20 years later I am finally letting myself look closely at the LOA and the things it proponents have to say and apply them to my life in earnest. What kept me away all these years are the things that Mark and others are raising here. Being too analytical can really hold you back from taking leaps of faith. I am a smart girl with an extremely analytical approach …but instead of patting myself on my back for “thinking” I tend to be frustrated by all it has kept me from.

Instead of focusing on events, I think the LOA makes much more sense when looking at the quality of our lives and our response to the world (which effects our health, our looks, our relationships, etc). Why do we have to disqualify something completely because we can’t get our heads around the extreme? Think about how the LOA works on the smallest levels…understand at that level before you start looking at natural disasters and political catastrophes. How about how I attract the fight with my spouse, my eating habits or my depression by the things negative messages I send myself? Thats the easy stuff; get that and work your way out from there.

I really enjoy reading your blog. Thanks so much for sharing so much wonderful stuff!

I do believe in the LOA and have experienced its effects in my life, the good and the not so good. It’s all good though because I feel like I have an active part in the manifestation of my life.

Where I struggle with it, however, is when something really horrific happens. Last year my friends’ 26 year old son was tragically killed in a violent car crash. So, my question is: how do you reconcile something like that with the LOA? He was happily engaged and planning his upcoming wedding. How is something like that attracted into his life to the point where his life ended? Into his fiance’s life? His parents’ lives?

Thanks so much for any insight you can share regarding this.

-Karen

In fact, I just had a dialog with a close friend about the same issue. I told her that while her difficulties may seem to be about people and situations in her environment, what she was really suffering from was the side effects of trying to “work both sides of the street.” She is trying to make a shift to a perspective in line with LoA, but also afraid of letting go of major elements in her life that are counter to it.

We all do this in our own ways, especially at first. I’ve been on the path for over 30 years, and I still find myself dealing with my own ambivalence sometimes. There is still a voice inside of me that tells me to play it safe by living as if I never heard of the idea that thought is creative. It is very persistent and, even after all these years, hard to ignore.

That is why I have for the last several years been seeking out “thought tools” that can be used to neutralize such ideas. The collection I have so far, which I call the “Wisdom of the Ageless Child,” are simply perceptions that are readily available to us all, but which we seldom, if ever, actually look right at. A simple example is, “Who chooses your thoughts?” This is a very powerful question, especially when you are feeling that someone else “made” you feel something. Others involve the very underpinnings of our sense of reality, like time, space, and causality. None of these are what we have been taught they are, and it is not hard to experience the truth of that assertion directly. We need only to have the will.

So again I congratulate you on striking at the heart of the real limitations to the popular approaches, and setting the record straight on them. I await with anticipation the rest of this series and beyond. If you are interested in seeing more about the Wisdom of the Ageless Child, I invite you to my new blog at http://spaciouspresent.com/blog. In the meantime, thanks for what you have already contributed and for what is yet to come.