APPLY THE DAILY ATTRACTION PROCESS
Long before you read this book and considered consciously applying a daily manifestation process to boost your sense of success and fulfillment, you were already manifesting the world you live in. When you were a baby and you felt hungry, your body responded with the cry reflex, which brought your mother or father or other caregiver to you to satisfy your need. The act of manifestation is the core process through which you have survived every day of your life.
Now, as an adult, it’s important to acknowledge that you’re already fairly good at manifesting what you need. One way or another, you get up and manifest the money you need to pay for food and housing and other things. You work to manifest and maintain loving relationships. Same with good health and all the rest. Everything you see around you is caught up in your own manifestation powers.
How does this work? It’s really very simple. You feel a need within you. You visualize what you imagine you require in order to satisfy that need or desire. Then—and here’s the key of this chapter—you focus your attention concertedly in the direction that you imagine will supply the fulfillment of your need . . . right?
If you seek abundance of whatever kind—material, emotional, spiritual—you move through the process of attracting to you whatever you want. Haanel says this succinctly:
Abundance will not come to you out of the sky; neither will it drop into your lap. But a conscious realization of the Law of Attraction, plus the intention to bring it into operation, plus the will to carry out this purpose, will bring about the materialization of your desire.
If you are out of work and need money, you will feel this need acutely at some point. This inner emotional pressure will stimulate ideas about how to make money, and then you will act on this idea by going out into the world to manifest what you need.
It’s the same with relationships. If you’re lonely and hungry for love, you’ll experience an intense yearning, which will stimulate a vision of the ideal relationship you want, which in turn will generate pragmatic ideas of what you need to do. Then you’ll act on those ideas and begin to attract to you the person you hunger for. I’ve written extensively about this particular application of the attraction meditation process in Let Love Find You, and the principle and the process are the same here.
What we’re doing in this book is raising into clear pragmatic consciousness all of the steps needed to truly satisfy your desires. Perhaps your ego mind conjures up an ideal sexual mate and you find that ego ideal, but the relationship remains unfulfilling. In this manifestation process, you will know that there are deeper steps to be made if you’re to manifest a lasting relationship that meets your core desires.
Haanel’s approach to all this is fundamental because, as we’ve seen, he challenges you to tap deeper than your personal ego so that you are guided not just by your individual life experience and programming but by a universal perspective on your needs. I’ve walked you through this process of quieting your ego mind, looking inward to your Source, tapping insight and guidance from the Infinite Mind, and then bringing this insight and creative power back into your personal consciousness, where it will stimulate your imagination and thoughts.
That’s the masterful approach to manifestation, and it leads us to a primary question: What is imagination, and how can you put your imagination to work in your conscious mind, so that you have a clear ideal vision of what you want to attract into your life?
We’ve seen that for high-level, long-term results, your personal imagination must be stimulated by your inner passion and inspired by the guidance and wisdom of Universal Mind if you’re to generate an ideal vision that will propel your life forward to satisfy your desire. Imagination is that infinite meeting point between individual and Infinite. Ideas just pop into your head out of the blue—that’s imagination. Here’s what Haanel says:
Imagination is the light by which we can penetrate new worlds of thought and experience. Imagination is a plastic power, molding the things of sense into new forms and ideals. Imagination is the constructive form of thought which must precede every constructive form of action.
Note that imagination is a “power” that takes your present reality and generates something new from your available resources at hand. This is creative power! In order to manifest something new, you must construct in your imagination the ideal image or thought and then proceed with constructive action.
Over and over, Haanel insists that you must focus your attention diligently not toward the details of your vision, but toward the ideal vision itself, the imagination in your mind’s eye. And you are to focus in the present moment upon your vision as if it were already complete—that’s so important!
We are first to believe that our desire has already been fulfilled. Its accomplishment will then follow. This is a concise direction for making use of the creative power of thought—by impressing on the universal subjective mind the particular thing which we desire as an already existing fact.
You must experience your imagined ideal vision as perfect in your own mind, and believe that it is in the process of manifesting in the outer world. Hold true to your dream, as they say.
If you desire to visualize and manifest a different environment, the process is to hold your ideal in mind until your vision has been made real. Give no thought to persons, places, or things; these have no place in the absolute. The environment you desire will contain everything necessary; the right persons and the right things will come at the right time and in the right place. Natural laws work in a perfectly natural and harmonious manner; everything seems to “just happen.”
But to work within and activate these natural laws of attraction, you must discipline your mind to focus on your vision constantly for as long as it takes for the outer world to respond to your inner dream. This means that you must focus your mind’s attention over time upon your ideal intent, until you attract to your life the material expression of what you are imagining.
In order to cultivate the imagination it must be exercised. Constructive imagination means mental labor, by some considered to be the hardest kind of labor, but it yields the greatest returns. All the great things in life have come to men and women who had the capacity to think, to imagine, and to make their dreams come true.
The practical reason that I keep insisting that you develop a daily or even hourly manifestation practice is because imagination “must be exercised.” It takes concentration over time to make your dreams come true. But please don’t think that I’m asking you to do something that is drudgery. Just the opposite: I’m asking you first to get in touch with your core driving desire, which you already at emotional levels strongly yearn to focus upon, then to use that passion to motivate and animate your “mental labor” so that labor is a pleasure.
Concentration is much misunderstood; there seems to be an idea of effort or activity associated with it, when just the contrary is necessary. In true concentration you should be so interested in your thought, so engrossed in your subject as to be conscious of nothing else. Such concentration leads to intuitive perception and immediate insight into the nature of the object concentrated upon.
If you spend most of your time worrying about what you don’t have, if you let your attention drift all over the place rather than holding it where it will serve you best, if you let your thoughts fixate on negative attitudes and emotions, then chances are high that you will not succeed with your vision.
Your primary personal power, as mentioned before, is your power of attention. You get what you focus on. My hope is that this book and set of online support systems will help you to manage your power of attention more effectively, so that you focus more often on what you want and less often on what you don’t have or don’t want. And what positive incentive will we be using to spur this focused attention?
The incentive of attention is interest. The greater the interest, the greater the attention; the greater the attention, the greater the action. So begin by paying attention. Before long you will have aroused interest. This interest will attract more attention, and this attention will produce more interest, and so on. This practice will enable you to cultivate the power of attention.
Charles Haanel insists that everything you need is already present around you—you’re simply not focused on it, and thus not attracting it (through your power of attention) to become part of your life. Hopefully this book and process will help you focus and thus attract what you hunger for. Haanel points out over and over that nine-tenths of the work in satisfying your needs is done in your own mind, not in the outside world.
And indeed this is true—once you get clear in your head what you truly need to be happy, these external environments tend to appear almost miraculously. But it’s no miracle; you’ve simply applied a deeper logic to the manifestation process. Rather than our ego presence going out and trying to grab what you think you need, your higher presence attracts what you need to you.
Let’s take a closer look at this whole notion of attraction. Haanel says this about the inner dynamic of the process:
In manifestation, your predominant thought or mental attitude is the magnet. The Law of Attraction states that “like attracts like.” Consequently your mental attitudes will invariably attract such conditions as correspond to their nature. If you wish a change in conditions, all that’s necessary is changing your thought; this will in turn change your mental attitude, which will in turn change your personality, which will in turn change the persons, things, conditions, and experiences that you meet in life.
And so we return to the most resonant notion that Haanel brings to our discussion: If we focus our desired vision not on outer manifestations but on the manifestations of a more positive, brighter, and more loving inner world, then the outer world will naturally respond positively, because indeed like does attract like.
The Law of Attraction will certainly and unerringly bring to you the conditions, environment, and experiences in life corresponding with your habitual, characteristic, predominant mental attitude. It’s not what you think once in a while but your predominant mental attitude that counts.
So what is your inner dream? If you hunger for a new person in your life, what is the inner change that you hope that person will bring to your heart’s experience? Go into the Silence and let your higher wisdom answer that question for you, not as a philosophical ideal, but as a feeling ideal. How do you really want to feel inside your own skin? Tap into that core positive emotion as an ideal vision and focus on manifesting that feeling inside you. Then that feeling will attract like people and situations that will express and nurture that feeling.
Create the mental image; make it clear, distinct, perfect; hold it firmly in your mind and heart. The ways and means will develop; supply will follow the demand; you will be led to do the right thing at the right time and in the right way.
By focusing on manifesting an inner emotional experience rather than an outer material environment that stimulates an inner experience, you’re again cutting to the chase rather than getting lost in details. You’re clarifying that you want most material things because of how they will make you feel. And you’re choosing to focus on first manifesting the feeling inside your own being, and then letting the Law of Attraction naturally bring you the outer expression of your inner feeling.
I mentioned in the beginning that Charles Haanel made a gigantic leap in his understanding of the power of attraction in the universe when he directly equated the Law of Attraction with the power of love:
The principle which gives thought the dynamic power to correlate with its object and therefore master every adverse human experience is the Law of Attraction, which is another name for love. There is no getting away from the Law of Love. It is the feeling that imparts vitality to thought. Feeling is desire, and desire is love. Thought impregnated with love becomes invincible. It is the combination of thoughts and love which forms the irresistible force called the Law of Attraction.
What a quote! Haanel has given us the master key to the manifestation of fulfillment in our lives. Science has been busy for the last hundred years since Einstein proving that the universe operates on basic laws of attraction that hold everything from subatomic particles to galaxies together. Haanel is simply applying the outer laws to our inner lives. Love is the power of attraction that brings us what we need to be whole.
Haanel often uses the words “resonance” or “harmony” in place of “love,” but they’re the same thing, and deep down we feel good when we resonate in harmony with our own selves and with others.
And what determines if we are harmonious and focused on positive loving feelings or disharmonious and caught up in judgmental, fearful, antagonistic, or other negative feelings?
The key is to be aware of and utilize the Law of Attraction every day and as often as possible. Your mental attitude is the most important factor for generating happiness and abundance.
As we saw earlier, we can spend years in therapy and never really change our attitudes, unless at some point we simply make the choice to stop focusing on negative thoughts and beliefs and attitudes and judgments, and choose instead to take charge of our own minds and focus our attention toward a loving vision of who we are.
We are what we focus on. We evolve in the direction that we focus our attention on. We have the power to shift our focus of attention at will. The choice is always before us. The challenge is to remember to make the shift away from fear-based thoughts and imaginings toward love-empowered thoughts and imaginings.
Let me review what we’ve already learned from Haanel concerning the process for creating more fulfilling and loving inner environments in our own minds and hearts—a process that is also the basis of effective cognitive therapy and successful meditation programs. He says it simply. If you want to change your inner life:
. . . hold in mind the condition desired; affirm it as an already existing fact. This indicates the value of a powerful affirmation. By constant repetition it becomes a part of you. You are actually changing yourself; you are making yourself what you want to be.
Over the next few weeks, as you regularly enter into the Silence and open up to insights into the quality of inner feeling you desire deep down to be happy and fulfilled, you’ll begin to generate a powerful ideal feeling imbued with the attracting power of love. You’ll come to know with great gusto what you really want. You’ll feel connected with your creative power to manifest this inner atmosphere and environment based on love rather than fear. Your inner vision of your ideal emotional condition will become perfect and complete.
And you will be ready for our final Focus Phrase, which will evolve your entire personality and inner sense of emotional well-being in the positive direction you are choosing and focusing on. Here’s the seventh and final Focus Phrase of this manifestation process:
“Each new moment is manifesting my dream.”
For thousands of years, human beings in all cultures around the world have developed religions in which human thought can directly impact the material world. The power of mind over matter became generally debunked as traditional Newtonian science gained influence over people’s beliefs. But recently, more and more scientific studies have demonstrated that focused thought can indeed impact the outer material world. A hundred years ago Charles Haanel certainly believed this to be true and based his entire manifestation process on that belief: Thought has power to impact the material world.
The underlying principles of subatomic physics state very clearly that the entire universe is one great resonant entity in which each tiny energetic particle in the universe is connected and influenced by every other particle. Indeed each particle is constantly moving back and forth from form to energy and interacting with the summation of energy fields surrounding it. The whole universe seems to consist of energetic bundles and waves that cannot be defined except in resonant participation with all other energetic bundles.
But how do human thought, desire, intent, and focus fit into this new scientific understanding of life? Traditional Greek philosophy dictated that thought is not a material phenomenon at all, and that consciousness operates in a different dimension than do material things. However, new theories in physics now insist that for the universe to work, there are indeed more than three dimensions at play—at least seven at last count.
Consciousness does seem to function both within the space-time continuum and also in other dimensions, thus our ability to tap into the Source that, by definition, as the Creator of the universe, operates beyond its physical manifestation. And the Haanel vision makes perfect sense in this expanded sense of the interplay of the material world and the more subtle dimensions that must underlie three-dimensional functioning.
Perhaps the most important research that demonstrates how your inner thoughts have the power to affect the physical world around you is the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) of the last thirty years, now completed but still just beginning to impress our minds with its discoveries. You can visit the official Princeton website at www .princeton.edu/˜pear to read more deeply into this important set of studies conducted by the Princeton Engineering Department, but here’s the gist of the research.
Many hundreds of subjects were asked to sit for half an hour and focus their power of intent directly at a random number generator to see if they could will the machine to generate more ones than zeros. The scientists doing the study wanted to prove Einstein wrong in his statement that “the intent of the experimenter influences the outcome of the experiment.”
To make a fascinating long story very short, the statistical data showed that the random number generator did in fact skew its performance in the direction the subjects willed it to skew. After more than ten years of trying to refute the data, the scientists had to admit that indeed the human mind somehow can muster a force as yet unidentified and change the performance of a very physical and trustworthy machine beyond any chance effects.
This was a massive discovery. They then did studies that for the first time proved that ESP is scientifically valid. One human being can focus on a particular shape or number, aim this mental image toward another person in another room, and influence that person’s choice of shapes or numbers. Again, the power of focused thought and intent was demonstrated to influence the outside world, in this case another person’s mental activity.
The head of PEAR, a conservative aeronautical engineer whom I knew personally when I was at Princeton, then expanded his study with the random number generator to see what happened when more than one person participated in a test study. The results were jolting and proved Haanel’s assertion that love is a physical force in the universe.
When two unrelated people focused their attention at the random number generator, the effect was doubled. But get this: When two people in a love relationship participated together, the effect was tripled. They had more power to influence the outside world than two people who were not emotionally related.
I relate these facts because with this and related research now formally completed in the scientific community, each of us must now realize that we are indeed impacting the world around us with our focused intentful thoughts. When we think negative thoughts about a person and aim these thoughts with passion at that person, we’re actually assaulting that person physically. Thus the need for a new sense of responsibility for how we employ our thoughts.
Furthermore, from Haanel’s perspective, when you generate an ideal image in your mind and concertedly broadcast that ideal mental image outward, you are indeed impacting the outer world with your focused intent, and the outer world will respond predictably. This is a clear, demonstrated scientific model for how the manifestation process actively brings you what you purposefully intend to receive.
If you have been faithful to your ideal, you will hear the call when circumstances are ready to materialize your plans, and results will correspond in the exact ratio of your fidelity to your ideal. The ideal steadily held is what predetermines and attracts the necessary conditions for its fulfillment.
So each day, pause to generate and reinforce your ideal, and broadcast it outward. Nurture the inner feeling you desire, and the world around you will begin to respond, not just as a foggy fantasy of manifestation power, but as a scientifically proven process in which you attract to you what you truly desire.
Let’s finish this chapter by returning to the core affirmation that Haanel taught, because it will help you to focus on the inner attitudes and conditions that will then empower the outer environment that nurtures your inner reality. Here is the quote you read before; now you will understand its power more fully:
The affirmation “I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious and happy” will bring about harmonious conditions. The reason for this is because the affirmation is in strict accordance with the Truth, and when Truth appears every form of error or discord must necessarily disappear.
If you regularly hold that basic affirmation in your mind, with those seven inner qualities that together generate the core positive feeling we call happiness, then you will actively step by step shift your focus of attention away from the negative, fear-based thoughts that pull you down to the positive, inspired thoughts that will attract everything you need in the outside world to resonate with your new inner experience.
Finally, here’s Haanel’s formula in a nutshell:
Earnest desire will bring about confident expectation, which in turn will be reinforced by firm demand. These three cannot fail to bring about attainment, because the earnest desire is the feeling, the confident expectation is the thought, and the firm demand is the will. Feeling gives vitality to thought and the will holds thought steadily until the law of Growth brings the vision into manifestation.
So be it.
Now that we’ve reached the end of the formal training part of this book, my challenge to you is that each new day, at least once, you spend three minutes or more doing the seven-step manifestation process that you’ve learned from this discussion.
I also encourage you to return to earlier chapters at some point and reread the explanation of each of the seven Focus Phrases, so that you begin to internalize the deeper aspects of each statement of intent. The Focus Phrases are portals that direct your attention toward vast realms of inner experience—and like I said before, each time you say one of them, you’ll have a new experience.
If you have an amazing experience when saying a Focus Phrase, be sure not to try to repeat that experience the next time, because you never will. Time moves on, each moment is unique, and it’s the newness of the experience that carries the insight and power and creativity you’re seeking in this program.
Each day you will have particular needs and desires that are prominent in your mind. Most of these needs and desires will be of the temporary kind: financial, interpersonal, health-related, and so forth. It’s fine to focus on temporary material or emotional needs and to use this manifestation process to move you in the direction of getting what you want. But hold in mind that temporary needs and hungers reflect a deeper yearning for a shift in the overall quality and focus of your life, so tap your deeper Source for insight, inspiration, and creative power.
Most people tend to focus on external things and situations they want to manifest in their lives. But as we’ve seen, it’s the internal attitudes and feelings that really need attention and advancement. So when you do the daily manifestation practice, be sure to give time and attention to quieting negative thoughts and reactions, and to nurturing positive feelings and attitudes, because that’s the change that transforms your life.
As a training adjunct that can make all the difference in truly succeeding with this program, we offer free online audio and video guidance through the manifestation process, so that you don’t have to make overmuch effort to remember and move through the process. This multimedia support ensures that, wherever you are, you can pause and gain access to guidance and support, plus stay up to date on new developments in this program and the ever growing Tapping the Source community. Just pause and go online, any time of the day or night, to enjoy streaming audio and video guidance. You can also download the video files to your computer and put them into your mobile phone to play on the go while commuting or at work. You can also burn a DVD version of the guided manifestation videos to play on your home entertainment system.
We’ve made this free online support and reinforcement system as effortless as possible so that your focus can remain more on the new experiences that come to you each time you move through the process rather than on discipline and memorization issues.
And so, here’s the core method. Be sure that you master and include the three-step breath-awareness process in item 2 so that throughout you remain aware of your breathing, which, as we’ve seen, is the “awareness medium” that guidance, insight, creativity, and manifestation function within: