Archive for the 'How-To' Category

What if Reality, your daily experience of life, didn’t work like how you thought it worked at all?

And how would you find out?

More and more over the last few years, I’ve come across stories and first-hand accounts of how powerful intentions are, and how the intentions I hold in my mind affect more than just my own actions. I kept coming across stories about something called the Intention-Manifestation model of reality that suggested that my thoughts and intentions actually ripple out into the Universe and eventually reflect back to me, often in powerful ways. It stated that these intentions reflect back to me from the Universe itself, because the Universe is reflecting back to me the reality that’s most aligned with my thoughts and beliefs. On the surface, it seemed strange and maybe even a little crazy the first time I heard about it, but as I’ve experimented with this worldview more and more, I’ve been startled at how my life has been transformed.

So today, I’d like to share with you the story of something really inexplicable and outright weird that happened to me which wonderfully illustrates the powerful ways Intention-Manifestation can occur while travelling. And perhaps along the way, you’ll gain a new sense of curiosity and wonder for this strange universe we live in.

Many Names, One Principle

This worldview goes by a few different names, and you may have come across this theory before since discussion of it among philosophers and well-known thinkers has been growing over the past few years. The phenomenon is referred to as the Law of Attraction or the Intention-Manifestation model of reality.

Recently, this has been showing up in popular media, too. You’ve probably heard of a movie called “The Secret”, and if you haven’t, you probably will. This movie is the most popular explanation of the Law of Attraction that has emerged in the last few decades. (And for the sake of saving ink, paper, time, and my sanity, I’ll abbreviate Law of Attraction as LOA for the rest of this article.)

Beyond simply being an enjoyable movie, “The Secret” contains some pretty powerful ideas, and it’s one of the more profound movies that I’ve seen in the last few years. However, to be honest, I was pretty disappointed in the movie, because it gave a disproportionately large amount of time to how to use the LOA to become wealthy and earn more money. Perhaps the book that the movie is based off of is better, but the movie put the wrong emphasis on what the LOA truly is.

Many People throw out The Baby

Now, there’s nothing wrong with becoming wealthy; but, because of the way the movie discussed money and wealth, there’s a real danger that people will make a false association that the LOA is always about wealth and becoming rich, which it is definitely not. There are various problems that arise when you become preoccupied with the wealth-creation aspect of the LOA.

Probably the biggest problem is that, for complex reasons (which would require another article to adequately explain), people new to the LOA invariably fail to manifest the money of their dreams. So guess what they do? They throw out the entire LOA model and decide that, since they couldn’t generate wealth in x-number of days, it’s completely bogus.

Forget “throwing the baby out with the bath water” — that’s like throwing out the entire bathtub.

Over a cliff.
Onto sharks.
With lasers on their heads.

It’s not pretty.

See, the LOA basically states that every thought is an intention. That means any and every thought is an intention, including any worries, hopes, and recurrent thoughts you may have throughout the day. According to the LOA, your sum total reality is a reflection of the sum total of your thoughts/intentions; and therefore, you’re directly responsible for everything in your life.

It follows then, that to change your life, you have to change your thoughts, right?

Yep!

Easy?

No.

It’s pretty darn difficult, because to change your thoughts, you have to reevaluate, and sometimes completely rebuild, your belief frameworks (or core belief systems).

I’m not going to sugarcoat this. Challenging your belief frameworks, and growing from that, is one of the hardest tasks you can ever take on. But there’s no rush, and over the longterm fewer things are more rewarding than challenging your belief frameworks and growing from the experience.

An Interesting side note

Recently it’s come to my attention that this principle may even be hinted at in the Gospel of Mark in reference to prayer. I’ll quote the relevant part of chapter 11, and you can come to your own conclusions:

Now in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. And Peter, remembering, said to Him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree which You cursed has withered away.”

So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.

~ Yehoshua of Nazareth
As chronicled in the Gospel of Mark 11:20-24 (NKJV)

Story Preface: Expectations Restrict You

So now that you’ve just had a beginner’s crash course in what the LOA is, I can preface my story.

I feel really lucky that this particularly inexplicable thing happened to me, because it clearly demonstrated to me, first hand, that the real key when using the LOA is to not hold specific expectations about the outcome of what you want to happen. I’ve found that, once I’m clear about what I want, any attachment to a particular outcome limits the LOA from working as it should.

Basically, expectations I hold about how something will manifest actually minimize the chance of anything manifesting in a profound way.

Instead, I found that if I have faith that what I need will come to me in its own perfect time, and I remain very flexible about how and when it will arrive (i.e., not placing specific expectations on outcomes), intentions manifest into realities a heck of a lot faster, and in more compelling ways.

Recently, I saw this summarized beautifully on twitter:

Attachment is the enemy of manifestation.
~ Steve Pavlina

And frankly, I never would have believed that my thoughts actually have a such a profound, and inexplicably-fluid, effect on my reality… until I began to experience it for myself. But I never could have experienced the LOA at work in my own life until I started relaxing my own beliefs about reality a bit. For instance, I started asking myself questions like, “What if this really is how reality works? What if I don’t understand the link between my mind and my reality as well as I thought?”

Once I opened myself up to the possibility, some weird things started happening to me. Some wonderful, weird things. The story below is one such example.

How I Manifested a Solution in 60 Seconds Flat

So how did I solve my travel dilemma in 60 seconds flat using the LOA? Well, the following story happened to me just last month, and it’s an excellent example of the LOA at work.

I had just set out on a long bicycle trip out of Madison. I’d carefully packed my travel inventory into my pack and attached the pack to my bike’s rack using some handy bungee cords. After biking for a few minutes, I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten something crucially important.

My front tire’s air pressure had been low for a few days, and I’d meant to stop somewhere and fill it up the day before. I’d forgotten, which resulted in a very interesting dilemma:

1. I could go back and fall way behind schedule.
2. Or I could press on but risk ruining my wheel’s rim if the tire lost any more pressure.

Don’t you just love dilemmas?

Just 60 Seconds later

After stopping (in my mind) and screaming “KAHN!!!” to the sky (again, in my mind), I thought to myself, “Where the heck am I going to find an air pump station around here?”

I didn’t know the far-western side of Madison that well, and the thought occurred to me that it would be really great if I ran into an opportunity to refill my front tire without spending a bunch of extra time looking for a gas station with an air pump.

Guess what happened 60 seconds later.

After arriving at the next intersection, I saw a fellow biker head towards me. For various reasons, I got the feeling that he really knew what he was doing (though not because he was wearing a spandex biking outfit, because he wasn’t, thank goodness). So as I was about to pass him, a small voice inside of me said, in a not-so-small tone, “ASK HIM ABOUT FILLING UP YOUR LOW TIRE!”

It continued, “SERIOUSLY. RIGHT NOW.”

Sigh.

I’d heard this small, still voice before, and I had the feeling that I’d regret it if I didn’t listen to its advice.

So I did.

It turned out that he actually had an air pump with him (and if you’ve done some biking, you’ll know this isn’t exactly common anymore), and he was really glad to help. He even pumped the air for me, and 30 seconds later my tire was at the correct air pressure again. I thanked him profusely. He smiled. And after saying farewell, I was on my way once again.

So what just happened there?

Let’s recap: I went from thinking about needing to fill up the air in my tire, to someone connecting an air pump to my tire in about… 60 seconds flat.

Think the Law of Attraction is crazy?

To be completely clear, I don’t expect to convince anyone anything with just one story, or even many stories for that matter. Convincing you is not my goal. My goal is to get you curious. My goal is to get you really suspicious, suspicious of your current beliefs about the way reality works. After all, if you consider yourself a true skeptic, you must be at least slightly skeptical of your own opinions and beliefs. Otherwise, how pure is your skepticism, really?

Now, challenging your belief frameworks isn’t easy. It took me time to internalize and understand this particular framework and open myself up to these kinds of possibilities. It’s easy to write off these kinds of stories if they’re perceived as isolated cases. It’s a lot harder to brush them all off as coincidences if they’re happening to you personally and things start to manifest more quickly and more often.

And that’s exactly what happens the more you open yourself up to the possibility that this is how reality actually works.

Challenging at first, but The Blanket does exist!

The concept of the LOA may sound weird, and that’s because it is. But in my experience, it works. (And I’m not alone. Many thousands, perhaps millions of people around the world also use the LOA every day. One good place to meet people who use the LOA are on discussion boards like this one.)

So the LOA may strike you as weird, but do you want to hear something that’s even weirder? If you decide that the LOA is completely impossible, that’s an intention, too. By denying the possibility of the Law of Attraction, you actually send out the intention to have the Universe reflect situations back to you that are designed to raise more doubt in you over whether the LOA is real or not. So in essence, by “deciding” that the LOA is impossible, you use the LOA against itself in your own life.

It’s like believing that, once you put a blanket over your head, you can decide it doesn’t exist because you can’t see anything!

This Wonderful Universe loves Congruency

But don’t worry. If you want to try this out yourself, you can. You just need to keep in mind that any conflicting thoughts you generate will result in conflicting realities. And conflicting realities usually cancel eachother out which results in nothing ending up manifesting. So the less conflicting your thoughts are, the better. (This is called being Congruent.)

So if you remember only 1 idea from this article, remember this:

The more time and the more you can lock onto the feeling of what it will feel like when you’re living with the results of what you want to manifest, the quicker it can manifest.

The feeling part is really important since the emotional energy behind any thought regulates how powerful the thought is. So be responsible, be congruent, and really tune into the feeling of what it will feel like once you’re living with the results of having/being/achieving what you want… and let me know how it goes!

And as far as the story goes, anything like that ever happen to you?
I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

Funny and wonderful universe we live in, isn’t it?

Recommended Reading:

1. How to Get Paid to Travel 1,000 miles: Craigslist