Hard to reconcile

[enlighteneduk]

Was reading a story in the paper yesterday. A 16 year old boy was desperate to learn to drive. He plagued his Mum to have a go in the car ( presumably off road as he isnt old enough to drive here in the UK). He got in the car when he was waiting for his Mum to come out to drive him somewhere, and got in the drivers seat. I cant remember the exact ins and outs, but he started to move the car, and saw his Mum behind him. He mistook the clutch for the footbrake and crushed his Mother against a tree with the car, killing her. The inquest was yesterday.

Yes, he attracted this terrible tragedy by his actions in driving the car, but how on earth is he going to face the consequences for the rest of his young life? Can you imagine going to sleep every night, in his minds eye, the look of pain and terror on his dying Mother's face, knowing that he had caused it? He wasnt a teenage thug who killed his Mum deliberately,-not the first time this has happened- he loved her, and just wanted her to teach him to drive. I just cannot imagine how the Universe will ever be able to repair his life? Any thoughts on this, folks?


Heather

Heather

[Edwin]

Heather,

All LOA Guru's will tell you that it is impossible to affect other's people's lifes with the LOA directly. We can't "order" people with the LOA to do something for us. With the right attitude they will do things voluntarily.

Even tho his determination to learn to drive lead to this horrific accident, the accident itself is not a logical culmination of his action or mindset.
If this were true, nobody would undertake any action with the LOA, because the endresult might be desastrous.

I know that in "the Secret" it is said that all that you have experienced so far is the direct result of what you have attracted.
This is a simplified version of the truth, and because of it's simplification, it is hard to understand completely.
Yes you attracted it, but it is the how you attracted it that matters, not the fact that you did attrackt it.
You see, all suffering is caused by the mind. If you live your life with gratitude and acceptance, you will attract a lot just by the effect your positive mindset has on the universe around you ( and that means that people around you will gladly provide you with what you need, just because of the person you are ). The same goes for a negative mindset, you will never get a break ( or recognise one when it is presented to you ) when your mind is constantly being negative.

And finally:
Killing someone can never be caused by the LOA, because the LOA never works if you want to use the LOA to affect someone. You can only affect your own life, and as a result, affect the people indirectly around you with your enthousiasm.

The difference is subtle, but it is there.

Now of course this is all academic to that boy.

[Bhavya]

We can also look at this from the point of view of karma. Buddhists stress that it is the intention behind our actions which is important. The example often used is killing someone with a knife. A surgeon, intending to heal someone, may in the process kill his patient whereas a murderer would have done so deliberately.

In Buddhist thinking we have mental imprints or habits - kleshas if they're negative ones - and these determine the way we live. Let's say this boy has impatience as one of his. That caused him to get into the car and perhaps start fooling with the controls with its unfortunate results. We could say that he';ll never recover but perhaps that's not true. OF course there will be terrible guilt and grieving - but there may also, eventually, be some good outcomes from this. Perhaps he will choose to make amends by not only learning that impatience can be disastrous but also by choosing work that will save lives or help others.

Heather, it sounds like you have compassion and empathy for this boy. Why not send him some loving thoughts? Ask that he find healing and picture him receiving it along with his family. It can only help you both.

Bhavya

[sliccy]

First of, Heather I want to apologize that my next question will be totally off topic. But I absolutely have to ask it.

Edwin, I read your post about 10 times before I decided to ask you this. Please don't get the wrong impression that this question is coming from a bitter source, but rather from a source of confusion.

Do you truly believe that everyone attracts everything with their thoughts?

I know I do believe it, but I can't help ask myself what about the 150 some million that were murdered, and killed in the 20th century? What about the millions that died in the holocaust, the thousands that died in Rwanda, the quarter million that died in Bosnia? Did they really want to attract those circumstantces in their life? Even better to ask, was every single one of them unaware about the Law of Attraction, but still died regardless?

I can see how certain "bad" things (breaking your leg, doing bad on a job interview, bankruptcy) that you attract into your life can benefit you. Learning from them, becoming aware through them etc. But how do you learn from dying? I mean, if you die that's it, you didn't learn anything from it to benefit you, not in this life time at least.

I think the Law of Attraction gurus have to come up with a slightly better explanation, then just "they attracted it with their thoughts". I don't think anyone wants to consciously attract anything like that.

Thanks for reading

-Andy

[enlighteneduk]

Thanks Bhavya,

Lovely thought, I will do as you suggest. Edwin, thanks for that, as it does make sense, but I can see what Andy is saying too. Any further thoughts on this? For istance, a friend of mine, a very good living Christian, lost his wife and two of his children in a car accident. Did he somehow attract this?

Heather

[Edwin]

Originally Posted by enlighteneduk

Thanks Bhavya,

Lovely thought, I will do as you suggest. Edwin, thanks for that, as it does make sense, but I can see what Andy is saying too. Any further thoughts on this? For istance, a friend of mine, a very good living Christian, lost his wife and two of his children in a car accident. Did he somehow attract this?

Heather

Andy and Heather, I was searching for words in my previous answer, and I was not clear enough obviously.

Not all can be accounted to the LOA. The LOA is part of life, not life itself.
What I was trying to make clear is the exact opposite of what you seemed to interpret from my post.
Like I said, the LOA only affects the person who is responsible for the "vibes", the good or negative thoughts.
What does this mean ?

If you think about bills all the time, you will attrackt more bills ( it's not just thinking about it, it is the powerfull emotion behind it that triggers it ).

If you think about making money all the time, you will attract money.

This boy from your first post wanted to learn to drive passionately, and his mother gave him that chance. The LOA delivered what was asked. The accident was not asked for by the boy. It happened, and he has to live with it for the rest of his life, and that is terrible, but I don't see how that can be linked to the LOA other than the fact that the circomstances that lead to the accident came from the LOA. But that is like saying 1 + 1 = 3

Also, before answering Andy's question about the mass murders, I would like to point out that there is more to it than just 1 person and the LOA.
There are lots of people living side by side that attract things, and there is a certain interconnectedness ( or as they say in Buddhism, everything is connected, nothing is seperate ).
This is the factor that makes it more difficult to get what you want, the Universe is working with everybody around you as well. And that is why real passion to achieve your goal resonates more clearly and this person who has this passion will achieve his goal sooner.

Now to get to the mass murders part.
First of all, the LOA doesn't judge. We humans do. What we consider evil means nothing to the LOA.
It delivers what your passion ( positive or negative ) asks for.

So, you might ask, does that mean that they asked for to be killed ?
No, they didn't.

They were killed by other people, and that is terrible.
Remember, The LOA can only affect the person who is responsible for emitting the passionate thought.

The person who killed his fellow man or woman, didn't send out vibes of killing that person, he just did it.
The victim didn't send out vibes to get killed, he just was.

Because of the simplified way that the LOA was presented to us in the Secret, we just might interpret it wrongly, thinking exactly what you were thinking: What about someone who gets killed, did he ask for that ?
What about rape, child abuse, assault...
No, they are not generated by the LOA unless that person specifically asks for it ( and I can't imagine why anyone would ).
There is more to life than LOA alone.

What the LOA guru's are trying to make clear is that certain parts of your life can improve if you passionately want it to !
That is why they say that your current situation is the result of how you have been using the LOA so far, usually on autopilot.
That your thinking at this moment is keeping you from growing, and that a new mindset will change your life.
If you have passion about your goal, you will achieve it. Numerous movies have been made about people going through numerous problems before reaching their goal. What kept them going ? Their passion !
There will be problems anyway ! If you keep going for your goal, you will surpass your problems and get better from it.
The LOA is not about eliminating troubles in life, it is about overcoming them !

There is even an example of a person who wanted to become a millionaire, and as soon as he achieved it, he gave it away to a good cause ! Now he knew how to use the LOA, and knew he would never be short on anything again. He was looking for a new challenge !

he had faith that he would reach that point he visualised in his mind.

[GilesC]

(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

[enlighteneduk]

Thanks Edwin and Giles, that puts things into perspective much better. Regarding visualisation, I had real problems with this, yet years ago, I realise now that I was extremely good at it, and manifested things I daydreamed about with passion! Many years/traumas/knocks left me with no faith or even the ability to day dream seemed to have vanished. Meditating with LF has been a big help, but I also found a short ebook by a quantum physicist, Dr Eric Amidi, who was part of a group who discovered Top Quark, the last subatomic particle, at Fermi National Laboratory in 1995. This stirred my curiosity and I bought the ebook. Yes, there is a lot of stuff in there that I have already covered, but his process for the visualisation, has been a big help. It really gives a step by step break down, and has given me much more focus again.

Heather

[sliccy]

Thank you Edwin, and Giles for taking the time to write up such big posts in detail that are easy to understand.

There are a few questions I'd like to ask about certain details of your post Giles, but I just thought about another over all question regarding the Law of Attraction.

Here it is, we are saying God, or Being whatever you want to call it. Is all powerful, has higher intelligence and knowledge we can't even begin to dream of. Why would God than come up with such a flawed system such as the Law of Attraction? It just seems to narrow in a way, even though we say "I didn't want that credit card bill" you will put further energy into it and amplify it more. Why wasn't God able to just use logic when it came to this? If you said you didn't want it, well than you won't get it. Simple as that.

Forgive me if I am missing out on something, but this to me sounds just like our current predominant religions. God is all there is, God loves you, blah blah blah....BUT! He is also jealous! It's not OK to kill people, but if God tells you to it is...etc etc (I am just using these examples to clarify my question, I do realize that some of my examples might have been inaccurate, and over exaggerated)

Thanks

-Andy

[Edwin]

Originally Posted by sliccy

Thank you Edwin, and Giles for taking the time to write up such big posts in detail that are easy to understand.

There are a few questions I'd like to ask about certain details of your post Giles, but I just thought about another over all question regarding the Law of Attraction.

Here it is, we are saying God, or Being whatever you want to call it. Is all powerful, has higher intelligence and knowledge we can't even begin to dream of. Why would God than come up with such a flawed system such as the Law of Attraction? It just seems to narrow in a way, even though we say "I didn't want that credit card bill" you will put further energy into it and amplify it more. Why wasn't God able to just use logic when it came to this? If you said you didn't want it, well than you won't get it. Simple as that.

Forgive me if I am missing out on something, but this to me sounds just like our current predominant religions. God is all there is, God loves you, blah blah blah....BUT! He is also jealous! It's not OK to kill people, but if God tells you to it is...etc etc (I am just using these examples to clarify my question, I do realize that some of my examples might have been inaccurate, and over exaggerated)

Thanks

-Andy

Before going into your question, I think it is vital to know how you see God.
I can explain you my vision, but I would rather not try to change your point of view. Everybody has a different view on this, and is entitled to I think.

If your view resonates with mine I would like to try to answer your question.