Rick Jarow - Alchemy of Abundance: Aligning with the Energy of Desire to Manifest Your Highest Vision, Power, and Purpose

A number of years ago, in a dream, I found myself on a long search with two elders, one on each side of me. We had been seeking the crown jewels and had entered a deep cavern where I discovered a large pool filled with clear golden gheethe clarified butter used for ritual offerings in classical India. I knelt down and peered into the pool, and there I saw the jewels, shimmering under the surface. I reached down with trembling excitement, when suddenly the elders on each side simultaneously ordered me to stop. They informed me that these were not the jewels we needed and that I had to return to my own land and engage in contemplative prayer.

This big dream, as C.G. Jung might have labeled it, became a call to the Alchemy of Abundance, directing meafter years of travel and study in Europe, India, and the Middle East; after initiations and long terms of practice in various yogic and healing traditions; and after years of intellectual pursuits in the philosophy and aesthetics of religionto return home. Home meant many things: returning to the roots of Western tradition (after all, the three of us were enacting the search of the Magi for the Christ) and returning to the heart of prayer and to the soil, the humus (the root of the word humility). I was called to my world of the Hudson Valley and to a spiritual path that would be non-different from everyday life.

Yet, when we turn toward home, we hold all the energies of all the places we have been. We weave them back into the tapestry of our experience and they enrich our communities and ourselves in a new way. This program, then, is the fruit of years of work and an ever-deepening intuition that our unique place in time demands a unique vision: one that integrates the great insights and traditions from all times and places with the here and now. To put it simply, no major world religion was ever founded in or upon a democracy, and the rise of the individual and the great American experiment of the pursuit of happinesspredicated upon the freedom of consciencedemands that each of us walk the earth in our own way. This is true abundance: to cower before no one and no thing, to honor the life we have been given, and to dare to open to our fullness. At the same time, we are asked to walk together, to open to one another with our compassion, and to perceive and create forms of connection that keep us related without sacrificing the freedom we have gained at such great cost.

If abundance honors the dignity, goodness, and value of the individual, then alchemyas one of the great disciplines at the root of Western culturehonors the collective. I use alchemy here, not in the sense of some arcane esoteric lore, but in the way that Jung, archetypal psychologist James Hillman, and other depth psychologists have construed it: that the journey of purifying base metal into gold is an inner one, organically ordered by the wisdom of the psyche through its unfolding in the life of the individual.

I am using alchemy then to denote an inherent and authentic process of self-realization present in our cultural milieu, one that need not be imposed upon a person, but rather one that unfolds through the interaction of inner imagery and outer experience, the fruit of which is pure living wisdom, the philosophers stone. The hermetic, alchemical teachings, in fact, offer us the richest body of spiritual practice developed in the West, and we owe our modern interest in depth psychology and astrology to them. Moreover, alchemical teachings are our own equivalent to the Tantric traditions of the East as the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche once remarked, calling Alchemy the Tantra of the West. Indeed, the practice of abundance may itself be a part of the evolution of our own Tantric tradition: one that does not get caught up in organizations but that honors the soil upon which we stand, the unique situation of every person, and the mysterious fusion of oppositesmasculine and feminine, compassion and wisdomas the core of the Great Work.

The modern alchemist may not be holed up in a laboratory, but he or she understands that the true field of experimentation, the alembic, or vessel, where the work is done is within the self, and that the self is not some abstract entity above and beyond the world but is squarely within the worldwithin everything and everyone. Enlightenment, then, is not conceived of as an ultimate state but as the ongoing reality of this moment: the intersection of time and timeless that obliterates neither but opens to a rich panoramic vista of teeming life as divinity itself: the ongoing experience of abundance.

This program is about realizing this abundance in our lives. It is about creating pathways to participate fully and consciously in the Great Work of alchemical transformation. Through the guided explorations and working with the zodiacal mandala, you will witness the ongoing fusion of dreams and archetypes with the most ordinary and practical of situations. You will understand and experience your own unique ability to generate well-being in every aspect of your life and to share it with others.

The core practice here, akin to the alchemical distillation of gold, is known as manifestation, bringing the deepest, purist expression of your life into visible form. As with Tantra, there is an understanding that all that is necessary to realize your full potential is already present. You are simply asked to deal consciously with everything that is happening in your life as your practice of abundance, wholeheartedly and nonjudgmentally. As you will see in this program, by learning to trust the flow of creativity that naturally moves through your life, you will forge profound connections with everything and everyone in your world; you will come home to the humus, the soil, of your own daily life and discover a level of abundance that has always been and ever will sustain you.

Very often, when people hear about abundance and manifestation, they think about getting what they want, and what they want is magic and miracles. One challenge in Alchemy of Abundance is to accept and work with the very earthy reality of particular situations. Patience, perseverance, and persistence are the key qualities that can help move you from dreaming into action. When things are cramped and difficult, when it looks like you cannot make it through, the techniques in Alchemy of Abundance can inspire you to focus and move forward. The proper respect for your current reality will lead you to accept situations and see them through to completion. When you have fully grounded yourself in reality, mastered the techniques and explorations included in this program, and learned how underlying forces bring things about, you will then be able to experience and express what to others will seem like magic and miracles.

In this program, you will become familiar with powerful processes that can be mastered and with subtle energies that can be harnessed to achieve what you most want in your life. This is the alchemy of it. These forces are real, and their power is palpable. To be a contemporary alchemist is to work clearly, honorably, and consciously with them, leaving no stone unturned. The ongoing use of the guided meditations on the CD included in this program will allow you to perceive your current situation in its contemplative depth and beauty. The visualizations are designed to take you deeper into your own being, allowing you to uncover and examine the vast array of profound forces operating in your life as you begin to hear the music of the spheres in the walk-a-day world.