Being a skeptic, the law of attraction was one of those ideas that I had heard over and over again since approximately the late 1990s but disregarded for years as metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. However as I began a long-term research projecton a related matter, I found significant scientific evidence behind the metaphysical claims for this law, and eventually decided the law of attraction was worth further consideration. However, this was one area that I decided needed additional first-hand research. In order for me to accept there might be something more to this “law” than mere ideas, I had to put it to the test.
The problem with testing the law of attraction, however, is finding a personal desire that is not potentially counter to your life’s goals because if that unobtainable desire was the focus of your efforts but still did not occur you might wind up with negative evidence not useful for “proving” the law did or did not work. For example, if you were destitute and your life plan required you to be destitute to understand some issue in life such as the power of need or hunger, then following the steps to implement the law of attraction to obtain millions of dollars would almost certainly not work. Your higher self would not allow the thought-directed energies to become manifest in your physical reality, and so the experiment on whether or not the law of attraction could work would be a failure due to poor experiment design. Conversely, if the law of attraction were designed to attack a problem that was too simple then it would be impossible to say whether the result was due to the law of attraction’s efforts or something that would have occurred anyway; again resulting in a failure to prove anything due to poor experiment design.
My test would have to be related to my life so as not to be (hopefully) counter to my life plan but also difficult enough that achieving the goal would not be simply happenstance. For my situation, you might want to know I have been in the military since 1989. By 2005 I was deployed in Iraq and was up for consideration for a large promotion, E8 – the second highest enlisted rank. The move from E7 to E8 is large indeed and one that I figured I would make before I retired, but I wanted the promotion as fast as possible. In 2005, I was considered for promotion in the secondary zone, which means I could have potentially moved forward faster than normal if I were selected for promotion. It seemed a lofty goal and worthy of the law of attraction experiment I had been pondering for some time. I followed the steps I had learned for over a month to implement the law of attraction, lasting from shortly before until about the end of the promotion board’s meeting period. When the results were released, alas my name was not among the lucky recipients. My first reaction was anger and disappointment. All that research conducted and scientific “proofs” I had read that seemed rock solid, and yet I had achieved no positive results. I set aside the law of attraction research for some time, but fast-forward to the next year’s board, and I repeated the process with a few minor tweaks. This time I started earlier, added a visualization board, and continued the process longer – past the board period and lasting until the results were released. This time I was selected for promotion to E8! Success at last.
