WHY THE LAW OF ATTRACTION IS SO DIFFICULT

The Law of Attraction, made widely known in "The Secret," became immensely popular when The Secret was first published several years ago. The Secret basically said that you can attract whatever you want in your life - money, success, the perfect relationship, great house, car etc. - simply by focusing on it with the positive intent to have it. In other words, by using positive intention, or positive thinking, you can manifest whatever you want for your life.

Positive thinking has actually been around for decades - it was the basis of the very successful self-help empires of Napoleon Hill, Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie - the forerunners of new thought applied to success in your personal life. Every ‘new’ formula for success based on positive thinking is always a hit - after all, who wouldn’t want an easy way to get rich? It appeals perfectly to the greedy, lazy age we live in.

Even though this concept is based on the ancient Hermetic Universal Law of Attraction principle, in the rush to get on the band wagon, very few stop to wonder, if it were so easy, how come everyone is not living out their dream? And anyway, how would the world function if everyone lived their dream - who would do the kind of work that no one else wanted to do? And would it really be so much fun if everyone else were also living in a big house and driving a luxury car?

You can tell by looking at the latest courses and books being offered that the initial optimism of The Secret is being replaced with not so positive results. Now courses offer to teach you why the Law of Attraction is not working for you - they say, pay me and I will give you the missing ingredient. It won’t make much difference ... and here is why.

Simply by applying positive thinking, we cannot change anything deep down inside because it is a way of avoiding looking at the unconscious mind, which is filled with the lifelong storage of our negativity. By not seeing it, do you think it disappears? You are just fooling yourself. You cannot change reality. The night will still be there; you can think that it is daytime for twenty-four hours, but by your thinking it, it is not going to be light twenty-four hours a day ... at lest not in your hemisphere.

And now, scientist Dr Bruce Lipton, has come up with scientific proof which backs up these concepts. He says that positive thinking does not work, because it is done with the "conscious mind." And the conscious mind is NOT what is running our lives.

Our lives are run by the sub-conscious mind, and what some like to call the unconscious mind. He says science shows that the subconscious runs our life 95-99% of the time, every single day. And the subconscious mind is much more powerful than the conscious mind - over a million times more powerful as an information processor. This is our creation machine ... the magic Genie or Jinn.

The combined effect of a million times more powerful part of our brain, and the fact that it runs our lives up to 95% of the time, means that our conscious mind (where our so called ‘positive thinking’ is) has quite a battle on it's hands to overrule this.

If our conscious desire fitted with our unconscious ideas, there would actually be no problem. Then the ‘Law of Attraction’ would work automatically - no need to do anything to create it. But most of our unconscious ideas (70% according to Dr Lipton), are negative and destructive, not what we would consciously want in the first place. And as that is what is running our life, you can see why any attempt at conscious positive thinking is doomed to failure all by itself.

It means that we may consciously think we want more money, and focus on the visualization of a nice fat bank account of a few million bucks and repeat a lot of affirmations to that affect, but if there is a belief in our unconscious mind that we don’t deserve to be rich, that we will never win the lottery, that it is something for other people not me, then guess what - no matter how much and for how long you visualize those millions, you will never get them. Somewhere in your unconscious files is the lie that you either don't deserve it, or will never be able to have it. The lies that are in our unconscious mind are toxic and are what wreck our daily lives.

The subconscious mind, is like a tape player – it just goes on playing the same old tapes we learned in early childhood. Those tapes are the messages we picked up mostly from our parents, or from anyone else who was very influential for the first six years of our lives. Most of the tapes run along the lines of, ‘You are not good enough’, ‘You don’t deserve’, ‘Other people are better than you’, ‘You are not acceptable or respectable as you are, you have to be better' ... or "no, no, no."

Whether these messages were given to us directly or indirectly, they are what we picked up from the way we were treated, and those messages went into our innocent unconscious minds where they became our beliefs. And then the tape player started re-playing those messages any time we were in similar situations, and we acted accordingly. In other words, we started living in a vicious cycle where we went on proving those negative ideas about us that we believed were true, thus making them even stronger. And it still happens today. We still continue to sabotage our attempts at happiness, success, love, etc. It's just that we are not aware - or conscious - that we are doing it ourselves, because they are, well… unconscious.

And where is our CONSCIOUS mind in all this? That tiny part that is supposed to be there for at least 1% of the day? Well, it is there when we consciously use our creativity to work on a particular issue or project. But when we are not using it, what does it do? It day dreams. It wanders off into the future or the past, or dwells in the past, and thus becomes unconscious ... joining the rest of our unaware zombiness. When it is somewhere else, it is not observing the unconscious mechanisms that are actually in this moment running our behavior. It remains unaware. And many of us are unaware that we are unaware. We're sleepwalking.

So, not only are we unaware of when our unconscious pre-recorded tapes are playing, we don’t even have the ability to use our conscious minds to become aware of and observe the mechanisms of the unconscious.

We have to learn how to use the STOP button on the tapes instead of the automatic Play button, and then to change the tapes. Reprogramming if you will. Grow new synapses ... replace old recordings of past experiences.

The best way to do that is through meditation. Meditation is, after all, the skill of watching the mind, without getting involved in it (ie without pressing the play button), and without judging it (it is after all old tapes that are probably no longer relevant to your life, if they ever were). It's like sitting on the beach and watching the ships go by. Don't label them, don't judge them ... just be the Observer ... the Witness.

We are NOT our experiences. We are the ones who are watching, observing, witnessing. We cannot take ownership of the things that happen to us in life. We are Spirit having a physical experience and ALL the physical experiences cannot belong to Spirit. When we take the time to find out the lies and the untruths that we have swallowed our entire lives, and start to clean out the boxes and throw away the garbage and the junk we have accumulated in our unconscious minds, then ... and only then can we affect change. Start at the bottom, then work your way up.

Just a thought ...

~Justin Taylor, ORDM., OCP., DM.