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The Law of Attraction, intention, manifestation, and their role in personal development January 10, 2007

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Law of Attraction.
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The Law of Attraction, plus the intention and manifestation process, can be an important component in achieving the goals we set in our personal development program.

 “Seek and ye shall find”

“Ask and the door will be opened.”

The words above are just two of the many positive quotations you will encounter in writings explaining the concept of using the intentions and manifesting process in order to create a new reality for ourselves. The concept of synchronicity enters when what we desire to have happen as stated through our intentions to the universe begin to gradually appear in our lives. Synchronicity is sometimes described as simply a word for coincidences, with an emphasis on the coincidences being favorable to our well-being, or to the outcomes we are wanting to manifest through the intention process.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote extensively on the concept of synchronicity. One, albeit perhaps over-simplified way of looking at his definition of synchronicity, is that coincidences are not simply random, but somehow meaningfully connected to specific circumstances, particularly personal circumstances. In what we might call “new age” writing on personal development, some writers present the concept of synchronicity as manifestation events that we may or may not recognize, resulting from our intention process, depending on our experience and receptivity.

My personal view is that the events or circumstances embodied in synchronicities appearing to me are opportunities that are either direct manifestations of my intentions or they are clues relating to the directions I have been wanting to head towards through my intentions.

I have been a “student” of personal development for most of my adult life, not in terms of formal education, but rather in being attracted to personal development literature and methods as a means of improving either my life situation or myself. This interest probably began through the influence of my mother who regularly read books on positive thinking, on the power of belief and various philosophies and theories related to the improvement of human behavior. These books were always in our home.

One of the main tenets of intention and manifestation is that we should not expect overnight transformation into the world we desire when we have just started the process. I believe we can create our own future through powerful intentions but our “new” future will not dramatically appear within a few days of starting the process. In fact, some experts say that we will probably not even recognize the initial manifestations unless we are very alert for their appearance.

For example, at one point in my life I entered a “realization state” that my financial situation was not good. Up until that point I had an unbridled emotional optimism that “everything would be fine” as I moved forward trying various new projects to make money. But one day I suddenly realized that I had burned through most of my savings, that I was in debt and that I had no real guarantee of an adequate income being forthcoming for the future. Panic and anxiety were the first reactions, but I gradually calmed down with the aid of a number of personal development tools and resources, which I hope to discuss in a future article.

What I want to talk about now is how I began to use the intention and manifestation process, particularly in the area of improving my financial situation. Overall, I had a number of areas in my life that I wanted to improve, so I wrote down about eight major intentions. I keyboarded them into my PC, printed them and then tried to read them every day, often modifying or making them more clear as I did so. The other thing I did was to include in the intention statement the recognition, or belief on my part that, the situation I was concerned with was, in fact, improvable.

I also began to write out by hand manifestation scenarios, mainly concerning my financial circumstances and the intentions I was “sending out” to improve those circumstances. To repeat, I did not input the manifestations on a computer, I wrote them out using pen and paper. I planned to read the intentions daily and write out the manifestations daily. And I concentrated mostly on my financial intentions. The manifestations I wrote were essentially positive statements written in such a way that I was stating them as if I was already in an improved financial situation. I did not invent this process; I did it based on the advice of a successful role model. This aspect could be the topic of a number of articles, so I will fast forward.

First off, I should caution that I discovered that the intention and manifestation process is something you have to be diligent with. As I moved from virtual panic into a more optimistic phase, I would sometimes forget to state my intentions and forget to write out my manifestations, or I simply didn’t take the time, when I was tired or busy, or perhaps just too lazy. Then the anxiety state would return and I would reactivate the intention and manifestation process. I soon realized however, that consistency is important and that I would have to keep “working” the process on a daily basis. It is not necessarily easy to do that when you are tired or swamped, but I think you have to.

Eventually I began to see some results, or small manifestations, or synchronicities in the financial area. At first I was not alert to them and even resisted some of them. It was not until later that I recognized they were in fact synchronous manifestations of my intentions. I am an independent writer, editor, and communications consultant — in other words, I work at home, for myself. So some of the manifestations occurred in that area. I knew the “why” of the need to improve my financial situation, but not the “how”. Here are some of the occurrences that I fortunately eventually recognized as being manifestations or synchronicities related to my financial intention efforts and hopefully also an introduction to the “how” of improving things.

(a)    I got a call from a colleague who had moved to Europe and that I had lost touch with. The call concerned whether I would be interested in writing a major article for a prestigious magazine

(b)   A small investment I had made in the stock market began to come alive and went up in value 25%

(c)    I was contacted by an editor I had not worked with for some time who wanted me to write for his publication and gave me four article assignments to start with

(d)   A couple of payment checks I was not expecting until a later date turned up in my mailbox just before Christmas

In addition there were other synchronicities or mini-manifestations, not directly related to financial improvement. I was discouraged about a small website I was building and was about to cancel it, but began to get some ideas, or at least an attitude, as to how to turn it around and a recognition that I needed to look for ways to rekindle my interest in it. I am a strong believer in the concept that if you are not doing what you like to do, it is a real chore, and is unlikely to result in your best work.

Another example: I had a particular book by Eric Hoffer called Working and Thinking on the Waterfront that I thought I had lost, and had been looking for it for years in used bookstores. Then one day my wife asked me if I could find a cookbook in the basement and while rummaging through a bunch of old books I found what she was looking for, and also my long-lost book. I needed the book at that time in particular for an article I wanted to write.

A further example. For along time, I had been trying to figure out my “life purpose” and I found three methods for doing so in the space of a couple of weeks — two methods were explained on self-improvement blogs and one was in a book on the topic of abundance, a book which I had never been able to understand, until I began to really study the concept of intention, manifestation, scarcity and abundance with some earnestness. There in the first few pages of the book was a method for determining a person’s life purpose that was very straightforward. I worked out my purpose I’m still working on refining it.

So essentially, while these were not earth-stopping events, they were indications to me that the intention and manifestation process was working for me and also a warning that I shouldn’t slack off or the process would lose its power. There were probably synchronicities or mini-manifestations embodying opportunities in various forms that I did not recognize, because while familiar with the principles of the process for some time, I had not earnestly tried to apply it to solve particular problems. My journey in personal development tended to be what I considered more on the practical side and I regarded some techniques as being somewhat “theoretical.” I had not dismissed them, but I had not taken the time to seriously apply them to my life.

There is much more to write about on intention, manifestation and synchronicity, but for now, I will close with a quotation from The Practical Dreamer’s Handbook, written by Paul and Sarah Edwards: “You can’t manifest a new future if you’re hooked on the past. Are their any attachments or unfinished business from the past that are keeping you from moving on?”

Intention, Manifestation and The Law of Attraction January 7, 2007

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Intention and Manifestation.
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Modern concepts of personal development might have more followers benefitting from the ideas if some of the writers on the topic would present a number of their thoughts in a more practical manner. An example is one of the more popular aspects of personal growth these days — intention and manifestation, and the Law of Attraction, sometimes described with the older and lesser used phrase “cause and effect.”

Anyone following writings on this concept knows the basic principles. You focus on what you want, rather than on what you don’t want. The idea being that whatever you focus on is more likely to manifest itself in your life. In other words, with the Law of Attraction, or intention and manifestation, you become your thoughts, or you are your thoughts. Focus on what you have to be grateful for in the present and focus on success and abundance in your future, and these positives will appear in your life. Alternatively, focus on what’s presently wrong with your life and envisage the future in terms of scarcity or more problems and negativity and that’s likely what you’re going to get.

However, some writers in this genre over-emphasize the idea that absolutely everything in your life has been manifested or made real through your thoughts or intentions. I am not saying that this is not true, I just think people like you and me would find it more productive, if the focus was instead on positive scenarios. One example I read, for example, proposes the idea that a person is in debt because essentially, they want to be a debtor. They have manifested the debt through their conscious or subconscious intentions. While this may be true in terms of the actions or lack of actions that the person took, it is difficult for many people to fathom the idea that they are the authors of all of their misfortunes, including illnesses and personal tragedies. I’m not saying that the concept of intention and manifestation or the law of attraction is wrong, but I am saying that some writers are driving people away from valid personal development processes by explaining the idea of intention and manifestation in a way that many people cannot relate to.

For example, you and I may be facing some financial difficulties and we know why we are in this position. If we were to take some writings on intention and manifestation literally, it would be hard for us to believe that we intentionally created this situation. We may indeed have created the circumstances, but some literature on intention and manifesting tends to give readers the idea that we deliberately or consciously chose financial difficulty as opposed to financial abundance, and that stretches credibility. What we may have done was to have made some key decisions that did not work out well from a financial perspective. We consider them a result, not an intention.

A better way to present the concept of intention and manifestation would be to concentrate more on the positive aspects of the technique. Instead of trying to explain the principles by emphasizing that the negatives in our lives have been essentially self-directed through intention resulting in bad outcomes. It would be more effective to show us how intention and manifestation can build a better present life as well as a favourable and dynamic future. In trying to build a better financial future for ourselves, for example, one technique I read about and have found useful is realizing that whereas we can visualize and write out positive intentions about a secure financial future, it is difficult to avoid thinking about the negative aspect of our current financial situation and thereby inadvertently intending and manifesting a continuing negative financial status. The answer is to always think of negative situations as being improvable in some way.

You can preface your thinking or written intentions about a negative situation you want to change to a positive scenario by reinforcing the idea in your mind that the situation is, in fact, improvable. You may not yet know “how” to improve the negatives, but the outlook of believing the situation is fixable will give you an overall more positive outlook and gradually build the confidence to take the appropriate actions to improve the situation.

There should also be a strong emphasis on the need for concrete actions towards the positive outcomes we want. Intending and manifesting and the Law of Attraction, are simply intellectual exercises in “wishful thinking” if they are not coupled with actions. Even though we may not know the necessary actions, we must have at least a recognition of the need for action and a commitment to develop a plan towards achieving the desired goals. Personal development presupposes activity and actions being taken towards either self-improvement or to the improvement of situations.

One of the techniques often used in intention, manifestation, and Law of Attraction effort is the concept of visualization – we couple our intentions with visualizing positive outcomes to achieve the manifestation of what we want. In fact, I used this technique in a primitive way to achieve many of the earlier desires in my life. In other words, until I became interested in the Law of Attraction as an intellectual concept I did it intuitively. My method was essentially daydreaming about things I wanted, particularly in the area of specific goals I was setting my sights on. One example is being successful in getting a particular job.

My career has been entirely in communications, particularly the written word and publishing. I am currently an independent communications consultant and have been so since the late 1980’s and tackle pretty well any communications project or contract that involves writing in any way.

One of my earliest ambitions was to be an editor of one of the specialty magazines in the publishing company I was working for at the time. So, not being familiar with formal visualization techniques, I simply daydreamed about being an editor and imagined what it would be like, while at the same time, through my work as an editorial assistant, I was developing the skill package I would need as an editor.

After a few years, I achieved my ambition, and then started daydreaming about being a publisher, which in turn happened a number of years later. I followed the same pattern for years. Wanting something, daydreaming about what it would be like having it, and then getting it. It was a somewhat primitive approach, but essentially without realizing it I was applying some of the basic principles of intention, manifestation, and visualization, each one of the concepts being key to success with the Law of Attraction. If I had concentrated and visualized on all of the negative reasons standing in the way of becoming an editor or publisher, I doubt that I would have made the progress that I did.

I’ll close this with a comment from Claude M. Bristol, author of The Magic of Believing: “Happiness is wholly independent of position, wealth, or materials possessions. It is a state of mind which we ourselves have the power to control – and that control lies with our thinking.”