(Please excuse the long answer)
A very interesting thread.
Do people consciously attract bad/negative things? I think we have to look at the conscious/unconscious mind connection. Let me give my understanding if I may.
Firstly let me pose this to you..
Don't think of a Banana.
If you've read that, then you've thought of it, whether you want to or not. You didn't have a choice in the matter. Your unconscious mind can't do the negative of something in that way. If the consciousness says not to do something then that "something" (rather than the "not something") is being brought to the attention of the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind cannot comprehend "Don't".
How often we see parents with their children in the supermarket; the parents telling the children "Don't touch that". But still the children do. The parents have enforced the childs focus on the object they didn't want them to touch... so the child is even more focused on it (and usually the parent gets more frustrated and angry etc.) Better would have been saying what they actually wanted the child to do i.e. "Come here and hold my hand".
This aspect of the unconscious/conscious mind connection relates to the use of positive affirmations. Rather than telling ourselves what we don't want in life, we re-affirm how we want to be (and we do it as if it's already happened in the present moment, but that's an aside to this topic).
Next, we have to look at the aspect of self-destruction in the mind...
Consciously, people can very easily say they want something, but the unconscious mind believes otherwise.
As a casual complementary therapist, I have had occasion to treat some people who tell me they want to lose weight, but no matter how much they try, nothing works for them. If I use muscle testing on them I can find that they have, what we would call in EFT terms, Psychological Reversal or in FreewayCER terms, Resistance Ambivalence. Essentially what we find is that their unconscious mind believes the opposite of their conscious mind. Consciously they want to lose weight, Unconsciously they don't want to. We can then do various little tasks to ascertain why they don't want to lose weight. e.g. It may be that if they lose weight then they will no longer have an excuse to not go out with their friends to a night club, and the reason why they don't want to go out to a night club could be because they feel insecure about socialising with strangers, and so on and so forth, until we find out the root cause of their social anxiety which we can then treat.
The point is, the conscious mind is a personality (persona = latin for 'Mask') on top of the unconscious mind, and neither the unconscious or conscious mind is our True Self, but we must work to bring the conscious and unconscious mind back into synchronisation before our True Self can recognise itself and not be under the control of the mind. (By True Self, I'm referring to the unchanging observer; that part of us which observes the thoughts, the memories, the senses, the emotions etc. as they change, but which itself does not change).
So, we all believe that a person could not possibly want to be killed during a war etc. and rightly so as this is the ideal that the mind would have us believe. Yet if we observe our unconscious mind we can catch glimses of the thoughts passing; we can catch those thoughts that are hating or angry towards others who are perceived to be the cause of the war (or whatever), even created thoughts of the future where we can see ourselves being caught up in such a war and perhaps being killed. It is difficult for us to feel, in Buddhist terms, unconditional compassion, for those we percieve to be causing the misery around us, and hence it is those non-compassionate thoughts that are attracting the situations to us or us to the situations.
I'll be the first to admit, it may not be an easy concept to grasp, and there will be those people who disagree or resist this concept; and putting it into other situations to give us understanding may not be simple; the terminology may change depending on the situation and situations can be hellishly complex to try and put into simple explanations of the mind.
So, let's look at this situation of the teenager who has accidently killed his mother...
He saw his mother in behind the car.
His conscious mind was saying something like "Don't run over mother"
His unconscious mind was focused on "mother" and "run over", creating a case of psychological reversal and preventing his True Self from being present.
His focus was not on the pedals, but his unconscious mind knew enough about which pedal was which (probably from previous driving lessons or watching others drive), and as such his unconscious mind pressed the pedal that would act upon his focus... his mother and running her over.
He was not in the present moment, but instead his mind had taken control of him.
It's a tradegy, but it happens to all of us every day, in small ways and big ways. (I know I've driven down the road, seen some debris in the road and my mind has thought "Don't hit that" and I've ended up manouvering right into it, whereas had I stayed on course I most likely would have missed it).
So how is this teenager going to deal with what he has done (the question posed at the start of this thread)?
Rather than us all dwelling on the thoughts of him leading a miserable and tortured future life (because that's what we are all thinking, we have to admit), let us all think of him now in the present moment, peaceful and recognising that it was an accident and that his is not to blame for it. Let's all think of him in a life where he can recognise his True Self from his controlling mind and has taken control of the mind and is able to put himself in the present moment to do good and bring peace to those around him.
Thoughts have power. We must use the mind as the tool for which it is intended; rather than letting the mind control us.
I wish him every success in his life.
Hugs
Giles
