The Other Side of the Law of Attraction

This is an excerpt from my book : The Soul of Prosperity The Law of Attraction We’ve already covered one of the Laws of Prosperity – the law of Inner Cause and Outer Effect. We observed this law in action in our educational system when noting that a child will perform up to our expectations, or down to our expectations in order to gain approval. That child has developed an awareness in its consciousness that in order to gain the approval that it equates with the love, support and nurturing that it needs to survive, it must meet the expectation of its authority figure, and it reacts in ways to meet those expectations. In essence, that child created the desired outcome in order to get what it needed to survive. This child then told itself the “story” of what it needed to do, how it needed to behave, and what it needed to accomplish in order to survive. This “story” became a part of the child’s consciousness. Psychologists call this phenomena conditioning. Sociologists call this phenomena socialization. And laymen call this the creation of a habit or pattern of behavior. Others call this manifestation of the Law of Inner Cause and Outer Effect the law of attraction.

Recently, quantum physicists have also studied these phenomena. Through extensive empirical research, they discovered that we build neural pathways as our consciousness develops. These neural pathways are the connections between our senses and our brains that are formed when we associate a stimulus (such as an experience) with an emotional reaction (such as an association or memory we have when we smell a certain perfume). In the perfume example, the neural pathway was the route that the electromagnetic impulse traveled from the olfactory nerves through the central nervous system to the brain. The emotional reaction to the smell was based on memories, and the expectation that the situations that were remembered would be repeated. As the same information travels on these neural pathways repeatedly, our reactions to these stimuli become “hard-wired” patterns of behavior in the same way that if we repeatedly trample on our lawn to take a shortcut, we wear a path in the lawn. This “hard wiring” creates the expectation that we will continually repeat our experiences. In addition, when we repeat the experience, the emotions that we feel as a result produce chemical reactions (the secretion of hormones, enzymes, neuro-peptides, etc) that affect and eventually change the cells in our bodies. The cells in our bodies become accustomed to receiving the emotional charge that these emotions generate and they change as a result. In other words, we tell the “story” of our consciousness to every cell in our bodies and this “story” becomes our norm. Our story becomes what we expect. Just as children learn to perform up (or down) to expectations, we subconsciously become dependent on this “story” as our truth, and we have an investment in fulfilling our expectations by repeating this “story” because its repetition gives us a sense of security.

This phenomenon explains why we become enmeshed in patterns that are ultimately destructive such as un-affirming relationships, unfulfilling professional pursuits, and unhealthy dietary and lifestyle choices. Even though we know we are engaging in destructive behavior, our central nervous system, brain and body “need” the experience in order to function and to live. That is why lab rats that become addicted to substances will ingest those substances until they die. A neural pathway in their brain has been formed, and the “habit” of the substance has become their new reality. The “story” that they must have the substance to survive has become their truth. They will then ingest the substance until they die, because ironically that is what they believe they must do to live. Their brains believe that they must have these substances to live because it believes that it must have this experience in order to survive. We then attract experiences that reflect our expectations when we perceive our expected experiences to be more prominent, threatening or apparent than other experiences, and we react to these experiences instead of all the other experiences happening around us. According to scientists, the brain processes 400 Billion pieces of information per second, but we’re only aware of 2,000 pieces of information. We become aware of the crucial information we need in the moment and filter out the rest. Our brain operates this way, even though we don’t perceive the depth or complexity of its operations. For example, our brain is continually commanding our body to breathe yet we rarely think about breathing. We don’t perceive this continual command and response. We filter out information that doesn’t support the story that we have told ourselves just as we filter out information that we cannot use in the moment. This is called selective perception. For example, Madonna recently released a song called “American Pie”, which was a re make of an old song from the ‘70s. The first time I heard Madonna sing the song, I started singing the lyrics even though I had never consciously memorized them. The lyrics had been buried in my subconscious mind for over 30 years even though I hadn’t perceived that they were there. Our expectations are often buried in our subconscious mind in the same way that song lyrics are buried there. When we perceive and react to the experiences that reflect our expectations, we set up a dynamic where our subconscious expectations are met. In the perfume example that we used before, we may have smelled hundreds of smells in the same moment, seen thousands of visual images in that moment, and filtered out billions of pieces of information in the same moment as we smelled the perfume. However, the perfume smell had a strong subconscious emotional charge attached to it (a strong memory association) and we reacted to that stimulus, giving rise to a situation that reflected our “story”. We could have reacted to thousands of other pieces of stimuli in that moment, but chose to react to the stimuli that had the biggest electromagnetic and emotional charge for us, because this “most relevant” piece of information reflects our “story”. Some call this occurrence, which is a manifestation of the law of Inner Cause and Outer Effect, the “Law of Attraction”. When we understand how the “law of attraction” works, our subconscious mind, and its thought and behavior pattern, we can then modify its behavior patterns, create a new “story” and attract circumstances that reflect our new “story”.

Therefore, if we want to attract prosperity we must adopt a prosperity consciousness in all the dimensions of prosperity. If we want to attract love we must attract a loving consciousness. If we want to experience peace we must cultivate a peaceful consciousness. If we want to adopt an experience of success we must adopt a success consciousness. We adopt a new consciousness by exploring and examining both our conscious and subconscious expectations, telling ourselves a new “story” in the same way that our minds have been conditioned to the old “story” and living our lives according to our new “story”. In truth, the Law of Attraction is simply a set of perceptions that drive a series of decisions that draw us to a story that begins in our minds. We believe that things are attracted to us, but in truth we are equally attracted to things that reflect our selective perception. This is the other side of the Law of Attraction.