Self-help literature and elaborate descriptions of how to work the Law of Attraction surround us on all sides, but let be briefly describe it anyway.
The fundamental concept behind the Law of Attraction is that your thoughts create your life. This idea is ancient. Probably the earliest example of it is from the Isa Upanishad, which is a text so old parts of it may come from before the last Ice Age. It’s called a Buddhist text now, but it pre-dates Buddhism by centuries. The opening passage goes like this:
What we are today comes from out thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.
That translation is from the Penguin Edition of The Dhammapada by a guy named Juan Mascaro, who I consider to be the greatest translator of all time.
You now know everything you need to know about the Law of Attraction, but there are two other classics you might want to read as well. This basic idea was re-expressed by an Englishman named James Allen at the end of the 1800s, and his book, As A Man Thinketh is widely considered the classic on the Law of Attraction. It’s about 25 pages long and you can get a digital copy for free.
The other classic, and by far the most widely read and most influential, is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Hill interviewed hundreds of highly successful people in the early 1900s — guys like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and Dale Carnegie — and described the way they think.
All of these guys went through periods of extreme poverty and hardship on their way to success. Henry Ford, for example, went bankrupt three or four times before he invented the assembly line for manufacturing automobiles. Napoleon Hill teaches you how they survived these misfortunes.
But by far more importantly, Hill teaches you how to modify your consciousness so you, too, can become successful. He was writing his book for publication during the depression decade. He was writing for people who had lost everything — their homes, their money, their family, their sense of pride, their optimism and their hope. And he explains exactly what you can do to rescue yourself from a situation that dire.
I hope you read the book. I’ll give you one part of it here: he explains that the whole project of becoming who you really ought to be arises from faith. You must have faith that you will become what you want to become. But of course you don’t have that faith when you are penniless and eating charity food. So he tells you to create your Definite Chief Aim, which is a long description of what you want to have happen in your life and who you will become. He has you commit it to memory. And every day, at least in twice a day, you concentrate on your Definite Chief Aim and you recite it out loud to yourself, really focusing on it.
Faith, he explains, arises from the sub-conscious mind, where our deepest beliefs are held. The whole point behind creating and reciting your Definite Chief Aim is to train your sub-conscious mind and to create faith.
The simple fact is that this method works. That’s why his book is still studied — intently studied — world wide.
But it only works if your sub-conscious mind and your conscious mind function properly. Which mine doesn’t, and which yours probably doesn’t either.
My experience of consciousness, for decades, has been helplessly watching while my demented sub-conscious mind goes off on some horrific story. My whole project has been trying to prevent my mind from producing negative thoughts.
Which is really, really unfortunate, especially since The Dhammapada, As A Man Thinketh, and Think and Grow Rich are all true statements about reality.
Because what you think about is what comes to pass in your life.
And if you are thinking horrible thoughts, then your life will be driven in a horrible direction. Even if you can’t help thinking these thoughts, even if you are suffering from a disease, even if your wholeproblem is a lack of dopamine or steronintin or redox signalling molecules in your brain, it doesn’t matter.
The thoughts going on in your head ARE your life.
And if you can’t change them, you’re screwed. That is my situation.
I’ve written my Definite Chief Aim. I’ve memorized it. And I repeat it to myself twice a day. And I think it is helping. But my mind is defective — very few people are like us — and because my mind is defective, I don’t know if or when Hill’s method might work for me.
Filed under: 3a. Think and Grow Poor, as a man thinketh, cure, depression, help, james allan, law of attraction, napoleon hill, obsessive compulsive disorder, secret, therapy, think and grow rich
Redox Signaling and Depression 