How the law of attraction fails and becomes brainwashing

by Jon Rappoport

February 3, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

“The focus on positive vs. negative thoughts is juvenile. It’s minor-league foolishness. And it leads people to obsess about their own minds. People aren’t passive magnets that attract and repel. That’s utter nonsense.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

The law of attraction is stated in two ways.

First, positive thoughts attract positive results in life, and negative thoughts attract negative results. This is mainly a descriptive overview. It doesn’t apply to people who consciously do something to change their own thoughts. It’s a “philosophic” basis for understanding why people get what they get in life.

Therefore, one assumes, if a hundred thousand people are dying of thirst during a drought, they brought that on by thinking a whole lot of negative thoughts.

People who advocate the law of attraction tend to dislike such examples. They sometimes hedge their bets by asserting that external events (e.g., a drought) are quite real and they never claimed otherwise.

This produces a blurry line between events that “just happen” independent of what people are thinking, and events which are the result of negative or positive thoughts.

The second version of the law emphasizes that people, by changing the nature of their own thoughts, automatically affect what they get in life.

Certainly, this isn’t achieved by a person entering his own mind like a surgeon with a scalpel, pruning away the negative. The interior landscape is far too large, the flows of thought are too mercurial, and quite often, what seems like a successful surgery later turns out to be a dud: the old excised thoughts return.

A frontal attack on thought is like trying to wipe out air.

But there are meditations and repetitive affirmations. Some advocates of the law recommend them. Focus on thinking about what you truly want. Clarify such thoughts. Repeat them to yourself over and over. Affirm them. Or concentrate on an object of desire.

Doing this in a dispassionate way hardly calls up very much energy. It’s about as effective as trying to move forward in an active ocean while sitting in a paper boat and paddling with a soup spoon.

What, though, happens if you really believe you can get what you want by thinking positively about it over and over, or by focusing on it?

In that case, the driving engine is that belief.

And this is a whole other territory. Suppose you ardently believe that by visualizing a purple rose sitting on a boiled egg, you will become rich? Suppose you believe that a pink bulldog dropping down from the sky holding the string of a large balloon will give you a new house?

The purple rose and the boiled egg and pink bulldog aren’t the vital components. What’s vital is the underlying belief.

Is belief enough? Will it carry the freight?