A persistent question of mine is the degree to which individuals shape their own destiny through a combination of what author Abraham-Hicks calls The Law of Attraction and what we might call chance. I’m starting this blog entry on a date burned in the minds of most of us in the U.S., 9/11. My sense is that most of those who worked in and around the World Trade Center had not been spending a lot of time focused on their potential as targets for assault. Some of them probably had fears about one thing or another. My guess is that most of them were probably focused on family and work (or vice versa) and had more fears about transportation to and from work and the possibility of street crime than the possibility of mass annihilation.
The same is undoubtedly true for those living in San Bruno, which is in the San Francisco Bay Area not far from where I grew up. They may have been worried about their mortgages or the cost of arugula at their local Whole Foods store, but my guess is that even those who reported having smelled gas were probably not fearful about having their entire neighborhood blow up. You can add to these the people living in New Orleans before and after Katrina and the subsequent flooding. You can doubtless add a number of natural disasters (and unnatural ones, too) to the list. I don’t know about you, but I have a very hard time believing that we can blame them all on the Law of Attraction. My sense is that, however powerful the Law of Attraction is in the individual microcosm, something else influences the macrocosm.
Clearly, if I want a new and better job, I am more likely to manifest it if I focus on what I want rather than on how miserable I am in my current job. If I want to be thinner and healthier, I am more likely to attain my ideal weight if I focus on what I want rather than on how fat I feel at the moment. These, and similar situations, can be influenced by the actions I take that demonstrate my focus. My unconscious mind is a lot more likely to believe that I want a new job or to be thinner and healthier if I take actions that help move me in those directions.
It seems to me that, in addition to the Law of Attraction, a couple of other things things influence what happens to whom when. The first is what Debra and I call Soul Purpose. We both tend to believe in what Gary Zukav calls “Earth School.” Zukav was, of course, not the first to say that we incarnate to learn lessons. The English poet John Keats wrote to his brother George and sister Georgiana in April 1819 that a physical, emotional life is required to “school an intelligence and make it a soul.” We don’t always know in consciousness what our soul contracts may require. A soul contract may require that a person be on the Bridge to San Luis Rey (written about in a novel by Thornton Wilder) or the Interstate 35-W bridge in Minneapolis when it collapses.
The other thing that occurs to me is that from the perspective of the All That Is—what some people call God—is death is an illusion. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It just changes form. In my opinion, the problem with the term, “God,”is that the expression is historically limited. The words for God in the Old Testament—Yahweh, Jehovah, and Elohim—were used in reference to a local, mountaintop God who had a territory to protect and who rewarded and punished people according to their behavior. Even though practitioners of most religions profess to believe that God is omnipresent, there is little evidence in language or literature to indicate omnipresence. At best, where God isn’t, we have the Devil. Even when we aren’t saying, “the Devil made me (you, him, her, them) do it,” we seem to think that God turns His or Her back when bad things happens. Think about the line in line in Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes / When the waves turn the minutes to hours.”
In The Power of Presence: Seeing the Divine in Everyday Life, Debra and I wrote about Gabriel Marcel’s concept of separating the the problematical world from the ontological mystery. The problematical world is the life in which we solve problems. We go to work. We go on vacation. We fix and eat meals. We get married, have children, and get divorced, and so on. They are all “problems” that require temporal solutions. The ontological mystery is what Debra and I call the Transrational Perspective, which recognizes that the problematical world, space, and time are illusions that give us the opportunity to learn the lessons of Earth School. This is a mystical view rather than a religious or scientific view.
The really interesting thing is that the better scientists get at doing “science”, the closer they get to adopting a mystical perspective. The vicissitudes of life belong to the problematical world. From the perspective of the ontological mystery, concern about them is limited in time and space, an illusion that fades as one gains perspective.
The Power of Presence: Seeing the Divine in Everyday Life, is a free download in e-book format from the SCS website:Free E-book.
