The Midas Story Revisited

King Midas made a wish that everything he touched would turn to gold. The wish was granted him with bitter irony: he touched his daughter whom he loved more than his life and she turned into solid gold—flesh turned stone.

We might say that the moral of the story is obvious—it teaches us that there is more to life than greed and that making a wish for money can have dire consequences. Most of us are consoled by this simple black and white configuration of love and greed. Wishing for love is good. Wishing for money is bad.

But I think the story begs to be looked at differently, especially in this day and age when “think and you will receive” is becoming more and more aligned with universal truth. What if King Midas’ failing lies not in his wishing for gold, but in his inability to see that gold can include love, goodwill, happiness and family as well. He could not see that abundance comes in many forms, one of which is gold and that very often money flows to us together with the joy and meaningfulness of relationships. His mistake is not that he made a wish for gold, but that he did not wish for more. His wish was not large enough to encompass the magnificence of the universe. He stopped too soon in his wishing and came up with a botched dream.

There is a lesson to be learnt here. We often cut ourselves short by asking only for one thing. Why not ask for more?Why not ask for everything?In a cosmos that is a unifying field of connections, asking for one thing reveals our incapacity to see the connections inside and all around us or the potentials that lie within each event. And it is this stunted vision that hobbles us, weighs us down with the literalness of our flesh and makes us accountants, rather than creators, of dreams.