Originally Posted by sliccy
It just seems to me that the Law of Attraction is lacking logic in a way. It seems to me as if you almost kind of have to "trick" it into doing what you want it to do, or else it might trick you into what you don't want. Or at least it seems to me at least.
For example: someone has a thought "I don't want to be sick", to the Law of Attraction (from what I have gathered so far) you would be attracting sickness regardless. Instead your thought should be "I want good health", while I do see how this works. I can't see why the first thought "I don't want to be sick" couldn't not be valid as well.
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In my view, for what it's worth, some of the confusion about the LOA you feel is due to the fact that most of the current popular teachers are mistaken about a very critical point. They will tell you that the LOA makes you 100% responsible for everything and everyone that enters your life. This, they tell you, is a required belief so that you can "take responsibility" for yourself and not be stuck in the role of the victim.
While it is true that taking responsibility for yourself is critical, it is simply not true that absolutely everything in your life is the result of your thoughts and feelings either now or at some time in the past. There are and always will be some things that come about as reactions to what other people do. This is a truth that current popular teachers of LOA simply can't accept because they feel it disrupts the symmetry of an otherwise beautiful theory.
Each of us is part of a grand Unity. You can call that Unity "God" or give it any other name you like. Yet at the same time each of us has also been given the great gift of Individuality. This is not an illusion. That Individuality is very real and very necessary. If it wasn't; if we would be happier just experiencing the Unity and nothing else then the fact that we possess and experience Individuality would constitute an unnecessary and wasteful expenditure of a lot of energy on the part of the Unity which granted us this gift of Individuality in the first place. If Unity was really all we need in order to be happy then we should have remained in Unity and skipped over this individual life we have now and we'd all have been happier and farther ahead in the game.
But that's not what happened. So either Unity has made a tremendous, wasteful error, or else there are critical reasons why each of us has been blessed with a sense of Individuality. For myself, I believe the latter to be the case. We are as we are for good, in fact
necessary reasons.
It is, I believe, a great mistake to think that our ultimate goal should be to extinguish Individuality and return to nothing but Unity. Clearly, to experience both things at one and the same time must be superior to experiencing just one to the exclusion of the other.
If this is so, and I have no doubt that it is, then one of the great lessons we all have to learn is how to relate to, and interact with other Individuals. But if LOA really means that absolutely nothing comes into our experience unless we attract it, then that's not really relating to anyone else. That's just relating to our self in a virtual vacuum. That would serve little purpose.
But because others can and do encroach into our world in very real ways over which we have no absolute control, we are forced to grow by learning to cooperate and co-exist on that Individual level. This, I think, is no less important than the way we all operate on the Unity level. It is a different mode of existence, but equally important.
Certainly utilizing LOA principles helps us to have greater influence over our experiences and circumstances, and a person who learns to consciously influence things in a positive way on a consistent basis is bound to have a generally more pleasant and rewarding experience of life, but no matter how proficient at this they become there will always be some elements that are not pleasant which arise out of our interactions with other people. Perhaps it does spoil some theoretical symmetry, but it is true nonetheless.
Anyone who doubts this need only consider the case of an infant who dies shortly after birth. It would be absurd to think that in those few moments of life that infant did something that attracted its own death. For those who subscribe to the notion that the death was the result of karma from previous existence, then the law of karma would be seriously flawed since death to this infant comes before it has time to experience this new life. The infant feels nothing of any "punishment" or "consequence" for any previous actions. It has not the cognitive capability of appreciating the experience of this loss of mortal life because it lacks the cognitive capability of understanding what it is losing. Nothing is re-balanced in this way and no karmic debt would be repaid.
On the other hand, if the LOA subscribers say that the child's death was attracted by some other person, perhaps a parent who had karmic debts of their own to repay via the painful loss of a child, then these LOA people would have to admit that in fact the parents (or whoever) DID attract a consequence that directly affected the life of another (the dead child, in this case,) which, again, cuts right across the grain of that beautiful symmetry.
No matter how you view it the conclusion is inescapable that people do and always will have some degree of direct influence on other people regardless of how proficient those other people are at using LOA in their own lives. And when these sorts of things come into our lives we acknowledge that they have come to us; we determine the most useful way to respond to them, and we press forward and become better, more developed Individuals because of it. THAT, is the true "taking responsibility for our own lives."
I suspect such an encroachment could be at least in part responsible for the example given about the teenager learning to drive from the mother. Perhaps there was some attraction involved but then again, perhaps this was a case in which the actions of others simply overlapped into that young person's world with catastrophic consequences. It happens. Popular LOA teachers will never admit this because it doesn't sell books, audio programs and seminars as well as telling people they are absolutely able to create every facet of their lives because they are taking 100% responsibility for everything. But that's not surprising. Seldom in history has the truth ever been a best seller.
I do believe, however, that the Unity, which contains the sum collection of all intelligence, probably intervenes on a fairly regular basis in order to shape our experiences and to insure that the things that happen in our lives ultimately work towards our greatest good. For example, if you and I were to meet in person I am confident that either one of us, if we chose, has the capability of acting in ways that would be hurtful to the other, regardless of the LOA. But would the Unity allow that to happen? If it was for our greater good, yes. But if such would not work for our greater good I am confident this great, unified intelligence would directly intervene in some subtle way to prevent those actions. Possibly by making certain we never got to meet. Maybe in some other way.
I think there is much good we can do for ourselves via the LOA and related principles. But I think we should also take comfort in the knowledge that, though we cannot deliberately shape everything in our experience, that greater Unity is always there in the field, an absolutely infallible fail safe to insure that everything works out for our greatest good. Even those things which at present we perceive as tragedies.
Does that sound a bit more reasonable to you than the "everything that comes into our world is 100% our own responsibility because we attracted it" hypothesis?
