The Law Of Attraction—And Beyond

The law of attraction is getting a high profile these days. Many books have been written about it and many people are making use of it, and with apparently effective results sometimes.

The law of attraction is: like attracts like. The idea is that you can manifest things into your life through your thoughts. If you think positive things, you will attract positive things, and if you think negative things, you will attract negative things.

I am not discounting the possibility of this. After all, Answers From Silence says, “You are a magnet for everything in your life.” This statement seems to agree with the law of attraction.

But Answers From Silence is a map of the unfolding evolution of consciousness. As the author’s consciousness evolved, things in one chapter could be superseded by something in a later chapter.

And in another article on this website, “Your Life Story And Beyond”, I wrote that the enlightened experience is that your life is not yours.

In that case, the statement, “You are a magnet for everything in your life,” stops being true when your life stops being yours.

And there is still something more to it.

The enlightened experience is not that you attract things to yourself. That is because nothing comes toward you.

Instead, something comes from you. It comes from you at all times and goes out in all directions. The direction of the flow is outward, like light from the sun. It’s the law of radiance.

Under these conditions, attracting things isn’t a concern. Experience is not defined by getting. It is defined by overflowing. This is a result of wholeness.

By contrast, if you feel incomplete and like there is something outside of yourself that will complete you, then you will feel the need to attract something to yourself.

But perhaps you just want to attract enlightenment.

If so, that is a good sign. About enlightenment, Answers From Silence says, “When you are pushing toward it, you are misperceiving. It is actually pulling you.”

In that case, what you really want is for enlightenment to attract you.

—JC

Tsunamis, Karma, and Divine Retribution

Some people have said that the Japanese tsunami catastrophe was divine retribution. In a search for a meaningful explanation of why this terrible thing happened to these people, the idea was put forward that somehow they had brought it upon themselves by displeasing God, who then punished them by sending the disaster.

Apart from making God look not so nice, this makes the search for meaningful explanations look not so nice either.

It also amounts to an extreme application of a widely accepted principle: do good things and good things will be done to you, do bad things and bad things will be done to you.

This karmic explanation creates a sticky problem. Sometimes bad things are done to those who do good things, and vice versa.

This requires that the explanation be elaborated upon, applying the principle over an elongated time duration: you can reap the consequences today of actions that you performed in the distant past. Maybe even a past life. The reaping is just delayed. It’s all cause and effect.

The way to be done with karma is to know yourself as fully being self-sufficient. The enlightened experience is of fullness, of inner fullness and outer fullness, and of fullness matching fullness. Nothing needs anything other than itself to be known or to be defined. Or explained.

The by-product of that is to know all moments as fully being self-sufficient. One thing at a time, and each thing unto itself.

Then it isn’t about cause and effect. There is just being. And tragedy or its opposite are just happenings.

As it says in Answers From Silence, “The wise have no ‘why’s.”

This doesn’t mean that you don’t grieve, or that you do nothing to respond to events.

One must always do what needs to be done. If there is a tsunami-sized mess to clean up, then clean it up. There are no questions to ask about that.

But when you ask, “Why did this happen?”, you are often really asking, “Why did this happen to me?”

When you ask this, you are confusing one thing with another. This happening is not about you. Only you are about you. This happening is about this happening.

It can be said that the Japanese didn’t cause a tsunami to wash onto their shores. Impersonal tectonic forces, driven inevitably by the laws of physics, did that.

As it says in Answers From Silence, “Don’t take anything personally. Except what you do to yourself.”

—JC

The Mayan Calendar And The End Of The World

There’s a big deal being made out of the fact that there exists a Mayan calendar that seems to end in the year 2012. To some people, this signifies that the world will end at that time.

I could write here about the fact that various groups of people at various times have mistakenly prepared for the end of the world on a particular date. Then the date passes and the world keeps on going. But that’s not the point I want to make.

The point is, the Mayan calendar warning is too late. The world already came to an end. It happened just a moment ago.

Perhaps you didn’t notice. That is probably because it is such an ordinary, everyday experience.

Answers From Silence says, “All that exists changes and in so doing there is the ‘death’ of its previous form. All existence dies every moment to become the next moment’s existence.”

Try it. Grab onto what was here just a moment ago. Can’t do it, can you? It’s gone. It all changed. That world ended. It has been replaced by this one. Which also just ended and also was replaced. And so on.

On the other hand, there is something that never changes, and you are connected with that. In fact, you are That.

Answers From Silence says, “At each time in your life, there was a part of you that was always there and that was always the same.”

This is the dimension of changelessness that is expressed in us as being pure consciousness. The quality of pure consciousness is that it is conscious only of being conscious.

Typically, your identity projects onto the things that you are conscious OF, but it is also possible for your identity to rest in pure consciousness. That would be the experience of the true self.

In that case, a meteor could collide with Earth, but it would have no impact on your unshakeable sense of who you are.

So what is the big deal with predicting the end of the world? Why all the concern and excitement?

The fruit of that tree is fear. Some people want to make others afraid, and some people want to be afraid. Answers From Silence says, “People do what they do in life, whatever that might be, in order to feel alive.”

I honestly believe that there are much better ways to feel alive than going into a panic. I encourage you to seek them out.

Answers From Silence says, “Anticipation has no value.”

–J.C.