Sunday, March 1, 2009

The Ultimate Outcome

Setting goals is a way of focusing the mind on a desired result. In a goal oriented culture such as our own, the teaching of “the law of attraction” has found its way into business schools, holistic circles and pop culture alike.

The law of attraction says “like attracts like”; you get what you put your energy and focus on. No matter if you want it or not, how you think creates your reality.

The beauty of applying this knowledge is that it brings us to reflect on our own thinking patterns. We begin to notice a space between ourselves and our thoughts so that we can now watch each thought rather then lose ourselves in it. There is an awakening in which we come out of the constantly thinking mind and into the meditation of consciousness

As we deepen our reflective practice, we may notice that we put more focus on the problem or on what we don’t want rather than the solution, thus creating more of the same.

We manifest what we think about all the time. On the simplest level; you get a call from someone just as you’re thinking about them or something shows up just when you need it. But how many times have we achieved goals or gotten things we thought would make us happy and yet we still felt unsatisfied?

The danger of the realization of our own power is that for many who practice the law of attraction, the basic focus seems to remain in the consumer mentality such as how to get a new sports car, or a vacation home in the tropics. We can get trapped even further in our dependencies of the material to make us happy.

While it is true that the mind is powerful and we can create and attract what we want, what else are we creating in the process? When we believe we must achieve something in order to make us happy; we experience a feeling of lacking something. We may manifest the things we ask for but the law of attraction also attracts more of the same; we attract more of the feeling of a void that needs to be filled.

Rather than focusing on getting “things that make us happy”, I suggest we make happiness itself be the goal. If the goal is our own inner peace, no matter how things unfold, we still stay in a place of calm and trust. Rather than seeing no result, we rest in the knowledge that we are in the process of creating the result, allowing something better to evolve.

We never know what happiness is going to look like. We may be missing the biggest gifts because we are trapped in our preconceptions that we need something else.
Or perhaps we truly are not achieving what we want because were too focused on what it feels like when we don’t have it.

The spiritual satisfaction comes when our desire becomes ‘to give’ rather than ‘to get’. When we feel that we can afford to give away, we are trusting in abundance. Feeling abundant creates abundance. Here we can still achieve all our goals while meeting our true desire of satisfaction.

Rather than being careful what you wish for; be careful how you wish for it.

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