I’d like to save you some time. You have a genie in a bottle. You always have. You probably believe that wishes don’t come true, because when you were a child, you watched people pray, and you watched their prayers go unanswered. This may come as a surprise, but those same people who don’t know how to tie their own shoes, they also don’t know how to pray.

I’m going to skip past narratives and we’ll just assume that you, walking along the side of a road, discovered a bottle with a genie in it, and you’re ready to use it. First we need to answer a glaring question. Where is the 1969 Pontiac Firebird you wished for? Well, as far as I understand it, your genie may not be able to give you your brand new car, or, perhaps your wish is actually so terrible for the outcome of your life that he has just pretended he didn’t hear that one.

We are going to assume the defining characteristic of your genie. Your genie is good, and by good I mean favorable. Why would we assume this? This is because you, ‘the wisher’, are making a wish that you intend to have a favorable outcome. This means that you trust that the genie you are wishing to would grant a wish that would favor you. You are then, wishing to a good genie, a genie that you trust wants to help you.

This defining characteristic matters because the entity we are dealing with that concerns goodness is only going to be connected to, associated with, that in his domain. It’s fairly possible that your genie may not even be able to hear wishes that fall outside of goodness. This is about the time when you tell me that there is no such thing as the archaic dualistic concept of ‘Good or Evil’, you’ve intellectually transcended such concepts. Now take three steps back, and leave your philosophy at the door. You’re going to need to identify the difference in order to work with this genie.

Good in this context is what is good for your soul, what grows and nurtures it rather than withers and harms it. A main theme here is that we do not always aspire towards what is actually good for us. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just that the fulfillment our desires often do not grant what we had hoped for. Let’s say I really want that Pontiac, because it will make me feel proud and confident about myself. Feeling proud and confident are good feelings, these are good things. There’s also nothing wrong with a car. It’s just that the car will not grant those emotional feelings.

[ Upon watching this documentary that shows how we were mass manipulated reprogrammed to identify the essence of our selves with materialism, you might ask yourself if anyone believed they could fulfill their desires with consumerism before the 1900s.]

We’ve established that the genie will not grant you something you wish for that does not actually grant the emotional desire you are seeking. The genie will grant that which it is associated with, goodness. So let’s identify what this may include. Here are the Christian and Catholic fruits of the spirit.

Something important here is that there are principles in this world that can hinder, interfere with your ability to attain a great many things. “Against such things there is no law”, means that there is no principle preventing you from accessing the things of this nature. In a videogame, we might call this a kind of cheat code, such as exploiting an ‘infinite money glitch’.

Goodness may seem to be a small constrictive box from which to operate in until you see it open up, and see that goodness contains every attribute you most desire. Wisdom, resilience, confidence, strength, clarity, focus, resoluteness, all that man aspires towards. Below are Benjamin Franklin’s famous virtues I often share.

These are simply inspiration, as again you can start with the virtues that you most desire to have.

Now what if your wish is for something like the power to hurt others? You do you, but now you’re dealing with a different genie. You’re now dealing with an entity that may help you harm others, but will also inevitably harm and destroy you, as that is the nature of the force which you have chosen to barter with.

Back to our good genie, we can wish for good virtues, and then follow a process with which to receive these wishes. Now why would I want these virtues? Anyone who has played an RPG has come to learn that the Skill Points they put into skills greatly affects the outcome of the entire game, even often those chosen at the very start.
These skills are your fruit, and the fruits you plant are the fruits that grow and come out of you. Those fruits equate to value, and the richer of a person you are, the more fruit you have, the more true authentic value you have, not the false sense of value our egos attempt to build up.

Another way to say it is that if you want something, you invest in yourself becoming the kind of person who would attain that thing. You become who you need to be in order to attain it, because only the person qualified to obtain something will obtain it. You would need to become that person. You become the character with the skills and attributes needed to take on a journey. You become the kind of person who possesses the virtues necessary to get what you want out of life. So use the infinite points glitch and max out your skill points to unlimited, “Charisma 99+”.

This is the most important paragraph of this read, and this is the required process in working with a genie in a bottle. 0(optional). Ask the genie what you should wish for.

1. Make your wish.
2. Have faith and the understanding that you will be granted this wish.
3. Set this wish as your focus, write it down, think about it.
4. Seek out to find your answered wish. You already know your wish has been answered, now you just have to find it.

It’s can be so easy to use this process that it is as if you are being carried and hardly even an active participant, as long as you move forward and continue to seek, you move towards it. That’s one of the secrets, you’re always moving towards something, whether it be a good thing or not.

The genie, however you may call it or choose to think of it, is something you should take seriously, because if you don’t take it seriously, why the hell should any of this take you seriously? Seeking is an active process. It means challenging yourself. It means learning and googling and reading. It means participating in your own life for your own behalf.

That’s about all I can advise for a generalization on the topic. If you’re curious about what I do with this and have come to find personally, read on.

My top and target wish is always Wisdom. This is because wisdom is valuable to me and my life and the lives of others entirely by its lonesome. It’s because Wisdom can grant the wisdom to know what to wish for. This is a valid wish. You can pray to ask what to pray for. You can ask what should my desires be. You can ask what would truly help you. Wisdom says that at any time, you cannot see the whole picture from the limited awareness that you are stuck in in time, and for this reason you cannot see the best possible possibility of outcome for your life, it is unimaginable to you. The answer to what is the best possible outcome is an answer that lies outside of yourself, and that is why you must wish for this unknowable possibility and ask for it to happen.

In other words, a major part of wishes, faith and prayers is trusting that a force that knows more than you is benevolent and wishes to give you the best possibility of outcome, that is if what you want is the best possibility of outcome. As you might be able to see, this requires surrendering the outcome. It requires making your wish more vague and abstract, less concrete.

If you experiment with prayer what you will find is that you can make many concrete wishes come true, and like the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for”, you will learn that getting your concrete wish answered and controlling the outcome does not lead to a desirable outcome.

Wisdom prays for the best outcome, and the best blessings, better virtues, better focuses, better perspectives, better than oneself can imagine.

After Wisdom, I seek out creativity, because honestly that’s all I really give a fuck about these days.

A last warning on the distinction between wishful thinking and working with these principles. Wishful thinking is simply delusion, fantasy, imagination that will not come into form, when you do not participate. Another perspective to take is that you will always move toward what you want most. You may want security and comfort more than the desire you wish for, and so you will not have the desire you wish for, because you move towards what you desire most. Remember Benjamin Franklin’s virtues? He moved towards them. Below was his calendar to track virtues. By tracking virtues, he focused on virtues. By focusing on them, he moved towards them to become who he aspired to be.