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positive thinking

A Few Things That Help Manifest Success

Considering how important the Law of Attraction can be in our lives, it’s surprising that more people don’t make an effort to understand how it operates.

Why? Well, when you are thinking, for most of the time your thought energy will be too disparate and unfocused to impact the world around you.

Only when you’re thinking in a very focused way with a clear objective in mind, and you do it repeatedly, will you be likely to send out enough energy to impact the universe.

It follows that you need to be able to control your mind to make sure that you’re sending out both the right messages (to get what you want) and you’re doing it in the right way (to ensure the universe responds).

Take, for example, the way in which people attempt to find love by using the Law of Attraction.

Video: Jack Canfield – Law of Attraction & Love

It Must Be Love, Love, Love… Nothing More, Nothing Less…

But does it work? Many people report that while they may get a few dates, they tend not to meet the partner they expect to spend the rest of their lives with.

On the superficial level, I’d argue that the universe is giving you what you expect – so if you don’t really expect to get the partner of your dreams, your belief isn’t strong enough, you won’t get it… The universe always responds in kind to your thoughts.

But that’s too simplistic. Certainly you need to stop the negative thoughts going through your mind, and replace them with positive ones.

And there’s more to it than that. What you’re trying to do is tell the universe that you need AND WANT something positive.

Start from the position that you’re actually in complete control when you use law of attraction.

Remember the law of attraction is called a “law” because it always works (as long as you’re using it correctly!)

Decide whether you going to try and manifest an extremely specific vision of the person you want – which might, for example, include hair color, occupation, age, weight, size and so on – or if you’re going to try and just manifest some more general qualities such as happiness, love, fulfillment or intimacy.

That’s a critical decision, because there are plenty of ways of obtaining happiness (or love, or fulfillment, or intimacy) – some of which you won’t even thought of yet!

By taking this route, you’re giving the universe more opportunities to give you what you want.

Yet of course it could be that you really want something very specific, for whatever reason. Just bear in mind that it may be hard to manifest a more specific vision than a more general one.

Another common use for Law of Attraction is in manifesting prosperity.

Once again, you have to send out the right messages to the universe before it will respond by manifesting what you want. This was emphasized in The Secret.

Obviously, if you’re thinking of prosperity then your mind will be attuned to opportunities for you to gain greater prosperity.

If, however, you’re thinking of limitation, lack and debt, then the universe may respond in kind to those thoughts.

And even if you can summon up a strong belief that the law of attraction can manifest things for other people, you might not be able to believe that for yourself.

This can be a sticking point which requires you to deal with deep-seated beliefs about yourself. Some of the most common beliefs that people experience when they’re trying to develop a prosperity consciousness are: “I’m not worth it”, “I might not be able to cope with success”, “I don’t deserve it”, “This isn’t the way things should be for me”, and so on.

Boosting Self-Esteem

Of course you can use Law of Attraction to manifest intangible things and states of mind, just as you can use it to manifest prosperity and tangible goals.

One of the most useful things for anyone in this world of ours is to have high self-esteem and a positive attitude. Of course we all have a negative side, and we all have limitations of some kind.

But you don’t get anywhere in life by focusing on your limitations!

What you might wish to do, when trying to manifest anything, as you may well imagine, is to radiate positive energy, optimism, gratitude and clear focused goals.

Easy to say, harder to do?

Perhaps that’s only true if your belief system tells you that’s true.

The practice of gratitude is an extremely helpful technique for changing the mindset that is predominantly negative into one that is predominantly positive.

You’ll find that after only three weeks of daily practice of gratitude – which need be for no more than five minutes twice a day – your whole mental attitude will switch from a negative orientation to a positive orientation.

You can reinforce this by writing up and pinning your goals on your walls where you can read them every day, by writing about your expectations and things that you are grateful for in a journal, and by only associating with positive people.

Think And Grow Rich
Think And Grow Rich

If you have a serious lack of positive people in your life, then create an imaginary council of advisers in your mind, who will support you unfailingly in everything you do. (That’s the basis of the Mastermind Group described by Napoleon Hill in his classic work Think and Grow Rich).

It needs hardly be said, I’m sure, that if you’re working on intangible objectives such as losing weight, or creating a more successful future for yourself, it’s important to be conscious of how you’re thinking and feeling at all times.

What that means in practice is having a greater level of awareness of your thoughts and feelings. It doesn’t necessarily mean stopping negative thoughts from occurring, but it does mean replacing any negative thoughts you have with positive ones.

And another aspect of using Law of Attraction that people sometimes overlook is the necessity for consistency.

Changing your goals and objectives from moment to moment will not lead to success.

If you do that, the energy behind your thought processes is too disparate.

Equally, you need to use law of attraction principles every day for the law to work successfully for you. And no matter how hard that may seem, no matter how much resistance you may have to doing so, it’s that consistency which will make manifest what you want in the world around you.

Affirmations

People sometimes ask about positive affirmations: and no wonder, because there is a lot of misunderstanding around the subject.

We all know that affirmations are things that we tell ourselves – but it’s amazing how rarely they seem to come true. That’s probably because most people don’t actually believe the affirmation they’re repeating to themselves!

After all, they have a lifetime history of negativity to battle against.

Think about it: it’s hardly likely that just repeating an affirmation a couple of times morning and evening is going to change your mindset around a particular issue.

The way to use affirmations correctly is to ensure that you’re in a state of mental and physical relaxation before you use them.

Napoleon Hill, one of the first and most well-known self-improvement gurus, suggested that you could simply repeat affirmations forcefully over and over again, and that sheer force of repetition would drive them deeper and deeper into your mind.

Maybe that’s true; but why would you put yourself through something so challenging?

By engaging in a process of self hypnosis or trance visualization, you can drive positive affirmations much deeper into your subconscious – and you can do it much more easily.

law of attraction

More About The Law Of Attraction!

We’ve been exploring the way in which the Law Of Attraction works. Find the first post in this series here.

Most experts who know anything about the Law of Attraction agree that the reason the Law works is because we are all part of the same energy field.

You can think of this field as an energy that holds the potential of everything that could come into existence in the future. And when the human mind interacts with that, the energy field will respond in some way.

It may, for example, respond by bringing about coincidences which allow particular events, circumstances, and objects to manifest in the physical world. Or it may respond by bringing people together in some way.

That idea is, of course, the basis of the saying “thoughts attract things”. And indeed, “like attracts like”.

And here’s another principle behind the Law of Attraction: your thoughts can impact what’s created in your world.

Energy & The Attraction Of What You Want

The idea of an energy field is a simple explanation for something that we don’t really understand.

Here’s a video on the subject.

A lot of people like to think of the Law of Attraction as having something to do with quantum physics. As you know, that includes the well proven fact that energy and matter are indivisible and the same at the level of the atom.

(There’s an idea floating around that this is all to do with the brain acting as a quantum computer.)

That’s true, but it doesn’t necessarily explain how the Law Of Attraction works. What I think we can say with certainty is that there is an energy field around which can be impacted by our thoughts.

At this point many people will object by saying, “Sure, but if that’s so, then why don’t ALL the things that I think about manifest?”

It’s a little bit of a naive question. Haven’t you noticed how thoughts in themselves are generally short lived and transient? They usually don’t hold enough energy to affect the universe.

If you’re setting a goal or an objective that you want to create in your life, it’s necessary to be – well, if not obsessed, certainly focused and clear about your intention to manifest whatever it is you want.

Most people set an objective, then the minute anything else important comes along that seems even slightly important, they get totally distracted and forget all about it.

To manifest anything, not only do you have to believe that it will appear in your life, but you also have to to maintain your focus for as long as it takes to get it.

That doesn’t mean thinking about something every minute of every day, but it certainly means thinking about it a lot! In fact it means thinking about it a lot more than most people ever think about their so-called objectives or goals.

Persistence and determination are very necessary here.

Besides those qualities there’s another one that’s needed for this to work: the energetic force that propels your desires into the universe needs to have sufficient energy to change physical reality. And this energy is the energy of your feelings.

Because even though maintaining a high level of emotional energy around your your expectations of achieving your objective sounds like a simple thing to do, the truth is that most people pretty quickly lose their excitement and enthusiasm.

They get bored, they get distracted, they stop believing. And all of those things bring the process of attracting, or co-creating, a new reality to a complete stop.

The Negative And The Positive Are Equally Attractive

Bear in mind that this energy doesn’t have to be positive, although most writers on the Law of Attraction suggest that you should use joy and excitement to help yourself manifest things.

In reality, any intense feeling will propel the process: that includes hatred, and anger, and the other negative emotions such as rage and jealousy and fear.

(Which of course is why the things we fear, if we think about them consistently, will often come to pass.)

In general most people writing about the Law of Attraction suggest that you visualize your objective and then feel the energy associated with its manifestation. Which of course is meant to be joy and delight, at least in most cases!

So let’s just summarize where we are at now:

  • You need a clear objective you can believe in.
  • You need to believe in the process of reality creation and you need to believe that the Law of Attraction is able to deliver what you desire.
  • You need emotional energy of some kind associated with that thought going out into the world.
  • And you need to have a positive goal that is for yourself or your own benefit.
  • None of this is very complicated. But how easy is it?

That’s the rub, of course. Most people find it quite difficult to manifest anything other than trivialities like a parking space. (Try it! Believe it will open up for you. It usually happens. Coincidence? Hah.)

You see, that’s the power of belief – most of us can believe in a parking space appearing. But you may not necessarily believe that bigger things – like having a million dollars in your bank account – can happen.

Read more about the idea of quantum computers here. And the associated idea of a form of consciousness which could manifest reality on that last link.

The Feelings Which Drive The Law of Attraction

It’s probably better if these feelings are positive rather than negative. The reason being that when you send out negative energy to help yourself manifest something, you’re often opening up the possibility of experiencing negative emotions yourself.

However, I have used anger very successfully to propel my desires and outcomes into the world, so I don’t want to deny something that is true for me and may well be true for other people as well.

I think many of us don’t really feel much joy in life. And if we are trying to use the feelings of gratitude and joy, and happiness and excitement, that we expect to feel when our vision manifests, there may simply not be enough energy behind our desire for the Law of Attraction to operate effectively.

But if you were in debt, and you were somehow able to summon up an intense feeling of anger about how you got into that situation, you could very well use that emotion to propel your thoughts out into the universe – as long as they were thoughts of abundance.

However, if you focus on fear, and you’re constantly thinking about how much you owe and the size of your debt, it’s pretty obvious that your focus and attention will be mostly on the negative aspect of being in debt. You do not have a prosperity consciousness.

A lot of people have asked me how they can deal with that problem.

Here’s a tip that I picked up from Mike Dooley, a great manifester: when you feel disbelief or fear of a negative outcome, or any other negative thoughts pop into your mind, just allow yourself to doubt your negative experience is true.

In other words, set your objective as a positive expectation, visualization, goal or objective – use whatever word and whatever technique suits you. And then, when negativity or negative beliefs or fear strike (as they surely will) you can gently just allow yourself to doubt that your disbelief is correct.

You see the power of this? You offer both your conscious and your unconscious mind (this is the same thing as your “subconscious”) the possibility that, in fact,  your fear may be misplaced and your doubt about future outcomes is in error.

And that allows for the possibility of something different happening.

law of attraction

A Brief Summary Of The Laws Of Attraction

Using the Law of Attraction isn’t difficult – after all, it’s based on a another Law of Nature, which simply says that “like attracts like”.

But of course in reality there’s more to it than that. Let’s find out exactly what might be!

One of the things I’ve noticed about writings on the Law of Attraction is that people basically write about it in a way that reflects their own experience. That’s fair enough, but the problem is their experience may not work for everybody else!

So are there some basic rules that control the Law of Attraction and how it operates?

I think there are. And here’s what I think they are.

Attraction & Creating – Basic Laws

First of all, for some reason, the Law of Attraction works in a positive dimension. What I mean is that if you try to prevent something happening it won’t work. If you try to avoid something, you won’t manifest the avoidance. If you try to create a negative, you most likely won’t succeed.

It’s like saying “I don’t want to be in debt.” The reason this doesn’t work is because the very act of thinking and visualizing a state of “not being in debt” is focusing on the problem that you want to solve – which is the reality that you don’t have enough money.

You need to focus on the solution – generating more wealth!

Or suppose you were to say, “I don’t want my daughter to marry her boyfriend.” Again, you’re focusing on the problem rather than on the solution.

What you need to have in mind is a clear objective, framed in a positive way. If you don’t want to be in debt, what do you want? A million dollars or pounds or euros or whatever in your bank account by this time next year?

If you don’t want your daughter to marry her boyfriend, what do you want? The fact that she should be happy in life?

In fact this second example is another misconception. What’s very clear is that you can’t manifest something using the Law of Attraction for another person. While you can send them blessings and love and positivity (or indeed the opposite), you can’t actually control the choices they make.

This is because we are all born with potential to make free choices and free decisions; when somebody else makes those choices and decisions for us, it takes away our power. The universe doesn’t seem to allow this.

A Summary So Far

So where have we got to so far? Let’s see. Two points, I think:

1) Your objective must be positive, and it must be for yourself.

2) Whatever it is that you’re trying to manifest – which is what we call your objective – using the Law of Attraction should be specifically defined.

Ah, yes – a specific goal. Really? Well, this is an issue that causes a lot of debate and discussion among people working with the Law of Attraction.

Some people say that the less specific your goal, the more likely you are to get it. Others say that you need to precisely set out the details of your objective before the universe will produce what you want.

But it stands to reason, I think, that the more specific you are in setting your goal, the narrower the range of opportunities you give to the universe for producing what you want.

So if you were trying to attract someone to have a relationship with, you’d probably want to visualize yourself enjoying qualities like happiness, joy, intimacy and love in a beautiful relationship, rather than the specific details of a certain individual.

(Remember, if you’re trying to make a particular person fall in love with you, you’re contravening a universal law – that of free will.)

On the other hand, if you want more money, you might think it would be appropriate to visualize having a million dollars in your bank account by this time next year.

And some people – in fact lots of people – would agree with you.

Others, interestingly, would say this isn’t the right way to go about it. What you should be visualizing, they would say,  is something more general that produces a sense of abundance for you.

That might, for example, mean starting a business which does a great deal of good in the world, and in the process makes you rich.

It can be hard to cut through different views like this, and get to the truth, although in fact I think there’s a simple explanation which resolves different views and opinions on the right way to go about attracting wealth and abundance.

You see, one of the things we do know about the Law of Attraction is that it absolutely depends on a person’s ability to believe that what they’re trying to manifest will in fact appear in their lives.

I think you can see quite clearly that if you’re trying to manifest a million dollars in your bank account, yet at the same time you fundamentally don’t believe there’s any way this could happen – well, it won’t happen.

The Importance Of Belief In The Law of Attraction

If you extend the concept that belief is essential for manifestation, and you state it like this: “The Law of Attraction will only create in your life or bring into your life those things which you believe to be possible” – well, then I think you have an explanation as to why different people have different approaches.

It’s because they believe that a particular approach to manifestation will work for them.

Other people believe in a different approach to manifestation – and unsurprisingly that’s what works for them. In other words, what you believe to be true is true.

Coincidence Or synchronicity? Or Something More?

A lot of people ask if the Law of Attraction isn’t just coincidence or synchronicity.

The answer to that is, “yes and no”.

In the sense that the universe produces coincidences to take you nearer and nearer to your goal or objective then, yes, it can look like coincidence when something you have been desiring to create in your life manifests for you.

On the other hand, it depends what you think of as “coincidence”. If you think a coincidence is pure chance, then co-creation between you and the universe is not a coincidence.

We’ve all had the experience of thinking about a friend and then hearing the phone ring, only to pick it up, and discover that the person on the other end is the person we’ve just been thinking about.

This is a good example of telepathy at work. It’s quite possible to communicate subconsciously, not in words as we would communicate verbally, but in an energetic form which allows us to enter the consciousness or awareness of another person.

Indeed, whether you believe that is possible (or not) is probably quite a good indicator of whether or not you are going to be successful in using the Law of Attraction.

You see, you have to suspend your disbelief and enter what can sometimes seem like a magical world when you begin to manifest your reality.

We’ll talk more about this in the next post, which you’ll find above this one in the list of latest posts (or you can just click on the link).

law of attraction

Levels Of Consciousness

Making Success Manifest

You probably wonder what makes success apparently so easy to achieve for some people and so difficult for others (you, perhaps).

Is it effort, is it determination, is it willpower?

Well yes, to some degree it’s all of those things. And it’s also about intelligence and courage and vision.

But then again, when you look at some people who’ve achieved success, it seems inconceivable that they could have done so using those qualities – because they don’t seem to possess them!

(I think we all know somebody who seems to have achieved something in life that seems difficult to understand when we look at their talents and abilities.)

So what is it that sets you apart form successful people?

The answer is simple: their minds are somehow ready to attract abundance in a way that yours may not be.

And this isn’t just about positive thinking, although that’s certainly major part of it. It’s actually about the Law of Attraction

You see, the thing is that very few of us actually know how powerful the human mind is.

And make no mistake about it. That power is available to each and everyone of us, including you.

Which raises the interesting and obvious question of why we are not all as successful as Bill Gates or Richard Branson.

And the first answer to that is: most people don’t focus on a particular objective. They may not even know what they want…. and if they do, they may not be able to stay focused on it.

People let opportunities slip by, or their minds jump from one topic or question to another, never making a decision to pursue one thing with single-mindedness, and perhaps never even identifying what it is that really drives their passion.

(Often the thing about which a person is most passionate is the thing in which they could find fulfillment and success most easily.)

Yet it’s no wonder so many people fail to achieve!

Our society is stressful, and each of us is required to juggle many different balls, think of many different things, hold many different responsibilities, and the stresses and strains people experience go far beyond anything the world has known in previous generations.

It’s no wonder that in this kind of environment people fail to use their minds in the way that their minds were, quite frankly, designed to be used.

Because, make no mistake about it, manifestation isn’t a gift given to a few people. It’s potentially open to everybody.

Law of Attraction Made Manifest

The Law of Attraction – which is to say the law by which the universe responds to the thoughts and feelings that we put out into it – is exactly the same for everyone.

I agree that it’s true you need a certain level of consciousness to be able to manifest what you want with Law of Attraction. But again, developing that level of consciousness is a possibility for every single human being on this planet.

And the truth is, very few of them will ever do so.

But so what? That’s their responsibility. Your responsibility is to take care of yourself, to learn how to use Law of Attraction as best you may, and benefit from it as is your natural right.

That leads us to a place where we can summarize the qualities necessary for manifestation to take place successfully:

  • Learn to focus and relax.
  • Deal with the beliefs and behaviors that inhibit you from achieving success. (Mostly negative beliefs about yourself and the world around you.)
  • Find out what it is that you really desire more than anything else in life.
  • Decide that you’re actually going to achieve it, come what may.
  • Develop a state of mind in which you have absolutely no doubt whatever that you can achieve it.
  • Expect it to manifest in your world.
  • Take action immediately, no matter how small to take you in the general direction of what it is you want to achieve.
  • Be grateful for everything and think positively.
  • Don’t allow any negative thoughts to cross your mind and destroy your belief in the reality of your desires.
  • Associate with other people who will support you and reinforce your self belief.
  • And above all visualize what you want every day.

It’s a simple list, or so it seems, but many people would say that actually it’s impossible to do those things – just because their environment is so disordered or chaotic or distracting… Or, no doubt, because of some other excuse.

Yes, excuse! To me none of those are explanations for failure. They are simply excuses from people who are scared to succeed, or who don’t believe that they can succeed and who would rather “sit” in that belief than do something positive to change their lives better.

Harsh? Well, you’ll probably be having a reaction if you see some truth for you in what I just said. In fact you’ll probably be denying the reality of what I’m saying!

And in fact it’s not easy to dispel negative beliefs about yourself – if it were, the world would be a much more positive place, and people would generally have a much higher opinion of themselves than they actually do.

There are many obstacles to thinking positively. For some reason the mind seems to be programmed to move more rapidly and powerfully towards the negative than towards the positive.

That’s an expression of human nature, sadly.

It seems to be something about the fear response we have to so many people and situations. (It might even be a genetically programmed emotional response that is designed to keep us safe from strangers or novel situations.)

Perhaps the way this hinders success is by causing us to diminish or deny possibilities and to find reasons not to pursue our aspirations.

So when I talk about people having to have a certain level of consciousness what I really mean is that people have to be prepared to work at overcoming the obstacles that stand between them and success.

And anything that takes hard work and a certain amount of effort doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone!

HOW EASY IS USING LAW OF ATTRACTION?

Many people think that manifestation using Law of Attraction is an easy process, and that they can succeed simply by visualizing what they want for a few minutes twice a day.

And of course there are a lot of people who have propagated that viewpoint. (The Secret, anyone heard of it?)

But it isn’t true, for this reason. Most people have a vague idea of what they’d like. A bigger house, a big car, rate of financial wealth, perfect relationship… that kind of thing. But when they start visualizing it their minds immediately produce all kinds of and objections. No, it’s not for you…. you can’t have it….. you aren’t worth it…. you can’t do it…. and so on….

Want a million dollars? Sure, so sit down and visualize it. Oh dear, as soon as you start visualizing it you may realize that you don’t believe for a minute you’re capable of generating a million dollars.

And such a limiting belief means that you won’t be able to manifest
what you want.

Make no mistake about it, it really is as simple as that.

You see, the universe picks up on positive energy and it responds to it by producing whatever it is that people expect to have. Provided, of course, that their belief is total, their expectation complete, and their desire absolute.

Those are hard criteria for all but a few of us to summon up, and unless you’ve done a great deal of personal development work you may find it a challenging indeed to develop firm belief in what you’re trying to manifest.

So that’s probably why a lot of authors in this area advise people to try and manifest things that are just a little beyond their current level of abundance or achievement.

It’s because that’s believable.

Video – Believing What You Can Manifest

For most people, believing that something a little bit beyond where they are at the moment can be achieved is easy enough. But believing that you can generate a million dollars if you happen to be finding it hard to put the next rent check together – well, that’s something else altogether.

On the other hand of course those authors who talk about setting your aspirations far beyond where you are moment are probably  speaking from their own experience: they – most likely – have no difficulty believing they can manifest immense wealth.

And that’s the key – this process will work invariably and without fail, provided that you believe and expect to get what you want. 

People who have achieved great deal of success have got where they are by single-mindedly focusing on what they want.

And they almost certainly don’t even realize what they are doing: for them, living in a state of complete belief about the reality they can manifest is natural. There’s no self-doubt inside them!

So how can you, as an ordinary person, going to be able to manifest great success if you can’t summon up the same level of self-confidence and self belief?

Well, you could try to eliminate limiting beliefs with Shadow Work or Self Hypnosis – programs are easily available these days on the Internet.

ACTION IS NEEDED FOR SUCCESS TO MANIFEST!

I’ve met people who think that by sitting in a chair visualizing themselves slim, they’ll be able to lose weight.

Do you really think that that’s possible?

(As a matter of fact, I actually do think it’s possible, but I know that 99% of the people in the world believe that to be a ridiculous idea – so it’s not true for them. It’s as simple as that!)

So what that means is that you actually have to take some action.

You have to do something.

Want to lose weight? Exercise daily and stop eating junk food might be a good start.

Want a partner? Get out and meet people. That might help.

Want a new car? Decide what it is you want. Immerse yourself in that knowledge.

And of course at the same time you should be visualizing yourself achieving your desired outcome.

By doing that, you feed your mind with positive energy and images that it can use as a template for the new you, with success manifested.

You see, the thing is this: you actually have to have the right intentions before the universe will “co-operate” with you.

When we talk about Law of Attraction, what we mean by that is that certain things need to happen in a certain order before manifestation can occur.

Remember, I said earlier that a certain level of consciousness would help people to manifest reality – indeed, some would argue that manifestation needs a fairly advanced level of consciousness.

In essence, what this means is that Law of Attraction will only give you abundance when you are ready for it – both mentally and spiritually.

And of course you can develop your readiness by taking small steps, by achieving incremental targets one at a time.

The question, really, I think is this: are you actually ready to write your own destiny? And if you are, how much time and effort are you willing to commit to it?

power of the unconscious in manifestation

Just For Fun – Manifesting A Post On This Blog

The Power Of The Unconscious In Manifestation 

I have been working this afternoon on the power of the unconscious mind, and its ability to produce synchronicity, coincidence, and generally act as a gateway between your conscious intentions and the astounding power of the universe. It is, in short, an agent of manifestation.

So I thought I’d have a bit of fun to close my working day, and open Napoleon Hill’s book Think And Grow Rich at random, to see if I could construct an article with any kind of synchronicity.

I’ll tell you what did strike me immediately: the fact that Think And Grow Rich is a book written in 1928! It’s desperately in need of updating.

However, it does contain some fundamental truths about manifestation, and Hill’s writing  is good in some areas.

He strong, for example, when he talks about the sixth sense being the agent through which “infinite intelligence” can communicate with everyone of us.

Now I know what he means by infinite intelligence – he means cosmic consciousness, universal energy, the collective unconscious, or some higher power, which appears to be the collective memory and knowledge of the universe, together with some kind of space-time continuum out of which an infinite number of possibilities can manifest on our physical plane.

Not that Hill put it that way, LOL!

Rather, Hill referred to the sixth sense as the creative imagination, but to be honest you can call it what you will. He was right in saying, however, that it defies description. And he was also right in saying that it can’t be described to someone who hasn’t mastered the philosophy of manifestation.

In short, unless you’ve experienced the power of the subconscious for yourself, you’re not likely to be able to fully understand it. And, you probably won’t believe in it, either.

As Hill said, you can only understand the creative imagination if you have spent time exploring how it operates, and using it as the “medium of contact between the finite mind of man and infinite intelligence”.

The creative intelligence, or the sixth sense, or the unconscious mind, have a spiritual aspect to them: they are the gateway, or the point of contact, between the human mind and the collective unconscious or infinite intelligence.

The way in which this works is mysterious to us, even now, but it’s certainly the means by which “miracles” appear to happen in our lives. Yet of course manifestation only appears to be a miracle because we don’t know the full explanation of how our minds can connect with the infinite intelligence of the universe.

What we do know is that manifestation is not a magical process, and in one sense at least it’s not a mysterious one either.

Manifestation takes place because our minds have the ability to communicate with infinite intelligence. And infinite intelligence is able to transmute our desires into concrete or material form.

Internal counsellors and manifestation

So one of the things that Hill wrote about was his internal, imaginary council. This was composed of historical figures in his imagination including Napoleon, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison and other notable figures from the world of business and science at the time.

Hill invited these figures – initially nine of them – into his imagination and sat them around what he called the council table, where he acted as chairman. And then he allowed them free range of expression, so they could say what they wanted to, they could make observations as and when they felt so inclined, and they could offer advice in response to his questions.

So far so good – quite an ingenious process, don’t you think?

Hill started this process because he wanted to incorporate the character of his counselors into his own psyche – specifically, he says in his book, to overcome the disadvantages of the circumstances into which he was born (he speaks of the handicap of being born into an environment of ignorance and superstition).

At the time, the development of psychology as a science was taking place in America, and people like William James were coming up with the first ideas about how personality and character was formed.

Hill clearly believed that a man’s character was determined by his dominant thoughts, and he believed that if he incorporated the best and most impressive characteristics of his imaginary counselors into his own behavioral and emotional repertoire, he would take on those characteristics.

Again, a fair assumption, quite sophisticated for his time.

But something rather unexpected began to happen: Hill began to experience these characters as though they were real.

For example, they developed individual habits and characteristics in his imagination, and sometimes they offered individual advice and behaved in a very idiosyncratic way.

It’s no wonder that at the time Hill kept this to himself: indeed, he didn’t speak of it until he was in the last third of his life, by which time, as he wryly observed, he had more courage to speak of such matters than he had in his youth!

Eventually, the meetings became so realistic that Hill developed some anxiety about the consequences, and discontinued them for several months.

Indeed, it appears that Hill might have thought he was going mad, although what he actually said was: “I was afraid if I continued them I would lose sight of the fact that the meetings were purely experiences of my imagination.”

Yet it’s clear from his writing about his counselors that he really suspected something above and beyond the power of his imagination was at work here.

One night, he had a dream in which Abraham Lincoln came to him and told him how essential his work would be in inspiring future generations, as a result of which he reconvened his imaginary council, and set it back to work.

Now Napoleon Hill does emphasize the fact that he knew this council was purely imaginary, but he also said that “While the members of my cabinet may be purely fictional, and the meetings existent only in my imagination, they have led me into glorious pats of adventure, rekindled an appreciation of true greatness, encourage creative endeavor, and embolden the expression of honest thought.”

He then goes on to talk about the sixth sense, what he described as the source of “hunches”. And then he specifically said that during his meeting with his counselors, he found his mind most receptive to ideas, thoughts, and knowledge which reached him through his sixth sense. Indeed, he attributed his counselors full credit for such ideas, facts or knowledge as he received through inspiration.

In other words, Hill regarded his imaginary counselors as being a gateway to infinite intelligence.

He had, in short, developed a mode of connection with infinite intelligence using symbols and imagination in his own mind. (Read more about master mind groups here.*)

And although he started out years before with the intention of taking on the characteristics of the men who he recruited into his council, in later years, he began to use them as a source of inspiration and information.

Although he freely admitted that he did not depend entirely on information from this source, what he said was that he went to his imaginary counselors with “every difficult problem which confronts me and my clients. The results are often astonishing, although I do not depend entirely on this form of counsel”.

Now what’s interesting about this to me is that people often speak of the power of the unconscious when they are talking about manifestation, yet I don’t really see anybody, anywhere, using a system as refined as Napoleon Hill’s as a mechanism for contacting infinite intelligence.

Just imagine, for a moment, if you could develop a system like this in your mind, and use it as a deliberate conduit through which you could communicate your intentions and goals – in short the things you wish to manifest – to the universal intelligence.

Would this not be a very powerful and effective adjunct to the process of manifestation?

Perhaps this was what Hill meant when he spoke about “the secret” that he had concealed within the pages of Think And Grow Rich?

*When success guru Napoleon Hill interviewed Andrew Carnegie, inquiring as to the secret of his success, Carnegie replied that it could be traced to the “sum total of the minds” of his business associates–his managers, accountants, chemists and so on. He called this combined brain power a “master mind,” and attributed to it the power of his success. Hill came to believe that a Master Mind was not only the key to Carnegie’s success, but the secret to the success of all great men, the “very foundation stone of all outstanding personal achievements.” From Art Of Manliness.

manifestation

Manifest Success

Michael, who saw this website, sent in this inspirational success story about how he manifested a loving relationship.

Because of my background – an unwanted child, brought up in an emotionally abusive family by parents who were limited in every way – I found it hard to trust anyone as I grew up, and at some point I came to the conclusion that I would always be alone.

After all, that seemed like the safest way to be in the world.

At the same time, I was very adept at making friends – though interestingly enough, those friendships never lasted long when circumstances moved us physically apart.

And yet of course there was a consequence as I moved through puberty and adolescence into early adulthood – one I never expected: it seemed impossible for me to establish a long-term intimate romantic relationship.

Perhaps because of my desire to explore the world, I was never lacking short-term relationships – even one night stands – but that intimate, close relationship? It never appeared.

So finally, at the age of 39, I decided I’d had enough of this and things had to change. So the first thing that I did was to address my belief that “I’ll always be alone.” After all, when you think about it, there could hardly be a worse belief to hold if you’re looking for an intimate relationship than this!

How did I deal with it? By doing deep personal therapeutic work. To be exact, Shadow Work (look it up on the internet if you want). Now I’m not suggesting that everybody needs to do this to achieve success with their goal setting. But the Law of Attraction is a law that only works when certain conditions are met.

But I do believe that if you have deep-seated beliefs about yourself which are directly oppositional to your desired outcomes, you will have a hard time believing you can get what you want.

Since belief is essential to the process of manifestation, it’s not the work of a genius to see that things are going to be – shall we say – more challenging than they otherwise would be.

It’s entirely possible to reprogram your subconscious by using self hypnosis, autosuggestion (as Napoleon Hill and others so wisely suggested almost a hundred years ago), and simple repetition and affirmation.

You’ll find your own way, I have no doubt… and I see there is a page on this website about overcoming limiting beliefs which might be helpful in guiding you to different solutions to this challenge to manifestation.

So having done my “work”, I then needed to set my goal. And that was very simple: an intimate relationship with a beautiful woman who would be my soulmate for life, in a relationship of strength, quality, and mutual respect.

It was a long time ago now, but I seem to recall setting this goal in April, and applying a deadline of July 31 to getting this outcome. That’s often helpful, by the way, because it focuses the mind; but, like the goal itself, you have to believe it’s possible.

Just to reiterate, once again, if I hadn’t done the work on my belief that “I would always be alone”, it doesn’t seem very likely that I’d have been successful in achieving my outcome.

And my belief system at the time told me that if I set a target of achieving that outcome within, say, one week, I wouldn’t be successful. You get the point, I’m sure. Do what you believe in!

And so every weekday for three months, I spent about half an hour every afternoon visualizing myself in a loving relationship, enjoying the most wonderful experiences imaginable.

Wayne Dyer - Wishes Fulfilled
Wayne Dyer – Wishes Fulfilled

Now, when we talk about the emotional energies that can fuel manifestation, some of the most powerful appear to be love, gratitude and joy.

Indeed, Wayne Dyer, in his book Wishes Fulfilled, speaks of love as the only emotional fuel for manifestation.

Video: Wayne Dyer at Wanderlust Festival

Of course when I was imagining (or “envisioning” – a word which absolutely sums up the nature of this process) this particular outcome, or, to put it another way, seeing and feeling my relationship in my imagination as a current reality, it was easy to summon up the energies of love, gratitude and joy. After all, in my mind, that was the very nature of my “experience to be”!

My desire was so strong for this relationship that I didn’t question it would happen. My self respect had reached the point where I believed it was possible, that I was a good enough person to have a loving relationship which would last, and I enjoyed my visualizations.

And then at some point in this process, a catalogue from a holiday company dropped through my door.

This was from  a company which owned a holistic holiday retreat center on a Greek island, where I’d visited a couple of years before. On impulse – or by design? – I signed up for a holiday in a particular two-week period in July.

I guess if I am honest about it, I did imagine that might be place where I could manifest a soulmate… particularly since most participants at this particular retreat center were women! But I can’t honestly say that I went there with the specific intention of meeting a partner.

And then, something arose: I think, looking back, it was some kind of important family gathering, but I’m not sure. The outcome, however, I remember very clearly: I had to move my two-week holiday back to start on 30 June.

And so, on June 30, I took the 24-hour trip by train, plane, boat, coach, another boat, and another coach to my destination. And on the way I traveled with my fellow holidaymakers, meeting, I thought, almost all of them.

Well, you’re probably ahead of me now. What happened next? At the introductory meeting on July 1, sitting in the opening circle, I looked across and I saw the woman I knew was there for me. How did I know? Well, how does one know these things?

And it was easy and delightful and exciting, and we’re still together 20 years later. Perhaps the most interesting point about the story is this: my beloved had to alter the dates of the holiday she’d booked, because of an invitation she’d received to a wedding. In fact, she had to move them in the opposite direction; she had to move the holiday forwards two weeks. And so her time in this beautiful holistic retreat center coincided with mine.

ow, what business is it of mine to know how the universe might have arranged and rearranged our lives, and arranged and rearranged everybody else’s lives so that the exact combination of circumstances that was necessary for us to meet was manifested in our physical reality?

The answer I think is clear: don’t mess with the Cursed Hows! Set your goal, have faith, keep the faith, supply the emotional energy, take some action, and one way or another the universe will manifest whatever it is you want.

When you hear a story like this, “miracles” become commonplace. And I suppose, for The Universal Force, God, Divine Intelligence, The Great Mind – call it what you will – miracles really are commonplace. After all, they happen every day….as our universal Law Of Attraction makes clear.

As Mike Dooley says: “Never give up. Everything that’s happened and is happening now is playing to your favor. Let this be your modus operandi and remember: throughout every journey, the miracles of progress are almost always invisible. What surrounds you today is no indicator of what’s going to unfold tomorrow. Where you are is never who you are.”

Video: Mike Dooley

manifestation

Understanding The Mechanism Of Manifestation

Mike Dooley, in his excellent book Manifesting Change, writes about an analogy for achieving goals and objectives.

As he points out, when you’re using a GPS Satellite Navigation system to obtain driving directions, the first thing you do is  feed into the machine the destination where you want to end up.

Manifest Reality:
How To Get What You Want

In a fraction of a second, the system will calculate how you get from your starting point to your finishing point, and in doing so, it will have considered every possible route, and come up with the quickest, easiest, and simplest way for you to get your destination.

It’s a fantastic analogy of how the universe works when you’re giving it an end result. You don’t need to know how the program calculates the journey from A to B; all you need to know is how to drive the car. As soon as you start out on your journey, the instructions will automatically guide you to your destination.

And note with a GPS satellite navigation system you don’t even have to feed your starting point into the system. You only have to provide your destination – yet the system can still get you there, and again it will consider every possible route for you to take before selecting the one that is going to allow you to reach your destination.

Goal setting is very similar to this, because the first thing you have to decide is where you want to get to – or rather, what you’d like your end result to be. You’ll see the importance of this very clearly, I hope: you can’t possibly hope to get a desired outcome unless you’ve made it very clear what that outcome is, both to yourself and the universe!

Your desired outcome must be both clear and accurate. Again, to return to the analogy of the GPS, if you make a mistake of only one character when you’re entering in your destination ZIP code or postal code, you can end up in completely the wrong location. Similarly, our universal Law Of Attraction requires clear instructions to work well for you.

For manifesting anything, therefore, your starting point is clarity about what it is you  want.

And furthermore, there is something really significant about this for your personal development. In Shadow Work, we talk a lot about Sovereign Energy. This is the energy of the leader in your life, which you can think of as the part of you which manages your life, chooses which direction to take, chooses how to get there, and controls and governs your “realm” or “kingdom”.

Some of the qualities of the sovereign, be it King or Queen, are discernment, good judgement, wisdom, clarity of purpose, generosity of spirit, and a general tendency to act for the benefit of everybody in your world.

No doubt you can see that goal setting is something that the King or Queen in you takes care of. After all, your internal King or Queen is in charge of running your life.

(If you don’t like the word King or Queen, you can substitute anything more to your taste – chief, leader, manager, Chieftain, director… Whatever suits you. The principle is always the same – this is the part of you responsible for success in the world.)

Law of Attraction At Work

So manifesting reality is the work of this sovereign part of you: and as you can imagine, the qualities of a good sovereign are the qualities that you need to be successful at manifesting your reality.

Of course the importance of having sovereign qualities at work when you’re trying to manifest anything is most clearly seen when you are able to honor (i.e. appreciate and accept whole-heartedly) your own wishes and desires.

That honoring most clearly comes in the form of believing you can manifest what you want.

And it’s also seen in the quality of acceptance: that is to say, in your own acceptance that it’s right and proper for you to know what your dreams and wishes for the future are, and right and proper that you can achieve them, whether they be material, spiritual, or emotional.

Manifesting With A Purpose

Other people have spoken of the importance of having a sense of purpose in different ways: for example, some people speak of having “a reason to get out of bed in the morning”, or “knowing what you’re on the planet to do”, or “fulfilling your sacred contract”.

But it doesn’t matter how you see this. Because knowing what you want in life, and going for it, are intrinsically rewarding to the human mind.

And the most important form of honoring you can give yourself is to believe in your ability to manifest, to achieve and acquire what you wish to have in your life. (To reiterate: as long as you know what that is, of course!)

Being Selfish

One of the problems we face in our society is that many of us are brought up not to be “selfish”. We are taught that getting what we want is somehow wrong, or that we should focus more on other people than ourselves.

In some cases, of course, people don’t even know what they want because they’ve been so effectively taught not to take any notice of their own wishes or desires.

The truth of the matter couldn’t be more different: knowing what you want, and then being able to manifest it, is actually both a gift to yourself and a gift to the world.

The gift to you is that when you are achieving your own goals and objectives, your self-esteem goes up, and you become a more effective sovereign in your own life.

And once you become a more effective sovereign in your own life, your leadership and wisdom begin to impact on the world at large.

Over time, you may find that your desires and objectives become “transpersonal” – in other words, that you begin to set goals and objectives which not only fulfill you, but which clearly work for the benefit of humanity as a whole.

This transpersonal move into manifesting stuff – not only for your own benefit but for the benefit of the world – is what enables people like Bill Gates, Bono, Bob Geldof, Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson, and many other philanthropists who are not publicly recognized, to shine a bright light into dark places in the world and to work positively for the good.

And nothing is more satisfying to the human spirit and when you’re fulfilling a purpose that you believe to be part of the bigger picture of how the universe is operating.

In short, as Mike Dooley says, “Universal principles are always at play. When it comes to choosing your end results and deliberately shaping your life, it’s up to you to decide exactly what your priorities and preferences are.”

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How To Be Happy

How to Be Happy

I think we’d all agree there’s a happiness deficit in the world today. Perhaps it’s because we’re focusing on the negative. So could it be that just changing your behaviour might make you happier?

Well, my own experience of just practising gratitude suggests this is probably true. That simple changes can produce a massive amount of joy.

Here are some suggestions from life hack https://www.lifehack.org about how you might be happy.

1 Give up Jealousy

And by jealousy I mean the experience of being one down to somebody else when you make a comparison between what they have and what you have. If looking at somebody else who successful gives you a goal to aspire to, so much the better. But if all it does is make you miserable and produces a sense of failure, stop doing it. Instead, focus on your own success and how you might become more successful.

2 Give up the Fear of Change.

In the work I’ve done over the years it’s absolutely extraordinary how often I’ve come across people who knew their lives were terrible, but who absolutely refused to make any effort to change simply because they were frightened of what might happen if they stepped out of their “comfort zone”. (And that’s somewhat ironic considering the comfort zone is usually a kind of hell on earth!) How could it be that somebody could fear change so much that they stick with their own hell on earth? Often it’s because they actually don’t make a simple decision to change things for the better.

3 Give up the Need to Be in Control

Being in control is only way of keeping yourself safe – but the irony is you can’t be in control of everything. It’s a simple piece of advice: “give up the need to be in control”. But it takes some effort. In fact it takes quite a bit of effort. Nonetheless, if you start recognising the certain things in certain events really are just beyond your control, and in actual fact you probably have no right to interfere anyway, then life becomes a lot easier. And ironically, it’s from that place that you can begin to manifest what you want more easily.

4 Achieve a Balance in Life

You all know what I mean by that: a balance between work and pleasure and leisure. A balance between home and family. A life where you are looking after yourself and the people around you.

5 Stop Blaming Others

This is probably the hardest single change for people to make. And of course there’s no doubt that our history, our childhood experience, our family environment, the bad boss, the awkward siblings, and so on can really impact on how we live our lives today. But just ask yourself this: did you ever meet anybody whose life improved because they were blaming what happened to them in the past? No, the only way people can improve their lives is by taking responsibility for the future. By taking responsibility and deciding once and for all that you are actually in charge of your own life, is possible for you to start focusing on solutions and shedding baggage of the past, which is almost certainly holding you back.

6 Be More Positive

It’s certainly true that where the attention goes, the energy flows. So if you’re criticizing, complaining, gossiping, focusing on the negative, moaning about how bad the news on TV is, thinking about the state of the world and all that other stuff, you’re wasting your energy. That’s energy that you could be putting into something more positive. One of my mentors once suggested to me that I stopped reading the newspaper watching the TV and radio news, and though I found it hard to give up what looks like an addiction in retrospect, I can tell you the difference it made to my mental state and energy was phenomenal. Focus on the things that you can control and change not on the ones you can’t.

7 Give Up The Need to Be Right

This was a big one for me. Of course wanting to be right is just another form of wanting to be in control, but there’s so much wasted energy goes along with this: persuading others, forcing others even to take on your point of view on attitudes and belief systems just so you feel validated. It’s pointless!

Validation comes from within, from knowing your own worth, and from having a set of values that are yours and yours alone and don’t depend on the approval or acceptance of anybody else. The only thing that need to be right produces is conflict. A wise elder knows there’s no point trying to persuade others to change their mind. They change their mind because of their experience. So give up the desire to be right all the time and use the energy that that frees up to improve your life.

8 Identify and Eliminate Your Limiting Beliefs

You can find more information on that on this website!

9 Find a Supportive Group Who Are on Your Side

Were all social creatures, and it’s extraordinarily easy to fall in with people who have a negative influence on you. To fall in with people who have no aspirations, or ambitions or drive. If you’re in a group of people like this, you’re almost certainly going to achieve far less than you otherwise could. You need to be surrounded by people who inspire you, people who act as role models, people who support you, and people who truly want you to live your life to the fullest.

10 Let Go of the past

Sometimes it isn’t possible to let go of the wounds that we experienced in childhood, and therapy or some kind of reparative work is needed to heal the wounds. I don’t think it is true you can just sidestep this stuff, but if you feel that the past is holding you back, then go and do something about it. Get some good therapy, join a support group, take of some practice like mindfulness or meditation. Just do something. By taking action, the past can become a source of wisdom and experience rather than holding you back by drawing your energy repeatedly to the negative experiences that you had during childhood.

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Manifesting Money With Napoleon Hill

The Mystery Of Manifestation

Napoleon Hill’s most famous book is undoubtedly Think and Grow Rich. It’s sold over 100 million copies since it was published in the 1920s – a fact which testifies to its extraordinary power.

Think And Grow Rich
Think And Grow Rich

But it may not help you work out the meaning of manifestation or help you find a practical way to manifest your desires.

You see, although Napoleon Hill wrote that “in every chapter of this book, mention has been made of the moneymaking secret which has made fortunes more than 500 exceeding the wealthy men who might have carefully analysed over a long period of years”, I don’t think the secret is either clear or obvious.

Hill wanted to tease people because he thought it would be more valuable to them if they could find out what the secret of manifestation was for themselves.

Even so, if you read the book you may well end up mystified as to exactly which secret he was referring to! The truth is that manifestation is a process that everyone can do, and we don’t need to be teased by a guru from the 1920s!

So I’m going to review this book chapter by chapter, and then tell you exactly what it is that Napoleon Hill was so reticent about revealing.

Because although he may have wanted to keep the secret hidden for his own reasons, perhaps of all the books that have been written about manifestation, Think and Grow Rich is the one that explains the principles most powerfully.

But in modern times, we need to put the prejudices of Hill’s time aside and ignore the way he speaks about race and culture and gender. Even though those anachronisms do not alter the value and truth of the principles which Napoleon Hill set out in this book, it can be, in places, an uncomfortable read. (Racism in particular, was so much more common then – but Hill’s book is full of unconscious prejudice of one kind or another.)

Instead, you can use my summary of the principles of manifestation!

So, Think and Grow Rich was written in the 1920s, and the men in the book who Napoleon Hill studied as he investigated manifestation and Law Of Attraction principles included the industrial barons of the time like Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie.

I’ve heard people say that times have changed, and there are no longer the kinds of opportunities for making money open to those rich industrialists around the turn of the 19th century. Yet this is total piffle!

If you think of people like Richard Branson of Virgin, Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Gates of Windows, and Larry Page and Brin Sergey of Google, amongst literally thousands of others, you can only conclude that opportunity has always been available – and still is….

Sidebar: Steve Jobs inspiring Harvard students. The text. Let him inspire you, too. Or just watch the video below.

The video. Success is made, not born.

Sidebar: Success Is A Product Of Your Own Creation

From The Guardian newspaper, England, November 2014. 

Who’s Hayley Parsons? She’s a 41-year-old Welsh entrepreneuse. She left school at 16 with [few qualifications] , got a job making tea in an insurance office, then got a job selling insurance for a company called Admiral, where she helped to set up confused.com [an insurance comparison site]. And it was at this point, in 2006, that she spotted a niche in the market for a Welsh insurance price and product comparison site…

You’d think someone would have got there first. But no one had. So Parsons set up gocompare.com, which crucially let people compare policy details as well as prices, worked hard and made the company a huge success while her husband Mark quit his job to look after their two children. She’ll get £44m [ that’s 44 million UK pounds – about 68 million US dollars ] for selling her stake in this deal, on top of whatever else she’s already made.

 Of her success, Hayley says: “I think a lot of it comes down to attitude and personality…. I’m not afraid to go for something and do it… I meet so many people in business who just get stuck up their own backsides and that’s not me at all.”

For those who are ready to manifest wealth and success – or indeed, anything else that they want – the opportunities are always available.

And remember, the techniques you have available to you today for transforming the way your mind operates are far superior to the ones available in Hill’s day.

Manifesting What You Want

Hill talks a lot about “autosuggestion” which basically seems to amount to writing out instructions to yourself on a card, and then carrying it around with you, memorizing it, and reading it yourself several times a day.

Nowadays this process of re-programming the subconscious can be done in many other ways, much more efficiently … and yet, oddly enough, Hill’s methods will still work if you use them with dedication.

In the introduction to Think and Grow Rich, Hill says we are all the masters of our fate because we have the power to control our thoughts.

Grasp this, for it is the most important factor behind every single aspect of your life today.

The mind has incredible power, the power to adapt the world around you to match the way that you’re thinking.

And the power of the mind can work to produce both positive and negative outcomes. It will convert just as quickly thoughts of poverty into physical reality as it will thoughts of riches.

With that in mind, and in a spirit of open-mindedness, let’s begin on the facts and information Napoleon Hill provided which can entirely change your financial destiny.

Read on in the next post all about the first principle of success.

Hermetic system, manifestation

The Law Of Attraction & Manifestation – The Kybalion

Manifestation is something that really confuses people.

A lot of people believe in the idea, or at least would like to believe in the idea, but find it quite difficult to actually make it work for them.

Yet the truth of the matter is that one of your purposes in life is to learn how to harness your desires, wishes and energies, and turn them into reality.

As Napoleon Hill put it, “What the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” We have been given both the power to imagine and outcome, and the means to achieve it.

 

There are traditions going back to the beginning of recorded human history which speak of the power of Manifestation and The Law of Attraction.

Manifestation is the ability of any human being to use certain techniques to manifest what he or she desires.

The Law Of Attraction – more accurately Laws – are the principles which you can use to manifest your desires.

There’s nothing mysterious about this.

Although the early teachers of manifestation tried to hide their teachings in secrecy and mystery, and tried to limit the knowledge for a select few who had undergone initiation rituals of one kind or another, the fact is this knowledge is now and always has been available to everyone.

Or at least, to those who care to look for it.

And manifesting your desires is a healthy way to live.

You know that your thoughts create reality — otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. But you may wonder how you can control your thoughts, and you may want to know what techniques you have to use, so that manifestation of your desires becomes consistent and reliable.

One of the original accounts of how to turn thoughts into reality was the Kybalion.

This was an ancient Egyptian text, but its origins are irrelevant.

Our only interest in it today is to see what it can tell us about Laws Of Attraction and the process of Manifestation.

The Kybalion was written by an Egyptian sage called Hermes. That’s why these teachings are called hermetic teachings. Like many others who have been interested in manifestation, Hermes tried to make sense of the principles behind this phenomenon by classifying and ordering what he thought was going on.

And so, to make sense of it, he came up with seven sacred secrets or principles of manifestation. Here, they are, with some comments about how they relate to us nowadays as we  manifest our desires.

The First Sacred Hermetic Secret Or Principle Of Manifestation

Everything in the entire universe, whether physical, intellectual, spiritual or emotional, is part of an all-encompassing divine creation.

People give this different names: The Mystery, All That Is, The Life Force, Cosmic Consciousness, and so on … you may have your own name for it.

Of course if this is true, and we are all living inside an omnipresent and omniscient energy force, or divine presence, then we are all more connected than we are separate, more similar than we are different.

A Modern Interpretation

Nothing, as you know, is permanent.

Change is a continuous force all around us. And whether you call controlling and directing energy of the universe Spirit, Divine Wisdom, or All That Is, this energy is present in every place.

In the Kybalion, Hermes put it like this: “That which is the fundamental truth, the substantial reality, is beyond true naming, but wise men call it the All. In its essence, the All is unknowable. The All must have continuously and always existed, for nothing else could create it, and nothing else could exist outside it. The All must be infinite in space as there is no place outside of it.”

This, of course, begins to sound a bit like “God”. But do we really need to consider the nature of Spirit, the nature of “All That Is”?

No, we do not, simply because spirit transcends our understanding, just as it always has and always will.

Given the grace to use Spirit (or whatever you call the universal energy) to manifest our desires, need we look beyond the techniques that we can use to get what we want, or should we be content in knowing that the universe has granted us the power of manifestation?

To me the answer is clear: explanation is not necessary. It is our grace that we can manifest whatever we wish, when we know how to do so.

And do we really need to consider the divine paradox — that matter is both illusory and real, simultaneously?

Modern quantum physics teaches us that matter is energy, and energy is matter, and that surely, is that!

The point for us right here, right now, in manifesting our desires is to simply keep in mind that because matter and energy are interchangeable,  the power of our brains is such that it can influence the manifestation of matter around us.

It’s also able to change events and energies around us so that certain outcomes can occur, can be made manifest.

And in any event, it’s not true that our universe is either an illusion or a paradox. In fact, our physical universe is but one, very real, manifestation of the energy of the universe.

It happens to be the manifestation that we require for our lives as physical beings on this planet.

At the same time, because we are also spiritual beings and we have an energetic existence, we can connect with the energy behind the universe, and influence how things manifest on earth.

Every system of manifestation, every example of Law Of Attraction, depends upon a certain mental process.

The hermeticists, the followers of the Egyptian sage Hermes, used words like meditation and divine attention to describe the process that somebody needed to use before they could engage with the mental energy, the spiritual energy of the universe. Others have called these processes, desire, belief, visualization, faith and more.

The Second Sacred Secret

The phrase which has come to sum up The Second Sacred Hermetic Principle is: “As above, so below … as below, so above.”

What this means in practice is that the physical, spiritual, or mental activities are subject to the same spiritual laws.

A Modern Interpretation

We all know the saying “As above, so below;  as below, so above”. The “above” refers to the spiritual plane, and “below” to the physical. That’s how people think of our spiritual existence – somehow higher than us. But it’s incorrect to do so, because all three planes of existence co-exist together in the same time and space.

So, in one sense, dividing our existence into spiritual, mental, and physical realms is artificial – they are all aspects of life and existence which co-exist together.

In other words, the physical, mental and spiritual realms reflect the qualities, each of the other. People think of the spiritual plane as having the highest vibrational energy – and maybe it does.

For me, a more useful way to think of these three planes of existence is to see them as different aspects of the All, the Mystery, All That Is,  Cosmic Consciousness, or whatever name you wish to use for the power of the Universe.

We can touch the cosmic consciousness by using our minds in certain ways.

Any formula for manifesting your desires, for getting what you want, achieving success, setting goals and making them come true, will ALWAYS involves some mental process that allows connection between your mind and the cosmic consciousness.

The most ancient form of such connection, of course, is prayer. But how many people have been let down by prayer over the years? Far more, I suspect that have had their desires manifested. We’ll examine why prayer works so inconsistently in the section of these writings about Belief.

The Third Sacred Secret

Everything in the universe is composed of matter which vibrates at a certain rate; and matter is just a physical form of energy.

We all know that is true, as the work of the atomic physicists from the days of Einstein onwards has shown.

It is a powerful and amazing thought, even so: what appears to be solid is, in fact, just energy. And since energy is universal, and manifests in different forms only because it has different energetic frequencies, it follows that we can probably influence what’s going on around us by changing the frequency of our own vibrations.

A Modern Interpretation 

The fact that energy and matter are interchangeable means that every thought, every emotion, every desire, attracts to itself its physical equivalent.

You’ve probably experienced how your mood can be affected by the mood of others — and, as you know, the same is true in reverse.

When you with a person who is happy, you tend to feel happy, and when you’re with a person who is depressed and negative, you feel your own mood lowering. (Unless you protect yourself from the transmission of their energy to you.)

Naturally energy flows from a higher energetic state to a lower energetic state.

That’s why you raise your emotional energy when manifesting…. (we’ll see how you can do this later on).

Somehow, the mind has the power to attract towards you the things about which you consistently think: so if you consistently think about poverty, you’re raising your awareness of poverty, and you’re avoiding the opportunities that wealth presents to you.

This means you generally have a “poverty consciousness”.

This simply means you’re functioning at one end of the poverty / wealth polarity – and by changing your thoughts to what some might consider to be a “higher” frequency vibration, you can raise your expectations so that you move both mentally and physically to the prosperity end of the spectrum.

And the same is true of any other polarity that exists in your life: health, wealth, relationships, success – these things are there for the taking, and the primary step to achieving them is to match your vibrations, your energies, your thought processes, with the energy in the world that will make these things manifest as a positive, healthy reality for you.

To put it more simply: you get what you think about.

But of course, you have to think about your desires in a particular way – which is the whole point of manifestation and Law Of Attraction.

The Fourth Sacred Secret

Everything that appears to be an opposite is in fact just simply a polarity.

So, like masculinity and femininity, poverty and prosperity are simply at opposite ends of another spectrum. Enlightenment and ignorance are another pair of qualities which occur at different ends, at different polarities, of another spectrum.

By raising our energy so that it more closely approaches that of the higher end of a particular spectrum, it’s possible to transmute unwanted and undesirable situations into something more positive.

A Modern Interpretation

If you worry about money, or complain that you don’t have enough, your thoughts are at the poverty end of the finance polarity. That’s what you attract.

And even if you don’t appear to have money right now, simply changing your thought processes to focus on prosperity and opportunity will change your physical circumstances.

But of course you must believe that prosperity is possible.

Releasing, eliminating, changing, or even destroying your limiting beliefs is a fundamental aspect of getting what you want and manifesting success.

Take love and hate.

A lot of people think these are completely different things. Yet they are simply opposite ends of a polarity: very few people feel either completely pure love or completely pure hate. Most of us experience a mix of these emotions.

The principle of polarity also allows you to influence another person’s mental state: to either elevate or depress it.

Another example: depression and fear can be transmuted into positivity and courage.

And you almost certainly will have experienced how the transmission of mental energy from one person to another can be conducted.

If you consistently attract negative people to you, is it because you are negative yourself? (Misery loves company!) Or is it because these depressed people are taking your positive energy to make themselves feel better?

The Fifth Sacred Secret

The Kybalion suggests that the entire universe operates to a precise and predictable rhythm.

A Modern Interpretation

While the Kybalion seems to suggest that every movement in one direction will produce a compensating movement in the opposite direction – in other words every success hast to be followed by a failure, every rise to be followed by a fall – the truth is rather different.

Success can be a continuous process. Getting what you want can be practiced each and every day.

There’s no negative karma coming just because you get what you desire. The universe did not give you the power to manifest what you want only to take it off you again.

If people succeed and then subsequently fail, they do so merely because they have a belief system which holds that every success has to be followed by failure.

Change your belief system, to expect success, and success will be a continuous process. We are not subject to any kind of Law Of Compensation as the Kybalion suggested.

The Sixth Sacred Secret

This is simply the law of cause and effect: every cause has its effect, every effect has its cause. Chance does not exist: it’s only a name given to the law of cause and effect where those two qualities are not yet recognized.

 

While there are many levels of causation, the essence of this principle is that nothing can happen by chance.

Life mastery, the ability to manifest using the Law Of Attraction, is the product of YOU becoming a conscious cause rather than a passive recipient of effect.

A Modern Interpretation

Every event has a cause.

Even so, I don’t buy into the idea that wherever you are in life right now is the product of your own creation.

Too many people have suffered abusive childhoods and are still experiencing the consequences in their own adult lives for me to believe that the universe – or even the people themselves – actually chose to manifest into an abusive childhood so that they could “learn something”.

I think this is banal and simplistic, and possibly even an insult to the creative design of the universe. (And I might be wrong, of course.)

I’d much prefer to understand the law of cause and effect working as follows: that in your adult life today, every single action you take has a consequence. What the universe gives you is the power to redeem your situation….

Even when you cannot understand why something has happened to you, you can safely assume that the law of cause and effect is at work. Perhaps the cause of what has happened to you (the effect or outcome) is simply too complicated to see clearly.

To take responsibility for your own life, it is necessary to accept that you CAN AND DO create, right here, right now, the things that happen to you.

No matter how bad your childhood may have been, and no matter how limiting the environment in which you grew up, you do now have the power, if you choose, to change your situation by taking control of the causes of what happens in your life, of your “outcomes”.

You can also visualize your outcomes – or effects – so you set clear and specific objectives for your life, which your mind will then go to work to produce. That is how you really take full responsibility for your life.

The Seventh Sacred Secret

This is a development of the fourth Sacred Secret: it ascribes male and female energy to every force and creation in the universe.

I’m not entirely clear what Hermes meant by this, but he seemed to think that a combination of male energy and female energy were important in manifestation.

He wasn’t referring to conventional gender roles here, but something more like female energy being an attracting force and male energy being a creative force.

A Modern Interpretation

Rather than thinking of every event and experience in the universe as governed by feminine and masculine energy, let us simply say that there are different and complementary forces at work in the world, some of which will get us what we want, and others which will not.

  • The energy of creation, the energy of manifestation.
  • The energy of visualization, the energy of action.
  • The energy of cause, the energy of effect.
  • The energy of passion, and the energy of passivity.
  • The energy of desire, and the energy of acceptance.
  • The energy of belief, and the energy of hopelessness.
  • The energy of expectancy, and the energy of despair.

Perhaps these are better ways of describing the opposing energetic forces that the Kybalion described as masculine and feminine.

So we can take as much or as little of this as we wish, and transmute it into a modern system of manifestation.

Manifesting Your Desires

One of the most interesting things about working with Law Of Attraction principles is how easily and quickly they work: at least, when you have mastered the antecedents, the requirements, the preconditions, for the universal laws to take effect.

We don’t really have to look at complicated principles which were created by less sophisticated peoples (by our standards) than ourselves to explain a natural process.

The basis of manifestation is simple: intense desire, complete belief, and confident expectancy. Oh, and action in the world….

You can see and hear more about Desire, Belief, Expectancy and Action on this website.

Take away from the Kybalion some simple straightforward truths:

That whenever negative energies present, so must the positive energy be present too. Napoleon Hill summed this up when he said that “in every adversity there lies the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”

Maintain your expectations towards the positive end of every polarity. Keep your thoughts positive, and you will manifest positive outcomes. Napoleon Hill summed this up: “The way you think determines the quality of your life.”

Balance visualization and creative thought with action.

And remember that you can think of your inner masculine and feminine as having different skills and abilities.

Since each of us has an inner masculine energy and an inner feminine energy, we are all capable of manifesting our desires by using the Law Of Attraction.

The masculine loves to take action, the feminine loves to create ideas. The masculine loves to go out and build, while the feminine taps into the creative unconscious.

One way to balance your masculine and feminine energy is to consistently engage in giving and receiving: give something every day (time, money, friendly words, or something more tangible) without any attachment to receiving praise, rewards or gratitude. This is your masculine energy at work.

And also allow your feminine to receive: it is very receptive to the whispers of the divine, of the collective unconscious. Quiet time, meditation, visualization, will allow your feminine to receive, to pass ideas on to the masculine, the energy which is always ready to take action.

“The possession of knowledge, unless accompanied by manifestation and expression in action, is like the hoarding of precious metals: a vain and foolish thing. Knowledge, like wealth, is intended for use.” – The Kybalion

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