One crucial question to ask before using the Law of Attraction

One of the misconceptions caused by the movie The Secret, and many of the other big-time Law of Attraction gurus is the idea that anyone can learn to make it rain money on cue, or make Lamborghinis mysteriously appear in their driveway overnight.

 If you’ve heard of the concept then you’ve probably already tried it, in which case you’ll be fully aware that it doesn’t work as described. The usual course of action from this point forward is that the frustrated would-be Lamborghini owner buys a hundred books or overpriced online courses in order to find the crucial missing piece, and when they still can’t find it they end up in the front row of an Abraham-Hicks seminar, eager to put their hand up and ask the great guru why they keep failing.

If there were ever a single crucial missing piece, it could be this question - but you’ll never hear about it from the big-time Law of Attraction teachers, because it doesn’t sit well with their business model. So here it is - if you want to get results, you should always ask yourself this before embarking on any attempted manifestation:

“How does this benefit me spiritually?”

If you’ve been trying to manifest a Lamborghini, you’re going to struggle to answer this one. There is only one circumstance I can think of where owning a Lamborghini would benefit someone spiritually - and that is the case of a soul in the earlier stages of its earthly journey, which has not yet evolved beyond money. In such cases, owning such an extravagance may actually provide a necessary, if bitter lesson that money and worldly goods simply cannot provide us with true happiness and fulfilment. There may well be other reasons too, but let’s get real - such extravagances are spiritually useless for the majority of us.

For souls in the latter stages of their earthly journey - that is, those souls genuinely yearning for truth, wisdom and peace, rather than simply mucking around with spiritual powers in order to advance one’s worldly status - owning a Lamborghini would prove to be nothing but egoistic vanity. For such souls, any such attempts at manifestation are ill fated because they conflict with one of the most important laws of the Universal Spirit. In fact, more than anything else it is the law of the Universal Spirit: the Law of Growth.

The Universal Spirit, the universe, or God, is truly life in itself. Because it is infinite, it has no specific will of its own, since willing one thing would necessarily mean that it does not will the opposite thing, thus imposing limitations on the infinite. But the golden rule of its eternal existence is that it is life in itself; therefore by its very nature it tends towards giving this life, through creation and then through evolution of all created things. When we manifest, we must manifest in accordance with the laws of the universe - including this law of growth, or we are going against the flow of nature.  This is not my own original teaching; in fact it was taught by Thomas Troward, who is regarded by many people as the father of the New Thought movement.  See this previous post to read more of his views on this.

Even though Troward seems to imply it, I will not say definitively that it is impossible to manifest anything spiritually damaging to ourselves, because the moment I did so, someone would point out numerous examples that appeared to contradict this. So let’s simply say that the purpose of manifestation, indeed the purpose of everything, is that we evolve and fulfil our destiny of becoming more and more like our creator. If we’re working against the one true purpose, we are working against the flow of nature - which is rather like attempting to row upstream.

To put it another way - the Law of Growth is continually, ceaselessly nudging us on towards our destiny of higher evolution. Despite this, our free will deems us capable of making mistakes that will temporarily set us back on our evolutionary journey. We can frustrate the Law of Growth and obtain undesirable results just the same as we can frustrate the Law of Attraction. Both laws are forever working just the same, but the outcome of them varies wildly depending on our thoughts and actions. So when we specifically call upon the spiritual laws to obtain a positive outcome, me must work with those laws, not against them if we hope to obtain the desired results. Thus, anything you hope to manifest through visualisation and the specific, positive action of spiritual forces must not be opposed to your highest spiritual good, or you will struggle to obtain it.  If you really want that car and you can muster up the motivation, you can whip yourself up into a frenzy of action, working 80 hour weeks and saving every cent - but you will be rubbing against the grain at every step. Do not expect circumstances to mysteriously align in your favour, as the opposite will be true.

But note that this situation rarely occurs, as people with a higher spiritual path are not generally inspired or motivated to put in such extraordinary efforts towards worldly gains. They may attempt to visualise riches, and when they fail they will either get the message and stumble onward towards their higher destiny, or they will get stuck at the promises of easy money and continue with their ill-fated attempts at spiritual manifestation.

All of this may appear to contradict one of the basic tenets of New Thought, which is that our ability to manifest is truly unlimited, and all such limitations are self-imposed.  This tenet is true in the absolute sense, but not necessarily true in the individual case.  I will address this issue in part 2 of the article, where I will discuss the need for consciousness in the manifestation process.