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[Ta-tsu-wa]

Your conversation with Giles is intriguing and I've been following it with much interest.

Your observations are quite good, CB, and your questions are ones that many people making money by promoting LOA either gloss over or skip entirely because the ugly facts tend to screw up a perfectly elegant theory.

A point to keep in mind while sorting through your questions, and I have found over the years that this saves a great deal of time and frustration, is that there's never any need to reconcile false statements with true principles. Clearly, some proponents of LOA really are suggesting that it works something like a wishing well: toss in your coin and whatever your wish is will come true. You need do nothing further. Not all proponents make this claim, but some do.

The reason they say this is because it is what people want to hear. Many sellers of entrainment programs like Lifeflow have a comparable strategy (not suggesting that Project Meditation uses this stategy in selling Lifeflow). Google brainwave entrainment and there are tens of thousands of sites selling some sort of product. Often they will say their product has the precise frequency that will do this or that. For instance, one will say they produce a track with the exact frequency "proven" to stop hiccups. And they have another one with an exact frequency "scientifically proven" to cure acne, and so on. Or they state outright that all you need to do become a master at whatever it is you want, is to buy the right track, stick it in a player, then listen to it. The track does all the work while the listener gets whatever they can dream up, just for having listened.

These sorts of claims just aren't true. They never were, and they never will be. In our hearts we all know this. And yet people continue to buy their products. One wonders why this might be, and the answer is simple: Many people, perhaps most people, believe they want something for nothing. I say "believe" because if we really did get everything we wanted just for the asking, life would quickly become dull and stagnant and not worth living.

There was an old television series called The Twilight Zone which you've no doubt seen before. I recall one episode in which this petty crook dies and goes to heaven. He is given everything he wants there, instantly, and just for the asking. If he wants women, beautiful women appear to fulfill his every desire. If he wants money, piles of it appear. He goes to a casino to gamble and he wins every time he plays, no matter what the game. As he begins to get bored with this situation he explains to his attending angel that nothing is worth doing if the outcome is always guaranteed to be exactly what is desired, and he asks if it is possible that perhaps he could lose at gambling sometimes. The angel replies that this is certainly possible. Any time he asks to lose he will lose. So again, it was just another way of giving him exactly what he wanted. There was no element of chance to anything; no risk; no spontaneity. In the end he complains to the angel that things are not right; that people are supposed to be happy in heaven, and he was not happy, to which the angel replies, "Who said you were in heaven?"

While people believe they want a free lunch, if it was really given to them they would soon find it to be a dead and meaningless existence. But because they've never experienced it this way, the belief that this is what we want persists in most of us, and many of these LOA advocates capitalize on this desire by holding out what is allegedly a way to get that free lunch. And many companies will continue to market entrainment products that promise everything for nothing because people want to believe those claims.

Whenever you run across statements and claims like this which are clearly false, there is no need to attempt to reconcile them to real life. No reconciliation is possible. They're false claims, end of story. Dismiss them to the trash bin and move on.

Some of those people who featured in the film and book, The Secret, make such false claims, either out of the desire for profit, or because they are genuinely mistaken in their beliefs and are simply passing along their own misunderstandings.

It's unfortunate that this whole subject was given the name, "Law" of Attraction. It presents the impression (and there are some proponents who will actually claim this,) that it is something which cannot fail, and which must be obeyed, 100%, every time. Again, there are some who claim this is the case, and they would be wrong. Dismiss such claims and toss them on the scrap pile along with all the others.

What we tend to forget is that "laws" seldom, if ever, exist in isolation. They are but individual threads in a grand tapestry, with each functioning independently to some degree, and dependently on the other threads to another. Nothing that exists is independent in the absolute sense. Nothing. It would have been much more useful if the phrase "Principle" of Attraction had been used instead of "Law".

A colleague of mine is Professor of Physics at a university in Oklahoma. He once taught me the distinction between laws and principles. We were discussing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP) and I asked him why he thought it had not been called "The Law of Uncertainty". He responded that it was not a "law" because it was only an incomplete fragment of a much bigger picture. Physics has two dominating theories: Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics. One deals with the very large, the other with the very small. Both make accurate predictions within their relative spheres of operations, and yet when they overlap each other they give contradictory results. The question then becomes, how can they both be accurate while at the same time be contradicting each other? The answer is that they cannot, and they probably don't.

Something is missing; something that would unite and harmonize the two, only we have not yet discovered what that "something" might be. This has resulted in a search for what is called a "Grand Unified Theory", or GUT; the discovery of the complete set of laws which would unify and perhaps to some degree, modify, those theories we already have. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not the GUT, but it is sort of a stop-gap rule that allows us in many instances to work around the fact that we don't yet have a knowledge of all the true laws in physics. HUP is quite useful, and permits us to make accurate predictions in its own right. But my colleague assures me that once we have the complete GUT, Heisenberg's Principle will no longer be required. It will be discarded because a GUT will supersede it.

If LOA had been more aptly named "POA", it would probably give a more accurate idea of its potential. Attraction is a principle. It deals with "tendencies", not with "absolutes". There is a tendency for like to attract like. At the same time there is also a tendency for opposites to attract each other, as anyone who's ever played with magnets knows. Both tendencies are true, and both give accurate results, but only within their relative spheres of influence. Neither is independent in an absolute sense. The so-called LOA is not a stand-alone, absolute law, as some would suggest. To make use of it you have to know when and how it works. To do that you also need to have a fair idea about what other, inter-related principles exist, as well as how and when they work. If you know only one or the other, yet believe yourself to know the whole, you'll be forever running headlong into apparent failures of your "law", and it won't make sense to you why it's failing.

Using LOA there may in fact be some instances in which you set your intentions on something and it "seems" to appear without you doing anything else. This does not mean, however, that you did nothing to bring about this successful event. It may very well be that what you are seeing is due largely to other actions you have previously taken; a sort of fruit that springs from previously planted seeds. It could also be that your shift in focus and intention has resulted in others being drawn into your sphere of influence, and it is these others who supply the additional, necessary pieces to the puzzle which ultimately bring about the result you desired.

Most of the time though, what Attraction will do is help you more consistently be in a position to take the next step or steps towards your ultimate goal, which means you have to be open to and aware of arising opportunities and then seize them at the appropriate moment. You won't be able to sit back and presume that your efforts are done just because you have placed your intention upon something.

That reminds me of an old joke about a man who was trapped on top of his house during a flood. The rains continued to fall and the flood waters rose ever higher, but the man had faith so he prayed to God that God would save him. Before long someone appeared in a small rowboat and shouted to the man that he should climb down off the roof and get into the boat so they could row to safety. The man thanked the would-be Samaritan, but declined the offer. "God will save me!" he insisted. A short while later another small boat came by, also offering to take the man to safety, but he declined this as well, saying, "I'm praying to God, and I know He will save me!". As the water continued to rise a helicopter passed over and lowered down a rope ladder so that the man could climb up and fly to safety, but the man once again declined the offer of help. "God is going to save me!" he shouted. Not long thereafter the water rose up and took the man and he drowned.

When the man got to the Gates of Heaven he demanded of St. Peter that he be given an audience with God immediately, so he was ushered into the throne room where God was sitting. "How could this be?" he fumed at God. "All my life I was a good man. I lived the best life I could. And now, when I needed help, YOU abandoned me and let me drown! Why didn't you answer my prayers?"

A very puzzled look came over God's face and He responded, "I don't understand. What are you doing here? I sent you two rescue boats and a helicopter."

Attraction is a lot like this joke. If you don't act on circumstances Attraction might place in your path when they appear, count on being disappointed a lot. Again, there are clearly people who suggest that you won't have to do anything but set your intentions to attract what you want and that's the sum total of the efforts you will need to make. That's horse pucky. Most of the time what you attract is the next step that you need to take in the process of getting from point A to point B, and you DO have to take it. If you refuse, it wasn't Attraction that failed, it was you. That's not a popular thing to say, but it's true.

It's also good to keep that Rolling Stones song in mind that says, "You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime you might just find you get what you need." Often in my life I've set my sights on one thing with the belief that it was what I really, really needed. But somewhere along the line I found other avenues opened up that turned out to be infinitely preferable. As an individual, I possess only a very limited ability to see the whole picture. My point of view is highly subject to giving me incomplete and incorrect pictures of things. But I am part of a greater Whole that does not share my individual myopia, and fortunately for me, that Whole seems to have my best interests in mind. I may well set my intentions on attracting one thing and end up with something totally different when all is said and done. That's fine with me. It means I'm still moving forward and I'm a little bit wiser afterwards than I was when I started out, and that's always a good thing. There are other times when I insist on having things the way I want them. Sometimes it works out, sometimes I get them and it doesn't work out so well. Those are usually the times when I look back and see that other opportunities did present themselves but I was too busy insisting I knew what was best to see them at the time. Even these are valuable teaching experiences, but I can't help but think if I'd been more open I might have been able to learn the lessons and still come to a better conclusion. As they say, hindsight is 20/20.