Open Your Secret Codex of Desire to Rescue Your Dreams

Come, let's scatter roses and pour wine in the glass;
we'll shatter heaven's roof and lay a new foundation.
If sorrow raises armies to shed the blood of lovers,
I'll join with the wine bearer so we can overthrow them. 
With a sweet string at hand, play a sweet song, my friend,
so we can clap and sing a song and lose our heads in dancing.

∞ Hafiz of Shiraz, Ghani-Qazvini, no. 374

You want it and you want it bad!

The problem?

You absolutely don't think you can have it.

Every time you consider it, your shoulders slump, your mind gets foggy, you close your heart in an agonizing defeat that stops you dreaming of anything but misery and impossibility.

The hope of ever reaping your desire drains out of you like blood flowing into a million ravenous leeches.

Oh sure, you have touched its sanguine heart. You have even rested for moments at a time in its folds, riven with sumptuous delight.

But when it comes to possessing it, the obstacles FEEL insurmountable. No wonder your shoulders ache all the time. You are burdened endlessly by hopelessness, fear, numbness, rage, frustration, and above all, a sense of being righteously excluded from paradise.

When you contemplate your exclusion, it resonates with who you believe you are.

Your resulting emotional location on the GPS of life?

Your mental state?

Dante's Inferno!

Your task?

Recognize your sin (how you have missed the mark), reject it, and move towards the Divine truth of who you really are: one whose soul was authored by paradise.

This soul story is written in your personal Codex of Desire, etched on the pages of your own Divine Comedy.

To unleash your TRUE STORY, you have to rise and meet your greatest challenge:

Take a side. Take a stand for what you desire and for what you came to this earth to offer.

Trust me, I have journeyed through this inferno. My eyes have truly seen the faces etched with sorrow's mark.

My heart has genuinely felt the sadness of unrequited desire.

My ears have heard the tormented cries of dreamers whose dreams road off into the sunset in a seeming act of treachery.

Those eery cries, the sullen expressions, and especially the heart stripes, were also my own; sometimes they still are. So, I can say this with the utmost certainty:

The grandest, most profound suffering in the land of the damned is quite simply put, foisted upon those who refuse to commit to anything at all except maybe being noncommittal.

Today you walk among them and for all the passion on your lips, for all the protests you have raised against your anguish, you too have utterly failed to make the required covenant with your dream.

The reason (aside from the fact it FEELS too painful after all you have been through)?

You are looking with plain, ordinary eyesight and it remains corrupted, utterly sullied by the pain of loss you keep playing on repeat every time you dare to WANT anything.

You cannot imagine how this thing called life will ever arrive at the point of fulfillment and you are suffering terribly because of this lapse in vision.

I'll tell you a secret: unless you commit on every level, under the most dire circumstances that arrive, deep in the heart of doubt's barren landscape, it won't.

Yet, even as I say that, even as you know I am telling the truth, I can hear you resisting the challenge set before you. And for good reason too!

I can hear your very logical, very reasonable objections loud and clear.

You have tried commitment by force of will too many times to count.

In your bid for dream control, you have tried to magic yourself into a new world via the ridiculousness of enforced positive thinking more times than you are willing to admit.

And you are most definitely done with this! Thank goodness! Or else you would be doomed to wander this inferno indefinitely.

Now where does being done leave you?

Standing in front of your life-sized Secret Codex of Desire, no idea how to open it, terrified of rending the safety seal on Pandora's infamous box.

Yet, you are oddly certain you must do this. For though you now walk among the cursed in the deepest circles of hell, you know you have not yet chosen this as a permanent, eternal condition.

You are here and you have been blessed to glimpse this excruciating sorrow so that you might fully appreciate the choice at hand. The time has come to wholeheartedly chart a course for paradise!

This is not some paradise of perfect ease, but a paradise of possibility where, choice by choice, commitment by commitment, you have the power to forge the life you truly wish to live.

Forge: to form or bring into being especially by an expenditure of effort
∞ Excerpt from Merriam-Webster

But not by force of will alone!

By the grace that stands ready to carry you just as soon as you open your mouth to speak words of certainty.

Then take the next right step forward with those words of certainty exuberantly, sometimes haltingly, passing over your lips and into the heart of your desire.

In this way, you will cross this threshold!

Like an act of CPR, your words (and the things you do after you speak them), will revitalize the lifeblood in your yearning. They will fill the lungs of your dream with enough air pressure to deliver a whole soliloquy, unbidden, a spontaneous and glorious homage to the dawn.

But first, you must open this book of your ancient secrets.

You must cross its threshold and move into the centerfold of your bondage.

There, ironically, you will discover anew and unleash your forbidden desire. It lays, tired and humbled, but alive at the heart of the very emotions you least want to feel.

It is bound, but not broken at the center of the dark, secluded places you do not want to go. Your contraband craving for satisfaction and meaning is trapped in the structures of a reality that calls itself "IRONCLAD" and refuses to admit that it is playing a game of liar's poker.

It is time to call the bluff!

You must go IN there now wrecking ball at the ready!

Everything depends upon it. Of course, you already know this. Or you would not have gotten this far.

So, what are we really talking about here?

• A full-scale restructuring of who you are and of your relationship to the deception and confusion that surrounds your hunger for more;
• Acts of certainty in the heart of rabid discontent;
• An old west-style confrontation with the unscrupulous devil poll dancing (in worn-out fishnets and 1970s, olive green polyester briefs, on a shag carpet stage) in the middle of your distress.

In other words, one of you has got to leave town or go down.

If it's the latter, you'll have to be quick on the draw! That old enemy has had a good go at your soul for a good long while and he's not likely to give up the gold without a fight.

He's your INner enemy (aka Saboteur).

Alternative Number 2 (Not Nearly As Attractive): You can keep manifesting the concentric circles of deprivation until NOT HAVING becomes your eternal identity.

This brings me to my indecent (by the standards of your defeat), yet oddly irresistible proposal:

You, me, the powers that be.

Together we will march into the very core of your despair, confusion, rage, numbness, jealousy, and fear. We will rend the veil of sorrow that is shrouding your dreams in a fog of no-can-do. Hand in hand, we will walk right out of the inferno and confidently toward your deepest yearnings fulfilled.

In short, I propose a reaper's journey right into the heart of your ill-gotten losses and a victory lap that will finally bring the seeds of your desire to full blossoming.

Together we will open your Secret Codex of Desire and reap this dream harvest.