The Hassles of Law of Attraction

If you’ve heard anything about Law of Attraction, you’ve surely heard that what you focus on matters. You tend to get results you intend in the areas that you focus on. The areas you forget about, you tend to neglect, and your results are those of entropy rather than intention.

It is not just a matter of focus. Emotion matters also. When you feel strongly about something, it lends clarity and intensity to your thoughts, and this gives the thoughts more power. Thus, The Secret advises, “Feel good,” and Tony Robbins, “Live with passion.”

Clarity and intensity are useful in creating a state of energetic focus called coherence. Repetition also adds to coherence. Highly coherent thoughts are more likely to inform the decisions you make. Highly coherent thoughts also have a greater ability to influence quantum events, according to researchers.

If Law of Attraction does not work well for most people, it is because most people do not have this kind of high degree of coherence in their thoughts very much of the time, and when they do, the thoughts are not related to anything they want.

Think about it this way. What events in life pop up with emotional intensity, clarity of thought, and frequent repetition? These are, more often than not, the hassles of everyday life, the moments that make us say, “Oh, no, not this again.” At the highest level of coherence, these hassles create what I call, if you will pardon the expression, our “Oh, shit” moments. It is the rare person whose dreams and lofty ambitions occur with the kind of undeniable clarity that seems to occur automatically in those moments of sudden realization that make us say, “Oh, shit.”

To offer a mundane example, I had one of these moments on Friday when I arrived at the post office only to realize that the package I needed to mail was not along with me. In a flash, I knew that my last several minutes of effort had gone to waste.

Ultimately, we want to try to create that same kind of clarity of thought for the things we dream about and work toward. At first, though, it may be just as useful to reduce the hassles in our lives. According to the way this is described in discussions of Law of Attraction, this focus on hassles creates more hassles. Hassles can take on a kind of momentum in your life. Whatever you can do to reduce the hold that hassles have on you gives you more time to focus on positive things and constructive actions.

The book Fear of Nothing focuses on clutter and to-do lists because those are two of the most universal and unavoidable forms that hassles can take. Clutter is there for you to see every time you walk in the door or get up from the television. The to-do list confronts you every time you ask, “What do I need to do now?” Reduce clutter by getting rid of possessions you aren’t so likely to use, and shrink the to-do list by striking off tasks that, realistically, you will never get to. Also take a look at the hassles that occur the most often in your life or that cause you the most aggravation. Realize that hassles are not an unavoidable feature of life. Perhaps every one of the hassles you face has a solution. If the situation itself cannot easily be avoided, perhaps you can find a way to approach it with less emotional intensity.

Law of Attraction won’t do anything for you when your highly coherent thoughts are the ones that say, “Oh, no, not this again.” If you live a life that is full of hassles, it is accurate to say that Law of Attraction “doesn’t work.” Reduce the influence of hassles in your life, and you may then start to find that Law of Attraction “does work.”