There is no way to state the law of attraction with finality,
because thousands of people have tinkered with it, and some of them
earnestly believe they have the only "true" version.
I'll present several of the more popular descriptions first, and then comment.
"The law of attraction is the name given to the maxim 'like attracts
like' which in New Thought philosophy is used to sum up the idea that by
focusing on positive or negative thoughts a person brings positive or
negative experiences into their life..." (Wikipedia)
"The Law of Attraction is no scary science or heavy philosophy - it is
all about turning good intentions into positive action. It really is as
simple as that. Simple exercises like filling your thoughts, words and
energies with positivity and possibility, knowing exactly what it is
that you want and then simply 'allowing' the universe to flow."
(thelawofattraction.com)
"Someone has said, 'the Universe has imagined it even better than you
have.' And we like to add to that: The Universe got all of its
information about what you like from you, and it has remembered every
piece of it and has put it together in perfect formation. And so, the
things that are on their way to you are so much better than you even
know that you want. And as you allow them, the essence all of these
things that the Universe knows that you are wanting make their way to
you and appear in perfect timing for you." (abraham-hicks.com)
The first thing to notice about these formulations is that they have a
major passive component. You're just there, thinking good thoughts, and
the universe delivers its gifts to you. Hello! Incoming! And the
second thing to notice is how the universe itself is characterized. It
isn't planets, stars, and galaxies. It's a mystic "everything" that is
paying close attention to you. It's an outside force that is ready and
willing to pass along positive results in exchange for positive
thoughts.
It's no surprise that the law of attraction has flourished in modern
America. The law, in its own strange way, is a marvel of optimism. "No
need to worry, all you need to do is accentuate the positive in your
thoughts, and good things will descend upon you."
There is even a more "sophisticated" version of the law, whereby, if you
think-positive and don't receive what you want, you didn't really want
it. That is, your higher self didn't want it. Therefore,
disappointment and failure aren't possible.
The law is also an expression of a severely declining culture, in which
large numbers of people, living in a superficial land of plenty, just
can't seem to be happy. They're not getting what they want. The
presents under the Xmas tree aren't the right presents. The dreams
they're dreaming aren't coming true. Therefore: build a better Santa
Claus. Call him Universe.
The law of attraction also has a dark side: don't entertain negative
thoughts or negative things will happen to you. This may as well be an
overt piece of mind control, because...who can avoid a trickle or a
stream of negative thoughts? The individual is being set up. "Be a
cop. Monitor yourself. Be your own Surveillance State. Keep those
negative thoughts away. Don't think of a pink elephant driving a truck
on the sidewalk as you step out a café..."
The law of attraction: it's as if someone read an ancient torn
manuscript, tried to reconstruct a valuable piece of information, and
missed the mark by a few miles. He got it all wrong. He got it
backwards. Everything he could get wrong he did get wrong.
Why do I say that?
First of all, re the law of attraction, we're talking about "positive
and negative thought" at a level of power that is weak, weak, weak.
We're talking about an inconsequential level of thinking. We're also
talking about thought that is divorced from action. The individual is
characterized as if he were a radio antenna, a receiving apparatus.
Thoughts are coming in, good ones and bad ones. His job is to filter
out the bad ones and strive to accentuate the good ones. This is
preposterous. This is a losing proposition.
In ancient Tibet, before the priest class took over and established a
theocracy, the practitioners of the art of manifestation were operating
at a truly profound level of creation. If someone had come up with the
law of attraction, he would have been encouraged to see it and invent it
with all the sustained intensity he possibly could---and then, when he
had it before him with alive and electric force, he would have been
told:
get rid of it.
The whole notion of Tibetan magic was: creation and destruction.
Through long-term grounding in this practice, the student would
eventually come to see, first-hand, that he could invent anything and
also dispense with it. Now we're talking about power.
Not the inconsequential static of "positive and negative thoughts." Not
the little amateur radio station. Instead, the Niagara, initiated by
the student and gotten rid of by the student.
"You're in love with the idea of a beneficent universe that delivers all
good things? All right, create that universe with all the energy you
can muster. Spend months creating it. And then, when you're quite sure
you've got that marvelous invention, and it's going to hand down to you
everything you want, get rid of your invention. You see? You're the
artist of reality. You invent it. You can invent whatever you want,
and you can destroy it, too. You're the painter with an infinite
canvas. You can fill it up with anything you want---and you can also
paint over it and erase it out of existence. And there's no need to
feel sad about it, because you KNOW you can create endlessly. You're
living in a sea of abundance, not because the universe is mandating it,
not because any entity or force or field or personage is mandating it or
allowing it, but because YOU are the beginning and end of the
abundance."
The Tibetans weren't fooling around. They weren't taking a stroll
through a mall. They weren't pining over some fervently wished for
relationship that never was. They weren't cooking up some little
religion with rainbows and marshmallows. They weren't a terminally
sentimental culture. They weren't living and dying by dreams of abject
hope. They weren't inventing some good guy at the center of universe
who comes down the chimney every night to deliver presents.
For that twisted version of the truth to flourish, there had to be a
culture that was seeming to produce a consumer paradise. A place where
every toy and machine and frizzle and frazzle on shelves of plenty were
within arm's reach---and still the people were unhappy. Then, the
people would imagine that a higher St. Nick was available by merely
"thinking good thoughts." Then, people would believe this St. Nick was
"giving them permission" to be happy.
Re the law of attraction, those early Tibetans would say: "Are you
really worried about thinking a negative thought? All right, take one
of those negative thoughts and invent it sky-high. Go to the quarry and
cut out a two-ton block of granite and have some horses drag it back
home and spend a few months engraving that negative thought on the stone
and put lights on it and hold a week-long boggling celebration---and
then blow up the stone. Do this whole process many times as you need
to, until you realize you can invent anything and then get rid of it.
Until you realize you're an artist of reality and you're infinitely more
powerful than some weak sister of a 'negative thought'.
An artist of reality puts together a vision of something he deeply,
deeply, deeply desires, and then he strides out and brings it into being
in the world. Because he wants to. Because he'll walk through
whatever he has to walk through to bring it to fruition. And that's
"the law of attraction." It's not a law and it isn't attraction. It's
art. It's creation. It's invention. Nothing is "allowing it to
happen."
The individual, as an artist of reality, can go anywhere and access
anything: he can tap into fields of data, oceans of being, other
people's minds, this consciousness and that consciousness, this role and
that role; he can merge and un-merge---or he can do none of that. He
can invent power out of nothing. He can, as artists have since the dawn
of time, experience the joy and ecstasy of bringing to life his
greatest dreams. He can invent and choose those dreams. And he can
also, if he wants to, put all that on the shelf, and just walk down the
street in the rain and hold a newspaper over his head and hail a cab and
ride to a restaurant and have a drink and eat a meal with a friend and
talk about the horse who won the fifth race at Del Mar.
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