One of my readers asked for a specific example regarding my latest blog post – What Do YOU Mean By The “Law of Attraction.” Since my response would have ended up as long and involved as a regular post, I get a two for one! So here it goes.
There are a lot of good old catch phrases floating around – things like “Your thoughts create your reality,” “You get what you focus on,” “Change your mind, change your life,” “What we think, we become,” etc. And these catch phrases are indeed true!! If we were in a corporate setting, you might see motivational posters on the wall that say things like “Attitude is everything,” or “If you can dream it, you can achieve it.” So the distinction isn’t between “woo woo airy fairy mystical stuff” and “common sense reality.” The distinction is between spiritual truth and wish fulfillment.
The snake oil salesmen dressing up wish fulfillment as spiritual truth are so effective because they prey upon your life frustration and pain (for their financial gain). So they use legitimate spiritual truth like “Your thoughts create your reality” to strongly imply – or to flat out say – that your life circumstances are a direct result of your thoughts. Therefore, changing your thoughts will change your life circumstances. (In my previous post, that would be akin to saying that your thoughts are directly responsible for creating the 3-dimensional cube).
To help explain this, I’m going to use my very favorite example ever: winning the lottery!!
So let’s say you suffer from financial lack and you’d like to change the situation. According to the snake oil salesmen, your financial situation is a direct result of your thoughts. And by changing your thoughts, you can change the situation. By changing your thoughts, you will change your energetic vibrations, and then the “Law of Attraction” will bring you a more abundant situation consistent with your new energetic vibration. I know, their logic seems to make sense – and there are kernels of spiritual truth in that. But with this reasoning, if you get your vibrations “just right,” you could win the lottery!!
Now, the lottery is such a good example not because the odds are so low. The “odds” have nothing to do with it. The reason the lottery is such a good example is because it is exclusively a game of chance – that means, by definition, there is no rhyme or reason to the outcome – it cannot be predicted, understood, manipulated or controlled. But the very logical implication of the snake oil salesmen argument is that you can win – this complete game of chance – simply by thinking the right thoughts and having the right vibrations.
So to relate back to my previous post, the snake oil salesmen say that your thoughts create the cube. But your thoughts don’t create the cube – Life brings you the cube – and you have no control over that. What you do have control over is choosing which side of the cube you allow yourself to see – and what actions you then choose to take from that perspective.
Those actions – taken from the choices you believe you had available to you – based on the side of the cube you chose to focus on – will take you to a new moment in time and space to encounter a new cube (provided by Life).
So all of those catch phrases – “Your thoughts create your reality,” “Change your mind, change your life,” etc – are true! But they are true because where you end up in Life is a result of the actions you took based on how you chose to see that cube (metaphorical Life situation).
To get back to the money example, you did not create your financial lack all on your own. Your financial lack is a result of how you engaged with every little metaphorical cubical moment Life has brought you. And changing your thoughts will not help you “manifest” the lottery. What changing your thoughts will do is to help you view your financial lack from different perspectives – and when you see these new perspectives, you may find choices and opportunities available to you that you didn’t see before. And when you take action and engage with these previously unseen opportunities, you will move down a new path in a different direction to encounter new Life situations and opportunities for abundance that you never would have encountered had you not taken the time and effort to explore the previous situation with conscious effort and intention.
Life brings you the cube. You do not “create” it. And you cannot use your thoughts to change the cube into another shape. The cube is the cube. But you can use the power of your thoughts to choose which side of the cube you want to focus on and what actions you will take from that perspective. And that is the true meaning of “co-creating your reality.”