The Science of Blue Feathers
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by: sas_hkalchemy
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Word Count: 1255
There are plenty of people who have become very much attached to the ‘law of attraction’ in one way or another, carving out their position, either ‘for’ or (less understandably) ‘against.’ Some of the articles I have read recently are almost evangelical in their fervor – it’s as if the authors are trying to convince the readers that they are right, one way or the other. This says something very interesting about human nature, I suppose – we obviously feel the need to align ourselves with some position or other, to be identified as a follower of this or a proponent of that or a arch-skeptic of the other. I guess we need to ‘belong’ to something, and this also explains, perhaps, the success of social networking on the Internet, where ‘birds of a feather stick together.’ More about feathers later.
I am not interested in selling the law of attraction. I do not care if you, the reader, are convinced that it’s ‘true’ or useful. I will not try to make you believe it. In fact, the whole idea of a thing called a ‘law’ of attraction doesn’t really appeal to me – I live in the post-modern world, and the talking in terms of ‘laws’ of the universe doesn’t sit very easily; it all sounds very Newtonian and mechanistic. But, for want of a better expression, and since everyone seems to be using it, I continue to refer to the ‘law of attraction,’ often placing the phrase in inverted commas in an attempt to highlight that referring to it as such is a rather contrived thing to do.
But having thought about it, read about it, tried it out and lived with it, I am personally persuaded that a certain way of thinking, of feeling, of doing things, leads to more success, greater health, more money and better relationships. This is how I live my life. And that’s the point – it’s not a ‘tool,’ something you can try out to see if it works, use it sometimes but not all the time – it’s a conscious way of living.
Does it sound like I’m trying to defend myself? I hope not. I’m describing the way I’ve come to see things. And here are three reasons why I’ve reached this conclusion, though I hesitate to use that word since I am always evolving, and conclusions are not what life is all about.
It makes sense
When I look around at the world, and when I look back over the course of my own life (with the benefit of hindsight of course, it seems rather obvious that the law of attraction has been in operation. When my perspectives have been narrow, limited and closed down, my life has reflected this. When I have started thinking bigger, my experience has expanded and taken on this larger quality. When I speak to people, I can pretty much tell whether they’re successful or not on the basis of the things they say. Some people are have a ‘poor’ mentality and seem to think that life is hard, money is hard to come by and, sure enough, they are not wealthy and not successful. People who are wealthier and more successful have a different way of speaking, and this clearly comes from a different way of thinking about the world.
It works
Some people seem to think that they can ‘test’ the law of attraction to see if it works. Fair enough, I suppose – why should you accept that something is true without any evidence? The thing about this, however, is that it takes time and patience. Judging from a viewing of The Secret, you’d think that all you have to do is wish for something to happen and there it is. But the reality is that it takes time – you need to keep your intention in your mind, it needs to be a dominating thought, and that requires that you train yourself – there’s no free lunch! I suspect most people who try to use the law of attraction consciously fail because they give up after a little while. Persistence is the key.
There’s an interesting little exercise you can do to start acquiring the skill and discipline of consciously maintaining your intention. Its described properly in a book called Illusions, by Richard Bach. You pick a simple object, something which doesn’t mean anything to you and which you would not come across in your daily life, like a blue feather. For the next day or so, try to think about the blue feather as often as you can and in as much detail as you can. Stick post-it notes around which say ‘blue feather,’ try to get a clear mental image of the feather, find a photo of a blue feather, meditate on it and try to keep it in your mind. Sure enough, if you do this, you will find your blue feather.
Napoleon Hill, in Think and Grow Rich, gave many, many examples of people who had achieved their goals through the power of thought. For me, this is evidence that there is something real about the law of attraction.
It has a scientific basis
My training is in physical Science so I am naturally inclined to give scientific credentials a heavy weighting in considering whether something is valid. I’m no Richard Dawkins and I am certainly not setting up Science as the only basis for making sense of the world – there are plenty of things we cannot understand and cannot square with what Science tells us. Nevertheless, Science is a powerful and pervasive part of the modern (or should that be post-modern?) world, so it’s worth thinking about the Science behind the law of attraction. This is something I intend to explore more fully in a future article, but here are some initial thoughts.
The real world is, in a very important sense, not accessible to us. That we live in a world of our own creation is so obvious that it hardly needs saying. Light is just a disturbance in an electromagnetic energy field, and so are X-rays, microwaves and radio waves. Sound is a disturbance – a set of compressions and rarefactions – in some medium such as air, water of metal. Te images and sounds we see and hear are our own brains’ interpretation of these energy disturbances. Smell and taste are similar, being our brains’ interpretation of electrical signals caused by molecules coming into contact with receptors in the nose or on the tongue. It is the brain that takes the raw sensory input and creates a coherent interpretation. We really do all experience a different world.
In addition to this, your brain is constantly ‘deciding’ what is important and what is not, what to pay attention to and what to filter out. This combination of the brain’s meaning-making and filtering creates reality. If you can direct the filtering system more consciously, you can start to change your reality.
Conclusion
I don’t recommend you take my word for it. Go out and do more research. Read some books. Does it sound reasonable? Talk to people. See if the way they talk relates to the way they live. Does the law of attraction make sense of your experience? For me, the ‘law of attraction’ makes things ‘click.’ It’s the glue that binds all of my disparate experience together. But this is a personal, experiential thing. It’s not an intellectual position, something I have to defend and proselytize about. It’s a way of life.
Try it for yourself. Try to find that blue feather.
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