What Secret?

By now, you’ve probably read the book or seen the very inspirational film “The Secret” which talks about how to manifest your dreams with the Law of Attraction. As inspiring as it is, though, the film doesn’t tell the whole story. As you may recall, the main message in the film is that your reality is a manifestation of your thoughts. Or more simply stated, what you think about, you create. Now that all sounds good and powerful, but will thinking about something really bring it into being?

Well, the answer is “yes,” but there’s more to the story…

You absolutely bring into your life what you focus your thoughts on. This is because the Law of Attraction is a universal principle, a mathematical equation. And it’s always working, whether or not you’re conscious of it. But how does it work? Let’s call what you create your outcomes or results. Your outcomes and results are all the people you’ve brought into your life as well as the situations in which you find yourself and your current state of affairs. For example, your state of health, the work you do, how your home looks, your achievements, your friends, your enemies, and the status of your finances and relationships are all outcomes. Interestingly, wealth is also an outcome. And, according to the Law of Attraction, you create your outcomes. But how? Well, outcomes are a result of your behavior–what you do. In other words, you create your outcomes through the things that you do.Now, believe it or not, everyone is always doing something, all the time, 24-7, whether it’s sleeping, lounging, talking, sneering, exercising, playing, studying, cooking, or caretaking. And, aside from the time you are asleep, at each moment, what you do is based on a decision you make in that moment. In other words, you are always deciding what to do–and, in each moment, you are choosing between an enormous number of possible behavioral options. What’s important to know is that a good 95% of those decisions are made unconsciously (outside of your conscious awareness). For example, imagine that you’re driving to a store that you’ve been to a hundred times before. In order to operate your vehicle, not only do you have to coordinate a dozen hand and foot movements (involving hundreds of muscles), but you also have to maintain an internal state called “driving” and be aware of both the internal and external environments of the automobile. And, this doesn’t even take into account the other activities you may be doing–listening to the stereo, talking on the phone, eating, thinking about your children, etc. And all the time, you are making decisions–where to look, when to move this finger or that toe, how fast to go, when to slow down, on and on, ad infinitum. Studies show that, during this process, you are probably making at least several thousand decisions each second! And most of them are outside of your conscious awareness. And, somehow, you manage to get to the store and back home. So,if your outcomes are based on your behavior, and each behavior is based on a collection of decisions, what determines what decisions you make?

According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, most decisions may use some logic, but the main driving force is emotion, which either overrides logic or uses a pseudo-logic to support emotional choices (this is extremely common). Another common use of emotion in decision is to start with logic and then use emotion in the final choice. Now, understand that we are primarily talking about hundreds of thousands of decisions made each second outside of conscious awareness. This implies that each decision is made so quickly that your rational cortex doesn’t even have time to become engaged in the process. We call this type of behavior a “reaction”. Needless to say, it would be impossible for anyone to be consciously aware of all–or even most–of their decisions.

Hmmm... Is this getting interesting now, or what? So, your outcomes are generated by your behavior, and your behavior is generated by… your emotions. So what are emotions?

Emotions are feelings–physical responses to mental or physical experiences. In other words, your emotions are feedback for you about what you are actually experiencing, or, in some cases, what your mind is remembering about past experiences or is projecting about possible future experiences. Simply stated, emotions tell you the difference between what you’re thinking and what you’re experiencing. Now, emotions can run the gamut from the very subtle to the extremely obvious, but they are all emotions nonetheless. And, the extent to which the emotion you feel is pleasant or unpleasant is determined by your expectation or desire. In other words, you feel pleasant emotions when your actual experience is what you expect or want, and you feel unpleasant emotions when your experience in not what you want. But, the bottom line is that it’s all feedback, and the key is that your emotions are generated by your thoughts. So now the question is… where do your thoughts come from?

Your thoughts–what you think about–are a function of your constellation of beliefs and values, otherwise known as your belief system. And, what determines your thoughts is how everything in your belief system is associated, otherwise known as your mental map or mindset. Stated differently, your thoughts emanate from and are created by your mindset. What’s interesting here is that, by and large, your belief system and mindset are mostly unconscious, meaning most of what you believe is outside of your conscious awareness. For example, do you know what you believe about metallurgy, chemistry, biology, physics, aeronautics, electro-magnetism and so on? Well, for most people the answer is “no,” and even if your beliefs in those areas (and believe me you do have them) are not immediately retrievable, you are still having thoughts, reacting emotionally, making decisions, and generating outcomes based on those beliefs every moment of the day.

So there you have it–the entire equation of the Law of Attraction: Your belief system generates your thoughts, to which you have emotional responses, which generate your behaviors, which create your outcomes. So, if your goal is to change your current situation (ie, financial status, relationships, health, etc.), you must focus on changing your beliefs. More specifically, you must 1) become aware of your constellation of unconscious beliefs that are generating unwanted outcomes, and 2) change those beliefs.

And now the $64,000 question… from where do your beliefs and values come? Ah, another question for another day...