Zap Oracle Card # - © Jonathan Zap
text and photo © Jonathan Zap
Most people on the planet experience scarcity in one or more key areas of their lives. Some scarcities are related to needs, and others to wants. Common areas of perceived scarcity include money, physical resources, social status, youth, looks, sex, physical health, fulfilling relationships, inner resources, and meaningfulness. Most lives involve strange and tense combinations of scarcity and abundance. For example, a tan and sleek billionaire walking off the tennis court might be dying of a famine of meaningfulness. Our vision of scarcity is often highly distorted and one-sided. Perceived scarcities range from delusory toxic wants to what would be genuinely fulfilling if we had more of it.
Scarcity comparisons with other people are almost always unreliable and highly distorted. Typically we compare our area of most irritating scarcity with someone else who seems to have that area filled to overflowing. We never look at the whole portfolio of scarcity and abundance in the other’s incarnation. We can’t look at it, we’d have to know how their whole life turned out. We see tall, handsome Christopher Reeve galloping on his thoroughbred horse, we don’t necessarily see up ahead where he gets tossed to the ground a quadriplegic, and goes through a life phase of horrendous scarcities as he becomes more soulful and compassionate and discovers new forms of fulfillment.
“Imagine getting more” and “envious comparison” are intertwined spells that bind us into neurotic suffering. These spells promise fulfillment in the future, but create hollowness in the present.
Hollowness is the mind set of the Ring Wraith as it withers the present while it forever reaches toward that glittering precious just up ahead. Hollowness is the state of one who forever reaches toward the future to be filled up.
Don’t wither the vitality of the present by looking at it with the eyes of scarcity and victimhood. All too easily you can build a reality tunnel defined by your view of the present as the time of scarcity, before you have abundance of money, or before you have the perfect lover, the perfect body…whatever you covet getting more of. But this is the time that counts right now, this time with its strange and tense combination of scarcity and unrecognized abundance, the time that gives you everything you need to work with in the present moment. Break the spells, become disenchanted and more powerful, work with what you got right now.
and Resource Fluctuations Happen — Working with Scarcity and Abundance
Recognizing Unseen Abundance: Catch the Cosmos Doing Something Right