The “Law of Attraction” and our local economies
From the Editors…
Most folks have some passing acquaintance with the so-called “Law of Attraction” these days. The concept has been discussed and popularized by many of our cultural idols and gurus, not to mention what the Bible has to say about the concept: As you sow, so shall you reap.
There’s a whole science and rafts of written material on the subject of The Law of Attraction, and I thought I’d examine it as it pertains to our local communities, culture and economies as well as our personal lives.
The basic premise is this: We attract into our lives what we think about with the most emotion. Fear is a very powerful emotion, and so many people manifest into their lives what they most fear.
Right now there’s a certain amount of fear floating around about world events, the economy, jobs, and rural health care. What we can do to combat anxiety and make a difference is to begin to envision and build a healthy local economy with a thriving sense of shared community.
To build community, we need an economy of gifts and connection with one another. We have lost our sense of community because our culture is based on money and community is virtually impossible in a highly monetized society such as ours.
We no longer depend on the goodwill of our local tradesmen and neighbours. If we don’t like local stores or services, we just take our business elsewhere. Community is woven from gifts and goodwill. Unlike today’s market system, whose built in scarcity breeds competition in which less for you means more for me, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Your good fortune is my good fortune.
Living in our current system of scarcity makes us focus only on the accumulation of individual wealth and saving money, rather than working together to build community.
Back to the Law of Attraction, you get the kind of life and community that you support with your focus and energy, and money is currently our most important form of energy.
Research has shown that our minds are much more powerful than we think. Miraculous cases of healing take place if the mind believes. Most of us do not possess the mental willpower to instantly manifest our desires. So, if we need to improve our health, we change our habits. We can tell ourselves to get healthy or thin but we also need to follow through on the plan by changing our habits. This shows our subconscious minds that we mean business!
You can order your little potbelly to disappear, but your subconscious mind won’t believe that you are serious until you clean up your act, alter your diet and take some exercise. You can spout affirmations and visualize abundance in your life until you are blue in the face, but once again you must take action and follow through in order to convince your inner self and the universe that this is in fact what you truly desire.
By the same token, if we want a strong, healthy and vibrant local economy with plenty of local services including our rural health care system we must invest our money and energy back into our own local communities. You can’t fool the Universe or your subconscious mind…if you say you want something your actions must follow to prove it!
