What is the Law of Attraction?
The Law of Attraction is an ancient law. It has always been around otherwise it wouldn’t be called a law. There are records about what the Law of Attraction is that go back as far as 3000 BC. It is not an invention of modern times or an invention of a person or culture.
Likewise the Law of Gravity did not start to work because some person proclaimed it. People discovered the Law of Gravity through observation. And over time through testing and experimenting they’ve obtained a better understanding about how this physical law works.
Same goes with the Law of Attraction. It has always been around and it has always been playing a central role in the results people get in life.
During the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th century and especially with new discoveries in certain scientific fields people developed a stronger materialistic worldview than before. So the focus for what causes our results, switched from the internal world to the material or outer world, especially in western societies.
These days there is a new awareness to refocus and to search for different answers since it is quite obvious that an overly materialistic worldview as a cause giver is a quite limited outlook on the world.
In the personal development and self help field there have always been teachers who specialized in the Law of Attraction. There is quite a number of books about the Law of Attraction on the market, and people consistently have been talking about it for hundreds of years in esoteric and success literature.
The big attention the Law of Attraction received in recent times probably was due to the hype around the great success of the 2006 hit movie “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne and her complementary The Secret book.
The Law of Attraction explained
In simple terms, the Law of Attraction is a mental shortcut. The mental world is governed by its own laws and principles. To better understand what that means, let’s seperate the mental world conceptually from the physical world.
On the one hand there is default processing going on. On the other hand, we as conscious beings, can interact with our mind, which will influence and adjust its default processing.
The default processing of our mind is based on associations. When I say the word cat, a mental image of a picture of a cat that is associated with that word might get triggered in your mind.
And then other associations that are linked to that association might light up as well. The word cat triggers an image in your mind and then ideas and memories that are related and neurologically close to that image light up as well.
You can probably remember how it was the last time when one thought led to another. These associative thought jumps are based on the default thinking process of our brain.
Do you remember reading something and suddenly a whole bunch of related thoughts did pop up in your mind. Think about instances when your mind was suddenly wandering. Where something triggered an idea and then more and more related thoughts were lighting up carrying you mentally away.
Like attracts like – a mental law
I’ve mentioned above that the mental world is seperate from the physical world. And that the mental world is governed by different principles than the physical world. Our actions are a direct result of the mental processes that preceeded them. Our actions are an expression of our thinking.
Our results on the other hand are attracted by the actions we take. Thus the mental world is primary and the physical world is secondary in terms of cause and effect.
The Law of Attraction states that our thinking attracts the results we get into our lives. The short version of the Law of Attraction often is referred to as “like attracts like”.
Our mental default processing is based on associative thinking, as I described above.
Ideas that are associated with each other get triggered successively in our mind. That means that by default thoughts of a certain kind attract and trigger thoughts of a similar kind in your mind because they are closer associated with each other than other neural pathways. One association triggers another. And from what gets triggered in our mind our whole experience, focus and results flow.
If a thought pattern gets triggered in your mind that produces anger, it is likely that more of these angry thoughts that are associated light up as well if you do not consciously interfere.
Additionally the more often a neural pathway is used the stronger it gets and the more likely it will be travelled, attracting more and more power or respectively, destructive power to it.
How the Law of Attraction works
You won’t become all knowing and all powerful with understanding the Law of Attraction. But if applied correctly you will maximize the effect of your power as a conscious being. And this will be enough to get to perfect happiness for yourself and everybody else.
Our body and mind are always in motion. Standing completely still would take more and more effort the longer the timeframe. Just think about how difficult it would be to stand still for 4 hours without moving or thinking about anything!
By default our body and mind are in motion. Movement without friction is effortless.
What is the driver for that movement?
If we install a goal correctly into our mind it will start to go after it. The whole achievement process will be effortless if we clear the way for our body and mind. So the driver for that movement is the default programming of our mind as a goal achievement mechanism.
The Law of Attraction in practice
First we need to focus on installing the desired goal into our mind. Therefore we need to get clarity about what it is we want to achieve and how the world would look like after we’ve successfully achieved it.
When the goal is properly installed in our mind, it will start to go after it and we will feel an urge to do something to get there. As mentioned before, everything will be effortless and quite enjoyable unless there is friction or a full block to getting to the goal.
If there is friction involved then the process of manifesting our goal will feel streneous. A full block will lead to frustration or anger. Pay close attention to negative feelings. They can get encoded and associated with what you want to achieve.
To name but one example, people who think that getting money is hard or who avoid money getting activities, even though they claim that they want to have more money, might have encoded associations of negative memories with going after money.
So the second part of making the Law of Attraction work for you is to remove blocks and failure conditions towards what it is you want. This often is a process of successive revelation.
In the beginning you probably won’t know all the bottlenecks you need to break in order to get what you want. However if you know what to look for, then it often becomes quite doable to spot points of friction and bottlenecks after you’ve started to go after your goal as soon as you run into issues.
The Law of Attraction always works. If you’ve installed the goal in your mind, the magnet will be there to attract what you want. Your job then is to focus on the context and to pay attention to the blocks and failure conditions that hinder or prevent your body and mind manifesting it. If you remove those blocks the manifestation of your desires will be effortless.
The two circles with the arrows inside is a vector model. It is a visual representation of how the Law of Attraction works. The circles can represent your mind or your whole circumstance including the environment. When the vectors point upwards, they are aligned with your goal and what you want to manifest in your life.
When we start out with a new goal there might be a bunch of vectors that pull in all kinds of directions. Let’s say you want to make a certain amount of money. Let’s say 10.000 $ per month.
An unhelpful vector for many people might be a number that acts as a norm in their subconscious mind that is much lower. That number is based on the amount people around them were making when they were growing up.
Another vector that might not be aligned with the goal to grow your income might be self image goals of not wanting to make mistakes or not wanting to appear incompetent when learning new things.
Also things and people in the environment can be included in the vector model. Let’s say you want to focus in on money getting but people around you constantly imply to you that it is not important what you want to achieve and that you should come and hang out with them to watch sports and drink beer. Or if you are a woman it may be more applicable that they might want you to meet for coffee and talk about non business stuff.
So there are mental vectors and vectors in the environment that can pull on our mind and the direction it channels its processing power. Correctly applying the Law of Attraction will help you with the alignment of these vectors in an intentional direction towards what you want to manifest.
We do this by paying attention to what is pulling on our mind and by carefully paying attention where our focus goes and what intuitively feels important to us. We can navigate the sense of what feels important to us by immersion.
If we are totally immersed in some drama story a friend of us just told us then it will feel important to us and our mind will put more resources into it which in turn will attract certain results.
If we immerse our mind in related and properly aligned questions and inputs to our goal then this will feel important and serve as a strong pull towards manifestation.
The second model that can help to apply the Law of Attraction in practice is the Cell Receptor Model.
Imagine a cell in the blood stream. On its surface there are receptors attached. The cell and a lot of other stuff is randomly bouncing around in the blood stream.
If a particle comes close to a cell receptor and it matches the receptor it will bind to it. If it does not match and is not in harmony with the receptor it can’t bind and won’t be attached.
This is a metaphor for people and circumstances in your life. If you get into situations where you are not happy in, you need to take a closer look at your mental receptors. There is something you are accepting or are unclear about that is attracting this result into your life.
This is not about blaming you for negative things happening in your life. This is about pointing out for you where to look to make a paradigm shift and to change the game in a lasting way.
If you change the receptor of what you accept and if you get it right, then the right people and circumstances will eventually get attracted over time.
On the other hand imagine you want to bind a certain particle on the cell surface. If you do not have the specific receptor for it it can’t happen. For us to be receptive for our goals we first need to become clear about what we want and then properly install it in our mind.
This can involve a process of successively revealing what really would be great to manifest into our lives. The act of successively revealing what we want in life and to seek what is good, true and important can be looked at as honing our receptors more and more in a way that serves us.
This is what the Law of Attraction is all about. It is not about wishful thinking. But about clarity, understanding and properly aligning with what we want to manifest in our life.
