Most people these days have heard of the Law of Attraction – the universal law that states that you attract what you focus on into your life.
Many have tried it without success and dismissed it as not for them and many more have dismissed it as new age ‘woo-woo’, completely out of synch with the way they have been taught that the world and ‘science’ works.
In fact, it is a very real phenomenon and one which works on many levels. There is even a rational, conventionally scientific explanation as to why and how the Law of Attraction works and how you can tune your brain into making it work for you so you can create your dream life.
The Reticular Activating System (or RAS) is a collection of cells and neural circuits that connect the brain stem to the cerebral cortex.
It is a very busy area of your brain, responsible for modifying the brains electrical activity during the cycle of sleep and being awake. In addition, it is also responsible for attention and that is where its role is particularly relevant to manifesting what you want in your life.
If you think about the amount of sensory information that is potentially available to you in any moment, it is absolutely vast. In fact, there are millions of individual bits of information that could be required to be interpreted by you at any time.
This would be so overwhelming that you would be unable to function in any meaningful way.
Therefore, your brain applies a filter to this information, so that you are consciously aware of far fewer bits of sensory information at any time (roughly 40 in any moment). However, all of the other bits of sensory information are still going on around you.
An example of this could be as follows.
Let’s say you are walking down a busy street, such as Oxford Street in London. There would be many thousands of people, loads of traffic and bustle and a huge amount of noise. You will probably just experience it as a general hum, while you focus on your goal of getting to where you want to go and are unlikely to hear the specific conversations and other things that are going on at that time.
Then, as you walk past a group of people, one of them says your first name and suddenly your attention falls onto them. Even though they haven’t raised their voices and are almost certainly talking about someone else, you are tuned in to focus your attention whenever you hear your name being said.
This is because the RAS is responsible for applying the filters through which you interpret your ‘reality’ in any moment.
Throughout your life, it has been programmed by your individual experiences to notice and draw attention to the things which are important to you.
Responding to hearing your name is just one example. It has evolved as a very effective survival mechanism, designed to alert you to anything that requires your immediate attention.
Unfortunately, most people are tuned in to notice the more negative aspects of their life. This is because they are trying to NOT get what they DON’T want.
This keeps them trying to think of ways to avoid something they perceive as bad, rather than trying to create what they perceive as good. So, they spend their lives in a state of crisis management, forever taking actions designed to avoid the worst.
This isn’t their fault. It’s the result of a survival mechanism that evolved to avoid the very real, life threatening dangers that were part of our early ancestor’s every-day lives.
Although our lives have evolved, we are still conditioned to subconsciously see all perceived threats as if they are life threatening and therefore respond accordingly.
Because this is so ingrained in our psyche, we also learn lessons and create beliefs throughout our lives based on avoiding things we don’t want, rather than creating what we do.
This way of thinking and being is passed down through the generations to a greater or lesser extent for most people. Of course, many beliefs that are learned are positive and assist you throughout your life.
However, it is the less useful beliefs and patterns, many of which you may not even be consciously aware of that sabotage you and hold you back.
Ultimately, the beliefs that you hold determine how your experience of reality is filtered and this is how your RAS is ‘programmed’.
The even better news is that by changing your beliefs and emotional responses to life, you can change the information that is filtered and enters your conscious awareness.
Therefore, people with differing beliefs will notice completely different things in exactly the same situation. One may notice apparent threats, while another notices exciting opportunities.
An example could be as follows. Let’s say two people work as part of a team in an office. One of them was unfortunately subjected to bullying at school as a young child, while the other had a largely happy experience of school.
If their boss is quite overpowering, speaks his mind and maybe partakes in a certain amount of banter (also a product of his younger conditioning) then they might react as follows:
The first could effectively freeze and be unable to represent himself well with the boss, as he is being subconsciously reminded of the bullying and he is reacting in the way that he did as a child in order to just get through the situation.
The second, on the other hand might respond with returned banter, humour and a much more relaxed manner as they aren’t reminded in any negative way of an earlier memory and conditioned response.
Over time, this could result in the first individual feeling ever more persecuted and reducing self-esteem.
This could either continue, or something might change. If they are able to clear the emotional responses that they feel to the memories of the old bullying and therefore to the boss’s behaviour, they might also start seeing new opportunities to act differently, which could lead to more positive outcomes for them.
So, you can reprogram your RAS to filter information in a different way, by sending clear messages from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind via your beliefs and emotional responses to life.
However, it isn’t simply a matter of deciding on a new belief or feeling and Hey Presto! The old patterns can be powerfully entrenched and you may need to use a process, or range of processes to start making things happen.
There are many ways that you can achieve amazing, life changing results to tune your RAS into creating the life that you desire.
Guess what some of my favourites are!
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