Adam’s Peace

No, this post is not about the imperial era of the United States, where we believed that we were ordained by some deity to control the entire North American continent. This post is about Intention Manifestation in all of its forms, from the clinically sterile Placebo Effect to the pop-culture Law of Attraction and the venerable world of Magic.

This post comes after promptings from Slade after I wrote down my analogy in a comment on K-L’s blog. He even offered to host this article on his site with me being a guest blogger.

The reason why I created the analogy in the first place was because I needed a way to get a very simple point across to people. That point is that doing the work yourself is the single most effective way to manifest an intention. If you want a cup of coffee, first you form the intention, then you put energy into it by getting up and brewing it and pouring yourself a pot. A lot of people say that, since you actually did the work, the intention failed, as there isn’t anything ‘magical’ about doing the work yourself… I say, it worked amazingly well, since you have the exact results that you wanted.

A lot of people have noticed that, for an intention to manifest, it is extremely helpful to put energy into your intention. This can be done several ways, but first, I would like to explain why and how I-M works.

The placebo effect, law of attraction, and magic all work based on belief. In the case of a doctor or researchers giving a patient a placebo, either as part of a control group or in the hopes of saving the patient some money, if the patient knows that they received a placebo, then it doesn’t do any good. Even some cases where a patient has received the real drug, if they believe that all they are taking is a sugar pill, then the drug may not provide useful results. Yet, at the same time, a placebo can be just as effective, or even more effective, than the actual drug being tested. The key here is belief… Yes, the real drug does provide real results, and shouldn’t be discounted, but the placebo effect continues to amaze researchers and physicians alike.

The Law of Attraction specifically states that belief is central to it working… I have no idea just how many times I’ve heard people tell someone else that the reason why their intentions didn’t manifest was because they didn’t believe hard enough… yet I’m certain that if I had an extra dollar for each time, I’d be able to pay my rent this month.

Magic, in terms of the native European religions, requires faith and belief as well. Instead of simply saying that the belief is necessary and leaving the practitioners to figure out how to build that belief on their own, as science and the Law of Attraction are facing now, magic has rituals that confirm the belief before the practitioner sends out the intention. Would you walk around your house with a handful of burning sage if you didn’t already believe that it would protect your house?

So, since belief is necessary for I-M, it is a very short logical leap to say that disbelief and doubt hurt the chances of manifesting your intentions, or at least delay it and weaken the effects. A lot of people have found ways to overcome this disbelief, and I maintain that doing the work yourself is the most effective way to overcome that disbelief. How can you doubt something that you are experiencing, except through carefully trained skepticism?

Here is my analogy. Imagine that your intention is to move a large, thin board. Your doubt and disbelief all manifest themselves as friction and weight holding that board in place. Do you have that idea firmly planted in your mind? Good.

There are several ways to move that board. You can stand on top of it and shift your weight creatively, allowing your own momentum to move it along. You can stand next to the board and kick or push it. You can lift an edge of the board and pull it along. You can also lift the board off of the ground and carry it to where you want it to be.

The first of these options is similar to how the Law of Attraction is described in the faux-cumentary The Secret. The Secret says that all you have to do is think that an event has happened, or is happening, and it will happen. Well, yes, that could work, but just like standing on top of a board and moving it with your momentum, you are adding to the board’s weight and friction by standing on top of it. With your intention, you are preventing it from working because you aren’t actually changing your beliefs, only your surface thoughts.

You can think about moving your arm, and you can actually move your arm… Both thoughts are similar, but with the surface thought of moving, you don’t get results. You can also think about changing your beliefs, and you can actually change your beliefs. Since most people haven’t consciously changed their beliefs in the past, it is very hard to learn how, and is similar in difficulty to learning how to wiggle your ears… some people just never quite learn how.

The second option, of getting off and pushing or kicking the edge of the board, is similar to putting strong emotion into your intention. The board’s own weight and surface area works against you, and all of your energy comes in sudden bursts, but you don’t have to fight your own weight as well. This is also where rituals help, although I would say that ritual also creates a path of sand, further decreasing the friction of disbelief.

The third method, lifting an edge, is a hybrid between the first two methods and the last method. Since I haven’t described the last method yet, I’ll come back.

The last method is to do the work yourself. Yes, all lot of LoA newbies will insist that this isn’t actually what The Secret is talking about… but it has all of the requirements for manifesting an intention. First, you have a desire, such as drinking a cup of coffee. Next, you put out energy, in this case, in the form of brewing it or going to a cafe. Finally, the intention manifests, and you have a cup of coffee to drink. It ’sounds’ like cheating, but what can be more simple? All of your disbelief is gone, because you are actually experiencing the events first hand. You may doubt your ability to brew coffee, but at least, at the end, you’ll have a cup of brown liquid with caffeine in it, no matter how poor you are at working the coffee maker. Without the disbelief, it is like moving an object without any friction, or actually lifting that object up so that it doesn’t touch the ground.

Back to the third method of lifting one edge of the board. This is the most appropriate method to use when you simply can not do all of the work yourself. Intentions of this nature include getting a new job, gaining more readers on a website, and anything else that requires other people to do some of the work. To do this, you must do as much of the work as you can, remembering that it is your job to reduce the friction of disbelief as much as possible. Then, you can either pull or push on that board.

Pushing on the board would be like gaining readers on a blog without going out and marketing it. Your own actions are to create the content, but then, you are simply waiting for people to show up. If you run into an obstacle, then all of your progress stops, sort of like pushing a board past uneven ground. In fact, you are adding the weight of your own disbelief onto the intention whenever you hit an obstacle.

Pulling on the board, on the other hand, is turning yourself around so that, instead of hitting every obstacle with the full force of your intention, you let your intention glide over the obstacles smoothly. There are several ways to do this… First, do not be attached to the methods. If you send out an intention to gain a large chunk of money, and the only activity that you participate in is to buy lottery tickets, then your chances are still pretty low, simply because you are requiring the money to come along only one path. Open up as many paths as possible by getting a part time job, inventing, doing freelance work, buying lottery tickets, advertising on your website, using the AGLOCO toolbar (aff), or anything else that you can think of that would open up many paths to gaining money.

Another way to ‘pull the board’ is to put more energy into the intention. Here, I’ll explain a bit of Steve Pavlina’s polarity, since that has often been unclear in the past. When Steve has been talking about dark and light polarity, he was speaking about sending and receiving. Here’s the key… You have to send in order to receive, and if you receive, you must send as well. Now, whichever part you do not concentrate on will take care of itself. If you concentrate on receiving, then your bills will get larger and larger. If you concentrate on giving, then your pay checks will get larger and larger… It balances out, in the end, and it is important to note that it is the speed of the flow that is important, not how much you can accumulate. Polarizing your intentions with either a giving or receiving attitude is probably the easiest way to add energy to an intention.

Now, putting this hybrid method of intention-manifestation together, we have a pretty clear outline of what to do. Let’s get a practical example real quick, to show how the entire process works.

Let’s say that my intention is to gain more readers on my blog. It is pretty hard to believe that people will want to read blank pages, so my first direct action is to create content. Since it is easier to believe that people like regularly updated content, I also work on additional articles as time goes by. Now, it is also hard to believe that people will appear from nowhere to read the articles, so I work on search engine optimization, and I head off to comment on other people’s blogs, build a relationship with the writers, and leech their readers… um… I mean… share our readers between us.

Now that I’ve done the work that I can do myself, it is time to reduce the friction on the other end. Since people tend to go where energy is flowing, I set about making the articles useful for them, giving of my own value. At the same time, I also have a donate button at the bottom of the page and an ad at the top so that money can also flow in. (Hopefully, by the time my server is up for renewal, I’ll have earned enough to pay for another two years. ) I also concentrate on giving value, which is, ironically, the very reason why my posting schedule has gone down dramatically… I need to be at peace in order to help other people to be at peace, so the majority of my time is spent in bringing myself joy and learning new ways to bring peace into my life.

Some other things that I can do is to form symbolic rituals which will increase my emotional investment and will help to focus my attention… If I’m very stuck, I can go ask a very grounded person to shift the earth a little.

Now, with all of this, is the very basic first method still appropriate? In some cases, yes. If you can’t find a way to do any of the work yourself, and you can’t get yourself emotionally attached to an idea, then you can use the basic intentions without feeling guilty that you aren’t doing more… there simply is no way that you can do more. A great example of this is concentrating on world peace. It is a very large topic, and even with peace being my life purpose, I can do very little about it. Most people in this world are not directly affected by war, and in fact, are rather numb to it from watching stories about it in the news. War just seems to be an ever-present fact of life, deeply entrenched into our concept of reality. There is very little that people are willing to do directly, and the disbelief of world peace being possible holds war firmly in place… In this case, a simple, basic intention does do some good.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 9:34 am and is filed under Intention Manifestation, Consciousness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.