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Goodbye Jesus

Law Of Attraction


yunea

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I blogged about this a while ago - http://www.ex-christian.net/blog/241/entry-1158-stuff-and-things-no-really/#.VOSuGlRJV5Q - and decided to finally start this thread. 

 

For those unfamiliar with the Law of Attraction, I suppose there are many versions of it but these are the kind that I've gotten used to in the past:

 

1) You attract what you think about without realising it. As in, if you take up a negative attitude, for example "I know things will be bad", it's more likely that you will find things bad. Same goes for honestly expecting things to turn out well - it makes them more likely to turn out well.

2) You can consciously attract stuff. This can be done in many different ways. Some involve praying to your god of choice to bring it to you, some involve just focusing heavily on the thing you want and visualizing yourself getting it. After the visualization, you have to go outside and take the first steps toward getting the thing, and your god/the Universe will throw it at you. 

 

Well, number 1 is confirmation bias I think. Many things are quite neutral in nature. We tend to seek confirmation for our thoughts rather than ways to prove ourselves wrong (it protects our idea of ourselves and our self-esteem from abrupt changes, and we need that, because familiarity brings comfort), and many things can be interpreted as good or bad quite freely. 

 

Number 2 is somewhat more interesting though, because as I said in my blog, I made it into an art.

 

I have done a lot of praying to God, Jesus, angels and spirit guides, and I've also simply imagined that the Universe itself can be asked to give me stuff. The simplest method was that I visualized what I want with as much detail as possible, and a silver string between myself and the thing. Then, in the visualization, I pulled at the string to get the thing close to me. In all of these cases, I've soon been able to find the thing I wanted. I've just had to go out and walk around second-hand stores, and there it's been, perfectly or nearly perfectly from my visualization.

 

I could list all the things I've gotten this way. I listed some of them in my blog. An amusing side to it is that I used to live next to a second-hand store run by some Baptists, and some of the best things I wanted, I found there.

 

At some point I made a point to attract money, and I did get some big surprises in that area as well during the next couple months. Not all of it was fully pleasant though; for example, some jerk crashed into my poor parked car, and somehow the insurance company decided my car was worth a whopping three times more than it actually was at that point. Wendytwitch.gif

 

What is also interesting is that I can still make this work even though I've done more blasphemy during the past few weeks than ever before in my life. I haven't consciously asked the Universe itself to give me anything, or visualized myself pulling stuff closer with silver strings. I've only been focusing heavily and honestly on what I've wanted, and believed that those things can be found soon. After a recent day when I found four or five things I'd really really been wanting within the course of a couple hours, I couldn't help but be reminded of my old way of life. 

 

I'm getting ready to think that if there is anything to this attracting stuff thing, maybe it's one "explanation" to how Xtians get their car keys back, and other tiny little stuff-related prayers "answered". I myself used to think that getting stuff that way was a humorous way of God telling me I was on the right road, especially since the Baptists' second hand store had the stuff so often. It's very easy to think that way, especially when the details end up exactly right. But if it was true, these days I should be getting into accidents and catching illnesses due to God's wrath over my blasphemy, not continuing to be lucky with stuff I want, exactly as effectively as I did when I was a believer. 

 

What do you think? What's your view on Law of Attraction?

 

Is it just that because we make ourselves sure about what exactly we want, we simply recognise it more easily in this world that's full of stuff, and it only seems more unlikely than it actually is and appears connected to us when it isn't? 

 

At this point I'm not sticking to any explanation myself. I've been fantastic at lying to myself and seeing meaning in things that have no meaning, and I try to recover from that. So, for now I choose to not know, but I'll continue to be firmly focused on what I want, because that in itself can't be a bad thing.

 

But hey, discuss! yellow.gif

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I find it interesting that the prayer in Christianity and the laws of attraction both work the same way.  And not only that, but the teachers teach to use the same principles:

 

In prayer: be thankful to God when you're praying for something and believe that you already got it. Don't be double minded in your praying, because a double minded person doesn't get anything.  Have a grateful attitude when you pray rather than a pitiful one, begging for things.  Do no worry about stuff, but just trust God to give you what you're asking for. 

 

Laws of Attraction:  believe that you already got this thing, visualize it, vibrate on the frequency of having it rather than not having it.  Don't keep changing your mind: oh, I can get it... no, I can't... Oh, I can get it... no, I can't...  (It's like double mindedness in prayer idea.  It's like it's going to confuse the Universe because it's not sure which frequency you want to come true since you keep vibrating on both of them).  Have a lighthearted playful  attitude about this thing because if you want it too much and become obsessed about it that somehow creates some obstruction in you getting it.  Just let the Universe bring it to you, you should not worry because then it opens a way for it to do it.

 

I've tried the laws of attraction and prayer also. 

 

It was cool.  I needed a reclining chair, but couldn't afford it.  So I started to visualize it in my living room.  Then my mother in law calls me and offers to buy us one.

 

Sometimes I pray to help me to wash the dishes.  There are modes where I could get extremely lazy (whatever that phenomenon is). And it's like there is no way I can make myself wash the dishes.  But I also really don't want them to be dirty.  So I started praying for help.  And then I got enough in me to get up and do it.  I did this a few times.

 

I prayed to find things.  I prayed for things to go well at a certain party or a gathering. 

 

I also use my husband to "wish" for things.  His powers are pretty strong.  So I wanted a dishwasher and I knew that I had to convince him to want one too.  Because if he does, then he'll start wishing for it.  And then somehow we'll get it.  So it took a while. I kept telling him how we needed it and he didn't believe it.  And finally he believed it.  And then his dad all of a sudden offers to buy us a dishwasher.

 

Sometimes he uses me.  Like he would be wishing for a certain room to get clean. (And I really don't like doing that).  But after he wishes, all of a sudden I get a desire to do it.  And I WANT TO DO IT.  So I feel good doing it.  And he is happy too, when it's done.  This happened a few times. I usually feel kind of sick after 1 hour of physical labor.  But this one time (when he wished for something) I spend 5 hours cleaning and did not feel bad afterwards at all.

 

One time I get a desire to visit my mom and she says: "I've been thinking about you".

 

I get a desire to give $100 to someone (and I usually don't do that).  And they say: oh, thank you, I've been praying about it.

 

I believe it's about a network. We are all interconnected, but we don't know it.  So the praying and the hearing and the answering happens because we are a part of the network.  You know how sometimes Christians get up at night to pray for someone and then later find out that the person was in danger at about that time.  So it's like someone on the Network woke them up and told them to pray, while someone else on the Network knew about the person's bad situation.   And someone on the Network knows about wishes and passes on the messages.  And someone else triggers others to help each other.

 

And sometimes it's about noticing like you said.  When you start to wish for something, you start to pay attention to the details and notice more, notice opportunities.

 

There was one time a thing I needed to buy, but I was really afraid to go to that store (can't explain beyond that).  Each time I think about it, I see an obstacle that I just can't overcome.  So finally I realized that I should visualize that object in my room, as though I already have it.  It helped.  I got just enough courage to go and buy that thing.  (But it seemed so impossible).  

 

This could be about connections also. Like WHO is it that makes me be able to do the dishes when a moment ago there was no way I could do it?  Or who is it that gives me courage to do something when a moment ago I had none?

 

Christians believe that God is always with us.  I don't believe in a Christian God anymore.  However, the Being I communicate with told me: I am with you.  (so it's a similar idea to the Christian God, but it's about being on the Network in my case, it's about all of us being interconnected...linked...)

 

So if we are linked, we can hear each other, we can help each other, and we can send feelings to each other (like some people feel love coming from the Entity that visits them) or maybe they sent me courage when I needed it.

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The "law of attraction" does indeed work, but there's no magic involved.

 

If you can truly believe a goal is attainable for you, you can focus on finding opportunities to achieve it. You will ignore the negative input from friends and family and simply work toward the goal. Others you deal with will behave according to your expectations and positive feedback you give them. A clear vision of what you want and the unwavering belief it will happen means nothing will deter you. Determination pays off. A happy coincidence will usually be chalked up to the "magic" of believing (or praying, specifically), and that only helps to encourage other successes that you yourself create.

 

An old but perhaps the best treatment of the subject is   http://www.global-performance-coaching.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/The-Magic-of-Believing-by-Claude-Bristol-1948-Success-Manual-Strategist-Edition-2010.pdf

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Seems to me:

  1. Those who wish to maintain the worldview that all is brutally mechanistic and physical will tend to say that you are deluding yourself.
  2. Those who wish to maintain a metaphysical worldview will tend to say that you are a gifted magician.
  3. Those who see this world in more nuanced psychological terms will tend to say that you get what you want because your concentration, knowingly or not, leads you to acts that bring you your desires.

From my standpoint, I would not say that any of these are right or wrong - they are not mutually exclusive and they form a sort of Venn diagram, with you somewhere in the overlapping area.

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I've read up on the topic and have practiced it very consciously at times. Quite strange, the results. 

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It's an interesting conversation to have and I've enjoyed all of your comments, thank you! yellow.gif

 

Personally I'm not sure this needs any beings, as this has worked for me even though during my deconversion, I did a little ritual in which I said firmly that no spirits, entities, angels, gods etc should ever contact me again, period, "just in case" there are any out there. If there is someone there making this easier for me, it's not respecting my will. I'd rather not think of that possibility, it'll open doors I've just managed to shut.

 

There is also another side to this that I don't like: it can make you fear you're attracting your misfortune, and then you get paranoid about where your thoughts are going. "Do I secretly hate myself so much that I unconsciously invited this and this shit?" 

 

I used the word "you" but that's actually the old me. I don't want to fall back into the trap of thinking that my pets get ill or I run into a particularly nasty person because of something I've thought. 

 

Was nice though, last week, to walk into the exact pair of curtains I'd just decided I wanted. They had a good discount, they were the last set left, and no other curtains there had discount at all. Heh. My living room looks much better now.

 

You guys who feel you've managed to attract things, how do you live with the possibility you'll attract bad stuff?

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Guest Furball

I don't believe in the laws of attraction. In the past i have been super positive and went out of my way to help as many people as i can and yet i still had horrible things happen to me as if i was under some curse or something. I have also held a negative view and treated people maybe not as good as i should have, yet i had good results in my life. To me it sounds like your describing karma or superstition. Do you remember that old superstitious saying, "step on a crack, break your mothers back?" It sounds like karma or superstition to me. I don't believe in that, i tried it in reality and it didn't work. Things went bad when i thought good, and things went good when i thought bad. It is a question to be pondered though. The why do things come into our lives or happen to us outside of our control.

 

As far as the things you got when you pulled it to you, do you think this could be nothing more than coincidence? 

 

Some people seem to have whatever they think they want, whatever they want it seems to just come to them while others it doesn't. I wish i had the ultimate answer yunea, but sadly all i have are guesses, with the exception i listed above. -me

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Yes CC, I too had some horrible things happen to me when I was doing the pulling, positivity & faith combination the most enthusiastically.

 

And yes it can be a weird coincindence that I seem to be getting what I want, I don't *know*, thinking i knew all about it played a large part in the happenings that nearly cost me my life and sanity (well temporarily the sanity did go away). I don't want to go back to the lifestyle of thinking I have more "control" on things than I actually do because it'd make me paranoid to think "bad" thoughts and perhaps cause the "don't think of the white elephant" effect.

 

I haven't done the actual pulling since my deconversion and hardly even remembered the whole thing till I started to once again run into all this stuff I'd just been focusing on, exactly how I'd imagined. I'd prefer doing Occam's razor but I'm not sure exactly what I should cut away.

 

It is strange how much there is in common with "prayer from heart", etc. I've thought of that as well (referring to the first comment I got, I'm typing with my phone so quoting is a bit tricky) but no more prayer, positivity, pulling, or other rituals make divine intervention or other protection happen when you're in fact in danger. So certainly there's a lot of lies in the bible about the power of it too.

 

Anyhow I remain agnostic but curious about what people's views are. :) Though I really have to be careful not to obsess too much over the unexplained in my life. I've had moments of regret about bringing this up, but then again it's brought about some chances for reflection, to see which way my thoughts go.

 

If I sound negative towards anyone, that's not my intention. I really appreciate being able to have a conversation that is not primarily centered on who has the craziest explanation (those new age forums, whew). It's a sleepless night for me, 5 am with a slightly upset stomach.

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I've read up on the topic and have practiced it very consciously at times. Quite strange, the results. 

care to share those results?

 

You know, just basically deciding inwardly that I'm ready for such and such to happen then watching it unfold in a slightly delayed reaction. My marriage, for instance. When I decided that I was ready to settle down I was suddenly surrounded by women trying to settle me down. And one of them succeeded! Prior to making the conscious decision I wasn't surrounded by it and getting bombed from all directions. Another was advancing in my trade. These things come at you, you don't even have to pursue them. It comes at you. It's not as explainable as people make out. It's just a steady stream of chance events that keep streaming along to the point where you may question if it's explainable as just random chance. The correspondence between your intention and then the unfolding is actually quite remarkable.  

 

Although you can never cross off random chance completely. No matter how dazzling, there's always room for doubt.  But at the same time there's nothing to loose by giving it a serious try.  

 

Basically the skill set involves thinking about things before going to bed and then harnessing that emotion so that it will feed into your sub-conscious mind while you're sleep. So whereas a kid may say bed time prayers, this is more of a mystical approach to doing something similar. But it's all in your mind. It's not off to some God out there. So it's not exactly like prayer but I think people who pray are really sending emotions into their own sub-conscious mind without realizing what they're doing. I've done this to the extant that I'm not asking, I'm commanding that such and such happen right away!  If you're worked up about it, that seems to trigger it off more. You're not groveling at some power that you perceive as other than you yourself. You're instead taking control of the powers of your own mind with intent and purpose. I remember being out of work and actually screaming out at the environment, "give it to me right now! I want the answer!" Next day I was called about a nice computer installation gig that ended up lasting 3 years until I moved on to something else. It was one of those jobs that if you saw it in the news paper you'd think it was a con. Just chance, right at the apex of everything falling apart. Right when it was the most important time. That's why I was so worked up about getting an answer. It was do or die. 

 

Another system that seems to work is having a talisman or talismans. It's not the object itself, it's your mental focus and the object is a tool to focus your mind on this or that. Let's say protection, for instance. You imagine that you're protected from the north, south, east, and west and possibly make the crucifix with the talisman while you recite that. It's not about a God or Jesus, it's about the four cardinal points of a perceivable three dimensional universe and imagining a force, energy field, or barrier of waves surrounding you at all times, warding off evil and ill-intent from people or animals (sharks!). If it's true, and it really works in some way, I would think it's because of the unknown power of the human mind, not magical forces or spirits emanating from an inanimate object. That's the way I see the proposal anyways. I think that if any magic actually works, it must trace back to something potentially natural like mind to mind or mind to matter interactions. If the idea that all is consciousness is correct, then this would all stem from that basic premise. The material world would be nothing more than an emanation from pure consciousness and interaction between physical mind and matter would be viewed in those terms. 

 

Another point made in these books is that the idea of like attracts like has nothing to do with magnetism. 

 

It's just the basic observation of nature and how things tend to unfold like that. I think mystics who were paying attention to the correspondence between thought and emotion and how life unfolds eventually devised the idea of a law of attraction. I see people all the time that will go into a situation with the attitude of "everything goes wrong for me," and dam it, it will usually unfold like that. It's a red flag in business. They will not be content with things going right. It's like they have to save face by being right about their prediction of negativity. So now there's mental incentive to save face and turn out correct. They've decided that things will go wrong, because they always do. It's that little dust cloud that never seems to go away.

 

I used to do that when I was a kid. Or try and think of the worst hoping that I'd be proven wrong. But I was able to shift all of that around though. I think everything will turn out just fine and it usually does. I'm not going to curse myself by entertaining the idea that things will go wrong. The guy I work for thinks exactly the same way. And he's successful! Things do generally unfold in his favor. But he has no knowledge of any of this. It's just his natural attitude towards life. And life put us together through happenstance and I'll likely take over down the road and be the owner of a booming business myself through this process of happenstance putting me at the right place, at the right time, with the just the right like-minded people, etc.

 

Whether it's true or not, I'm still glad I discovered it......

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Guest Furball

Thank you for sharing all that. I appreciate your willingness to open up about these things. I am curious about harnessing the emotion before bed and seeing if it unfolds into reality. I am going to try it tonight. Again, thank you for taking the time to share your experiences and thoughts. I wish you peace. -me

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Here's a link to the book (pdf) "The Secret of the Ages," by Robert Collier: http://www.tigerseyedowsing.com/ds/other/Secret.pdf

 

You may want to read into the whole thing and then try it out. The conscious mind, the sub-conscious mind, and how it communicates with the whole. 

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The "law of attraction" does indeed work, but there's no magic involved.

 

If you can truly believe a goal is attainable for you, you can focus on finding opportunities to achieve it. You will ignore the negative input from friends and family and simply work toward the goal. Others you deal with will behave according to your expectations and positive feedback you give them. A clear vision of what you want and the unwavering belief it will happen means nothing will deter you. Determination pays off. A happy coincidence will usually be chalked up to the "magic" of believing (or praying, specifically), and that only helps to encourage other successes that you yourself create.

 

An old but perhaps the best treatment of the subject is   http://www.global-performance-coaching.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/The-Magic-of-Believing-by-Claude-Bristol-1948-Success-Manual-Strategist-Edition-2010.pdf

I'm currently reading through this book and comparing it with "The Secret of the Ages." 

 

Thanks for the link. 

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