Exquisitive

I’ve been thinking about the Law of Attraction for about a year and a half and seeing what I can do with it. As I’ve said before, my results have been modest. I’ve been proceeding on the belief that it works, because I really do believe that there’s something there, somewhere between “poof – there it is” and “this total nonsense.” During one of my sessions meditating, the thought arose about applying LOA in reverse: Instead of using it to attract something I want, why not look at what I’m getting, with the belief that it is what I’m attracting and see what it can tell me about what I believe?

I think this can work even when you don’t necessarily believe in the Law of Attraction, as it’s been presented in things like The Secret or Hicks/Abraham, on the not so off chance that you find those things a bit too wooly. It could be a way to ease into it and sort of let it sink in. I know that for myself, it’s been a somewhat intriguing discovery to make and in some ways, it’s given me another way to think about it in addition to the more direct ways I’ve been trying to incorporate it in my thinking.

I know that for me, this has lead to some different ways of looking at memories I have from childhood and how I feel the’ve affected me as an adult. Everyone bears some scars from childhood and adolescence, and I’ve certainly heard far worse stories than mine, so I won’t go into terrible detail, but doing this sort of thing has caused me to ease my belief in the immutability of my memories. In a way it’s been a backdoor method for allowing me to consider how I might see myself differently, and this new sense of possibility, of potential, has had the somewhat unintended consequence of reinforcing my understanding of how the Law of Attraction might be actively applied in my own life.

I’m not saying any of this is particularly revolutionary, but it was a bit of a bolt from the blue for me. In my reading of LOA, this sort of idea has only been hinted at and mentioned indirectly. I’m just taking it upon myself to expand on it a little. Who knows, it could work for you too!

The first version of this post was a bit long, so this is my next attempt to put up a small what-about on myself and my motivations for doing this.

My aim with starting this blog is to give myself a forum to try putting up a few insights I’ve been having in the last year or so. I’ve been working with a few ideas having to do with manifesting intention and the law of attraction. I might talk about The Secret, which I liked the first couple of times I saw it, but now I find it just irritates me, mostly. I’m more likely to mention Steve Pavlina, which is where I first learned about the law of attraction. I just started reading Esther and Jerry Hicks and their Abraham stuff. It’s early, so the jury’s still out. I listened to some of the audio on their website and I have to say, they started to lose me when Esther started talking with an Eastern European accent. I realize she’s supposed to be channeling Abraham, an idea I’m still having a bit of difficulty with, but I’m trying to withhold judgment until I can give the message a bit more of a chance. There are other sources of insight that have been feeding into this and I want to try to synthesize all that as best I can.

I realize could have done all this in a personal journal, and arguably, that’s exactly what I should have done, however, I feel that if I’m working with some of this stuff, then it’s safe to assume I’m not alone. I like to think I’m at least a fair writer, so maybe I can contribute something to the conversation too.

Anyway, about me. I’m a Christian, ostensibly. I always feel a need to qualify that statement since lately, the title has been hijacked by an overly-political group of powerseekers whose views don’t overlap with mine particularly. I would humbly suggest that to a large extent, Jesus would have a hard time with some of the stuff they’re doing and saying “in his name,” but that’s a question for the theologians, a group to which I do not belong.

My route to this point in my life, spiritually speaking, has taken me through the typical early pious phase of life, to the rejection of church in high school and college, fueled by a double-whammy of French existentialist writings and eastern religious philosophy. I had a re-acquaintance with the church after a rather intense religious experience brought on by something of an identity crisis. I call it Big Bang 1, or BB1 for short. I’ve only added the 1 in the last year or so, when I recently came to realize that I’m in the midst of “BB2.” It took a while to come to that conclusion, since while the first time around was very intense, it was also rather short in duration. Make no mistake, though. I feel its reverberations to this day. This time around, though, the experience has been much more drawn out, dawning on me only in degrees.

The parts I feel I’m trying to draw together in some coherent fashion are those insights I’ve been gaining in my more recent experience with the more established parts of my spirituality that have been valuable or important to me. In some regards, it’s taken me a ways outside the traditional make-up of a Christian’s spiritual journey, but I’ve been skirting along the edge of that for some time now anyway. At times, I’ve joked to myself that I might be a closet Buddhist, although I realize that my understanding of that religion has a sizable pop psychology filter on it. In the end, I feel no strong need to “choose a side,” since I possess a fair bit of ambivalence toward organized religion anyway.

And the thing of it is, I find so much out there that just thrills me to no end. I hear people knocking this stuff around and I get as much of a charge out of listening to Richard Dawkins speak as I do Jon Kabat Zinn as I do David Spangler as I do people on the forums over at Steve Pavlina’s site. I can’t just take what comes to me passively and accept it without question. My brain just won’t take it. Let’s see where it goes!

Wow, an empty blog with no posts. A sad thing to behold and WP’s default empty blog is particularly bad to look at. So, let’s spruce it up with a hopefully only mildly inane, relatively modest, rather unassuming first post. Cha.