Enough Already

Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months,
then comes the harvest’?
Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that
the fields are white for harvest now.

In Richard Bach’s classic parable Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the mentor Chiang tells young aspirant Jonathan, “To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is … you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.” Chiang was teaching that enlightenment and manifestation are a form of reverse engineering. You have to start from where you want to end up.

My friend Sharon’s father had a sneaky way of asking his wife for a favor. While the couple sat on their sofa watching television, her dad would turn to her mom and say, “While you’re up, would you please get me a soda?” The oddity of the situation was that Mom had indicated no inclination to get up or go anywhere. Yet in Dad’s mind, she was already up. Most of the time, Sharon recounted, Dad ended up with a soda.

While feminist readers have already come up with some invigorating responses to Sharon’s dad, this example illustrates a principle that can help you manifest what you want. In sales terminology, it’s called the “assumed close.” You speak to your customer and act as if he or she has already decided to buy your product. In your mind, the sale is already done. While you may not make your sale every time, you will make it more often if you assume it will happen, or has already happened, than if you wonder or worry that it may not.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

— Albert Einstein

The assumed close principle goes far beyond sales, and can change your life if you grasp and practice it. It is the secret of all great inventors, teachers, artists, statesmen, healers, and visionaries. Anyone who has ever created anything—that’s all of us, all the time—has tapped into the idea for the creation before the creation came forth. Edison conceived of the lightbulb in his mind before it showed up in his laboratory. Einstein envisioned a split atom. Gates, Wozniak, and Jobs imagined something no one had ever seen—the personal computer. Ideas always precede creation.

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been.… You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.… What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.

— Alan Alda

To discover is to dis-cover—to remove the veil between what is seen and unseen, what has been and what could be. The thing you envision is already so, and you pluck it from universal mind. When the object of your intention becomes sufficiently real in your inner world, you generate the momentum to birth it in the outer world. When someone asked Michelangelo how he sculpted the magnificent statue David, he answered, “I saw David in the stone and chipped away everything that was not David.”

When I write a book, I do not feel that I am creating it. On some level the book is already written. My job is to record it as true to the material as possible and bring it to the world. The experience is more like bearing a child than manufacturing a new item.

After my first book was published and I began to present seminars, sponsors would introduce me as an author. I was uncomfortable with that appellation, since I did not feel that I wrote the material. I feel more like a recording secretary than an author. Many artists and inventors recount a similar experience. We are not creators; we are co-creators with a Higher Power.

All things that exist, have ever existed, or will exist, exist always. This is so because everything that exists represents an idea, and ideas transcend time and space. Our technology has caught up with this principle. A movie is captured on film and lives digitally on a DVD or storage device practically forever. Even though the movie was made a long time ago, you can pop the disc into your DVD player or download it to your viewer and all the characters, scenes, story lines, and music come to life in your living room. At this moment George Bailey is returning to his family, tears streaming down his cheeks, hugging his wife and kids with an appreciation he has never known before. Ben-Hur is defeating the evil Messala in the famous chariot race as you take your seat in the coliseum to cheer. E.T., about to leave Earth, is touching Elliott on his forehead and assuring him that he’ll be right there.

Such events are not simply fictional or historical; they are rooms in a vast mansion, realms of the mind, theaters of the universe you can visit anytime you choose. They are here now and will be always.

Great ideas to be developed in the future are already here for you to reap and harvest. Leonardo da Vinci sketched the submarine and helicopter 400 years before their creation. Star Trek prophesied computer floppy disks, cell phones, iPads, phasers (Tasers), “hypospray” hypodermic injections, voice-recognition universal translators, bionic eyes, and MRI-technology tricorders. In a very real sense, the future is already available for those willing to claim it. Your ideal self living your ideal life is not simply a long-range wish or goal. It is already so.

Although Jesus Christ is regarded primarily as a religious leader, he was more fundamentally a master metaphysician. He achieved miracles because he understood the crucial relationship between mind and matter. He gave many clues that you and I have access to the same power he utilized: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions” means that in universal mind all realities or dimensions of experience coexist simultaneously. “The kingdom of God is within you” reminds us that we already own what we seek. Jesus’s most mystical yet practical teaching was: “Come; for all things are now ready.”

Visionaries see what could be as if it already is. To big-picture thinkers, life is not a competition for limited resources, but a feast from which we select what we prefer. Our human journey is not a dilemma of insufficiency, but an adventure into all-sufficiency. (“I am come that [you] might have life … more abundantly” [John 10:10].) There is enough of everything for everyone because the universe is brimming with supply. We just need to open our eyes to broader reality and use it for our highest good.

You have enough already because you are enough already, and you always will be. Your wholeness is not negotiable. It is a fact of life, surer than gravity or the rising of the sun. No matter what you think, say, or do, you cannot add to or diminish your rich and royal self. You can overlook it and live like a pauper, but your true prosperity and power are held in trust for you until you claim them.

That day may be closer than you think—perhaps even today. All the love, life, health, and wealth you value are available beginning right where you stand. They are given freely, and all you need to receive them is to be as generous to yourself as life has been to you. Do not delay joy for want of time, geography, finances, or approval—or any other requirement you have been taught. Teach yourself freedom with the same zeal the world has taught you limits. Do not banish happiness to a future time, and do not consign it to any source outside yourself. There is a room in the universe where all that you seek is already given. Permission to enter is granted.