Quick, what do Donald Duck and Moe of the Three Stooges have in common? If you get this one, you’re good (or, you looked at the title of this piece and guessed)! Besides the fact that I adored both of them as a child, the answer is that they both often exclaimed, “Hey, what’s the big idea?” They said it when they were annoyed about something, which they often were, but what’s interesting to me is how meaningful that question has become in my life and also how the refrain has been picked up by other heroes and teachers along my way.
For instance, at some point in my chiropractic journey I found that B.J. Palmer, the developer of chiropractic, had said, “Get the big idea, all else follows.” B.J. was saying that when one owned and embodied the bigidea of chiropractic, its grand purpose of restoring the expression of life through the body and thus reconnecting the physical with the spiritual, then everything else followed: motivation, success, fulfillment, what to say and do; even the healing results achieved. Another of my chiropractic mentors, Dr. John Demartini, said it this way, “When the ‘why’ is big enough, the ‘how’s take care of themselves.”
Then later on in my Unity studies, we were taught that the creative process follows a definite order, described as mind-idea-manifestation. Everything begins in mind (consciousness), and it’s the ideas that we hold dominant in our mind that determine what manifests in our life. The emphasis then rests on the ideas, not the manifestation. And while we’re focusing on ideas, why not make them big ideas, like love, joy, wholeness, compassion and abundance? I believe all this was stated best by another of my mentors, Jesus, when he said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
For me, the Kingdom of Heaven is right within my own consciousness; that place within me that knows only love, joy, wholeness, compassion and abundance. It’s that place in which you and I abide together in oneness. As I’ve hung out in that place more and more in my life, I’ve learned that what I truly desire is not so much the things, but those aspects of being, such as love, peace and joy, that I’d thought I could only have by obtaining the things. I’ve learned I can experience and enjoy those aspects right now, with or without the things, and regardless of whether I label the experiences of my life as “good” or “bad.”
In an important way, this flies in the face of the Law of Attraction, as taught in movies like The Secret. It seems as though that is based much more on focusing on the manifestation. We’re told to think about the car, money, health result, perfect mate, etc, visualize and affirm it, see ourselves having it and feel what that would be like and we will attract it to us. Not that this formula doesn’t “work” in bringing me what I want. For much of my chiropractic career, for example, my goal was to adjust 500 people in a week. I thought that reaching this goal would bring me joy and fulfillment. I applied the formula for years and eventually reached my goal. Unfortunately, I quickly realized it didn’t bring me what I thought it would. There wasn’t even a ticker tape parade! Almost immediately my mind wanted to grasp onto a new goal. I then realized that all along the way, I had been focusing on what I thought I lacked, and because of that I’d often felt frustrated and that I was “doing it wrong.”
Now I see that all the things I have always truly desired (such as joy and fulfillment) are already within me, waiting to be expressed and experienced. They don’t even have to be “added unto me”; I just need to keep them center stage in my mind. So I’m now much more focused on the goodness than on the goodies, as one of my Unity teachers puts it. When the lens through which I look at life is centered in the biggest ideas I know of, I see more of all that in me and my life. When I get and hold the biggest possible idea for myself, that idea becomes my beacon, guides my choices and allows me to live in freedom, joy and gratitude. It allows me to experience those beautiful truths that I used to think only came from material things, right here and right now. And when I notice I’m holding some other idea of myself, one based on old limiting beliefs and tapes, I hear Donald or Moe asking, “Hey, what’s the big idea?” It’s a beautiful reminder.
I’ll get more specific on this in future posts. In the meantime, if that’s all we remember, that’s more than enough for now.
