Seeing is believing… by Howard Dickins, on Flickr

Do I have the old adage backwards? Surely we’ll believe it when we see it, not the other way around? Not if you ask David Wood. His thesis is that we see things when we believe in them. Now that’s food for thought.

I particularly like the podcast episode I linked to above because David provides a plausible rationale for The Law of Attraction. Being a sensible kind of bloke, he doesn’t talk about quantum mechanics or ripples in space-time or peptides or other stuff he knows he doesn’t understand. He talks about paying attention, about noticing what’s happening in the world.

Have you ever been on crutches? Did you notice that odd phenomenon, that suddenly there are people on crutches everywhere you look? Chances are, there hasn’t been an epidemic of sprained ankles. No, you just didn’t notice them before, because you weren’t paying attention to crutches. You didn’t mystically draw them to you – they were always there.

If I understand David correctly, he maintains that The Law of Attraction works in a similar fashion. We are always surrounded by opportunities, we just don’t see them unless we are paying attention. By focusing on what we want to achieve, we allow ourselves to see things we didn’t see before. We don’t bring them into being (a la Wallace Wattles), we merely bring them into focus – they were already there.

I have to say that I really like this way of thinking. As a scientist by training, and a physicist who has actually studied quantum mechanics to boot, I can’t swallow the quasi-scientific language some practitioners use. On the other hand, I do believe that there is “something out there” and that our thoughts change our brains, and therefore our perceptions.

Life is a figure-ground puzzle, like the famous Rubin Vase that is two faces or a vase, depending on how you set your mind. I believe in a form of the Law of Attraction that says that you will find the positive things and opportunities you seek, if you set your mind to noticing them. Conversely, if you expect to see nothing but failure and disaster, you will. I’m not blaming the victim here – I don’t believe people draw bad things upon themselves. I do believe that how we react to the things that happen to us is a choice that we make, and it is up to us to open our hearts to the possibilities in every situation.

To quote the great philospher Henry Ford, whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.

What do you think? Do you think that our view of the world affects our ability to perceive opportunities? Or do you believe in dumb luck? Let me know!