If manifesting were easy, we’d all be doing it. My guess is there must be a few safety switches…
so I’m listening to some young bloke on the internet going on about something or other and he’s talking about the Law of Attraction.
This phrase entered the common language with the book and movie ‘The Secret’, but the idea has been around for a long, long time.
In case you’ve somehow missed it, the idea is that like attracts like. So if you want money or power, or a new bike, or whatever, you need to focus your conscious energy on those things, and your soul will then become a magnet for whatever you want.
Through mantras, affirmations, vision-boards and those sorts of things, we can change our cosmic shape, and thereby, the things that we are attracting toward us.
Could it really be as simple as that?
Now if you know me, you know I’m a big believer in radical responsibility. We ‘own’ our lives and everything that happens in them.
I’ve also seen first hand the power of mindset – the immense power of attitude and belief. At times I’ve seen this get a bit freaky and ‘cosmic’.
But I also know that humans have a tendency to want to believe in fairies and that sort of thing, especially when the message is as easy and seductive as “think it and you will have it.” And I know in myself that even when things happen that are too good to be true, I’m just as likely as anyone to fall into confirmation bias.
So I hedge my bets. Attitude and belief are powerful allies, even if there isn’t a cosmic dimension to it. Positive thinking is worth doing anyway.
And the truth is that there must be more to the story. If it really were as simple as “thinking hard enough”, then it would be an easy experiment to set up. Get a 1000 people, thinking as hard as they can, and they should all become millionaires.
But as far as I’m aware, there’s no studies out there like that.
So, just for arguments sake, what else needs to be part of the picture?
Well, for one, I think there needs to be some sort of maturity measure. The ability to manifest whatever you want could be incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands.
Like a toddler. Their world would be full of boobies and gummy bears. A tweens would be full of Justin Beiber. A teenage boy… well. You get the point.
And you certainly can’t say that tweens and teenagers don’t want things ‘hard’ enough. They are incredibly passionate.
So conscious desire alone can’t be enough. Focus alone can’t be enough.
If it is real, then it has to be in the way our conscious and unconscious minds relate (or else its external and out of our control.)
This is where it starts to get interesting.
The Law of Attraction says that we can use our conscious mind to shape our subconscious beliefs.
Now I’m not sure if I was designing this system, that I would make the subconscious mind all that accessible to the conscious mind.
The way I think about it, we’ve got surface mind and deep mind. Surface mind is all the dazzling thoughts that flit about all over place, from pasta to cars to work schedules.
Deep mind is where the real work happens – from regulating breath to intuition. Perhaps, even, connecting with the cosmic mind.
Do you really want to give a monkey the keys to a bulldozer?
If the deep mind is accessible to the surface mind, then I think there must be a few safety switches involved.
I think one of those is probably maturity. The monkey has to prove it is trustworthy. It needs to demonstrate that it takes its responsibilities seriously, and that it can stay the course through squalls of emotion.
I think another is probably consistency. The monkey wants the same thing from year to year. Its not just chasing one desire after another. That’s not to say there’s no room for novelty. More, that the monkey has a clear idea of what it is about and what makes it happy, and it keeps it energies focused on that.
Third, I think there needs to be an alignment with inner truth. We might desire things that would actually inhibit our growth. We might want to become a millionaire so we can escape (or paper over!) our own inner worlds of hurt or painful relationships.
The monkey might think it wants a million bucks, but the deep truth is that the soul is looking to grow and looking to love.
If the monkey is going to take the soul off its true course, then no bulldozer for you.
Again, this isn’t knowledge. This is just theory and thought bubbles. But it seems to me that if the great creator was going to put something as powerful as pure manifestation in our hands, there would need to be some checks and balances.
There’d need to be a safety switch.
So I suspect, unless you can take on responsibility, unless you can demonstrate consistency, and unless you can do the deep work to reconcile and align yourself with your deepest truth, then the fullness of your own power will be kept hidden from you.
It means that your efforts to manifest your dreams will be frustrated and get mixed results at best.
The bad news of course is that while ‘believe it and it will happen’ sounds easy, getting past the safety switches of responsibility, consistency and alignment are actually quite a bit of work.
Still, work worth doing right? No matter who’s running the cosmic construction yard…
What has been your “real” experience around the law of attraction?
Worked for you?
If so how and in what ways?