Episode 12 – Action and the Law of Attraction

Episode Summary

In this episode we discussed a little more detail about the law of attraction and the necessity of incorporating action into your manifestation efforts.

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Show Transcript

All right, hello, everybody, and welcome to yet another episode of the Emotional Embuffination podcast. I am your host, David Enevoldsen. And here on Emotional Embuffination, we are training to become emotionally buff enough to overcome any conflict in life. And just as importantly and going along with that is that this is about discovering new levels of success and happiness and optimizing all the positive emotions in life. This podcast is just one of a bunch of resources I have available. If you want to learn more, you can check out my website, the Emotional Embuffination website, which is embuffination.com. All right, on today’s show, I want to dive a little deeper into the Law of Attraction and specifically how action interfaces with the Law of Attraction. On our last episode, I talked a bit just about the basics of Law of Attraction, and we talked about kind of why I started to buy into the Law of Attraction paradigm. Today I want to just go into a little more detail on one aspect of the Law of attraction, at least as I see it, and that is action. But before I get into that, let me start off with just kind of a story that I think I think sort of illustrates some of the concepts around this particular topic. This is a true story. I didn’t make this up or anything, and this kind of started in the early 1900s, so in that era in Africa, the African colonies were kind of a mess.

The Europeans were kind of all over the place. Germans in particular had troops occupying all sorts of different colonies. The, East Africa, specifically the Germans had a pretty weak control, control of. They had weak control over East Africa. And because they had weaker control, they had fewer troops there. They got super violent as an effort to kind of control what was going on. And they were taxing the the natives there heavily. They were using forced labor of the natives to kind of go out and produce cotton on behalf of the Germans. So, it became an intolerable system. Obviously, the African tribesmen that were there didn’t like to be taxed heavily or taken away from their homes to go produce cotton for the Germans. So, a lot of resentment started growing. And on top of that, because they were stripping the men away from the homes, women were kind of getting shifted into these roles that they weren’t traditionally doing, which was fundamentally altering the society that was already in existence there. So, a lot of bitterness started to develop. A lot of resentment was going on. And then there was this really heavy drought that hit East Africa and that put even more pressure and more tension into this whole situation. Africans started getting upset, like justifiably upset. And amidst this environment, there was this guy named Bokero who told the Africans that it was their mission to wipe out the Germans.

They were going to be the ones to eliminate them and drive them out of East Africa. And so this guy was a spirit medium. He kind of held himself out as some sort of I don’t know what the title was, but some sort of wise person with respect to the spirits. And he had a key or he claimed that he had this key to drive out the Germans because the Germans had a technical, technological advantage in this situation. And the tribesmen had bows and arrows and spears and nothing nearly as technologically advanced as what the Germans had. They were coming in with machine guns and rifles and some more technologically advanced weapons which were just going to annihilate the Africans in a vacuum, right? So Bokero said, “Look, I realize that there’s a technological advantage, but we have more men. We have a lot more Africans here than the Germans have troops here. And on top of that, I’m going to make this potion that’s going to make it so that you are impervious to the German bullets. They’re going to turn into water and they’re just going to splash right off of your bodies when they hit you.” And so he made this potion, and it was comprised of water, castor oil, and millet seed. And he mixed up this potion and he was handing it out to all these tribesmen. And the tribesmen were ready to go. They decided they were going to fight back.

They were going to kick back at this oppressive German force and finally take back their homeland. Well, they they mounted up. They got ready armed with their spears and arrows and their potions made of water, castor oil, and millet seed. And many of the people even would wrap these necklaces made of millet seed around their necks as they were kind of going in. They attacked the Germans. And in, this was in 1905, I believe, and, again, the Africans way outnumbered the Germans. So even with the technological advantage, it seems like there should have been some possibility of a win here, right? Well, the Germans repelled them. And then they counterattacked. And the Germans got mad that they were attacked in the first place. And they started destroying villages. They destroyed crops. Remember, there was a drought going on here. They were just going through and just essentially wreaking havoc on the tribesmen. Tribesmen got massacred. Absolutely massacred. By 1907, which was a couple of years later. The Germans lost, and we don’t have the exact numbers, especially with respect to the African troops. There’s a lot of debate about how many actually died. But the general estimates are that the Germans lost about 15 soldiers. That’s one-five soldiers, and they lost 389 Africans that were fighting for them. So in effect, about 400 people, if you count the African soldiers that they were using, only 15 Germans died in this whole conflict over the course of two years.

The African tribesmen, their troops lost, the estimates are somewhere between 200 and 300,000 people. 15 Germans. 2 to 300000 African troops. Obviously, the potions didn’t work. In fact, there are a lot of records about some of the people running away from the battles. The African troops saying this was all a lie. Bokero lied to us and they would throw their millet seed on the ground and run away, upset that the bullets that the Germans were firing at them did not turn to water and instead just killed thousands, hundreds of thousands of African troops. So, this whole thing was known as the Maji Maji Rebellion. For any of you historians out there. Now, the reason that I picked this story and the reason I think this is relevant is I think it ties directly into what a lot of people either present or at least perceive with respect to the law of attraction. So, what you hear with the law of Attraction all the time is you can have anything you want, you can do anything you want to do. All you have to do is believe. I went through The Secret, which is the the book, that kind of made famous the secret or made it more popular. A couple of years back. I guess it’s been more than a couple of years now. But a little while back, The Secret sort of popularized and brought to the mainstream this idea of the law of attraction.

And I recently went through it again and just repeatedly throughout that, the author just keeps saying over and over again, essentially, you can have whatever you want. All you have to do is believe. You can do whatever you want. All you have to do is believe. Here’s a direct quote that I pulled off of the website from The Secret. “As you travel through these pages and you learn the secret, you will come to know how you can have, be, or do anything you want.” You can have, be, or do anything you want. And that’s, I think, the impression that most of us get is all you have to do is think, write and anything you want will just magically pop up. It’s like voodoo. That raises a question for me. Why didn’t this work for the people in the Maji Maji Rebellion? These African troops that were charging at the Germans with this potion. I mean, we don’t have the specific records and we’re not talking to them. So, I mean, there’s a lot of ambiguity about what happened there. But at least some of these people had to truly believe they truly believe that these potions were going to work, but they didn’t. These guys just got annihilated. So, if The Secret is right, or at least this representation of The Secret, the law of attraction, if this is all right and all you have to do is believe, why did that not work in the Maji Maji Rebellion? I think this is a really, really important distinction about the law of attraction.

It’s not exactly just that you can do, or be anything you want. You just have to believe it. There’s a little more to it than that. And that’s where we get into some of this action stuff. One of my favorite expressions is the Law of Attraction inherently includes action. So, in the word attraction, you have action, attraction, attraction. Get it? Some people say this, but I don’t hear this very often. Most of the time I just hear the same thing that you hear in The Secret, which is just believe whatever you want to have or be, and it’s going to come to fruition. But I think you have to have this action element in it. To a certain extent. Now, I think that the model, the Law of Attraction paradigm all revolves around what you are thinking. Action is not an element of the output of the law of attraction. That’s really just a cognitive event. It’s just dependent on what your thoughts are. And if you remember from the last show, if you listen to that one, one of the things that I say is that the Law of Attraction model is in essence, you align your thinking, those thoughts, tune into a certain frequency, and then the thoughts that are on that frequency then ripple out into the universe, in essence, and cause the things that you want or are dwelling on or are thinking about to manifest in reality.

And so, in that that model, there’s no real active component. But here’s the catch. We are partially physical creatures. If you buy into this, this whole spiritual paradigm, we are part spirit and part physical. We have a foot in both realms. We have a foot in the spiritual universe. And in the physical universe we have physical bodies and we are merged with these things. And so at least something that we are doing has to have a foothold in this physical world. Now, here’s the interesting element for me is that in, because we are this merger, if you want to have complete alignment of your thoughts your actions have to be consistent with what your thoughts are doing. I’m going to say that again, because I think this is kind of important. The thoughts themselves, may be the only thing you need for the Law of attraction. But in order for your thoughts to be appropriately pure or aligned such that they are going to manifest what you want, your actions have to be congruous with your thoughts. Otherwise it’s not going to work. And otherwise you are essentially showing that you are not actually as congruous in your thoughts as you thought you were. Let me give you an example of this. Let’s say that you sitting there thinking, I want to manifest $10.

I’m going to have $10 come into my life. And then somebody walks out. Walks up to you and says, “Hey, I have $10 for you.” And they hold out in $10 bill. And then you just stare at it. If you just stare at this $10 bill. It doesn’t actually come into your possession unless this person somehow stuffs it into your shirt or something. If they sit there and they are handing you the $10 bill, but you just look at it, it’s not coming into your possession. However, you could be sitting there thinking, “I’m going to get this $10, I’m going to get this $10.” And then this person walks in and hands you the $10, and you say, “Yes, it’s finally coming into my life.” And you reach out and grab the $10. That reaching out and grabbing the $10 is a physical act. You have now taken action because your thoughts around I’m ready to receive this $10 had to be congruous with your actions. You were believing now in all of your thoughts and body that you were going to accept that $10. Now, if you weren’t congruous in your thoughts and actions then you might not have been doing that. Like, for example, have you ever had a situation where somebody is like, “Hey, here’s $10” or whatever the thing is, and you kind of sit there and look at them and be like, “What are you going to pull it away from me? Like, What’s going on? Why are you giving me this? Is there some hook? There’s a catch to this, right? Like, what do you expect me to do for that $10?” Now all of a sudden, my thoughts have changed from I’m going to get the $10 into I don’t think I can actually have that or there’s going to be some weird conditions on it or there’s some reason and my not reaching out and just taking that $10 has now reflected what my thoughts are. And my thoughts are not consistent in a way that are going to allow me to receive the $10. That’s why it’s so important that your actions be consistent with the thoughts. Because if they’re not, even if the actions themselves are not what’s causing the manifestation from a law of attraction paradigm perspective the thoughts themselves are being influenced by your lack of consistency with respect to what you were doing in your actions. If your thoughts are pure and congruous, your actions are going to intrinsically become consistent. You see this in a lot of other contexts, too, where let’s say that there’s something that sounds a little more traditionally like you would need to take action, for example, if I want to. Let’s say, be super fit. I just am absolutely convinced that I can be in unbelievable shape. I’m going to be super ripped. I’m going to have zero body fat, I’m going to have huge muscles.

And that is what I’m my objective is, I can sit there and I can think about that all day long. And in fact, there’s some research, I read a couple of different research articles that talked about the fact that if you sit there and simply imagine yourself working out, you can reap some of the benefits of working out without ever physically doing anything. Now, there I think some of the research is thin as to how far this goes. I haven’t seen anything comprehensive saying how far it goes, but you can have some impact on your body in terms of just sitting there and thinking about things. But at the end of the day, my personal feeling is if you are so focused on being in really good shape, your actions are going to start to become consistent with your thoughts because you’re going to start to believe, I can really do this. You’re going to start hitting the gym, you’re going to start learning about exercises, you’re going to start taking action and doing stuff that is going to put you in a better position where you’re you’re fit, you’re going to change what you’re eating. You’re going to alter your diet to be consistent with the things that someone who is in good shape is going to be doing. And in the process of doing that, you start to align your thoughts with a fit person. And this applies to so many different things.

If you want to be a millionaire or a billionaire or whatever, you have to start to think and act because the action is a reflection of your thoughts, think and act like a millionaire or billionaire or whatever it is you’re trying to be. I can’t think like a drunken slob that’s living in my parent’s basement and expect to be a CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. Make your actions consistent with your thoughts. Make it all congruous.

Now, let’s circle back for a second to the Maji Maji Rebellion. Because the actions from the African troops there seemed on their face to be consistent, right? They were sitting there saying, “Okay, I was taking this potion. I believe that this potion was going to make me impervious to bullets. And the end goal was to drive out the German troops.” So, their end goal was to drive out the German troops. They believed in it and it still didn’t work. They still got mowed down. Their actions were consistent there, right. But still it didn’t work because their actions were, I’m going to drive out the troops, so we’re going to take these potions. And then they attacked them. But that wasn’t enough. So, there’s still a missing element here in terms of the physical stuff, the action, the physical orientations of the universe in how you are lining up with the law of attraction. Here, here’s kind of how I interpret it. I think this is the second missing piece of this whole equation with respect to the action element.

Sometimes, we don’t know how things are going to manifest. We don’t know in what way our thoughts are going to turn into things. And that’s one of the actually most magical and fascinating things about this Law of Attraction concept in the first place is that you don’t know how the thing is going to pop up. I mean, it may be that you become the CEO, but in the process you win the lottery. Like, maybe there’s just some unexpected way that the money falls into your lap or that you get in good shape or whatever it is that you’re hunting for. It can be very surprising and that that makes it fun almost to be experiencing this law of attraction stuff. But, if we go in with the perception that it has to be a certain way, oftentimes it does not work. And oftentimes we are very disappointed that that thing didn’t work. Mike Dooley, who talks about Law of Attraction concepts a lot and he was one of the earliest people that I was listening to and gained a lot of, I guess, inspiration from, he talks about what he labels as the “Cursed Hows.” And in essence, he says, Don’t think about how the things are going to manifest. Just think about that, that they are going to manifest. So, if you take that analysis and we say, all right, the there’s a way that I can get my objective.

But the, it’s got to be intertwined with this physical world in some way. And my thoughts are going to ripple out into it. And I just can’t get locked into how the things are going to physically work out. Then I think you get the complete picture. Because we’re in a physical universe which has some sort of sequence of physical rules and laws, and there are things that work, and sometimes we don’t know exactly how they’re going to work out, but things have to operate under the rules of the universe, the physical rules of the universe. So, for example, if I say, let’s say it’s 1600. The year 1600. And I am saying that I am absolutely determined that I have the ability to fly and I start flapping my arms really hard and I jump off of a building or castle or something. And I just I’m utterly convinced. I throw all my faith into it, I risk my life by jumping off of this castle, flapping my arms as hard as I can. Am I going to fly? Obviously I’m not. And maybe there’s some way of doing it that we haven’t uncovered yet. But as far as I know, that’s not going to work. However, if I have the underlying objective that there is a possible way for a human being to fly, I might be able to figure it out. I just can’t get locked into the how of it.

Maybe I can find some sort of glider. Maybe I can do some sort of Wright brothers thing. You know, they’re obviously from our modern perspective, we know humans can fly and we’ve got elaborate airline systems. But the how looking at it from the perspective of someone centuries ago might have been mind boggling. And it’s important to note that if I just said, “Well, it’s not possible because I tried flapping my arms and it just doesn’t work,” then I’ve completely shut down on the possibilities for the objective. If I start to say it can’t be done because it can’t be done in this way, then it all stops. There is some way to do all the things that you want. This is my theory. The catch is you need to not lock into the how and when one pathway isn’t working, accept that some other pathway is going to show up. Now let’s circle back to the Maji Maji Rebellion again. Millet, seed water, and castor oil don’t stop pieces of metal from tearing through your body when they’re flying at you at high velocity. That is a physical rule of this universe. It would defy the laws of physics to say otherwise. And yet that’s where they all got stuck in the Maji Maji Rebellion. They kind of just stopped and said, well, it doesn’t work. They threw their necklaces on the ground, said it was all a lie, and they ran away.

There has to be more to the analysis. So, the underlying there are two pieces to this. Remember, the law of attraction inherently includes action. That action has to be consistent and congruous with your thoughts and consistent and congruous with the direction you want to go in. It also has to be consistent with the natural laws of this universe. And that means not that I can say my objective is impossible, but that I have to figure out how to do the objective if one pathway is not working. Now, even if if you embrace the idea that the law of attraction is just utter nonsense from a metaphysical perspective, there isn’t some weird, magical force binding everything or my thoughts ripple out into the universe or whatever, if I’m just looking at this from a pragmatic point of view. And I know a lot of people will embrace it that way, and that’s fine. This paradigm still facilitates you moving towards your objectives because now all of a sudden my mindset is going to become okay, this pathway didn’t work. I’ve got to start taking action to get the things that I want. And if one route isn’t working, I’m going to take a different route and do an action in a different pathway. And if you keep repeating that over and over again, eventually you’re going to get the things that you want or you’re at least going to significantly increase the probability that you do.

So even if we throw away all this metaphysical stuff, this still has some real practical applications. Again, I feel like you almost have to embrace the metaphysical stuff from a certain perspective just because you always have the sort of out or excuse if you don’t. And just from an experiential level, I’ve really started to buy into it and believe it. But again, regardless of whether you are accepting on that level or not, if you are using the law of Attraction on any level, then I would offer to you action has to be an element of it. It’s not just think whatever the heck you want to and it’s going to magically show up like voodoo. It is think and have actions that are consistent with that thinking and make sure that the actions are consistent with the things in this universe that are going to yield results. And if your actions are not yielding results, alter them and try something else. Okay. I think that’s pretty much all I have to say right now about action. And this may be a little bit of a shorter show here, but I felt like it’s important to go into some of the details about the Law of Attraction because it’s a very broad topic. And I think that there’s a lot of things about the law of attraction that people just are really oblivious on. And one more, as I’m saying this, I think of one more example here.

There’s a I think I’ve mentioned this in some past shows before. I’ve watched this Facebook group that will put excuse me, not Facebook group, an Instagram group that will put memes up that just say type “yes” or “affirm” and you’re going to have this amazing new job tomorrow and it’s going to pay you way more than you got. Or tomorrow you’re going to find $2 billion in your bank account. And then you go in and there’s like a million people that are just typing, Yes, yes, affirm, affirm, affirm, affirm, yes, amen. All these things. Well, if you think about it from the framework that I just described and the Law of Attraction may even if you assume that it has validity, my actions now are not truly consistent with the idea that I’m going to get that new job or that I’m going to get that billion dollars in my account because I’m just sitting there watching Instagram typing yes or amen or affirm or whatever it is, and that’s it. So, I don’t really believe that that stuff is coming to me. Or else I’d be doing something. And when you start to take action, whatever it looks like, you give the universe the building blocks with which to hand you things. So don’t just sit there and recite an incantation. Go do something. Do something to move you towards the things that you want. And then it can come up in these crazy, unexpected, magical ways.

But you’ve got to start taking action to give the universe those building blocks in the first place. There’s a lot of misconceptions, I think, about the law of attraction. This is and there are people that will disagree with me on this stuff, but this is my perspective on it. I found this incredibly useful. Taking action helps in so many ways and it makes you learn things along the way. There’s so much that it starts to manifest just by way of your taking action. So if you buy into the Law of Attraction or even if you don’t, or you just want to casually use it as a paradigm to help you move forward or think positively or whatever, take action. Be consistent with the action. Be consistent with your thoughts and your actions. All right. Let’s leave it there. I think that’s good for today. So. I hope that you guys find this a little bit useful. I hope that this is a useful new insight. Or maybe I give you some little nuggets somewhere that you can take away and use or practice with or try something new with. Remember that the Emotional Embuffination concept is a lot like going to the gym and working out, right? We, it’s a lot of little nuggets, a lot of little refining things, a lot of, Oh, I just got to do this rep differently. Oh, I need to eat slightly differently.

I need to modify my macros or whatever it is. There’s this constant refinement of your understanding. There’s kind of a level at the baseline where you’ve got to get rapidly up to speed in order to hit that threshold where you’re starting to see some improvements. But after that, it starts to become this, oh, here’s one little extra thing I can do to increase my speed or get a few more reps in or increase my endurance or whatever it is. Here’s a different way of eating. Here’s a different frequency of eating, whatever it is. All those little things are the same thing we’re doing here with the Emotional Embuffination stuff. It’s get these extra little nuggets, these extra little tidbits that are just going to make you a little bit better. And you keep doing it. You keep doing it all the time. You keep practicing it, you keep working on this stuff just like you do with the gym. You know, you don’t just go to the gym and work out one time and then you’re like, I’m good forever. You keep going on a regular basis. Remember that the Emotional Embuffination objective is that at the end of the day, I want you to be emotionally strong enough to go from saying, “The struggle is real,” to saying, “What struggle?” Thank you all for listening. I hope you’ve enjoyed this and have a great week. I’ll see you on the next show.