When Is It Time Not To Plan?

Many of us have all heard the age-old saying that failing to plan is planning to fail. And many of us know the value and power that is found in setting goals, especially written ones. Every business guru, diet guru, sports guru... any guru... take your pick from the plenty there are... all of them stress one thing: have goals, will succeed. So we know this works. At the same time, we all hear of the importance and immense power of letting go, detachment. So we also know that this works.

But it all sounds contradictory at first, doesn't it? Well, it isn't. The question then is, when is it time to plan, and when is it time to let go (not plan)? Put in another way, when does planning help you, and when does it harm you? When do things "go bad" not in spite of your plans, but because of them? That is the question, the answer to which will allow you to drop off the stress and worry baggage, stop unwittingly messing yourself up with plans made at the wrong place and time, and generally empower and free you a great deal.

Well, to begin with, it is a good time to define a plan so that we know what we are talking about. A plan is a vision; a template which when followed guarantees a certain outcome. It is a collection of cause-and-effect clusters that all work together to produce one final desired outcome. The essence inspires a vision that defines the becoming of a form, through process, that will hold the expression and experience of the essence that inspired it. That is a plan.

Obviously, a plan with missing or incorrect inputs will not lead to the correct outcome, because it is not based on truth, on the Universe as it were, on the Laws It Works By. So you can imagine that an incomplete plan will work, but it won't - it can only hope to approximate. Incomplete plans don't work fully, no matter how one deludes themselves prior to the frustration of seeing the plan dashed against the rocks.

Moving on, a plan made at the level of your ego is a personal plan. You make it because you have certain hopes and fears and you wish to avoid what you fear and make what you hope for happen. Without fear, you would rarely plan personally. Most plans are defensive; defensive against some imagined attack. A feature of a personal plan is that they have a future imagined "good end" to aim for and a "bad end" to avoid.

Therefore, a personal plan is based on judgment (against yourself and others) and abstract assumed scenarios as part of its inputs. Its driving force is partially based on fear, as all things from the ego level are.

Here is a key point: personal plans are made from a vantage point that has no vision of all factors involved in all dimensions of space and time, and that is why the ego assumes things in an attempt to fill in the places it has no idea about. At this level of consciousness, you can only see what is right Here Now, and for most humans that is a tiny slice of eternity.

Of all the millions of cause-and-effect components required to cooperate all across the universe for your desire to be fulfilled, your egoic self is only aware of a tiny percentage of them. That is why its plans are never complete. But then there is a part of You that is nonphysical and aware of all, all, the components and how they would exactly fit into the space-time continuum to guarantee that your desire is fulfilled. That part of You is Everywhere, that is why It Knows.

Now, I would like you to stop for a moment and remember the last time you had a flash of insight, an ah-ha that made you smile with delight at how smart you are. We have all had those moments where, literally out of the blue, we get it! You could be taking a piss while daydreaming about the ocean, when this brilliant solution for your business appears in a flash in your mind, and you get so excited! It's a funny thing how they happen.

Have you ever wondered why they come to you as finished plans? Seriously, remember the last time you had one. You did not construct it, put it together, or formulate it. You know, you did not put it together, block by block, until it became the genius idea that it was. You just found it all done for you, there, flashing in your mind. And you ran out and told your friends what you just thought of, never once stopping to consider just how you thought of it. Really, who put it together?

Think about that. You found it complete, perfect for your needs. Who put it together with such wakeful intelligence that is aware of all that is involved so much so as to produce such a suitable idea? What about musicians? Many chart-topping artists report that they simply find the music in them; they hear it then write it. They don't put it together; they more like report it. The same goes for many inventors, many artists, and so on.

By the time you get one of those flashes of insights, by the time it enters your mind, it is already a copy. The original is out there somewhere, where it was put together by One who has full vision and was capable of bringing to you what you had not managed to package together yourself.

But remember, there is only One Mind, separation is a mental illusion, just like time is a mental illusion (time is thought "stretched" out into "space" to demonstrate and experience it; you recognize sections of eternity "at a time" to experience process, space demonstrated). You "heard" the thought, the inspiration, because you were listening, at that point empty in relation to the matter.

If you remain empty, you could continue, day by day, to listen to the rest of the plan, which includes how to execute the vision, what inputs to use, when to make what move, and so on. The place where the original plan came from is your own Higher Mind, that part of your individuation that is still in perfect recognition of its unity with All That Is, the part of you that sees all and knows all, the part of you that is not in the experience called human, the divine essence.

Now here is the greatest news: no divine plans are incomplete. None! So none can possibly fail when executed as planned. The Planner Sees All, Directs All. The only thing that can interfere (which means it introduces inefficiency to your personal experience) with a divine plan is a personal plan. This is not because a personal plan is more powerful; it is because the right to free will is upheld with the highest respect.

You have heard many times that you have many aspects of you, some of which you are conscious of and others of which you are not. When they are not aligned, you experience conflict and confusion. So now we know the difference between a personal and a divine plan.

A divine plan is not some plan made by some foreign god to impose on you; it is Your Own answer to your questions, from a level that sees all (Spirit) to one whose experience is one slice of the whole at a time (human). But it is all you. That is why those flashes of genius that you get are so complete, yet they are specific to the very problem or desire you had.

Now let us go back to this goal-making business. Personal plans have a function, but only when used to free the individual. It is the only time they can help you. And this is why. Imagine a person who feels like a victim (in anything, any area of life). They have given up hope. They feel powerless, incapable of making anything happen.

Now, if something happens that triggers their courage or anger enough to make them decide to do what it takes to make things work for them, they begin to become self-reliant. They drop the victim mentality. They make a plan; a way in which they feel will get them out of their desperation. Now, every time a human has a desire, the non-physical part of that human starts inspiring this human with ideas from a divine plan, ideas which are guaranteed to work.

However, if you have so much personal thoughts and emotions distracting you, you cannot hear these inspirations. You must still yourself. Like a calm pond, one which will instantly be aware of any rock thrown in. If you are like the Niagara Falls inside, you will not notice the rocks being thrown in.

Anyway, back to our example. This person, far from calm, will only hear parts of the plan being given them. They will, out of fear and a belief that they can fail, that there is some danger somewhere, they make a personal plan. They use inputs from inspiration, whatever they can hear and are not afraid to follow, and they also make up scenarios, imaginings based on their fears, and use these in the planning process.

At the end of it all, what they invariably find is that the plan works in certain portions. They are elated! Even if not everything worked as planned, at least something worked! And this way, they rise out of desperation and can now start to direct their life.

The point here is that from the place they were, the helplessness they believed to be in, any plan was a good thing. Any plan! And goals are great, because they give a point of reference, something to aim for. As you can see, even the worst personal plan, one with 10% success, is still a great thing for one who though they had zero power. It is something to celebrate and honor.

But then there comes a point where self-confidence and self-reliance is believed in enough to no longer be doubted. At this point, making personal plans becomes a great hindrance. Once you have proof that your life can be deliberately lived instead of under the idea that you are a victim of forces beyond your control, it is time to start using complete plans.

That means that the ego's personal plans are no longer useful. They were a crutch to remind you how to walk, with their goals and all, but now that you can walk on your own, you need a new tool to show you how to run and fly. That is a complete plan, a divine plan made by the higher aspect of Who You Are. You are much larger than you imagine yourself to be. Let us examine how this works.

Under the rule of personal plans, a person would "hear" the insight, the flash of genius, stop everything they are doing, and excitedly run to the office to start planning how to make this plan work! They assume it is "my idea" and "I must make it work against threat of failure". They make plans which rely largely on assumptions (an assumption is anything that is not What Is) because they cannot see the Whole Picture.

So by mere fact, their personal plans will have elements in them that interfere with the smooth progress of the original insight, the divine plan. This is where you start to fail because of your plans, not in spite of them. To begin with, you do not know what the vision you saw in your mind is for, its complete use to the entire universe. The universe is not personal; it works as a Whole. But the Original Source of the idea does.

You also do not know what the millions of cause-and-event components required are; you can only guess a few of them. And you do not know at what points in the space-time continuum they require to be inserted for everything to work perfectly; but the Maker of the Original Plan does.

Now watch how a personal plan messes you up at this stage. Your plan is based on dates and deadlines that you pull out of the blue. It is full of standards that you have determined indicate whether you have succeeded or failed. Let us say you miss a deadline, and something happens that is opposite of what you had hoped and expected.

What happens to your ego then? Does it not rush to judgment, calling you a failure, asserting the belief that things can go wrong and that you need even more control, and increasing the level of fear and anxiety? So next time when faced with a similar situation, you put even more focus on what you fear and then it happens again! Simply because you focused on it and thus created it.

It becomes a viscous cycle. And you keep reaching for more control. And you experience more stress instead of less. And fear increases. You never once to consider that there is nothing wrong with you or the universe, nothing unsafe. You never stop to consider that it is your personal plan that was grossly mistaken due to relying on a fear-created ego. Now let us see why the most successful people all preach the power of letting go. Let us look at how one would proceed in the above example, but by listening.

A person would hear the insight, and automatically know or remind himself or herself that all divine plans are complete, all the way to the end. They know that the vision is complete in the Mind of the One, and it cannot ever fail. So it is simple. In the same way, they listened to and heard the great idea that made them all excited, they would remember that their copy is just a copy.

The original is still out there, along with everything needed to make it manifest. So they would listen and wait. They would know that at the right time and place, they would receive the next piece of the puzzle. They would rest, not stressing about making plans to "make sure" it happens. And it makes sense. If they did not compose the first idea, why can't they trust that composed it will also give forth, at the right time, everything else needed to make it work?

Imagine the universe is a big circle and you are a little circle within that big circle. Now a personal planner assumes that the big circle is at war with him or her, the little circle. In their fear over this imagined state of things, they make up a phantom world in their mind, with assumptions about the future and how the rest of the universe will act and react, and they plan against this.

It is so draining. One who does not make personal plans but listens to their higher aspect, on the other hand, sees the big circle as part of them, part of the whole, with only an intention to love them and make sure all is OK, because all is One. They have chosen to believe in peace and love rather than separation and scarcity.

This is a choice, and it is the choice that allows them to let go. They realize that they are best served focusing on the little circle, their Here Now, which is what they have full knowing of. And they awaken within that circle that is them, here, now. They chose to put all their attention here, now, and because they do this, they are aware of their emotions and thoughts.

Presence gives them the ability to control their here, now. So they choose, here now, always, to make their here now happy and well. Here, Now, they follow whatever cues come up, always deliberately choosing their thoughts and emotions, here now, and not throwing their mind into some imagined past or future.

In other words, they make every here now moment golden, and because all life is a successive moments of infinite Here Now, their lives automatically work perfectly! You have seen them or heard of them. That is how they do it. Clarity, simplicity, power, peace, calm... all rewards of being present and following complete plans, letting go of personal plans once you recognize that their use as a crutch is complete. They become purely efficient, effortless.

Such people walk this earth without the baggage of plans and worries, and things work better for them! They recognize that the universe is not personal, yet it is only, only, loving and all else is our self-created illusions. Just because we do not understand something does not make that thing wrong.

There are more things relating to your life than you are consciously aware of at this level of your existence. Remember that your life always creates the next moment of your experience out of your intentions. Whatever you give attention to grows. You are therefore held hostage by your own personal plans.

So what is the point of your mind at this level, in relation to planning? Well, it is to execute that plans it receives, knowing with certainty that they cannot fail. It is to fashion all of your existence here into an appropriate vessel to execute these plans. The plans are already perfect. All they need is a suitable vessel to manifest through.

You have to become a certain person for certain things to flow through you. It is this that you can use your lower mind for, by following cues from the higher mind. The attainment of success is not something that one comes by through chasing after success - it is something one attracts by the person they become.

You form a vibration match with what you desire. It is an inner journey of transformation. You can call it education, training, skills, self-help, discipline... it is all an inner transformational journey resulting in a frequency match. It is guaranteed. That is all you have to do. The rest is done for you (admit it; you don't know how it is done, how all those things are coordinated universally to make this amazing miracle called life work with predictability!).

You now have a progression of the use of various types of plans. In the beginning, personal plans can be used to establish self-reliance in a being that has lost hope. However, there comes a time when that crutch, the personal plan, because the very problem itself, the cause of failure instead of being the cause of success. That's when its time to let go of the crutch.

It is time to dare give trust a chance, to dare believe that the universe is loving (not dangerous, as you have been indoctrinated to assume) and see what happens! Give it a go! Find out for yourself. Let go, truly, a few times and listen to the plans as they come and see what happens!

Gather your own evidence instead of holding on to personal plans because you are afraid something could "go wrong". You don't have to carry that huge unnecessary load. Drop it. It is very liberating! Try it a few times and see how you like it.

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About the Author

Article written by David Cameron, CEO ImagesOfOne.com, author of A Happy Pocket Full of Money, Diet Liberation, and other books, and developer of the Prova LifeGoals Effortless Achiever+, LifeDiet Liberator and LifeMap Numerology software packages.  These and titles such as Think and Grow Rich, As A Man Thinketh, and more are available for download and free trial at http://www.ImagesOfOne.com.

You may distribute this article freely as long as you keep the content unchanged and include this byline.  For further information you may contact the author at his website: http://www.ImagesOfOne.com.