Once we begin to recognize that our old way of seeing things is attracting negative things into our lives, we begin to feel the attraction to become something else. We begin to focus on the things we love and this takes place in greater and greater intensity as we adopt a wider view of the world around us. We learn to accept things and to even experience gratitude for the way things are because this brings more joy and happiness to us. It is a difficult task at first as our old ways of seeing the world tend to permeate every area of our lives and negativity has become a very bad habit. It is even hard, in the beginning, to root out our negative emotions as their source tends to be very cunning and hidden from our view. In our work and at home we can especially see that we have established many bad habits that keep us stuck in the more narrow fields of consciousness and the magnetic power of these old ways is very hard to overcome.

The difficulty of inner work results from the great effort required to escape from the familiar gravity of lower attractor fields and move to the influence of a higher field.

– HAWKINS –

In order to arrive at this higher level of consciousness, we eventually find that we must begin to apply a new awareness to every aspect of our lives. The spiritual effort becomes a daily practice that we apply to our careers and our relationships. At first the efforts seem very difficult but eventually we come to see that something else has been working in our lives which is far beyond our own personal power and has begun helping us along the way. In fact, this power has been there all along but we were not aware of its presence until now.

Our careers require extreme amounts of time and effort in our lives and yet, this area is often relegated to the ‘back burner’ when we think about spirituality. We think of our spiritual lives as a time to read or meditate and our careers as a time to make money and survive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our careers are an intricate element of our spiritual lives and an area that needs considerable attention if we are going to attract positive energy into our lives. We will have to learn to think more positively about our careers if we are going to attract positive energy throughout our entire day.

A career involves more than just a job. A career involves a progression or an increase that brings us toward a greater level of success in our job. This happens by becoming more advanced in our spiritual pursuits. It is often a surprise to many people who practice spirituality that some of the most successful career minded individuals are also some of the most spiritual people in the world. It is the underlying drive to succeed that fuels people’s desire to have a career and facing the daily challenges of a career is a great way to improve ourselves.

Choosing a direction is the first step in aligning ourselves with wider attractor fields. Commitment is the element of attraction that makes the journey a likely success because things start to take on a quality of permanence. This is obvious in human relationships but not as commonly understood in terms of spiritual pursuits. Commitment can keep a marriage together but can also make a spiritual journey a grand success.

Until one is committed there is hesitating, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans. That the moment one definitely commits oneself, Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of

unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed

would have come his way.

– JOHAN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Goethe knew that nothing can come about until there is commitment. This is true because the law of attraction will only allow us to have the things we think about each day. Until we are committed to placing our energy in one certain area, the success of our endeavors cannot be realized. Goethe also expressed this sentiment in relation to the power of love when he said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” It would seem from his ideas that we are not only affected by the things we focus on in our minds, but especially by the things we love.

Taoism is a great spiritual tradition which is based on the teachings of Lao-tzu. The Tao, in the broadest sense, is the way the universe functions, the path taken by natural events. It is characterized by spontaneous creativity and by the regular changes of phenomena. Through the techniques and practices of Taoism, many dedicated followers have claimed to achieve a greater harmony in their lives and a wider expansion of consciousness. For them, the incoherent has become coherent and they have finally experienced a grand vision of peace and order in their lives.

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.24

– LAO-TZU

Taoism teaches that, in nature, spring follows from winter and day follows from night. These cycles, that we also learn about in our science classes, proceed without effort. The Tao has always been considered to be the way of the universe; the norm, the rhythm, and the guiding power behind nature. It is important to recognize, however, that the Tao is spirit, not matter. It is an inexhaustible energy that flows stronger the more it is drawn upon. It is an energy which is very similar to the energy of Love. Love focuses on giving to others and transforming rather than controlling. If the power underlying all of nature were similar to the Power of Love, then Lao-Tzu would have been right even long before the scientists had begun theorizing about the workings of the stars.

The reason why the universe is eternal is that it does not live for itself; it gives life to others as it transforms.

– LAO-TZU

The goal of Taoists is to attain harmony with the Tao. This attainment of harmony with the Tao is also seen as living in accord with nature. Nature is something that should not be exploited and abused, it should be befriended and appreciated. The ideal man in Taoism is one who, through the naturalness of his existence, becomes self-sufficient and not dependent upon wealth or social realms. In this way, true happiness can be found.

The yin-yang doctrine is based on the concept that there are continuous transformations within the Tao. The principle that embraces nature is divided into two opposites or principles that oppose one another. The principles of yang are light, heat, Heaven, male and sun. The principles of the yin are darkness, cool, earth, female and moon. Everything consists of this balance. The production of yin from yang and yang from yin occurs in a cyclical motion. It is continuous and it happens in such as way so that no principle ever dominates the other. Yin and Yang express the contrasting aspects and interrelationships of everything in the universe.

For a Taoist, the objective is to reach and maintain harmony with the Tao. When this harmony is reached enlightenment has been achieved. In Enlightenment, we accept the plainness of our life. The truths of the Tao cannot be found in any doctrine. Instead, they are found when a person’s energy is balanced and their mind is clear. Taoism promotes simplicity, openness, and wisdom. Once you have realized it, you have openness to life, a tranquility of mind and a reserved genius. The Taoist sage is not arrogant and does not discriminate between opposites. They are indifferent to worldly affairs and are at peace.

In such loving attraction live earth and sky: As when blessed rain falls soft upon the earth, Mankind and Nature could unite like lovers — Free of law, free of command, People would finally be at peace.

– LAO-TZU

As we develop our understanding of the Tao, we learn to incorporate its ideas into our own lives and to experience a more profound sense of harmony all around us. Things start to work much better in our lives and there seems to be a lot less problems to contend with. The power of both attraction and love are working in our life to bring us to a greater sense of wholeness and unity each day.

Although we are constantly attracted by the experiences that these higher fields of consciousness can bring, we also find that our old habits tend to return to us and are always pulling us back down into the more narrow energy fields that we initially experienced in our lives. These lower fields of energy still exist in other people and other places. We only learn to change our lifestyles by aligning ourselves with the wider attractor fields of both love and peace.

Although love is considered to be a power even greater than reason, science itself has certainly come a long way in explaining the power of attraction. Modern medicine can do wondrous things to help us along to a better vision of reality and help to boost us out of the negative thinking that we originally had entrained ourselves into. The tendency of more and more people to reach a more holistic vision of reality is getting closer and closer every day. The progress of science has continued in recent decades with the advancement of non-linear dynamics and, what is known as, “Chaos theory” in science. Despite its inherent challenges, science has continued to press on and to champion more and more elaborate explanations about the power of attraction. In recent years, the new science of nonlinear dynamics has posed the idea of ‘strange attractors’ which help to explain more about our objects’ behavior in the universe.

‘Attractor field’ is a term derived from nonlinear dynamics and signifies that within what appears to be random or unconnected occurrences, there is actually an invisible, organizing pattern field of influence that affects the occurrence of phenomena within each level of consciousness.

– HAWKINS –

Scientists now believe that the universe may be just a large conglomeration of attractor patterns under which all of nature is guided. These attractor patterns might be viewed as the underlying cause or ‘Mind’ of the universe with which science is learning more and more every day. In this sense, the decision making process may be part of a much larger and more essential pattern of attraction that we are only just beginning to understand in our modern conception of scientific understanding.

The decision making process is a function of consciousness itself; the mind makes choices based on millions of pieces of data and their correlations and projections, far beyond conscious comprehension, and with enormous rapidity. This is a global function dominated by energy patterns that the new science of nonlinear dynamics terms ‘attractors’.

– HAWKINS –

Dr. David R. Hawkins is a leading scientist and lecturer on the topic of both science and spirituality. He has introduced the idea that the underlying cause of people’s behavior, and of the activities in nature, are actually guided by these larger ‘attractor fields’ which are thought of as ‘fields of consciousness’. These different fields organize the behavior of objects in nature and tend to attract things into their field according to a greater degree of order that they inspire.

Although he is not an advocate of any particular field in general, one of the larger attractor fields that Dr. Hawkins has spoken of is the field of Taoism or “The Tao”.

According to the great masters and many of the more modern interpretations of science, anything that can be perceived or thought of is always considered to be subjective in some sense. This is why the law of attraction works so well in our lives. Ideas about “nothingness” or the “void” do not have any real existence apart from a person’s subjective experience. We are the ultimate creators of our own reality and coming to this realization is the only thing we need to do before our own happiness can become a priority. We eventually learn that there could never be a “void” if there were not someone like us to experience it in the first place.

The observer, our Self, is the subjective reality which becomes the very proof that the “void” does not exist. We become our own proof about the reality of the world around  us. This has been the natural progression of many great mystics over time, many of whom have experienced deep periods of depression or what is often called ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ before they have reached Enlightenment. Eckhart Tolle has expressed this idea about his own fear and the idea of the “void” in his book The Power of Now.

I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as though the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that. I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before…..Tears came into my eyes…..I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before…For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss.

Eckhart Tolle’s experience of the “void” was an extremely profound experience and one that he seemed to attract into his life before he found the ability to overcome it and thereby let it go. After his experience, it is plain to see that another focus took over his attention and the negative ideas were seen as truly non-existent. Tolle could not recollect anything from his experience of the void because such an experience is actually non-existent in ultimate reality. He went on to have many subsequent experiences which had a positive quality because he let go of his false conception of the void. Theodore Nottingham has also expressed a similar idea about negative emotions in his reference to the teachings of Peter Ouspensky.

The purpose of dealing with negative emotions is to a) clean up our inner life so that b) we can use the energies precisely for experience of higher consciousness.

– PETER OUSPENSKY –

After working on our negative emotions for so long, a saturation point is eventually reached and a new realization crystallizes in our minds. In terms of the grand lesson that many spiritual teachers have tried to impart to us, Dr. David R. Hawkins’ published works are widely recognized as evidence of a very advanced state of spiritual awareness such as the one being discussed here. Dr. Hawkins has also spoken extensively on the idea of the “void” and has given valuable insights into the interpretation of this idea about “nothingness” in spiritual experience.

Void is a state created solely by the mind’s belief in it as an actual possibility. The only actual possibilities in Reality are Is-ness, Allness and Beingness. It is obvious that theoretical opposites to these would then be conceived.

– HAWKINS –

Although theoretical opposites to what “Is” are often conceived, these opposites are only temporary diversions from the truth. They are not accurate pictures of reality. Dr. Hawkins explains that concepts such as “off” when used to designate the condition of a light switch, do not actually refer to a separate state. “Off” is merely a convenient idea that we use to designate what would more accurately be referred to as “not on”.

Although this sounds like an insignificant point, Dr. Hawkins explains that it is actually very significant to our underlying perceptions about the world around us. We keep imagining that there are objective realities to the negative ideas we possess. Dr. Hawkins stresses the importance of understanding that there is never an actual state of “offness” in an electrical circuit but only the presence of electricity or the absence of electricity.21 The problems that we experience between love and separation always stem from a misconception that there are certain states in our lives where there is “lack” or “emptiness”. Lack or emptiness, however, is simply not a reality that holds any true existence beyond our own perception of it. Without realizing what we are doing, we attract certain ideas into our lives. Oftentimes we cannot see this because we don’t see the immense power that our minds possess. We find later that we are very depressed and experiencing a sense of emptiness in our lives but we don’t know why. Many spiritual practices attempt to get us to a place where we are feeling good more of the time. If we can eliminate our negative tendencies, then we tend to attract more positive things that improve our feelings. Ideas, in general, tend to be magnetic.

They attract more of the same and we see a momentum that eventually starts to go in the right direction. By gently guiding our thoughts and our feelings to a better place, we become more adept at this practice. We learn to take a nice walk when we are feeling bad or spend some time in appreciation of nature. We learn meditation and how to guide our thoughts and emotions into a more harmonious stream and the good events will only follow once we learn to change our minds. In a universe that is based upon the law of attraction, what could be more important than our own good feelings?

Depression is a similar energy as fear but it is also a very common and natural phase of a person’s development. As we learn to incorporate the negative ideas that we encounter in life, we also learn to reach for a larger context in which to understand these negative emotions. This larger context may eventually lead to a healthier attitude but this certainly doesn’t happen overnight. As we begin to identify our negative emotions, fear and grief will begin to dissolve. The outside will eventually conform to our inner vision of things as we put the law of attraction into action. It takes a lot of practice to overcome sadness and grief in our everyday lives and sometimes these emotions can go on for years. Oftentimes, people will turn to anti-depressant medication as a way of helping them get over these negative emotions. Anti-depressants can be very helpful in learning how to turn away from negative ideas and emotions and to incorporate more positive habits into our lives. Experiencing grief or depression can be seen as a positive step toward spiritual growth even if we need to turn to some help from science and medicine. We eventually discover that we were the inventors of those fears and that there wasn’t any realistic basis for them in the first place. Looking at our own depression and sadness is a necessary phase of development and can be viewed in a positive light if we allow ourselves the chance to grow. The true reality in the universe is love but coming to this awareness is often a very long and arduous process. Eventually, we find the strength to view our grief as a temporary illusion that can also be dissolved in the light of consciousness.

The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

– A COURSE IN MIRACLES –

Many of our negative impressions come from an underlying belief that everything is useless, empty and essentially a large void. People often talk about a sense of emptiness in their lives and a void in their hearts that simply cannot be filled no matter what they do. If this void were truly the ultimate reality of the universe, then there would certainly be a good reason to assume that everything was ultimately negative. This, however, is simply not the case as both science and spirituality have come to show us. The one simple understanding that someone can have about “nothingness” is that, by its own very definition it is “Not”.

If we decide to focus on fear and grief, we will surely attract these kinds of things into our life and feel a certain perverted satisfaction that our vision of negativity was initially correct. Even when we run from these fears, we cannot escape them. Running from fear only instills the energy into our lives and helps it to manifest as a reality. Running from fear is not the way to alleviate this negative emotion.

In fact, battling with any kind of negative emotion is only another way of attracting it into our lives. If you have ever seen a person who is suffering from a mental illness, they can often be seen muttering to themselves or carrying on in a very strange manner. They may have acquired a sickness that paralyzes them in their lives. They will engage others with senseless arguments in order to satisfy their own sense of frustration or grief. What is so interesting is that others, who are less disturbed, will sometimes engage these people in elaborate discussions possibly in the hope of curing them or changing their minds. Quite often, the efforts are fruitless and only make the sane person appear worse off than when they began.

When a sick person and a well person get together, it is more likely that the two will both end up sick rather than the two of them both becoming well. Engaging in a battle over negative ideas is likely to only produce more negative ideas so that nothing is solved. This same idea holds true when it comes to fear. Engaging our fear as though it were something we should be afraid of is not the correct course. Instead of running from the things we fear or fighting against the things we dislike, we might choose instead not to waste our energy. We might take the high road instead and choose not to give in to the secret attraction that these arguments may have. We might turn the other cheek and look for something more positive to pursue. Running from fear is only a way of expressing our own belief in the very power of fear. FDR’s famous quote “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” profoundly suggests that fear is an empty idea with no power in and of itself. As long as we don’t feed these fears, they will have nothing to live on and will eventually dissolve in the light of our own awareness. The law of attraction teaches us that this kind of positive thinking will only build on itself as we apply it in our lives. We begin to find that our courage is growing at enormous rates each day and the things we thought we should fear were only figments of our own imagination.

Another challenging idea along the path to creating our own destiny involves the idea of the void. This is an idea which originates in the idea of separation and can be seen as a way of looking at life or at the universe. In simple terms, the void can best be understood in terms of the things that we WANT and the things that we DON’T WANT. If there is a thing that we DON’T WANT, we focus on it wherever we go and divide up our experiences in relation to this hidden idea of emptiness or “negation”.

The “void” is an idea that has been presented to many spiritual seekers along their path and this is actually a form of negative thinking that is very subtle and insidious to the advanced seeker. We all give power to our hidden negativities and they take on a larger and larger context as we develop.

This context, when it reaches its widest conception, is something that eventually manifests as the “void”. If we can look more closely at this idea and try to uncover the negativity in our own thinking, it may help us to open it into a wider context of awareness. This wider context would, by its very nature, be a more attractive context simply because of the larger awareness that it allows. First, let’s look at an example. Some people are always dreading the future. They imagine that they will eventually have problems with their health or with their finances. They are always worried about what will happen to them down the road. After worrying about these outcomes, they find that they are very tired and need to take a break from the draining problems in their life. They decide to take a break from work because they are beginning to feel sick. They may stay home or even decide to quit their jobs because they “just can’t take it anymore”. “I hate my job” is one of the most common ideas that people tell themselves. “My relationships never work” is another common negation. With this kind of thinking, the future always seems to arrive with extreme predictability.

Inevitably, negative people tend to be viewed by others as lazy or irresponsible. People don’t want a negative person working at their company or hanging around their circle of friends. These people often lose their jobs and find themselves incapable of paying their bills after their relationships go sour. They are often abandoned by their mates and can even enter into a severe form of depression. Oftentimes, they will even develop health problems and find that all of their original predictions about the doom and gloom of the world have come true.

Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein.

– PROVERBS –

People who see a negative future become discontented. This seems obvious and yet, negative people seem intensely committed to their own negativity. It is as though they felt there was some great honor in seeing the bad side of things. The evidence they were looking for about the world and the negative “reality” of life always seems to arrive with predictable accuracy because the law of attraction is working in all areas of the universe. In order to stop this negative thinking, it is best to look at the way it manifests itself so as to uncover a larger field of attraction and open ourselves to more positive energies.

You’ve heard this said a million times and it certainly seems to be true in many cases. Opposites seem to attract. Oftentimes, couples seem as though they were two very different people. One is active, one is passive. One is cool and one is hot. Although these differences seem to exist on the surface, couples that stay together also have something more and this underlying vibration is the real thing that makes the attraction so powerful. People seem to be attracted to the qualities in another person that make them different. This is the way it appears on the surface and yet, this isn’t the truth. As time goes on, the differences that seemed to attract these people no longer have the initial appeal that they first had. Couples who are mainly focused on the differences that we have with each other, tend to argue and even despise those same qualities that seemed so great in the beginning. They often find that they have nothing in common after they have been together for a little while. In this case, they may start to realize that they need some similarities in order to balance things out. Yin and yang tend to attract each other to create a balance but it is the underlying “balance” or “wholeness” that is really so attractive to these individuals. It is not the qualities of yin or yang themselves. An underlying vibration is necessary in order to keep those opposites together. The essential quality that is necessary to keep people together is often thought to be this wider vision of ‘love’ or ‘peace’.

Without this underlying power, the universe and the relationship would fly apart just like both Newton and Einstein might have helped us predict. Although it may be true that opposites seem to attract, it is an even greater truth that opposites are only kept together by an underlying vibration of love. This power of love is an even greater power of attraction that supersedes the powers of yin and yang and becomes, for many people, the supreme power of attraction in the universe.

The spiritual law of attraction stated in another way says that, “Whatever we hold in mind tends to manifest in our lives.” This is an interpretation given to us from Dr. David R. Hawkins in many of his lectures and speeches around the world. It has also been expressed by Napoleon Hill. In general, it simply means that we tend to attract the things that we think about or focus on in our lives. By instilling our emotional energy into certain things, we call them toward us each day.

Our minds become magnetized with the dominating thoughts we hold in our minds and these magnets attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.

– NAPOLEON HILL –

Keeping a positive attitude certainly isn’t an easy thing to do. Each day, people will tell themselves many negative things. These negative ideas will sometimes be expressed in the light of day by a seemingly happy person and yet, when we get to know the people who are thinking these ideas, we may find that they are actually quite depressed and afraid of many things. People make a lot of decisions based on these negative feelings and it isn’t always apparent how much it is affecting their lives. It will often appear to be quite bad when you take a closer look inside. The negative tendencies that people pursue in their lives often help to confirm the initial fears that they have. They lose their jobs, their friends and their closest loved ones to problems that seem beyond their control. This seems impossible to change and yet, the law of attraction tells us something different. People’s thoughts and decisions often promote the very kind of negative evidence that they initially set out to prove. They are the very cause of their own problems!

The negative ideas that people project often function in a similar manner as a “self-fulfilling prophecy”. By focusing on the negative, the negative comes to pass. The law of attraction tells us that, whatever we give our attention to becomes our point of attraction. It becomes the thing that we magnetize into our lives. This is even true for the things we try to separate ourselves from or fight against because we find that we are still giving these “negative” things our constant attention.

Let’s look at an example. Someone decides that the worst thing in the world would be for their loved one to leave them. They worry about this day and night. It is their worst fear and they can’t get it out of their mind. As they focus on this fear, they find that they simply cannot trust the person they are with. They are constantly second guessing this person and accusing them of the fears they hold inside.

Instead of showing them love and affection, they are actually driving this person away.

When we create something, we always create it first in a thought form. If we are basically positive in attitude, expecting and envisioning pleasure, satisfaction and happiness, we will attract and create people, situations, and events which conform to our positive expectations.

– SHAKTI GAWAIN –

Getting over our fears and negative emotions can be quite a challenge when we are applying the law of attraction in our lives. In order to be successful and attract what is positive, it is helpful to see the challenges ahead. If we know what to expect in terms of the law of attraction, we will be prepared to attract only the things that are truly best for us in our lives. In this way, we will avoid the fears and confusions and find the love and understanding along the way.