time is gone irretrievably – it’s too late now for red bicycles.

Well, let me re-phrase that. It is too late for real red bicycles – but it isn’t too late to go back in time and give that boy he once was and who stood for hour upon hour outside the bike shop, staring in through the window at the shiny, expensive red boys bicycle with the white handles and saddle and the cat’s eyes in the spokes, his hearts desire at last.

We can appear, and we can take him by the hand into that shop, and buy it for him, and help him take it outside, and watch him cycle off down the road, that one true and honest heart’s desire filled at last.

For some of us, there is such a momentous “unfulfilled needs reservoir” that it feels like the size of an ocean and if we even began to make a breach in the dam, it would wash us clean away.

As you have been reading this, I am sure you have already began to think of some things of your own you wanted with that extraordinary intensity of a child and it might well be that you recognise some resonance purchases of this in your life right now which still fail to fill the old need.

When next you go shopping, and you find yourself attracted to some object that common sense tells you you shouldn’t be wanting or needing, stop and consider just what that resonance is and where it came from.

I had an experience of this not too long ago. I saw a shiny plastic sword and shield set in a toy shop whilst looking for a birthday present for a niece. I very nearly bought it because I was completely drawn to it and fascinated by it but then found enough wherewithal to have a brief sanctuary moment and ask the part of me who needed this toy to step forward. I was not surprised to see it was a tomboy me of about 6 years old who fought mock battles with the boys in the neighbourhood and to whom this shiny silver sword and shield would have been just about all the birthdays, Christmases and general festivities wrapped up in one.

I made the transfer from the real object in my hands to the sanctuary space and the little girl was as delighted as delighted can possibly be, snatched it from me and ran off at high speed. At the same time, the object in my hand turned from a fantastic magical thing to a simple, quite well produced toy that I no longer needed to purchase under the guise of giving it to a girl who was nothing like I used to be for a strange and most likely, highly unwanted present.

The Red Bicycle principle extends to many other circumstances and not really just objects; and make no mistake, even today there are things that are the current Red Bicycle in your life and that you need these “energies” NOW – not in 30 years from now, because by then, their time in your life has long passed and they are no longer appropriate.

Whether it’s a jaguar or a swimming pool; a corner office or a swing in the garden; a garden of your own or a bed with valances; a summer house in the mountains or a luxury yacht, a recording studio or a nature reserve of your very own – go right ahead and have this now. Have it, live in it and take from it what you need as fully and completely as you ever will, because chances are it isn’t the bricks, mortar, metal or actual physical reality that is what is important about it, but a state of being, an experience or an energy represented by those “hard metaphors” instead.

It is a very important process and one that can not only save you a lot of money on unnecessary and in the end, unsatisfactory purchases; but also something that can contribute significantly to your happiness in the here-and-now, and entirely achievable immediately, regardless of your financial situation or any other circumstance.

Now here's the last of the relationships that I want to discuss, and some hold it's the most profound of them all.