But What If Manifestation Doesn’t Work?

Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, one of the big problems people experience when trying to manifest with the Law of Attraction is – wait for it – it doesn’t seem to work!

Although there are many reasons for people’s failure to manifest successfully, if you happen to be trying to use the Law of Attraction and it’s not working you can be quite dispirited.

You see, there’s a widespread viewpoint that all you have to do is form an image of what you want, picture it with great certainty, and it’ll mysteriously appear in your life.

But that’s too simple a viewpoint!

I’ve repeatedly said that the universe isn’t fickle, by which I mean is basically programmed to give you what you want, but there are some things you have to do to make this happen.

We know about the obvious ones, like ensuring you have complete belief in the process, not setting targets you don’t believe you can achieve, and taking action of some kind to move towards your objective – but are there more subtle factors at work which might prevent the law of attraction from working?

It’s a fair question and one that deserves serious consideration.

Manifestation Misery

A lot of the teaching around the law of attraction seems to focus on three simple steps: Ask – Believe – Receive.

In other words, you simply ask for what you want by presenting your request to the universe; you then try and believe that you already have it – something that is called acting “as if” – using the joy and energy you feel about the prospect of having your goals achieved to “drive” the process; and finally you wait until what you want is delivered to you by the universe.

It sounds great – essentially you just sit back and dream. And of all the places where these ideas have been put forward, none has exceeded The Secret for offering a simple representation of the process – and emphasis of how easy it is.

Rhonda Byrne – The Story of Manifesting The Secret

Manifestation Misery!

But that clearly isn’t true, because many of the people who are disappointed with the results they get other ones who have read The Secret (read a critique here.)

So what’s going on ? Why isn’t manifestation working for people?

We know that different people will have different outcomes from using Law of Attraction principles the way it’s traditionally been taught.

One possibility is that you have rather inconsistent success – you find some good things coming into your life – and that’s fantastic – but you’re not really quite sure how that happened.

Not everyone using The Secret will get results like these two magnificent manifestors – Branson and Robbins!

And in fact if the Law of Attraction is sometimes working for you and sometimes it isn’t, you’re almost certainly going to be confused: why is it sometimes effective, and why is it sometimes not?

Is it your fault, or is it the Law of Attraction which is unreliable?

The truth is, if you don’t know what’s responsible for your success you’re likely to be very confused indeed.

And of course another possibility is that it simply didn’t work for you all – no matter how hard you tried, the Law of Attraction doesn’t come up with the goods, which can be the most disheartening of all outcomes because it causes you to lose faith in yourself and in the Law of Attraction, which you may well have been relying on to completely transform your life.

I’m not sure if the third possibility is even worse: where you’ve managed to manifest things that you want, but you’ve experienced some negative side effects.

You got what you want, but you’ve also got a whole gamut of unforeseen problems, and your life’s ended up worse than it was before you started trying to manifest anything!

Indeed, it’s not uncommon for people to manifest what they think they want, then discover that their life is actually no better than it was before…or perhaps it’s even worse because now they have unexpected negative side-effects to deal with.

I remember one person who manifested a beautiful loving relationship, or so he thought, and only years later discovered that his “ideal partner” had been lying and cheating him for years, and had reduced him and his business to bankruptcy by stealing the profits.

Not good, but sadly not uncommon either.

And another possibility is that people can’t focus on the energetic requirements for successful manifestation.

Either they lose interest in what they’re trying to achieve, or they’re distracted by something else, or they simply can’t sustain a positive frame of mind for long enough to maintain the energy that is needed to drive the process of manifestation.

Quieting their mind so that they can enjoy meditation. The same must be true of people’s ability to quite their mind so that they can visualize and think about the particular thing they’re trying to manifest in their lives.

So what’s going on?

Sidebar: Before we look at that, I’d like to invite you to consider Byron Katie’s work on improving your life. Just check it out here.

Well, the fact of the matter is that it isn’t that traditional teaching about the Law of Attraction is wrong. It’s just not actually complete.

You see, there are several more aspects to the Law of Attraction which can make your attempts to use it much more successful.

And we will start with one of them which Michael Mackintosh has described as “the new method” of using the Law of Attraction.
He describes what he calls four “missing secrets” which are traditionally not taught in work about the Law of attraction.

#1 The Law of Ascension
#2 Not All Desires Are The Same
#3 It’s The Opposite of What You expect
#4 The “Obvious” Secret

Let’s look at these in order, starting in the next post.