Do you remember these lines from a song in Walt Disney's 'Pinocchio'?

When you wish upon a star,

makes no difference who you are,

anything your heart desires

will come to you.

"How sweet!" we remarked when the film had rolled to its satisfactory conclusion. "If only life really was like that!" We bought the DVD or video-tape for our kids, remembering with fondness the first time we had seen it, and couldn't resist watching it again for the umpteenth time in our lives. We sat through it in awe, with that cosy, secure, 'someone up there watching over us' feeling we last had when we ourselves were children.

A song from another Disney film started -

The second star to the right

Shines in the night for you,

To tell you that the dreams you plan

Really can come true.

Yes, we still consider his films ideal viewing for our children (sandwiched between 'Star Wars' and 'The Hulk'.) Their moral is infinitely suitable to encourage in our tender off-spring, but of course we ourselves are way too mature and sophisticated to accept anything so naïve. Yes - it might be okay for our kids to believe in such poppycock, as they do Santa, while they're young, but soon enough they will have to grow up and see things as they really are. To make their way in the real world, they will have to face some of life's stark realities, won't they?

These films were created apparently for the amusement of children, but while wishing upon stars and thinking nice thoughts may today seem childishly inappropriate for us grown-ups, we may be very sure that Walt himself did not for one moment think so. Disney was indeed a very wise man with much to teach us about life, and the philosophy behind such simple ditties was profound indeed - aimed at and suitable for not only children, but our floundering selves, too. All Disney's works were about 'accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative‘, and considering the modern preoccupation with 'positive thinking', these songs are certainly not out of place nowadays, airy-fairy though they may be. But we prefer things to be solid, don‘t we? Solid is dependable, reassuring - we know where we are with solid.

However, the world we know is only that observable part of nature to which our limited senses and our instruments can attune - and is not nearly as solid as we suppose. Of course it feels rigid, stable and solid enough when we bang our heads against a wall or trap our fingers in the car door - enough to make us cry out in pain, but it feels solid and material because our senses, specifically attuned to appropriate awareness of it and adapted especially to their individual tasks, tell us it is so. We can only be aware of our physical environment through our physical senses - each being finely tuned to those properties particular to them. Through our sense of touch we feel hardness, roughness etc. Equally through other senses we scent, see, hear and taste the physical reality of our world. Indeed it is because our senses detect these things that we consider them real - though we nowadays extend our belief to include non-physical phenomena detected by our scientific instruments, too. All of these things detect phenomena in the way they do because they are designed to do just that, and anything which cannot be detected in these ways is dismissed as either a chemical bi-product or reaction, something to do with our genes, or a mere figment of our imagination.

Except for our limited study of psychology, with need to apply it to our confused, stress-plagued lives, and hypnotism for our unenlightened entertainment, everything else we cannot directly apprehend with our senses or gage with our instruments is frowned upon and dismissed. Even our imagination is rationalised away as some sort of chemical reaction. We feel, and we think, and insubstantial as these may be, we somehow accept them as real and do not need our physical senses or machines to verify this. For the comfort and continuance of our society we are supposed to think this way. We are required to believe in its values and concepts, are not encouraged to question their veracity, and not meant to believe in anything but that which our senses and our instruments tell us. Doubt corrodes - eats away at the constitution and fabric of our establishment. It stops wheels turning and inhibits 'progress' and profit.

It appears that the more we learn, the less we actually know. Is it not better to admit that without being in possession of all necessary data, there is so much that we do not and cannot know - rather than to assert that we do know, and so inhibit the chance of learning aright? Whereas, to admit that we don't know how we came about, and to allow that we may be something more than the sum of our assessable parts, is actually being realistic, opening up our horizons and expectancies to any possibilities. Our genes and our chemical composition may well have their part to play in our lives, but do we not nowadays accept that there is much more to us than our physical bodies?

Everything that exists vibrates at its own frequency and pace, and emits its own particular waves. Some of these we may be conscious of through our senses or our machines, but there are many more emitted which can be neither felt, nor registered so far via our machines. This does not make them any less real and significant as those which can. Eastern and Oriental cultures have for thousands of years maintained that there are invisible electrical currents flowing through our bodies which determine or strongly influence our general well-being - indeed they have developed a sophisticated healing technique which works by treating these currents. We in the knowledgeable west are only of recent days beginning to admit that there may be something in what our ancient eastern brothers claim, while those of us within our own society who have dared similar assertions have until quite modern times been pilloried and even put to death for even voicing them.

We imagine our cities and towns to be just so comfortingly stable and rigid, with their fine stone and brick municipal buildings, magnificent sculptures and grand houses. But there is an unwritten law which says that everything put together will eventually fall apart. Nothing is permanent - all matter is actually in a continual state of flux, forever changing, growing and hardening, decaying and disintegrating in its own time and at its own pace. Some day the Rockies will certainly crumble and Gibraltar, surely tumble. What we are observing is a panorama of effects, seemingly permanent, concrete and so convincingly real that we never contemplate a possible less than concrete cause behind them. Vincent Van Gogh saw this. Everyone who has seen his work must have wondered why he painted in the way he did, with swirls of primary pigments applied in the most rudimentary way - bearing hardly the vaguest resemblance to the ‘reality‘ we know. Could there have been something amiss with his eyesight?

There was nothing defective in his vision, and neither were his paintings the product of insanity, as we are led to believe. He saw that the real nature of the material world is not nearly as substantial as we think - and that which we imagine as ‘insubstantial' is actually more powerful and substantial than the body in which we are clothed and restricted. He saw fluidity, motion and rhythm in all things, and through the movement of his brushstrokes he tried to show us how powerful, unseen, un-solid forces combine to create the illusion of our apparently solid, material world. He used primary colours because they were the simplest and closest pigments he could find to represent those of the causal forces - the inner essence or spirit behind the mere material.

Living as he did in the new age of reason, when to entertain such ideas was considered superstitious and unsophisticated, he was a total misfit in a world entrenched in and blinded by materialistic views and values. He ended his days in a lunatic asylum, shunned by society - and quite mad, we are told. The choice for him was between institutionalisation and a struggle for survival and acceptance in a hostile, insensitive society. Safer inside - he judged. Do you remember the song about him by Don McLean in 1971, 'Vincent' or ‘Starry, starry night'? Dig it out from your collection, dust it off and listen to it again. This time you will be amazed!

Our ‘solid' society is only as substantial as our wavering belief in it, and as permanent as the ever fluctuating values we invest in it. But Van Gogh saw even further than this - he knew that there is actually a wholly different world about and within this one, more real and vital than the familiar husk we see about us. Watch a dog respond to sounds we ourselves cannot hear. Just as there is a range of sound and light waves which lie beyond our human perception, so too the greater part of creation remains, like an ice-burg, concealed from our ken. It is an infinitely more subtle world which we may observe not with our eyes but our imagination, feel not with our fingers, but our emotion, and know not merely through logic, but intuition. It is also a world which can be affected not by our physical intervention, but by our mental and emotional influence.

It is the world from which all creativity springs. We all dwell in it, are aware of it and responsive to it in varying degrees - though creative, emotional, imaginative people like Van Gough are sensitive to it and make use of it rather more than most. The more creatively we are employed, even though we may not realise it, the more in touch we are with this inner world. We may all recognise the kinds of talents such people display, and accept that they spring from some vague dimension within, but we fail to take the next logical step to the realisation that this insubstantial inner world is actually the driving force behind the substantial - the creative power which moulds and moves all things physical.

There was a time, before the necessary machinery was invented to measure them, when we didn't believe in the existence of x-rays, light waves or even sound waves, but no-one nowadays will dispute that they do. We accept the enormous part the sun's rays play in our lives, and yet those rays are not solid, or even liquid. We cannot actually see them, and can observe them only via their effect on material things, but we know those rays to be the power behind our solar system. And on the other hand, after Hiroshima, no-one would dispute the detrimental effects of radiation. Yet these are all quite insubstantial as far as our physical senses are concerned, attuned as they are to more corporeal things.

Even our fleshy bodies are formed and maintained by apparently ethereal forces, not least our thought and emotion. But are we this organs, muscle and bone body, or its mental/emotional, ethereal and for the most part unconsciously operating core? We see and feel our bodies and the environment about us, but that does not make us only this. We are indeed controlled, both from within and without, by much finer, more subtle forces than those of our physical bodies - forces of which we are for the most part unconscious. Ask the hypnotist, ask the psychologist - they will confirm this and you will accept their word. Then ask the douser, the healer and the psychic - they will confirm this too, though you will doubt theirs. The psychic person may tell us of how they read 'auras' - or energy fields - surrounding our physical bodies. Judging from the way he painted, Van Gogh could probably see these, too.

We enlightened westerners doubt everything we cannot see, touch, or register with our machines, and if something cannot be measured in these ways, we deduce that it cannot exist. But who today would deny that there is a strong mental and emotional side to us, one which consciously or unconsciously we employ or are effected by every day? We desire to procreate, to communicate, to move about and manipulate things around us to effect changes, and in order to direct each physical action we must take thought beforehand. Here our moods and emotions come into play; in fact, if you think about it, it is those feelings which give birth to and command our physical actions. They are the inspiration and the impetus behind our every mental and physical move, yet so immersed in and distracted by the seemingly substantial, physical world of effects are we, we tend to ignore and even disbelieve the causal, creative, insubstantial world within it.

It is all a question of what we value in life, as to how we build our establishments. Our ideas, beliefs, fears and desires are the bricks and mortar of our institution. Like the caterpillar spins about it a cocoon, or the mollusc its hard shell, we fabricate our societies around our values and traditions, precepts and desires - not necessarily those of our own, of course, but certainly of our forbears and more influential peers. We ourselves may play only a small, supporting part, but we are all of us involved to some degree in its formation. We identify completely with our society in its institution and edifice, we try to believe in its concepts and mould our lives to its requirements, but are we this artificial structure, or are we the un-tempered, un-moulded inner being?

Everywhere our senses our focussed are the outward tangible manifestations of our society's values - the solidified sundry and sordid desires and concepts we unconsciously accept and adhere to - and so real do they appear to us, we think they are all there is to life. Living and functioning in, and identifying with this world of our fabrication, it is for us moderns our only reality, our faith, and almost the sole object of our attention. In western society we pander almost exclusively to this outwardly focussed attention. Progress is measured in currency and material convenience, and money being our god, material possessions are a visible sign of the blessings he bestows upon us. In this way he rewards our cleverness with riches, and with our concentration thus occupied, the potential for inward development is stunted, with who knows what greater treasures denied us - what superior faculties eluding us. We have been side-tracked into a market driven, egocentric avenue of thought and behaviour by which we are an mentally conditioned and emotionally disturbed, allowing scant possibility of exploration into other paths.

Of course this was not always the case; prior to the industrial revolution people were much more in touch with their psychic sides. Before Darwin promoted his theory of Evolution we may well have mistakenly given credence to the Church's six-day Creation, but we also accepted that there was much more to man and universe than our limited senses indicate - gods and devils, angels and witches aside. Darwin's Origin of the Species is a recipe for despair, leaving us with no hope or expectancy of amounting to anything more than our gene patterns and chemical compositions suggest to our data starved reasoning. Survival of the fittest is not a fact, but a philosophy for dinosaurs. It is an unverifiable assumption, and just as much a leap of faith as is belief in a six-day creation - limiting our horizons by denying us the possibility of change or improvement, and leading us forever downward on the slippery slope of destruction.

Our fitness for life has very little to do with our genes. It is measurable not by how powerful we are in tooth and claw, or how clever we are at manipulating people, money-markets and things about us, but by how much love we show our neighbours, our fellow creatures, and our environment. But don't jump to the conclusion that I am advocating a return to dogma and superstition - quite definitely not! What I do suggest is that we take off our scientific blinkers and revert to an open, enquiring society which does not simply accept the evidence of its senses in all matters, but is willing to explore those realms within us, unseen, unheard, and so far undetected by our scientific instruments.

The main (if not singular) obstacle to this is our disbelief - clinging tenaciously to us from birth. This disbelief is a powerful force in itself; it is actually a firm belief in life being only as our physical senses conceive it, and in the hard and fast values and misconceptions engendered therein. Much of the mischief in the world is caused by our beliefs - whether religious or political. But does this mean that all belief is counterproductive? The Nazarene advises us to discard our preconceptions and become again as newborn babes, but does he mean we must stay in a permanent vacuum-like condition? He did not say that all beliefs are erroneous, but that we are labouring and constricting our lives under the wrong sets of beliefs and values. We have lost our way, he says, and are heading for certain destruction unless we find it again.

Nature cannot tolerate a vacuum, and wherever one is created it rushes in to quickly fill the hole with something of equal substance. So it is with men's minds: ideas govern all our affairs, and wherever one system of belief dies or is overthrown it is quickly replaced by another. The vast majority of us apparently need something to believe in. Jesus saw this, but was careful in his ministering not to dogmatise. He used metaphor and simile to describe the ‘kingdom‘ and the workings of ‘God‘, saying ‘think of it like this' or ‘as this‘, rather than commit us to a dogmatic, firm conception. But he knew the value of visualisation - that a mental picture helps to focus our thoughts and actions, and so he speaks to us in pictures in allegories. It is in pictures and situations that he describes the kingdom, and advises us as to how we should behave in order to find it. And don't worry, he says, the karmic law takes care of everyone - it knows our innermost thoughts and desires, and is forever seeking to fulfil our needs. All we need do is believe that something has already come to pass, and it will happen so. The more precisely we can visualise a situation, the easier it will be accomplished. But he also warns us that our belief must be for the greater good, otherwise we invite only chaos.

Eastern authorities have long maintained that there is a universal karmic law embodied in our physical universe, but we in the west are far too knowledgeable and sophisticated to accept such medieval nonsense. We moved on from that rubbish generations ago. Might it not be that we in the west are still living in our own medieval theatre, conditioned since the times of the Romans through military conquests, Church and Imperial domination, industrial and technological materialism, and ‘scientific' presumption - all in the advancement of monetarism? Do we really imagine that we hold the monopoly on truth? Do we really think that, even in the light of all modern evidence apparently to the contrary, more than half the world prefer to cling to their ancient, unenlightened beliefs. If we are so much more progressive, and confident in our own views, then surely we have nothing to fear by studying the subject for a few minutes from their standpoint. Supposing after all there is something to learn from this exercise, wouldn't it be idiotic to deny ourselves the opportunity?

It is easy for most of us to accept how our actions invite reciprocal reactions, and some of us can understand how what we think can influence and even dictate our actions, but what most of us cannot see is that every thought we entertain is a potent energy winging it's way to fulfilment, and inviting on its way its own particular reciprocations and consequences. To put it simply, evil thoughts invite evil acts, while good thoughts invite good acts in return. This is the Karmic law in operation. But the law is more than just a compensatory one - it not only balances our affairs, but has a complete other side to it's nature.

We are all familiar with Newton's concept of gravity - a sort of negative pulling power within matter, accidentally created by the random gathering of body mass. However, let us think of it as more of a gentle, positive pressure from without, rather than within, building and holding atoms together in various combinations to create and sustain life in all its forms. And then imagine this: the world is wheeling within a wheeling solar system, within a universe wheeling about and within us. We are composed of the same matter, the same force of which the universe is made, and the same capabilities and same potential exist in us as do in the universe. Our world, our solar system, and our universe are all a gigantic wheel, turning subject to the Karmic law, and as alive and responsive to our thoughts and actions as we ourselves are. According to Jesus, the wheel is alert to our every need, creating the conditions in which our desires may be fulfilled by seeking to grant even our smallest wish. As Disney points out, it is a wheel to wish upon.

Jesus said before him: to have something happen we must believe it already has - being confident in the knowledge that this power is working through us, guiding every movement we make. In belief there is realisation and fulfilment. The more we concentrate our minds and efforts upon something, the more the wheel tries to accommodate it. Our every wish registers, and sets ethereal currents in motion seeking to fulfil that wish. But wishing and visualising is not quite enough in itself - we cannot become a master baker without mixing dough, or renowned composer, without writing music - we must seek to put ourselves in the position which allows them to come true. This means working physically toward that end. Set the scene, and the right situations will find their way to us. As long as the wish is held, and not obscured or impeded by contrary wishes, and physical moves are sustained to bring about that wish, then ethereal eddies will stay in motion, continuing to shape events to our purpose.

We all understand that to get something out of life we must put something into it, but very often, however much effort we put into something and no matter how hard we try, nothing seems to go our way. It is as if the "cards are stacked against us", and this is an expression we might use to describe our predicament. We feel exposed, depressed, worried, despondent and even despairing that anything will ever again work in our favour. This is doubt, and the slightest doubt negates. Doubt is inconsistency, and inconsistency is counterproductive. It impairs the wheel's power and invites chaotic circumstances. What actually does get in our way is the involvement of other people, with their own particular wants and wishes upon life, conflicting with our own.

Visualisation is a powerful tool - the more precisely and positively we visualise, the quicker the fulfilment. Those who can visualise well and maintain the image strongly and consistently, see their wishes fulfilled - while those who cannot are soon overtaken by other people‘s. Throughout our lives we are bombarded with and conditioned by society's negative influences, and almost all of us are focussed upon mundanity and moneymaking, the consequences of which be easily seen in today's dire worldwide disparities. Given the distractions and prevalent mindset of our materialistic lives we find it difficult or impossible to direct our thoughts for even five minutes upon anything worthwhile, without them being invaded by some seemingly more urgent and important snippet of trivia, or some advert aimed at relieving us of more our hard-earned cash. Such is our gauche world today, but all of this is what we jointly wished for.

We must therefore be careful what we wish - someday it can come true. Within each wish is a desire to mould events, and so things are, simply because we all desired them so; our present daily mundane situations and dire world events are the consequences of our combined wishes and acquiescence to other's wishes. Thus while the power of the wheel can be whatever you want it to be and do whatever you want of it, it is surely better used in a beneficial, rather than destructive, way. Selfish aims find routes to counterproductive rewards. Negative, undisciplined desires invite negative, out-of-control consequences, and if we entertain violence, even in the fiction we read and watch each day, we encourage violent behaviour in society. If we dwell upon negative things we construct a hostile, negative environment and promote a selfish, uncaring world. To achieve a peaceful, positive world we must think and act in peaceful, positive and constructive ways. It therefore advantages us to think good thoughts, to desire right conditions and act in ways conducive to their fulfilment.

Finally, Mother Earth is as alive as we are, and being subject to the same karmic law as we, it responds to our violence with like. It gave us life, and can take it away, too.

Tom Manson.