The Law of Attraction and its Application to Spiritual Sadhana

It is interesting that people are willing to believe the ‘secret’ of the law of attraction , spend time, energy and money trying to learn it, for the purpose of manifesting wealth, enjoyment and the powers available in the world, but they do not tend to apply the principle behind this ‘ law of attraction ’ to the focus, and actions, that take place in their inner lives. This of course is the real truth behind the law of attraction , not that one can attract money, sexual partners, material things, but that what we focus on, what we think, how we focus our energy internally guides the being to the energetic vibrations that resonate with that inner focus.

Once an individual takes the standpoint of the witness of the nature, he can begin to re-focus attention away from the external pursuits and enjoyments to the process and objectives of the spiritual practice. This may be liberation from and abandonment of the external nature; or it may be a linking of the consciousness to the Divine consciousness, and thereby integrating spirit and matter into one wholistic existence.

Even before he is able to shift entirely to the witness standpoint, a strong aspiration, or inner drive towards spiritual realisation can help the process of reorienting the energy, although, particularly initially, the individual has issues with forgetting as outer energies press for attention, and the normal habits and drives of the external nature continue to hold the predominant focus for the being. In this transitional period, there is an alternation, a continual process of bringing back the concentration to the spiritual practice no matter how many times one simply forgets or goes about under the impulsion of the habitual nature. The main thing is to tune oneself to the extent possible to the higher vibration one is seeking to realise in the nature, rather than emphasizing and focusing on obstacles, difficulties and failures. Over time, as the individual grows and matures at this new level of vibration, the obstacles fall away of themselves or at least become much lessened in their intensity and thus easier to disregard.

This approach of refocusing can also be used for very specific types of changes in human nature, for instance, if one is experiencing a pull of desire from the vital being, one can consciously undertake to redirect the awareness and focus toward the spiritual realisation. To accomplish this initially many people rely on specific techniques such as meditation, concentration, contemplation, pranayama, the use of mantras, asanas, including the use of mudras, bandhas, and specific alignments of the body to shift energy and focus away from whatever the outer nature was seeking; aspiration, prayer, bhajans or devotional music, devotional feelings, karma yoga , a feeling of service and surrender, a widening of the attention toward the Infinite, or a call to the Guru or the divine Presence in some form, entering into a state of unity with a particular divine form, whether through a murti or through inner practices including things like visualisation, etc. There are countless techniques that can be applied under one circumstance or another, depending on the specific circumstance that the seeker is working on changing.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “Difficulties and perplexities can never be got rid of by the mind brooding on them and trying in that way to get out of them; this habit of the mind only makes them recur without a solution and keeps up by brooding the persistent tangle. It is from something above and outside the perplexities that the solution must come. The difficulty of the physical mind — not the true thinking intelligence — is that it does not want to believe in this larger consciousness outside itself because it is not aware of it; and it remains shut like a box in itself, not admitting the light that is all round it and pressing to get in. It is a subtle law of the action of consciousness that if you stress difficulties — you have to observe them, of course, but not stress them, they will quite sufficiently do that for themselves — the difficulties tend to stick or even increase; on the contrary, if you put your whole stress on faith and aspiration and concentrate steadily on what you aspire to, that will sooner or later tend towards realisation. It is this change of stress, a change in the poise and attitude of the mind, that will be the most helpful process.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 4, Ordeals and Difficulties, pp..101-102