“When you are in a ‘wonderful state’, you can give so much more to everyone you love. And you know what? Happiness is power. There is a happiness advantage in life. Happiness is a priority in our relationships, in our business, in our health and in everything we touch. Living in a wonderful state, no matter what, is the greatest freedom and the greatest gift we can offer to those we love. This is the experience of absolute abundance — the abundance of joy!— this is true richness.”

This is what he writes in his financial (yes, financial!) book ‘Unshakeable‘ or. In his book, ‘Unshakeable’, the well-known American business strategist, motivational speaker and ‘life coach’, or. ‘success coach’ Tony Robbins. What’s more, we already have this abundance, he goes on to suggest, when he says that we can only provide ourselves with this measure of happiness. The decision to do so is therefore in our hands.

I am well aware that the last sentence may (over)read as pure cliché, but if we delve into it in the same way that we can delve into the exhortation‘Man, know thyself’ (the inscription above the door of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi), we can indeed come a step closer to our own Truth.

Our inner world creates our outer world

How true it is that our inner world creates our outer world, even if this sounds abstract and our human (un)mind would (again) require evidence for argument or clarification to confirm it – but our evidence can be as simple as ‘just ‘ remembering what the famous American life coach Maya Comerota. For example, remembering how we came to have something that we currently already have and/or possess. Let us ask ourselves, for example, where we are at this moment. That’s right – where are you physically?

For example, I sit in a recliner with my laptop on a cushion (which is on my lap, so I don’t have the laptop directly on my body). The recliner was conceived by my husband, Thomas, last December when the sofa we still had at the time was causing him discomfort in the lying position he ended up in when he was battling a rather serious illness. The cushion is a gift I gave myself a few years ago when I was travelling around South Australia with my friend Tania (I love travelling, yes) and I wandered into an art fair (I love handmade art creations!) where I came across some wonderful products from local artists, including illustrator Sally, who was printing her creations onto cushions. My laptop, which is therefore my tool of expression, is also a product of the need to express myself. Well, I’m in our (still very cute to me) flat, which we just signed a contract to sell today – on the day of writing 😁. In November we are moving into a wooden house, tailor-made for us, in a sunny location just a few steps in front of the forest. (Very close to our current place of residence, which is also very dear to us).

I am writing this because I want to share with you, dear Reader, dear Reader, the awareness of the power of manifestation. Because everything we have, everything that is happening to us, or rather ‘happening for us’ – all of it has already come into being somewhere in our minds. Because first there was an idea (Plato has already spoken beautifully about ideas, but more about that in the context at the end) and the idea manifested, materialised, became real. Do you understand? “Do you understand?!” even Maya would ask. 😁

And as Gandhi said, ” Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.”

A leap into the place where it is at home – our Truth

So, if we imagine our own life in a few years’ time, we are only allowing – without the doubt that our ego constantly tries to impose on us – a glimpse of our inner self. That is where our Truth resides. We knew this as children, and why shouldn’t we know it as adults? (Just think of how many times we think of someone and shortly afterwards that person calls us or we even bump into them unexpectedly.)

For example, I had a puppy with blue eyes when I was a little girl. And there was a white puppy ‘hanging around’ … I remember, for example, I was crazy about the movie White Eyed Susan starring Ethan Hawke (based on the book by Jack London) and there was this ‘wolf puppy’ that took me over to the point that I spent a lot of my primary school depicting wolves and dogs, and my art teacher even sent one of my works to an art competition (it didn’t win, but never mind 😁).

I also remember that later, when my family and I ‘swapped’ our flat for a caravan (and later still for a tent), because we lost all our assets, including our flat, due to the collapse of the family business, a little white puppy came to our campsite. A puppy that just disappeared one day. And then winter came, and we ‘disappeared’ too – part of the family to one grandmother, part to another. (Soon after, we also parted permanently.) For a really short time, one micro fragment of my childhood was filled by a German Shepherd puppy, who was named Crt. Unfortunately, he didn’t even stay with us long enough for his cute little ears to stand upright …

But guess who are my and Tomaž’s roommates today? Biba, a black mix with blue eyes and binking ears, brought to me by a wander through the streets of Macedonia, and Hans, the white ‘little man’ as we call him, and a former homeless dog from the Serbian south. Isn’t that something extraordinary!! 😁

I am thinking of the power of manifestation (I am not here concerned with the extent to which Beings other than man mean something to the individual). The wooden house I mentioned can also serve as an example of manifestation, because I myself have – since I can remember – imagined (and literally smelled!) a life with nature that includes wood. And, in my case, books. And so, instead of the classic wooden fence that forms a bridge between the two galleries upstairs, our unique little house includes a fence in the shape of bookshelves, so that the books will actually be part of the interior design. Did I mention that I imagined having my own library when I was a child? 😁 (Specimens will also be part of the collection of my own children’s ebook editions, mostly featuring animals.)

A brief word on property and (non-)attachment …

Perhaps now someone could say something more about property and how it (property, that is) can eventually become our owner, rather than the other way around. I agree. It is healthy to train non-attachment, or. unlearning the need to ‘have’. And so I also – quite honestly – feel that I can give up our fairy house, which is the product of manifestation, i.e. originally an idea (also according to Plato), at any time. And I am going to live with Tomaž on an island, which he has been talking about more lately. I don’t know yet (and neither does he) which island it is, but we are letting ourselves go. We trust.

We remain – to refer to Tony Robbins, who was quoted in the introduction – in a wonderful state. Richer for the experience of the last year. Richer for the ‘Little House Project’. I do not feel any attachment, even though the thought of moving into a fairytale house soon really warms my heart.

Aja! Did I mention that I once said that my life here could only be replaced by Hawaii? An island then. 😁

And then there is Plato’s doctrine of the cavity, or. the doctrine of the cavity:

Plato’s doctrine of the cavity summarises his ontology, known as the doctrine of ideas. What Plato is trying to tell us with the metaphor is that perhaps we ourselves are as blinded as the people who are trapped in the cave are in our everyday knowledge of the world. For we see before us sense-perceptible (material) objects, which in Plato’s ontology are but shadows of more real beings. Inside the cavity, the objects behind the backs of the kneeling spectators are more real than the shadows themselves, but they are only imitations of the ideas that really exist in Plato’s ontology. The key here is to understand that for Plato the idea is always one and as such an archetype for the existent. Individual sensible things are always only imitations of one idea (the idea of a tree is one, there are many sensible trees).

The passage into the world outside the cave is a metaphor of enlightenment, of the mind’s realisation that the sensory world metaphorised by the cave is only a snapshot of the world of ideas. Here, in fact, is the realisation summed up in the last sentence of the first point: that is, ideas as one and real, and sensuality as many and less real. The sun, which shines so brightly outside the cavity that the liberated are blinded by it, represents the torment that one has to endure when one renounces the old established opinion. For to realise that sense objects are not real beings requires an arduous twisting of the world-view itself.

The sun itself metaphorises the idea of the Good, which is the supreme idea in Plato’s ontology. Its function is twofold: it is at once the very condition for the existence of sensible objects and other ideas (it gives them being), but it is also the very cognitive condition for knowing precisely that. The idea of the good, like the sun, gives clarity and light for the world to be seen and known by the knower, but it is also the condition for things in the world to exist.

Source: https://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonov_nauk_o_votlini