Isle of Lyngvi

The law of attraction, commonly referred to as The Secret, has become a popular conceit of the modern mindset. The idea behind it is that by maintaining a positive vision of what you want along with the proper mindset you can attract what you want to you. While how it functions is still a mystery, examples of it in my own life have been far too prevalent and in some cases dramatic for me to ignore it. The effect seems to be strongly connected to synchronicity and to operate in accordance with cybernetic principles. What follows are some of my tips and techniques for working with the law of attraction.

First is that what seems to be the most important factor is the combination of the vision and the right emotional tone. This is where the first warning comes into play. If you are constantly running through worst case scenarios and feeling doomed then this is likely how you will experience your life, as a serious of disasters which you feel trapped by and despair. When you have formed a vision of what you want make it as rich in terms of sensory experience as you can. Include what you can see, hear and what it would feel like. Make the image big and bright, the sounds clear and loud and the feelings very intense. When you have this image, make it a movie. Run it through and see it move. Now step into it. See out of your own eyes as it is happening. What you can do at this point is create a little hand gesture and catch phrase for this. Take all of those sensations of the goal experience and double them in strength. It is at this point that you make the gesture and say the phrase. This is what NLP calls an anchor. Use this anchor and call up the vision and the feeling regularly and especially whenever you feel yourself drifting into negative feelings and thoughts. Whenever you use this anchor you should also make the sensations stronger. Double them every time you call them up. Warning number two, it is very important that the feeling you concentrate on is the feeling of having reached your goal not the feeling of wanting it.

Once you have started broadcasting this signal of what you want, the system of the world will start signaling back. I call these signals synchronic confirmations. An alternate interpretation of this effect is that through selective attention you start to notice things relating to the desires on which you are focusing. Either way the result is the same. The signals back come on the synchronicity channel. You will notice these signals either because they relate obviously to the desire or because they feel a little like it. These signals must be taken seriously. Pay attention to them and if they represent an opportunity take them. There are two reasons for this. One is that what you reinforce increases. The other is that you are training your unconscious to recognize pathways that lead towards your goals.

Vectors are those angles by which fulfillment of your desire can come to you. The universe can’t provide you with something that is impossible. When you have created your vision you should also do anything in your power to make it easy for that vision to come true. If you’ve asked for money then set up a number of ways that money can come to you. If you are looking for a particular person put your self out where people like the one in your vision are likely to be. If you don’t set up vectors along which your desires can come to you they will quite often come to you despite yourself but things go much quicker and smoother if you make sure to make everything as easy as possible.

Another principle I’ve recently discovered to increase the propagation of an attraction signal is called priming and amping. I tend to do my law of attraction visioning in discrete sessions, frequently while walking with a particular friend of mine. What we will do is develop the vision we want in one session and then revisit the vision in the next session. On that second session we have a tendency to exaggerate the vision sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. Early results of the ridiculous session can occur as quickly as an hour later. These sessions can be separated by a day or two or can be as close together as a walk before dinner and a walk after dinner. This leads us directly into the next tip, the mastermind group.

This is a facet of the law of attraction program that The Secret leaves out. The normal approach to mastermind groups is needlessly formal. There is no need for a mastermind group to be large or follow a recipe book of rules. All you need is someone else that gets the secret and with whom you can discuss your vision. As long as you can maintain a positive non-judgmental discussion you have a mastermind group. The point is to build up, rather than tear down, each others vision for the world and the feelings that go with it. And you will find that as you share and brainstorm about you visions that you are greater than the sum of your parts, synergy as Buckminster Fuller called it. It may even seem like out of the two, or more, of you a third mind has formed. If you maintain this collaboration for a while you may attune to the point you can see each others synchronic confirmation.

Now that you have your vision and feeling anchored, you are looking for synchronic signals towards your desires, you’ve set up vectors that your desire can come in on, are taking advantage of every opportunity and you’ve already primed and amped your wishes… now what? Maybe its been a day, maybe its been a week, hell maybe its been a year but here you are and you don’t have what you want. In fact, your life is full of things you don’t want. You are starting to think… hey man this is bullshit. Alright. Now stop and think. Have you been applying these principles to things you DON’T want? Have you been thinking about a vision of what you don’t want, intensifying it, experiencing the feelings of it and then maybe giving that a name or a catch phrase? Have you been looking at your experience for proof that what you don’t want is on its way or here to stay? Have you been setting up vectors for what you don’t want to come to you, or even just leaving open existing vectors? If there’s a person who treats you like crap why do you still hang out with them? Have you been amping your fears and complaints every chance you get? Well stop it. What you feed increases. So stop feeding what you don’t want. Shut down as many vectors to what you don’t want as you can. Any time you find yourself feeding what you don’t want simply move your attention to what you do want. And remember its the emotional tone that matters. If you find yourself feeling like what you don’t want take a moment just relax your breathing. And as your breathing becomes calm and smooth fire off that anchor for the feeling and vision of what you want.

So take the principles I’ve outlined here, and start feeding what you want with your attention. Forget about feeding what you don’t want. You don’t need to believe it will work, you just need to play with it like a game. When synchronicity starts responding and you start to see confirmation, smile because now the game starts to get really fun. Find other people who are willing to play the game with you. Once you have the vision and you have the feeling then its only a matter of time before the universe realizes them in a unique experience for you. All of these tricks are just to speed up that matter of time.

Any person is a component in a cybernetic system of the social situations and contexts that they generally interact with. What component will have the most influence on the outcome of an interaction depends on what cyberneticists call requisite variety. Requisite variety is the number of options available to the component as a response to an input. The component, and therefore the person, with the most options available is at a distinct advantage in an interaction. This holds in social situations.

Let us take as a hypothetical situation two men competing for the attention and affection of a woman. The first has three basic tactics talking about shared experiences, physical sexuality, and violence. The other is additionally capable of intellectual conversation, mocking, and flirting. The second male can vary his response to the female or the first male more often and with greater subtlety. With his greater number of conversational gambits he can maneuver the other male into situations that he simply doesn’t have a response to or that he’ll make the wrong response to and he can engage the woman’s attention for more of her possible moods. Recently I witnessed an interaction very similar to my simplified description above. The more flexible male shut down his competitor to the point the competitor developed a new option, he drank until he passed out and didn’t have to compete anymore.

Another example of requisite variety at work is in the job interview situation. The interview questions are essentially setting the variety necessary to succeed. If the interviewee does not have enough options in their behaviour to answer all of the questions offered satisfactorily then his application is rejected. Requisite variety in largely expressed here by being able to recognize the questions behind the question and in being able to reframe your experience to be relevant answers.

There are three points in the response process that we can concentrate on increasing our variety in a useful way. We can work on our inputs, our processing, or our output. If we choose to concentrate on our input than what we would do is increase the subtlety of the distinctions we make. We would work on increasing the number of patterns we recognize. If we concentrate on our output then we increase the number of responses we can make. Increase the subtlety of our output and learn new ways of expressing ourselves.Finally, we can work on our processing. This is perhaps the most difficult to do. What you would want to do with the processing is to arrange the connections between the input and the best possible output in relation to it. In this what you are trying to do is look at the input you are getting in terms of what input you want from the other person and output. The processing phase is in this way the most complicated.

The processing step is most related to the idea of feedback loops. You have to have some model of the response you are looking for from the people you are communicating with. You have to make some kind of comparison between the signal you are getting and the one you want. Then you have to have some idea of what action on your part is likely to lead to the other people making their signal more like the one you want. In general we all do this naturally but it is quite possible to improve how well we do this. The number of potential processing steps is equal to the number of inputs you are capable of recognizing multiplied by the number of outputs you can do multiplied by the number of outcomes you want. The internal processes can quickly get unwieldy. Thankfully most of them are operated almost entirely unconsciously.

When engaged in this kind of fine tuning work on your responses the goal is not to make all of these options conscious for you. But to engage in a standard learning cycle. We want to move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. In general all of your processing and most of your input and output are unconsciously competent at what they are doing and unconsciously incompetent at what you are not doing. One way of going about this is to watch what other people are doing that you are not. Or looking for where the output you are doing is leading away from the response you are looking for. Once you have identified where you are incompetent you have already moved into phase two. Now what you need to do is find out what someone competent in these particular patterns do. Practice this until you are competent. Then keep practicing it until you are doing the more effective pattern without thinking about it.