Alright. Fine. Here’s your definitive guide to LOA.

Is the Law of Attraction Real?

That depends entirely on what exactly you think the Law of Attraction is. If you think it’s a magical universal vending machine that immediately dispenses the very thing you’re thinking about, the answer is no. If you think that it’s actually attracting things to you or manifesting them out of thin air, the answer is no. If you think it means that it’s physically manifesting every single circumstance that you experience in your life, the answer is no.

Now that we’ve established what the Law of Attraction is not, let’s talk about what it actually is.

What is the Law of Attraction?

In Conversations With God, Neale Donald Walsch states that the formula for manifestation is thought + word + deed = manifestation. But not just any thought –– the sponsoring thought. The sponsoring thought is your fundamental belief.

What this means in its simplest form is that your beliefs about yourself and the world around you – conscious or not – dictate your words and actions, and your words and actions dictate how you co-create the world around you, and how you perceive that world which surrounds you is entirely predicated on your beliefs about it. This is simple cause and effect. Essentially, people experience the Law of Attraction through their frame of reference.

We don’t attract anything to us, but we are attracted to things which resonate with our beliefs (sponsoring thought). This is also called confirmation bias. Our thoughts are creative in this context because they are dictating many of the situations, people, and information we choose to engage with. The entire goal of using spirituality as an avenue for healing and personal development is to become conscious of our sponsoring thoughts so that we can be attracted to healthy situations, people, and information that we actually want in our lives.

Our actions create a great deal of our lives individually – at least the aspects which are in our control. Our actions, collectively, contribute to the the things which are not totally in our control, such as systems of oppression. Oppressive systems are a co-creation. How you choose to engage with those oppressive systems is your creation and your individual contribution to the co-created reality we live in.

We are simply either open to opportunities and creating change, or we are closed to opportunities and change, based on our current cultural conditioning and trauma. Which opportunities we are presented with are completely luck of the draw and entirely at the mercy of where we sit in the social privilege hierarchy.

When we heal a lot of our trauma and decondition ourselves from the fundamental beliefs (our sponsoring thoughts) given to us by our cultural programming, it shifts our awareness and attention, giving us the ability to see those opportunities –– and limitations –– which gives the outward appearance of “attraction” or “manifesting,” particularly if and when someone has already framed it that way for us and primed us to view it that way, which is yet another form of psychological conditioning.

How did we get from this to “you literally manifest your own reality with the thoughts you are thinking in any given moment”?

One of the basic misconceptions that even people within spirituality have which has given rise to the magical lens of Law of Attraction is equating our own divinity with being all-powerful – the idea that we are all God/source and therefore, if God is all powerful and can create the universe, so can we. But that’s not what God/Source is according to spirituality—that’s the Christian version of an all-powerful external creator god being projected ONTO spirituality’s version of god/source. This is how Western culture, which is founded on and deeply influenced by Christianity, seeps in and distorts the Western understanding of spirituality.

Here’s a 30-minute video examining the not-so-divine origins of the Law of Attraction and how it’s been used to prey on people.

Note: There’s some fundamental issues with this video beyond the assumption that being divine=all powerful, such as the fact that we really do have scientific evidence that our frame of mind does, indeed, affect physical health. You can read more about that here. But the point is, both people inside and outside of New Age belief systems fundamentally misunderstand spiritual concepts and then spread those misunderstandings to the masses.

Divine does not equate to all-powerful. It simply means “of or like God.” The notion that we are all God in spirituality is simply that god is nature and the natural universe and we are all a part of that and made up of the same stuff. There are examples of this across a multitude of religions:

In the pantheistic Kutsayana Hymn, the Upanishad asserts that one’s Soul is Brahman, and this Ultimate Reality, Cosmic Universal or God is within each living being. It equates the atman (Soul, Self) within to be Brahma and various alternate manifestations of Brahman, as follows, “Thou art Brahma, thou art Vishnu, thou art Rudra (Shiva), thou art Agni, Varuna, Vayu, Indra, thou art All.” In the verses (5,2), Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are mapped into the theory of Guna, that is qualities, psyche and innate tendencies the text describes can be found in all living beings. – Wikipedia

“Qualities, psyche and innate tendencies that can be found in all living beings” is describing archetypes which are universal, even among non-living things. Those archetypes can be found in all of the natural world (which is God), and since we are a manifestation of that natural world, they are also found in our own psyche. We are divine, and so are the animals, and so is earth, and so is our solar system, and so is our universe. This is what we mean when we say “we are one.” And these basic concepts can be found in the mythologies of pretty much every religion.

Assuming of course, you don’t believe the stories are literal, but rather allegorical descriptions of the archetypal concepts. But in order to understand this, one must not read into them with their rational, focused, literal left brain (masculine archetype) but rather, the part that is capable of abstract thought and big picture thinking (usually what we would think of as right-brained or feminine archetypal qualities). This is why we say the divine is accessed through the feminine and you are connected to it via your intuition.

When I hear people say things like “I’m not a believer” in regard to spirituality, I chuckle a little, because that’s like saying “I don’t believe we exist.” Spirituality isn’t a choice, fool. You’re living it.

So what’s the point of manifesting?

The entire point of spirituality is to become conscious of our own divinity (that we are a part of god/nature as well as the whole of it, (archetypically speaking) and bring ourselves back into balance with that divinity. Imagine how the world might change if we recognized that level of unity. And, you know, that’s kind of what Native spirituality was all about.

In Lakota spirituality, Wakan Tanka is the term for the sacred or the divine. This is usually translated as the “Great Spirit” and occasionally as “Great Mystery”.

Wakan Tanka can be interpreted as the power or the sacredness that resides in everything, resembling some animistic and pantheistic beliefs. This term describes every creature and object as Wakan (holy) or having aspects that are Wakan. The element Tanka corresponds to “Great” or “large”. – Wikipedia

I want to make it clear: when I say that everything is divine, I mean in our physical reality, not necessarily the social constructs we humans have created which are separate from nature — like capitalism. Those are built upon our own individual beliefs, biases, and actions which are separate from and in contradiction to nature –– and thus, our own divinity –– and which arise from the human ego’s belief that it is separate from and superior to nature.

Learn more about social constructs and why they are the foundation of spiritual philosophy.

This separation from nature and our divinity is the original trauma, like Adam and Eve being kicked out of the garden. It’s what a lot of people view as “free will”. And this is what Neale Donald Walsch was talking about in Conversations with God when God said, “My will is your will but your will is not my will.” We are god/source/nature, therefore our will is also of god/source/nature, but we also believe ourselves to be separate from god/source/nature and act out of alignment with the natural order. This is separation consciousness and it’s what has created the social constructs we live within, which programs us with toxic belief systems. It’s what some might call “the system” or “the matrix.”

Learn more about how separation consciousness shows up masked as spiritual unity.

The system refers to the rules and structures put in place that govern our existence. Capitalism is an economics system. Our democratic republic is a system of government. These systems are made up of smaller systems, like the criminal justice system, the foster care system, the healthcare system, etc.

• Systems are founded on social theories (Individualism is a social theory)
• Social theories are founded on philosophies (religion is a philosophy)
• Philosophies are often influenced by social constructs (like identity, gender roles, race, money, religion, certain disabilities)
• Social constructs are influenced by culture (attitudes, beliefs, values, biases, prejudices)
• Culture is influenced by collective experiences and how we understand, process, and cope with them (psychology)
• Psychology is influence by trauma

And then these things all collapse and intermingle to influence one another in a cyclical fashion and ultimately end up creating systems that oppress people who don’t fit the social constructs that offer the most advantages: wealthy, white, able-bodied/minded, cisgender, heterosexual males. The world is constructed and viewed predominantly from their perspectives which offers them power and provides an incentive and a desire for them to keep it that way –– but this incentive and desire to amass wealth and power only exists among humans. It doesn’t exist in nature, and so it is not divine.

And that’s why capitalism is destroying earth and our society –– because we are choosing to act outside of alignment with divinity and out of alignment with nature.

Learn how the desire to amass wealth, power, and privilege is a manifestation of white supremacy.

So when spiritual people use spirituality (typically the Law of Attraction) to try to manifest wealth, power and status, they are not in alignment with their higher self, nor God/source/nature. They are in alignment with the fundamental wounding of their own ego.

When spiritual people buy into this belief system that all of the trauma and abuse that happens to us is divinely orchestrated, they are mistaken. It’s a product of “free will” in as much as we have free will, since much of these atrocities are driven by cyclical trauma and abuse, which we know affects the brain, behavior, and decision-making, and all that infiltrates the societal constructs we have created and continue to create.

Learn more about why we don’t manifest abuse.

Because of all of these belief systems (culture, philosophy, social constructs, etc.) founded upon various traumas, most people are running around living in a subjective reality of their own making, rather than the objective reality sitting right in front of them. This is what is really meant by “You create your own reality.” It’s done through your beliefs and biases that color how you view the world around you. That’s what is meant by the notion that this world is an illusion. It is an illusion from your perspective. A self-delusion.

The end goal of spirituality is not to create your own reality, as these individualistic ass hats claim — it’s to get everyone to JOIN THE FUCKING REAL, TANGIBLE WORLD that’s right in front of them. That’s what it means to expand and raise your level of consciousness, bring yourself back into alignment, and create unity.

Thanks for being here,

Ash

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