Limits to the Law of Attraction

You've probably heard of the Law of Attraction (discussed in the book and movie, "The Secret"), which is basically, "What you focus on, expands." The wonderful thing about teaching the Law of Attraction to people is it gives them more power over their lives, and less of a sense of being a victim.

While the Law of Attraction is useful, there are several limitations, which most people don't bother to talk about. I have written about this here, here, and here.

The first of these is that you must be very precise about what you intend. Where you are not clear, anything can show up.

The second is that all of you must be aligned with your intention. This is not as obvious as it sounds: you must find and change beliefs that are beneath your conscious awareness which conflict with your intention.

The third limitation is obvious -- and never discussed either. As I discussed here, your intention will interact with the intentions of others -- none of us is the only person with an intention here on Earth. To use a really simple metaphor, imagine you were arm wrestling with someone else. Each of you would work really hard, and eventually one, probably the stronger and/or bigger one, would win and the other would lose.

But how often are there only 2 people with competing intentions? Let's scale up the metaphor to that of tug of war. Now there are two teams competing, and the one that has the most collective weight will probably win. It's that way with groups of people having intentions, too, as in elections. No candidate wins without a team, including a majority of voters.

But sometimes the team with the most collective weight loses, because they are not aligned on the same intention. Each person on the team has his/her own personal intention -- and if those personal intentions don't align well with the stated group intention (in this case, to win), then the group won't create well together, won't win. Haven't you been on a work team like this, where the unstated personal intentions of one or more team members derailed the group effort?

Back to the Law of Attraction: if you are the only person with an interest in what you are creating, you are clear about what it is, and you are aligned, voila! An example of this would be wanting to be clear about what you want. Yes, you can get your own clarity.

If more than one person is involved, it gets a bit more complicated. But if you are the only person with a strong intention, like a strong desire for a barbecue or a car, your intention will manifest pretty easily.

But let's say you have a strong desire for something bigger, like a successful business producing and selling widgets. Now you have to attract people who might use widgets, convince them that they need widgets, or at least that your widget is the best one around. Then you have to align all those people making the widgets so that they're made well and provide useful and cheerful customer service. Your intention alone, without a lot of skills in promotion and inspiration, will never make that happen, because all of your potential customers and manufacturing workers have their own intentions. Are you beginning to see the limit of the Law of Attraction? 

Or let's say you have a strong desire for something huge, like fairness in our economic system. You can desire it all  you want, but you still have to be clear what it would look like, get rid of all your internal blocks to having it -- and do the same thing for some proportion (a majority?) of the population involved, or it won't manifest. This means involving people who don't notice a problem, or don't have any idea what to do, and coalescing them into a force big enough to overcome the force of those who like things the way they are. And each of those people has his or her own intentions. Again, this is the limit of the Law of Attraction.