Remembering the Secret that can Change Your Life Forever

I’d be hard pressed to think of any other single philosophical viewpoint potentially more life changing than that of accepting and fully understanding the first law in the Law of Attraction. The problem is that most people who hear about the Law of Attraction for the first time tend to reject it far too quickly because they THINK they understand how it works and they think they can immediately prove it wrong with just a few examples from their own life. Today I’d like to share a few of the thoughts about how I feel the Law of Attraction works and why I personally believe this truly is one of the biggest secrets we have all forgotten.

According Abraham (as recorded in the book “The Law of Attraction)”, there are three fundamental laws of the universe that must be understood in order for us to live our most rewarding and fulfilling life. The first law of the universe, Abraham says, is “that which is like unto itself is drawn”. Abraham explains it further in the following manner:

“Without exception, that which you give thought to is that which you begin to invite into your experience.”

Another way of saying this is that whatever we focus our attention on, we begin to attract more of that towards us. If we tend to view the world as a positive place and remain positive ourselves, our lives tends to be a more positive experience. If we tend the view the world negatively and let ourselves focus on the negative, our life tends to be pretty shitty. For me at least, when I began to fully understand this it was immediately (and intuitively) obvious – so much so that it felt more like something I had simply forgotten than some sort of new information I’d just discovered. With this, Abraham agrees:

“As you begin to understand—or better stated, as you begin to remember—this powerful Law of Attraction…you will begin to recognize the exact correlation between what you have been thinking about and what is actually coming into your experience. Nothing merely shows up in your experience. You attract it—all of it. No exceptions.”

But one of the key words here that people tend to overlook in the principle above is the word BEGIN. Things do not just instantly appear. This is not your traditional understanding of “magic” in that you simply say, “I would like a millions bucks” and POOF it magically appears in your hand in front of you. Rather, the process BEGINS with your intention and continues to gravitate toward you so long as that is where you attention remains. For most of us however, attention changes constantly and what we want one moment may be entirely different the next.

Just try and imagine a world in which our thoughts INSTANTLY manifest what we desire in any given moment. I would imagine that world would be quite dangerous. For example, have you ever been so angry at someone that for a split second you wished they were dead? In a world of instant manifestation it would only take that one fleeting thought and WHAM, that person is dead! Or maybe you just have a fleeting guilty thought that you kind of hope something bad happens to someone and suddenly they are in a horrific car crash maiming them for life. Therefore, it’s actually a good thing that things take time to manifest. Abraham concurs:

“Fortunately, here in your physical time-space reality, things do not manifest into your experience instantaneously. There is a wonderful buffer of time between when you begin to think about something and the time it manifests.”

Consider for a moment that this buffer of time between attention and manifestation is expressly for the purpose of making sure we manifest for ourselves exactly what we truly wish to manifest and not something we might later regret. The delay helps us avoid making mistakes in the things we wish to manifest in our lives. Unfortunately, few of us realize what we REALLY put our attention on most of the time. For example, we may feel that we continually have our attention on getting a new car because once or twice a day we say a little prayer or something about it. We might even say to someone, “I pray for a new car every day and I still don’t have one!” But that expression of your desire lasts about 10 minutes while the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of your day your attention is on other things – things we aren’t always consciously aware of.

The key to understanding why the Law of Attraction doesn’t seem to work the way most people think it should is that it’s not responding to your WANTS and your WISHES but rather where your ATTENTION and THOUGHTS are. There is a huge difference. People THINK they want to be rich. They THINK they want to have a new car, a new phone, a new book or whatever, but these wants and wishes may not be where they truly focus their attention. Often times we focus our attention not on what we think we want but rather we focus on all the reasons we AREN’T getting what we want. Instead of attracting more of the things we feel we deserve, we spend time putting our attention on why things aren’t going right yet or why it’s never really going to work.

Have you ever had one of those horrible days when it just seems that everything in the world that CAN go wrong WILL go wrong and have to stop and ask yourself, “Why is this happening to me??” Maybe you slept through your alarm for work one morning, got up in a hurry twenty minutes late and promptly kicked the metal leg of some piece of furniture REALLY hard, breaking the skin and causing you to be bleed. Your rushing to the bathroom because you need to pee so badly but now you have to stop to grab a bandaid to stop the bleeding (something you have NO time for this morning). You then go to grab a quick breakfast only to find that you’re out of milk and therefore have nothing quick you can eat and thus, despite the fact that you’re raving mad hungry, you just decide to skip breakfast and get on your way to work. Then suddenly you realize you forgot where you put your keys last night… ten minutes later you FINALLY find them and dash like mad to your car only to find that the car won’t start. “OF COURSE!” you yell at your stupid car. “Why would I expect anything different from you today!”

While this may be an oversimplification, it illustrates a point I find in my personal life. All too often we EXPECT failure and disappointment. If something bad happens to us we often (especially me) tend to say things like “Well I should have expected that” or “Of course that would happen, that’s just my luck.”. But seldom do we look upon good fortune and say, “I knew this great thing was going to happen to me, how could it not?” we EXPECT failure and focus on seeing proof in the universe that we just can’t catch a break. When good things happen to us we tend to dismiss it quickly as a stroke of luck that probably won’t happen again for a long time. And yet, we seem to think that we AREN’T creating a negative reality for ourselves when we do this. Abraham explains:

“People often explain, in the midst of unwanted things occurring in their experience, that they are certain they did not create such a thing. “I wouldn’t have done this unwanted thing to myself!” they explain. And while we know that you did not deliberately bring this unwanted thing into your experience, we must still explain that only you could have caused it, for no one else has the power to attract what comes to you but you. By focusing upon this unwanted thing, or the essence of it, you have created it by default. Because you did not understand the Laws of the Universe, or the rules of the game, so to speak, you have invited unwanted things into your experience through your attention to them.’

Words of Abraham as channeled via Esther Hicks and Recorded in The Law of Attraction

The secret is that YOU did all of that to you – every bit of it. Rather than getting angry at why the world is seemingly hating you this morning, the better question to ask yourself is, “Why did I want to have this experience this morning? What am I trying to learn?” Or even better yet, totally ignore the fact that bad things happened and move on, knowing that bad things just happen from time to time and it means nothing. It is only when we focus our attention on bad things and EXPECT them to happen in our lives that it begins to negatively shape our life. The trick is not to give negative things our attention.