Many advocates of the so-called Law of Attraction claim that faith is a necessary part of seeing positive Law of Attraction results. For those who may not be entirely informed the Law of Attraction is, generally speaking, the notion that people create the circumstances of their life experience through their predominant mental focus.
So if we have a mental focus then that dwells primarily on lack, whether this be a lack of money or health or a lack of something else, this lack is what will be created, literally, within our life experience. Contrary to what some people may believe, this notion of creating life experience as a result of mental focus is not a new idea. The term Law of Attraction became quite popular with the 2006 release of the movie The Secret, but creating life experiences from mental focus goes back as far as recorded history itself, and is referenced in ancient texts like the Bible.
Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
I personally do believe in the legitimacy of the Law of Attraction, which I refer to as life manifestation (intentional or unintentional). For everyone else, an easy way to determine whether life manifestation is a valid notion or not is to compare one’s typical mental focus to life circumstances. In most cases, our typical mental focus will be a match to our lives. The person who habitually dwells on lack and dissatisfaction will, in fact, often have a dissatisfying, lacking life experience.
Presuming that life manifestation is valid, and presuming as well that we can change our life experience by changing our typical mental focus, must we have faith in the new focus that we want to manifest? In other words, do we have to believe that our new focus will lead to better life circumstances and / or do we have to believe in any new stories that we tell ourselves (with the intent of manifesting better life circumstances)?
I do believe that, in order to see results from a change in mental focus, we must have conviction that a new focus will bring change. I also believe we must have conviction that the different results we’re looking for are going to happen. But I disagree with how this conviction, or faith if you prefer, is often characterized in relation to life manifestation.
As I said at the outset of this writing, advocates of life manifestation or the Law of Attraction often claim that faith is a mandatory part of successful manifestation. This infers that we must somehow convince ourselves, or more accurately convince our ego, that things will change if our mental focus changes. It is my experience that applying force, or coercion, almost never leads to desired results. So it is with faith. Telling ourselves that we must have a particular response, whether it be faith or something else, is an invitation to resistance.
What if, in fact, we don’t have certain faith about manifesting something we desire? What then? Should we beat ourselves about until we cave and faith finally shows up? (My guess is this is a quite unlikely outcome.) Or should we consider manifesting to be a lost cause for our lack of faith and simply give manifesting up altogether?
A much better approach than the two above, I believe, is to leave the notion of faith out of our manifestation focus entirely. Instead, let’s simply put our focus on what we hope to manifest, and do this on a consistent and regular basis. As we do this, as we tell ourselves the story of how we want our life experience to be (rather than how it is or how we perceive it to be), an organic faith usually arises. We begin to see the new picture we’re painting, we being to feel it, we become excited and hopeful, and yes, confident (or faithful if you’d prefer) that this new story is our new reality.
The faith that comes from this is not forced, there is no coercion: it naturally comes into being. It is this sort of faith, not something that “must” be felt, that is a genuine fuel for manifesting desires specifically, and better life experiences in general.
