Whatever you are giving your attention to is vibrating, and as you give your attention to it, you include it in your vibration.
You can choose something that causes you to reverberate in such fantastic harmony with your Source, that your heart is singing all the time ... or you can choose something to focus upon that is gut-wrenching, or unsettling.
You do have those choices.
And the more you deliberately exercise those choices and choose those things that feel good ... and therefore connect you with the whole of who you are ... then the less inclined you are to try to control the conditions around you.
And that’s a happy day for you.
When you discover that it is not your work to control the conditions around you, ... then you are finally free.
When you are feeling negative emotion, you are in a very good position to identify what you want.
Because never are you more clear about what you do want… than when you are experiencing what you do not want.
And so, if you will stop in that moment and say,
"Something is important here, otherwise I would not be feeling this negative emotion; I need to focus on what I want." And, then turn your attention to what it is that you want.
In the moment of the turning of your intention, the negative emotion and the negative attraction will stop.
And in the moment the negative attraction stops, the positive attraction will begin.
And your feelings will change from not feeling good to feeling good.
That is the process of Pivoting.
A very simple process of Pivoting would be to say, "I want to feel good."
Anytime you are feeling bad, stop and say, "What I want is to feel good."
And if you will offer that, then thoughts will begin to come to you on the positive side of the equation.
And as one thought attracts another, attracts another, and attracts another, ... you will very soon be vibrating at the frequency that is in harmony with your greater knowing.
And then you will really be rolling in terms of positive creation.
Do not try to save the world; save yourself. That means that you need to focus on what makes you feel good.
The process of Pivoting is the tool that will bring you to what you want.
It is the process whereby you consciously decide: "Yes, I want to look for what I want, and I will no longer look in the direction of the lack of it."
Pivoting is the continual, hour-after-hour, segment-by-segment process whereby you choose the positive.
It is the way you get to feeling good.
And, it is a way that you can get whatever you want.
...excerpted from the book, "Ask and It Is Given." (Process #16...Pivoting)
If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was and always will be yours. If it never returns, it was never yours to begin with.
If it just sits in your living room, messes up your stuff, eats your food, uses your telephone, takes your money, and never appears to know that you actually set it free in the first place, --- then you either married it or gave birth to it.
I've had numerous emails asking me to comment on The Secret, the latest and massively popular New Age offering (available as a best-selling book and a DVD movie) on how consciousness allegedly can be used to attract health, love, and prosperity.
First off, one has to hand it to Rhonda Byrne and the crew at Prime Time Productions, who put together this collection of New Age wisdom on the subject, for their keen sense of what would appeal to a mass audience. The packaging is unquestionably first-rate.
Even a cursory reading of the book, however, reveals that it offers no secret at all, but only a reheated collection of the same instruction that's been available in the New Age literature since the 70s on a cultural scale, and since the 1800s and early 1900s somewhat less visibly in the work of New Thought writers such as Phineas Quimby, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Ernest Holmes, Florence Scovel Shinn, Emmett Fox, and others.
The essence of this teaching, to which Field training takes exception, is that one can, through visualizing or using affirmations or prayer or otherwise embodying a consciousness of fulfillment, create corresponding conditions in the world.
Note that Field training does not deny that the outer world corresponds to the inner, but points out that one cannot use this "Law of Correspondence" by setting out to use it.
There is an element of paradox built into the principle that Field training regards as central, and which the various New Age offerings on the subject, including The Secret, miss.
This paradoxical element becomes obvious once it's stated, but it is nearly invisible until then:
If our belief creates reality, and we seek to create, say, prosperity, then it is unavoidable that we must already be believing in a lack of prosperity (else why would we set out to try to create it?) and this belief casts the vote of our faith, as it were, mobilizing the Law of Correspondence against our desire.
It should be apparent that any attempt to use consciousness to solve a problem presupposes believing in the problem. Therein lies the paradox. The idea that we can create conditions through consciousness techniques is nearly irresistible to anyone who has suspected that our inner life and our outer life are mysteriously commingled, but those who have made the experiment have learned quickly and sometimes the hard way that desire alone is not creative, and that visualizations and affirmations fail as a rule to have any creative effect on the world, which seems to roll on indifferent to our fantasies.
We can want something with every atom of our being, we can visualize and affirm it till the cows come home, and still find the universe unresponsive.
Of course, writing a book that tells us otherwise, that fosters and perpetuates the popular misconception that we can have, say, prosperity at the same time that we're believing in its absence and consequently the need to create it—writing such a book may well fulfill the author's expectation of prosperity, because there will always be a huge market for the idea that we can have what we want simply by wanting it, that "wishing will make it so," but in such cases, the authors have made use of something like a pyramid scheme.
As long as these writers can keep "selling" the idea, prosperity follows surely enough for them, but the tab ultimately is passed to those at the bottom of the pyramid who run out of customers, and are left wondering why this seems to work for others while they can't get results.
I don't say that the authors of these books are doing this intentionally. My guess is that they got excited about an idea and mean well, but this is the effect nonetheless.
The fallback position for the New Age's mistaken approach to conscious creating has been essentially the same as the fundamentalist's, who infers from the failure of prayer that we must not have had enough faith.
So, the New Age practitioner may wonder or even worry what he "did wrong" when the universe fails to deliver the goods.
It doesn't occur to him that the whole model is wrong, that the Law of Correspondence (also called Law of Assumption, Law of Attraction, Law of Creation, Law of Mental Equivalents, etc.) is elegant and unfailing but also in this sense ruthlessly thorough and efficient, and that he overlooked something essential, viz., that what we get in life corresponds not to what we want but to who we are.
The person who believes he lacks prosperity sufficiently to be trying to create prosperity uses the law perfectly, and ends up with more lack, though this was not his aim.
Here, then is the paradox:
We cannot use the Law of Creation to create anything. We can, however, assume the identity we desire for its own sake, that is, solely for the sake of the inner fulfillment.
Paradox requires that practice stop there.
Anyone who could practice this far and no further would find the Law delightfully surprising him, and at that point indeed would have discovered a great secret. A few weeks ago, I received an angry email from someone who had visited the FieldCenter site, looked at our "how we're different" chart, and accused me of saying that other models "suck" as he put it.
Most of what he found upsetting, I never said and wouldn't. But even responding charitably, I don't see anything wrong with stating that one approach is better, more revealing, more thorough, or more useful if it really is. And we don't just allege this; we explain why.
Furthermore, we don't claim that Field training is the model. It's a model, certainly not for everyone. That said, nearly every student who has come to Field training came from some New Age approach that, in the end, had not "worked."
What Field training gave these students was an entirely different standard for what counts as "working" when it comes to deliberately taking on the great adventure of living consciously, complete with its creative implications.
It taught them that, as we say endlessly, "the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation." It taught them to recognize, appreciate, enjoy, and work with the paradox of consciousness-as-cause.
And it freed them from the pervasive and obviously still very popular misunderstanding that we can have anything in the world that we haven't earned by right of identity.
Instead, through their willingness to look beyond the popular model, they saw firsthand that identity is the generative force of creation, that what we want also wants something of us, that we cannot have anything we believe we lack, and that we cannot make an end run around these living principles through pretending, visualizing, repeating affirmations, or any other strategy.
"The Secret" - Part 2
Last week, on 25 June, the Associated Press ran this story: (below)
The Secret: Big Sales, Loud Criticism.
Here's an excerpt: "While The Secret has become a pop culture phenomenon, it also has drawn critics who are not quiet about labeling the movement a fad, embarrassingly materialistic or the latest example of an American propensity of wanting something for nothing.
Some medical professionals suggest it could even lead to a blame-the-victim mentality and actually be dangerous to those suffering from serious illness or mental disorders.
As with many publishing hits, the 'Oprah Effect' played a role.
Winfrey devoted two shows in February to The Secret, and Larry King and Ellen DeGeneres also featured it on their shows.
It was spoofed on Saturday Night Live when a man portraying a refugee in the Darfur region of Sudan was blamed for having negative thoughts.
However, the fear that The Secret will lead to a blame-the-victim mentality is a serious claim of critics.
For example, the book dismisses conditions such as a genetic predisposition to being overweight or a slow thyroid as 'disguises for thinking "fat thoughts."' And during times in which massive number of lives were lost, the book says, the 'frequency of their thoughts matched the frequency of the event.'
So, according to The Secret, the victims of the Holocaust were responsible for their extermination, the rape victim is asking for it, and the people in Darfur are being murdered because of negative thinking.
You see, this is a prime example of the sort of oversimplifications and confusions typical of the New Age approach to consciousness-as-cause, and one that Field training regards as particularly egregious and shameless.
Our response when asked how we explain the Holocaust and other calamitous or tragic events is that we don't.
We recognize that decency places a limit on how far theory can or should be willing to go, and we don't speculate about the experiences of people who are not present to take part in the conversation and present their experience firsthand.
We don't preserve our theoretical model at their expense.
It is true that many who have come through Field training who endured and survived such experiences found that they were not beyond the reach of Field practice to revise and redeem, and that the principles applied even in such severe cases, but this was their call to make, not ours, and this is perhaps why our program doesn't appear either on Oprah or Saturday Night Live.
The great mistake of The Secret and the many models, some of them far more rigorous and thoughtful, is the failure to recognize and incorporate paradox and what we call the "dialectic" into its principles and practices.
As stated in Part 1 of this piece, believing in a problem sufficiently to set about "consciously creating" its solution already places one in a position of checkmate. The game is over, because belief, not willful intent, not visualizing, not prayer, not affirmations, not wishing or hoping or knowing "the secret" is what creates.
This has a far-reaching implication, namely that we cannot use our creative consciousness to create conditions.
We can, however, believe in the desired conditions for their own sake, or as we say, for the sake of alignment rather than manifestation.
This is where practice must stop.
This is the oasis in a desert of contradiction to which we banish our practice the moment we allow it to be strategic.
And this indeed appears to be something of a secret.
At least the New Age doesn't seem to know about it.
This essential element of paradox...
This is one of the first things we give our students, and it changes their view of who they are, of what it means to be conscious and creative, and as a result, their lives in many ways, all for the better.
There is no "secret" that will bring us to anything that we do not earn through the willingness to live up to the version of self to which that thing corresponds, and moreover, to live up to it for its own sake.
Conscious creating, it turns out, is an act of love, an act of giving the self to the ideal rather than trying to get things from the world.
We cannot escape the assumptions of our own consciousness.
When the creative moment is entered into lovingly rather than for some desired effect, then and only then are we operating at the level of cause. This means that it isn't enough for us to visualize and such.
We have to become the thing we want, until all experience of lack has vanished in the joy of our having come home to our ideal.
Then, as far as we're concerned, the world can come along or not.
And the one who practices this way will discover a great secret indeed.
Multitudes of people are attracting the wrong things because they do not know the law. They have never learned that the great secret of health, happiness, and success lies in holding the mental attitude which builds, which constructs, the mental attitude which draws to us the good things we desire.
They have never learned the difference between building and tearing down thoughts; the difference between success and failure thoughts; in fact, they do not know that whatever comes to us in life, in our undertakings, great or small, is largely a question of the kind of thoughts we hold in the mind.
We can attract the thing we desire as easily as we can attract the thing we hate and despise and long to get rid of. It is simply a matter of holding the image of the thing in the mind. That is the model which the life processes will build into our environment and which we will objectify.
Like attracts like, failure more failure, poverty more poverty. Hatred attracts more hatred, envy more envy, jealousy more jealousy, and malice more malice. Everything has power to attract its kind.
The feeling of jealousy or hatred is a seed sown in the great cosmic soil all about us, and the eternal laws return to us a harvest the same in kind. What we sow we reap, just as the soil will return to us exactly what we put into it.
Nothing has the power to reproduce anything but itself. There is no exception to this law.
The law cannot pity or help you if you break a bone, or are injured, any more than the law of electricity can help you when you abuse it. It will kill you if you break the law.
To think about and worry about the things we do not want, or to fear that they will come to us, is but to invite them; because every impression becomes an expression, or tends to become so unless the impression is neutralized by its opposite.
If we think too much about our losses, too much about our possible failure, all these things will tend to bring to us the very thing we are trying to get away from.
On every hand we see this law of like attracting like exemplified in the lives of the poverty-stricken multitudes, who, through ignorance of the law, keep themselves in their unfortunate condition by saturating their minds with the poverty idea; thinking and acting and talking poverty; living in the belief in its permanency; fearing, dreading, and worrying about it.
They do not realize, no one has ever told them, that as long as people mentally see the hunger wolf at the door and the poorhouse ahead of them; as long as they expect nothing but lack and poverty and hard conditions, they are headed toward these things; they are making it impossible for prosperity to come in their direction.
The way to attract prosperity and drive poverty out of the life is to work in harmony with the law instead of against it. To expect prosperity, to believe with all your heart, no matter how present conditions may seem to contradict, that you are going to become prosperous, that you are already so, is the very first condition of the law of attaining what you desire. You cannot get it by doubting or fearing. Whatever we visualize and work for we will get.
What we most frequently visualize, what we think most about, is constantly weaving itself into the fabric of our lives, becoming a part of ourselves, increasing the power of our mental magnet to attract those things to us. It doesn't matter whether they are things we fear and try to avoid or things that are good for us, that we long to get. Keeping them in mind increases our affinity for them and inevitably tends to bring them into our lives.
It is a curious fact that many people seem to think that one must spend years as an apprentice to become an expert in any line of endeavor, in business or in a profession, but that in regard to prosperity it is largely a matter of chance, of fate, something which cannot be affected very much by anything they may be able to do.
They say, "Well, I was not built that way. I am not a natural money-maker, and never can be." Or they excuse themselves on the ground that their parents and those before them were never money-makers, and never did anything more than make a bare living.
There is nothing at all peculiar about prosperity any more than there is about legal efficiency or expertness in law or medicine. Its realization is purely a matter of concentration and of preparation; a matter of focusing all our powers upon the prosperity law in order to attract prosperity and to make ourselves expert in attaining it.
The law of prosperity, of opulence, is just as definite as the law of gravitation, and it works just as unerringly. Its first principle is mental. Wealth is created mentally first; it is thought out before it becomes a reality.
If you would attract success, keep your mind saturated with the success, idea. Develop an attitude of mind that will attract success. When you think success, when you act it, when you live it, when you talk it, when it is in your bearing, then you are attracting it.
When we once get this law of attraction thoroughly fixed in our minds we will be careful about attracting our enemies, contacting with them through our mind, thinking about them, worrying about them, fearing, and dreading them. We will hold the sort of thoughts that will attract the things we long for and are seeking, not the things we dread, and despise, and are trying to avoid.
It is just as easy to attract what you want as to attract what you don't want. It is just a question of holding the right thought, and making the right effort. There is no exception to the law of attraction, any more than there is to the law of gravitation, or the laws of mathematics.
It is of great value for you to give your conscious attention to what you specifically want, otherwise you can be swept up by the influence of that which surrounds you.
You are bombarded by the stimulation of thought.
And so, unless you aresetting forth the thought that is important to you, ... you can be stimulated by another's thought that may or may not be important to you.
Whatever you are giving your attention to is vibrating,
