I’m shopping for a new car (yes, that brings up all kinds of attraction questions, but I’ll leave that for another day!) I’ve owned my current car for more than ten years now. When I first test-drove it, I hadn’t heard of that particular model. But once I’d looked at it, I started seeing it all over the place. Has that ever happened to you?
When I wasn’t in the car-buying mentality, my mind wasn’t picking up on different models. They didn’t enter my consciousness. Then I tuned into it, and boom! they were everywhere. Where did they come from all of a sudden?
The obvious answer is that they were always there. They didn’t appear on the freeway just because I was ready. But they appeared to me because I was ready.
I had seen that particular make and model of car before. But there are cars everywhere. I was aware of it, but I hadn’t focused on it till I was considering one for myself.
There’s always something to think about, something to occupy my thoughts. My mind races in I-don’t-know-how-many different directions. I can have a lot of things going on at once. But I can’t focus on all of them. I can be aware of them, but I can’t focus on them.
Charles Fillmore understood this when he wrote in his book Prosperity:
--…there is a spiritual law that brings into manifestation the thoughts we focus on, a divine universal law of mind activity that never fails. (Lesson Four: “Humanity, the Inlet and Outlet of Divine Mind.”)
That’s really the crux of the Law of Attraction, isn’t it? Part of it is making sure you’re filling your mind with the right thoughts, thoughts of abundance rather than lack. But what I read tells me we need to go a step beyond that. We need to get clear on what we want, the clearer the better, and focus on it. Ask for it specifically. That’s how we’ll get the message across. Once we focus on what we want, once we see it mentally, we see it physically. And when we’ve figured out exactly what we want, we give the universe the chance to find it for us.
When you were small and told Mom, Dad, and Santa Claus what you wanted for Christmas, were you vague? Did you say you wanted a new bike, and left it at that? Hardly. You knew what model, what color, how many speeds. You had that bike picked out. So Mom, Dad, and Santa knew exactly what to get. You weren’t going to leave that to chance, were you?
Think about wanting a new car, and…well, it could be just about anything, and you’re getting what you asked for, right? Think about the red Mercedes CLK 320 Cabriolet with the charcoal leather interior, walnut trim, 6-disc CD player…you get the picture, and so does the universe. It can’t fulfill what you want unless you tell it.
We keep our prosperity mindsets alive. That’s the framework. Within that we gain clarity on specifically what we want, and learn to ask for it. That’s how we learn to manifest those things, those desires, that are unique and special to us.
The Outside Counts, Too
A couple of years ago, I decided that cycling sounded like a good hobby. I bought a bike and one Saturday morning put on a t-shirt and shorts and lugged my bike out to the meeting place of a local cycling club.
Fearing the Light
I’m writing this on a plane, between Boston and Los Angeles. Our movie today is “Coach Carter.” It’s about an inner-city basketball coach who coaches his players to be not just winners on the court, but winners in life. A little cliché, but always a good story.
