Back in March of this year, I was at a Hay House Writing Workshop listening to Doreen Virtue when the negative Nelly who has resided in my head nearly all of my life, channeled my father. I'm listening to this delightful, positive woman who seems to genuinely connect with the panel members who have lined up at a microphone to ask questions. She connects and gives each of them a book that is cherry picked to address whatever issue they asked their question about. I am moved. I am inspired. I am happy. In my head my father says, "They only do that as a marketing scam, you know. She knows that for every book she gives away, you idiots will buy six more."
That's all it takes. For that moment, I am caught. Stuck in a pothole of disillusionment. I snagged my hopes, my aspirations, and my dreams on a submerged limiting belief which hadn't even originally been my own. It had been my father's. I still remember why he felt that way. Sometime during his childhood, he sent away for Christmas ornaments. I think they were supposed to glow in the dark. I really can't remember anymore. When they arrived, rather than being real Christmas ornaments as he was led to believe, they were paper. Not origami. Flat, two dimensional paper, as in just a drawing of the item he thought he had been going to receive. It became a defining moment in his life. It made him a bit of a skeptic. Certainly he wasn't someone who would trust again once trust was betrayed, but truthfully, it seemed it also made him look for the catch or the lie even while the ball was still in play. He was looking to be burned.
That. That pothole of disillusionment. That "looking to be burned." That is why the Law of Attraction doesn't work for so many people. If you believe in something, you have to believe in it. Whole heartedly even in the face of it looking like a lie. You must not only talk the talk, you must walk the walk, you must "be" what you believe. For the Law of Attraction, that means you can't be looking to be burned. You need to be excited about the possibilities and certain good things are always on the horizon. You have to see every red light and traffic jam for the good things it may bring you rather than the irritation of it disturbing the flow of your day.
The first step is to ask yourself what do I really believe? Take all of the things you've learned over the years throw them in the same pot as what you believe or has been handed down to you about God, the universe and everything else and shake them around together. Look at where they actually seem to converse with each other and make sense to you. Tell yourself your own story of what life is all about, who we are, what happens when we die. Whatever life's mysterious questions, tell yourself the story that makes sense to you. Tell yourself the story that answers all of your questions.
Have you ever played that game where person number 1 whispers something and by the time person number 10 is whispering the same secret to person number 1, it has morphed into a different sentence entirely? With the exception of those who believe they have had a direct experience with God, everything from the Bible to a pastor's weekly sermon is fed to you via someone else's perceptions. It is filtered through them just like a suspicion of salesmen was filtered to me by my dad. In my opinion, you simply owe it to yourself to suss it out and figure out what makes sense logically to you. You don't have to share it with anyone. It is just your personal "backstage" to how everything works that enables you to believe the action "on stage" is real.
I can give you my own example. I believe in the First Law of Thermodynamics. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Arguably, each and every one of us is or has a certain amount of energy. I tend to think of energy as flowing through humanity as water cycles through weather. Now while it doesn't reassure me as to whether I will remember being me or not, this does give me a notion of death and the afterlife. Energy cannot be destroyed. So that part of me that is energy will not die. It must go on to somewhere. It supports the Law of Attraction for me. Energy has positive and negative charges, just as our personalities and windows on the world do. I can explain a lot more aspects about it, but for our purposes, that is what I believe. By extension, you could say, that is who I am.
So it's March in San Francisco, I'm stuck in a negative pothole while listening to the very lovely Doreen Virtue talk, and suddenly the answer shocks me near to standing up.
Believe.
It's like the riddle about the two men guarding doors. One of the doors has certain death, the other has freedom. One of the doors has a man guarding it who always tells the truth, the other has a man who always lies. The man who always tells the truth (or for my purposes "believes") is the path to the right door and life. The riddle's answer is: You ask each man the following question. "If I ask the other man which door to pick, which door will he pick?" Then you walk through the opposite door. You see, the man who always lies, when asked which door the man who always tells the truth will choose, will lie. The man who always tells the truth, when asked which door the man who always lies will choose, will tell the truth. So both answers will point at the lie, or in other words, the door that would kill you.
So I asked myself, "What if she is telling the truth? What if she believes every word she is saying?" At the core of the Law of Attraction is a belief in abundance. There is no need to compete because there is more than enough for everyone. The accompanying positivity adds being grateful and happy about every bill you pay and hoping the recipient gets wealthy in part because of you. Why not? I don't need you to be poor for me to be rich or vice versa.
And it was just like the riddle. I knew. If I believe that she believes what she is saying, then she believes what she is saying and she believes there is no need to compete and in that case …. no need to scam.
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