The Law of No Attraction

This isn't a story, you blog.

The law of attraction is something I had come across years ago when I had first exhibited a curiosity in New Age Spirituality. However, that curiosity fast subsided and the residue was a form of existential nihilism with which I still choose to live my live. So, although I don't believe it actually matters to me - I found the concept interesting enough for me to weigh out through a piece of writing.
Now, for anyone who may be wondering - what brought my attention back to the law of attraction was a viewing of "The Secret" upon a close friend's recommendation. This friend is a very smart young man, and before he gave me the doccie-movie, he had recommended the book to me quite a few times. I opted for the movie just to see the gist of the argument brought forth by the modern day best-seller.
It was basically all the things I had come across in my earlier escapades with New Age, except in a very sophisticated and organized form. Also, it boasted the testimony of some great minds - quantum physicists, best-selling authors and metaphysicians all took part in the movie, and there were also claims appropriating the greatest minds in history like Plato and Newton as knowers and even teachers of The Secret. This would seem to be a warning sign to anyone with an open-mind looking to critically examine what is being said - it seems like the chances grew that it would be tainted by containing various appeals to authority. Nonetheless, for the sake of keeping an open mind, let us dwell not on who the movie offered testimony from but rather what were they saying.
For those less familiar with the law of attraction, it is basically about the power of the mind - more specifically how our thoughts can influence physical reality and yield tangible results. That is The Secret brought forth by Rhonda Byrne and her cohorts - the fact that our mental conditioning affects our surrounding reality. Simply put, with the law of attraction, you get what you think about.
Suppose you were thinking of an old friend you hadn't been in contact with for a while. During the course of the day, you keep thinking of this friend - and later on, in the afternoon, when you're on your way home, you suddenly bump into this person you had been thinking about the entire day - some people might attribute this to coincidence, but people who believe in the law of attraction would explain that your thoughts that day had attracted the given person back into your life. The explanation that would be given to you by an adherent of the law is that your mental energy somehow manipulated the universe to fulfilling your will.
However, that doesn't give a vivid enough picture of HOW this prospect actually works. Bob Proctor, a philosopher who appears in The Secret, likened the process that facilitates this seemingly magical control one may exhibit over the universe to electricity. He claimed that no one has actually seen electricity but that doesn't mean we can't see the results of electricity, for example, a cooked meal in a bright room. In the documentary, Proctor claimed the law of attraction is similar in that we don't understand the process the universe works in or why, but we may still enjoy the results of knowing the 'secret'.
And it all sounds so good - according to the secret, thinking incessantly is what it takes to change one's circumstances. Does this mean that no one has a reason to ever be in a position of distress, and when they are, it is because they bring it upon themselves by their constant negative thoughts?
To me, at least, it just doesn't seem like that's right - sometimes bad things happen to people unwittingly, no matter how positive their mindsets are. I highly doubt that most people who are shot by serial killers walk around persistently lamenting their misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes coincidences do happen - I mean, The Secret only tells us about the situations where one thinks of something and it happens, but not about all the infinite others where you DON'T think about something and it still happens either way, or even when you think of things and they DON'T happen.
Of course, anyone who knows about the law of attraction knows that it is a 3-step process (namely perceive - believe - receive) and if one lacks these requisites then one shouldn't expect the thing they want to happen to actually happen. That's how fanciful dreams and delusions alike may be explained as never coming to pass - through a lack of genuine belief or a flaw in one's initial visualization or whatever.
The law of attraction requires a large amount of faith in the unseen for it to work. Constant practice in it also helps, so its not really a one-time thing, you have to do it over and over again at less-dramatic levels until you get good at it. This will be when your thought constantly bellows in the law of attraction - then, even the most fanciful dreams will unfold right before your eyes according to its adherents.
In a way, the law of attraction is like prayer. You simply think of what you want and believe that an unseen, higher entity will deliver that very thing to you through the passage of time. Also, for both, if you don't get what you want after asking with true faith, more often than not it is said that the Entity you were praying to or the Universe you thought in works in "mysterious" ways. Consider that there are people who don't pray or even have much faith in things they'd like to see happen in their lives that see results. To me, that means at very least there are counter-examples that undermine the law of attraction which may point to it very well being just random coincidences being observed with a heavy sense of confirmation bias by the people who believe it to be true.
The biggest problem that I had while watching The Secret was a hidden premise in the law of attraction. This premise is rooted in a sort of solipsism - one may think things into existence exerting control over their external universe... But what about other thinking things? In many cases, we find that people have conflicting goals in respect to our own - for example, a sportsman may believe he is going to win a championship, and through this faith, eventually reaches the final. What happens if his opponent has an equal degree of faith that it is in fact them who will win and not the given sportsman? And granted, it is possible for some people to say whoever has the greater faith and willpower, even by one single unit, will win. But worse still, there can be cases where the sportsman with faith meets an opponent with no faith at all in the final and somehow loses - how can such very possible instances be explained?
I think we just live in a random, meaningless universe that is founded on random, meaningless coincidences that build on their consequences through time.
However, everyone is entitled to their own way of making sense of this apparent randomness and if the law of attraction is such a way in which one chooses to do so, then so be it.

Its just not so attractive to me.

Author's Note

Do Feed the Trolls.