Is there enough for everyone?
‘Your wish is my command’, said the Ginie. Can the universe fulfil everyone’s wish?

By Meha Mathur
‘You are the most powerful magnet in the Universe… Have you ever started to think about something you were not happy about, and the more you thought about it the worse it seemed? That’s because as you think one sustained thought, the law of attraction immediately brings more like thoughts to you.”

My latest reading is The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. The Secret reveals a secret to life: That it’s your thoughts which create the world around you. Think negative, and you will attract more negative things in your life, think of happiness and you will attract more positive things. “Thoughts become things”, she says, and puts forward the case that thoughts have frequency, and thoughts are also magnetic, thus attracting likeminded thoughts to themselves. Thus the more you brood over a relationship going wrong or a health problem or the lack of certain things, the more such things will happen in your life. Likening the human thought process to TV transmission, she says you just have to change frequency (or your channel of thoughts) to start inviting good things in life.

“The pictures you receive from the transmission of your thoughts are not on television screen in your living room, they are pictures of your life. Your thoughts create the frequency, they attract like things on that frequency, and then they are broadcast back to you as your life pictures.”

I must admit the book has done me good. I’m sure a reading of the book has made me forget all those premonitions about wars, terror attacks, floods, earthquakes and accidents. But I do have a problem with the book. The author wonders, what if every inhabitant on the earth learns this secret, and starts thinking of prosperity. Will the earth have enough for everyone then? Yes, she says. Her basic premise is that there is greed and anxiety on the earth because people suffer from paucity mentality, and fear that there’s not enough for everyone, whereas the opposite is true. There’s enough for everyone. This is what she has to say:
“Nothing is limited - not resources or anything else. It is only limited in the human mind… The Universe offers all things to all the people through the law of attraction.”

This brings me to the famous lines Gandhiji had said, “There’s enough for every person’s needs, but not enough for every person’s greed.” And to what I think about quite a lot these days: Can the planet earth meet the food, water, clothing, shelter, education, fuel, entertainment and high-living requirements of six billion inhabitants? It will perhaps take a planet of Jupiter’s size to meet these needs.

Who would not be happy if every person on the earth is well-fed, has clothing, shelter and education for his children? But does the world have enough to meet the desire of perhaps every single being to own a car?

The book says that according to the law of attraction every human gets the thing what he really wants. How will the desire of conservation lobby be met at the same time as that of builder lobby? How will green lobby’s demand be met along with car commuters’ demand? How will the demand of city planners who want environment aesthetics to be given importance, be met alongside the demands of those who want to build six-storied buildings in the fragile Himalayas?

—The author is the Executive editor of Management Compass and Career Choices