The Awakened Psychic Being Attracts What It Needs for Its Growth and Development

There has been a lot of publicity about what is called generally the “law of attraction”. This holds that an individual can focus on something and thereby cause it to be attracted to him. People have used it to try to attract wealth, romance, and other things they desire to themselves. There is, of course, an occult truth behind the connection between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ that takes place when the focus or concentration of the subject shifts to the object, and thereby can cause some attraction. The real problem with the way this is formulated in the popular imagination is that an individual’s mental, emotional and vital focus of energies is sufficient to draw together universal forces and results. For most people, with a limited power of concentration, and a limited power of persistence in that concentration, this is, for the most part, very illusory, and results are limited at best.

In his lectures on Raja Yoga, Swami Vivekananda describes the power of yogic concentration, samyama, to bring knowledge by identity to the practitioner of whatever is being focused on, and with it, the powers of the object of concentration. This of course requires a substantial ability to practice raja yoga in order to obtain the results. There may of course be individuals who have a natural capacity, based on past lifetime development, to effectuate such a form of concentration, but this capacity is actually rooted in the psychic being, which is the actual carrier of experience and growth from life to life.

When we look at the mechanism of the psychic being, the entire focus from life to life is the growth of the soul and the increasing awareness and purposeful adherence to the universal manifestation and the Divine intention. The soul does not focus on fulfilling the objects of desire, but rather, on circumstances and capacities that will enhance the soul’s awakening and growth. These may be circumstances that the ego-personality would judge as highly negative or painful! The pain and struggle may push the soul along its path more effectively than wonderful, satisfying circumstances in life.

he Mother writes: “If you have within you a psychic being sufficiently awake to watch over you, to prepare your path, it can draw towards you things which help you, draw people, books, circumstances, all sorts of little coincidences which come to you as though brought by some benevolent will and give you an indication, a help, a support to take decisions and turn you in the right direction. But once you have taken this decision, once you have decided to find the truth of your being, once you start sincerely on the road, then everything seems to conspire to help you to advance….”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Growing Within: The Psychology of Inner Development, Chapter VIII The Psychic Being and Inner Growth, pp. 161-162