Basic Methods: The Law of Attraction

Chances are you're either a believer in this idea or not, and won't be swayed either way by anything I say. That's fine with me! Don't forget, I'm here to figure it out, myself. You have to admit, though, that if true, this could be the biggest change of all from the ordinary.

The Law of Attraction (LOA for short), at its simplest, is the ancient idea that like attracts like. It combines with, or is partly interchangeable with, the concept of “intent,” which suggests that what you mean to do or what you want to happen, is urged toward existence thereby. Whereas Positive Thinking (PT) is a way to alert oneself to good things and align one's perceptions and actions toward receiving and encouraging them, LOA and its related concepts state that the same can be affected outside of one's physical influence.

Think of it: utilizing this sort of thing, one could remotely prompt an old friend to finally call; not just see a parking space but reliably cause one to open up on your path; increase walk-in business. Though these examples don't really show it, there are ways to empirically define whether or not one's intentions are making an actual difference. What makes this part of the experiment interesting is that it can be tested and exists outside of one's control.

Like PT, LOA is not the same as Wishful Thinking. If anything, it's even farther from it than PT. It's a law of nature, and you can no more “break” it than you can break the law of gravity. That is, you can fight against it, but it's still there, fully in effect. We all interact with gravity every hour of every day, and people have since long before Newton had that incident with the apple. You don't have to understand Bernoulli's Principle to see that airplanes somehow leave the ground and know that it has something to do with their wings. LOA is with us whether we know it, want it, believe in it - or not! It simply is.

So… what the heck is it? What possible effect could my mere thoughts have on the physical world around me? It's a complicated answer (much more so than explaining Bernoulli's Principle), but the essential idea, as my imperfect understanding has it, is this:

When we experience an emotion about something, it has an effect on that something. Whether the emotion is positive or negative, the object of the feeling is drawn to the emotion. It seems, according to my reading thus far, to have a stronger effect on the web of patterns and effects in the world rather than the specific objects in those patterns. It's not a matter of wishing or hoping for something, but rather of recognizing that it is real or true (even if it isn't yet). Wishing, as I've said before, is very nearly a focus on something not being so, which may well have the opposite effect that one desires. Instead, build strong feeling in yourself, joyous positive feeling, that something is already true, already coming to pass, already real (whatever is appropriate), and connect it to a gratefulness regarding this good thing.

I sound very much like I already believe in LOA, don't I? Well, until pretty recently I didn't. Some things have happened lately that shoved me rather forcefully toward thinking that it just may be so. More on that another time.