On Friday, I sent a piece talking about the law of attraction and asking for your own thoughts. I was completely blown away by the number of responses, and the thoughtfulness of those responses!
This may (but shouldn’t) come as a surprise, but I read and respond to every response I get from this email list. Some days I get a ton of response, some none at all. But on Friday, I got a ton.
I wanted to share one response in particular, not because it’s better than the others, but it was extremely thoughtful and covered a lot of ground. It comes from a friend and Unrealist, Adam Morris. Check out his perspective, and enjoy!
Good reminder for the day… I needed to reflect on that. Here’s my insight:
You tend to interact and create your place in the world depending on your beliefs. And by belief, it’s not just the mental words, but your deep down intuitively knowing of how things are. It is “how you perceive reality” that shapes your experience.
We’re constantly collecting evidence to support our reality — and usually ignore anything to the contrary. An effective way to change these underlying beliefs is to specifically re-write how you see a situation, and then set out to gather evidence for that situation. At some point, you start to internalize it, and it becomes your new reality. [Collecting evidence helps!]
But it still needs to be believable. You can’t lie to yourself. You can’t say, “I’m X”, or “This great thing is going to happen,” when it’s too far fetched. (Maybe you can, but for all those that truly believe they are the president of the United States, only one is not in an insane asylum, and there is quite a lot of debate about the one exception…)
Quite often there is a radically different way of seeing something which does makes sense. Usually this is the awesome and fertile ground where manifestation / attraction works beautifully. Your point on “spending time thinking positively correlating to what you see” makes sense — our minds run off of habits, and when you visualize how things will be, you start living into that. [Build habits to reinforce!]
One of the big caveats though is when you try to use this as a tool to control the universe. The instant you try to force it, I find it falls apart. (Possibly because the act of trying to “will” something to happen implies that it does not — this shadow side to your attempt to change your manifestation is KEY: quite often what you do to change your situation implies that you believe the opposite.). [Accept you can’t control the universe!]
Two other big points:
1. Impermanence is real. Everything changes, and yet we still try to control the universe, and pretend that we can. At some level it feels like we can, and yet even what we manifest is as impermanent as everything else.
2. Dissatisfaction exists. There is something innately dissatisfying about being alive. That kind of sits there at the base our desire to change things. It’s the same side of the coin as suffering, this phenomena of discomfort that arises from not accepting how things are.
When the objectives of manifestation are to control the universe, create something permanent or eliminate this dissatisfaction / suffering… it will ultimately fail. Quite often, this is actually what’s happening beneath the surface.
But…when you’re trying to attract stuff into your life for the fun of it, are enjoying the journey and are not attached to the outcome, then your likelihood of successfully attracting something into your life goes through the rough. (Also, you’re more open to it being something other than what you expected.)
Fun topic.
Cheers,
Adam