Contributor: Law of attraction believer Max of powerfulintentions.org and the Empower Network.
I have been deeply involved in spirituality for a number of years now. From a young age I felt a burning desire to know what was real and true. I knew that there was more to life than I was seeing. I felt incomplete, disconnected and lost.
I had a very comfortable childhood and yet I always felt something was missing. Like many people, I assumed that by perfectly arranging the circumstances of my life I could find this completeness. This belief was seen through by the time I finished high school. During my four years there I had desire after desire fulfilled, until there was nothing more I could ask for. I had a large group of friends, a great girlfriend, I was a star athlete, and was even crowned prom king. I was acutely aware of this blessed period of my life, and yet, the hole in my heart was as big as ever. My life had conformed to exactly what I wanted, but I felt the same as I always had: incomplete. From that moment I knew that simply getting what I liked and avoiding what I didn’t like was not going to be enough.
This realization forced my to look deeper into life. I started devouring books on philosophy and religion. I became taken by the ideas of Buddhism and Indian philosophy. In these teachings I found confirmation of something I had sensed my entire life: that there was a deeper reality to life that the vast majority of people are unaware of. And that this unawareness is the cause of all suffering, confusion, and discontentment in life. I was told, and I believed, that only by discovering this truth for myself could I find lasting peace and happiness.
From that moment on I did everything I could to find a way to access this deeper consciousness. I began meditating, doing yoga, ingesting psychotropic plants, as well as reading, listening, and watching various spiritual teachers alive and dead. During a particularly condensed period of focus I experienced a fundamental shift in my awareness. I still can’t put into words what happened, but it completely changed the course of my life. Equal parts clarity and confusion poured into my experience; however one thing was certain: I still felt incomplete.
I was still searching.
Years later this experience continued to reverberate through my life, slowly dissolving all forms of resistance. My life became easier and easier, but my seeking was as strong as ever. I felt I had reached a dead end in my spiritual search. I couldn’t keep waiting for enlightenment to fix my life. I realized that, in a way, I had been using spirituality to avoid fully engaging with my life. Life was passing me by and I realized I need to stop waiting and start living the life I wanted now before it was too late.
Around this time, a friend of mine who I met while teaching English in South Korea asked me if I would be interested in joining an online network marketing company that he was a part of. It was certainly not something I would typically be interested in. Being a business person and striving to make tons of money had always felt unnatural to me. Additionally, this offer raised all the red flags of a scam. However, I trusted my friend and more importantly, I was tired of working uninspiring odd jobs, making just enough money to scrape by. I needed a change desperately. I knew money couldn’t buy happiness, but it could allow me to do more of things I wanted to. The biggest appeal was the freedom of time. If there was any possibility that I could only work a couple of hours a day, work on my own schedule, and make enough money to live comfortably, I wanted to hear more. So despite my skepticism, I decided to join the company. With a low start up cost I had nothing to lose.
Upon joining, I immediately started delving into the training. I had absolutely no experience with marketing so I needed to learn everything I could. The first thing I read was a short list of daily activities that were described as essential to success. Two of these steps were listening to and reading books about personal development every day. In all my time reading about spirituality I had specifically avoided such material. I saw the areas of self-help and personal development as of a “lesser level” than what I considered the deeper teachings of spirituality. However, I became curious about it since almost all the people involved in this company seemed to talk about the law of attraction.
Before this time, I had heard about The Secret, but never really given it much attention. However, the fact that many of the top earners in the company always seemed to be talking about the law of attraction encouraged me to give it a second look. While looking The Secret up on Amazon I saw a review which said “For better reading try the books by the Hicks, especially Ask and It Is Given.” So, I skipped The Secret and went for that book instead. As I began reading I was shocked. I had never heard the law of attraction described in this way. I learned that it wasn’t really about manifesting your desires. That was part of it, but the true goal was to align oneself with the Source. By doing so, life would naturally began to manifest what was most important without any additional effort on your own part. I learned that my life was a reflection of this alignment or misalignment and that everything good in my life depended on it.
In a way, I had actually already discovered this already. I knew from experience that the less I struggled the more life would be friendly to me, for the only thing struggle leads to is pain and confusion. I started to see that my ideas of spirituality were too limiting and they needed to expand to include all aspects of life. I saw that there was nothing wrong with living a life of abundance and that more for me was not less for you. I also saw all the ways I had sabotaged my success through fear under the disguise of moral and spiritual high ground.
Through of all of this I have become excited to use this business as a way to challenge myself to grow and break down all my self imposed limitations. I kind of see it as a testing ground for the law of attraction. It’s easy to become an armchair philosopher with all of this stuff, but I want to put it into practice and figure there’s no better testing ground than my own financial circumstances. In doing so, I have been amazed at all the hidden self doubt, fear, and uncertainty that has been arising. It’s never been so clear how prone I am to thinking negative and how those thoughts attract similar experiences. I never realized how deep the feeling of mistrust was within me. But not anymore. I can no longer succumb to these negative feelings of fear and doubt. I know that they are what prevent me from living the life that I was meant to live. I’m tired of playing small in life. I am on a mission to live life, in all its aspects, to the fullest.
If you are interested in what I’m doing (my law of attraction testing ground!), I can give you some info if you enter your email address at empowernetwork.com. You can also listen to this audio clip to get a sense of the type of people the company attracts.
Max
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Yes, the Law of Attraction works and the Empower Network works as well 🙂
It’s good that you gave a second look to The Secret. It’s important to remember the LOA reflects our dominant and most practiced thoughts. We can’t spend 5 minutes on a new thought and 23 hours and 55 minutes thinking the old thoughts and have anything change. If we want wealth, but constantly focus on our poverty, and we will reap poverty as a result of the Law of Attraction. And positive action is important as well.
We must also understand that the Universe works at its own speed. Although instant manifestation may sometimes happen, our desire will manifest in the universe’s timeframe rather than ours! It could even be that the universe knows that we are not yet ready to receive our desire.
Thanks for your contribution. Yes, the 5-minute comment is true. However, very often I can think about something for five minutes in the morning, then FORGET about it (deliberately sometimes) for the rest of the day or week, and have it manifest itself shortly. This is that “letting go” thing that I love so much.
Do you have a true law of attraction story, BTW?
The thoroughness with which Max detailed his history and then his opening up to a greater understanding is what makes this stand out.
I love these stories, Mollie — thank you Max for sharing yours.
Evan