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Look for the good stuff
I’ve heard it expressed in different ways: Beliefs create reality. What you think is what you get. Careful what you wish for; you’ll probably get it.
Psychologists call it selective perception. We see what we expect to see because that’s how our brains process the streams of data gushing through our life at any given moment.
The quality of our life comes down to how we focus our attention. Isn’t that an amazing idea?
Our happiness or sadness or fright is largely determined by how and upon what we focus our attention. Your brain is like an auto-focus camera that is constantly looking to bring you clarity, but it’s you who is holding and pointing the camera.
Not all gifts are obvious at first sight
Much of human existence is all about wanting things. Some of the things we want are material. Some of the things we want are mental, emotional, or spiritual.
Over the course of my life, I have gotten many of the things that I wanted. I have also not gotten many of the things that I wanted. When I start to compare the two experiences, that of getting versus not getting, I can see interesting dynamics at play. I have learned from these.
Especially when I got older and could see life through a lens of a longer perspective, I saw that some of the things I really, really wanted at one time ended up to have little to no meaning in the end. Very intriguing how that works. Ultimately I expended vast amounts of energy in the pain of not having something or someone in my life that I really wanted.
Everything's coming up roses
As I have written before, so much mass media obsesses on answering the question, “What’s wrong?”
The news is mostly about bad stuff. Dramas, soap operas, documentaries, and even a lot of comedy shows attract people to flock to their screens to hear about the latest conflicts, conspiracies, scandals, rip-offs, and disasters. And this is training for us as we learn by example.
But people who espouse the law of attraction, including a growing cast of non-physical beings, instruct us instead to focus on what’s right with the world. It’s a real paradigm-flipper. It’s almost counter-intuitive because of all the training we’ve had compelling us to look for problems.
Mental Poison Dispenser
As an aspiring novelist. I read my fair share of books on how to amaze readers with my prose. Time and again the writing instructors say that if you want to write a best-seller, you’ve got to fill your novel with page after page of conflict.
Translation: if you ever hope to rise above the poverty line as a selling novelist, the industry demands that you make your protagonists squirm. Make ‘em suffer. Make ‘em miserable.
The flip side of that writing advice that I seldom see talked about is the psychological impact all that manufactured conflict has on readers. The same, of course, can be said for movie-goers and TV viewers because screenwriters work with the same advice to sell their screenplays.
Translation: the media that you ingest as an entertainment consumer has been created and produced to give you the vicarious thrill of watching someone suffer conflict. It is a formula built into the system.
At first it seems like a silly idea to say affirmations to yourself. An affirmation is one of those sayings that you make up to create good stuff in your life.
It could be something like, “I attract a steady stream of good stuff to me in as many ways as there are drops of water in all the oceans in the world.”
Or, “Money comes to me effortlessly.”
And through the law of attraction, it’s supposed to come to you automagically.
To many people, affirmations seems like artificial goodness having little basis in reality. Good, good, good. People with too much good are thought to be Pollyannas and goodie-two-shoes and pie in the sky worshippers and fairy tale believers and hopeless idealists and so on.
But wait a second.
