The Law Of Attraction—And Beyond

The law of attraction is getting a high profile these days. Many books have been written about it and many people are making use of it, and with apparently effective results sometimes.

The law of attraction is: like attracts like. The idea is that you can manifest things into your life through your thoughts. If you think positive things, you will attract positive things, and if you think negative things, you will attract negative things.

I am not discounting the possibility of this. After all, Answers From Silence says, “You are a magnet for everything in your life.” This statement seems to agree with the law of attraction.

But Answers From Silence is a map of the unfolding evolution of consciousness. As the author’s consciousness evolved, things in one chapter could be superseded by something in a later chapter.

And in another article on this website, “Your Life Story And Beyond”, I wrote that the enlightened experience is that your life is not yours.

In that case, the statement, “You are a magnet for everything in your life,” stops being true when your life stops being yours.

And there is still something more to it.

The enlightened experience is not that you attract things to yourself. That is because nothing comes toward you.

Instead, something comes from you. It comes from you at all times and goes out in all directions. The direction of the flow is outward, like light from the sun. It’s the law of radiance.

Under these conditions, attracting things isn’t a concern. Experience is not defined by getting. It is defined by overflowing. This is a result of wholeness.

By contrast, if you feel incomplete and like there is something outside of yourself that will complete you, then you will feel the need to attract something to yourself.

But perhaps you just want to attract enlightenment.

If so, that is a good sign. About enlightenment, Answers From Silence says, “When you are pushing toward it, you are misperceiving. It is actually pulling you.”

In that case, what you really want is for enlightenment to attract you.

—JC

In The Zone Of Enlightenment

“Being in the zone”. People speak of this in relation to such things as playing sports and performing music. It is a state of congruence where inner and outer make a perfect match, where there is no friction between thinking and doing, and where everything seems to flow joyfully, effortlessly, and spontaneously.

All of that sounds awfully good. Maybe good enough to be enlightenment. But is enlightenment the same as being in the zone? Not exactly.

Being in the zone is regarded as an exceptional case outside of normal, daily life. But in the enlightened experience, enlightenment is normal, daily life. It is a constant that is invulnerable to changing circumstances. If someone’s enlightenment were superseded by daily life, then that would be the exceptional case.

And the part about perfectly matching inner and outer, and no friction, and effortless flow? Yes, those attributes definitely apply to the enlightened experience. It’s just that the reason for those things happening in the zone and the reason for those things happening in enlightenment are different reasons.

Being in the zone happens because of a focused, energized awareness on performing action.


Enlightenment happens because of a reversal of perspective.

The perspective is about who you are. The reversal is that instead of being an individual in the cosmos, you are the cosmos in an individual.

Then instead of thinking of yourself as a person with a name, personality attributes, preferences, and a life story, you know yourself as eternal being.

Being eternal takes you out of time, and therefore out of daily life—life measured in days. At that point, daily life takes care of itself as you rest in eternal being. There’s no friction in that.

Perhaps you want to get to this kind of enlightened normalcy and you are wondering how long you have to wait for that to happen.

To address this, let me use the word “zone” in a different sense—the sense of “location, place, area.”

Answers From Silence says, “Everyone is on their path of enlightenment, and everything that happens in a person’s life is their path of enlightenment.”

This means that your life is an enlightenment zone. You are in that zone constantly, no matter what the changing circumstances are. All that you encounter and all that takes place has an ultimate purpose, which is to bring you to a reversal of perspective about who you are.

So take heart. Enlightenment is with you either way. Until enlightenment is your daily life, daily life is your enlightenment.

—JC

Your Life Story–And Beyond

I heard a woman talking about building her whole life as an homage to her deceased husband. She bought a house in the town where, before he died unexpectedly, he was planning for them to move. She has regularly spent time there with her children throughout their lives, “to build memories,” she said.

She spoke about these things always with grief, never with happiness.

This is a person who created a framework out of a past experience. She used it to shape her entire life and the lives of other people as well.

I would say that she is captivated by her life story. But that is not unusual. Many people are.

Of course, not all stories are mournful. There are a lot of them that are happy and uplifting. When people tell stories about their lives, the stories can have any kind of energy.

The point is not which kind of energy resonates in a life story. The point is that people often mistake their life story for their identity.

In the article, “Enlightenment: Why Bother?” on this website, I wrote about “the essential issue of enlightenment: a realignment of identity. Instead of being aligned to the story of your life, you align with eternal being.”

Your life story is not who you are. In essence, who you are is pure timeless consciousness.

The enlightened experience is consciousness established in timelessness. When you experience this, you won’t have the urge to repeat and re-live the story of some past event that made you feel vividly alive in either a positive or negative way.

It’s timelessness that spoils the life story party. Stories are about the past. Because the past is an aspect of time, it can’t mix with timelessness.

And there is something more beyond that.

The enlightened experience is that your life is not yours.

When your life is not yours, there is just life.

And then your life story also is not yours. It is just a story.

A stone falls into a pond. On the water’s surface, ripples spread out in circles, echoing, echoing, echoing, repeating, repeating, repeating.

The ripples tell the same story over and over.

Be the falling stone, not the ripples. Be the cause, not the effect. Dive to the depths. Leave your story behind you.

When you are captivated by memories, you forget the rememberer.

—JC

Are You Ready For Enlightenment?

If you were getting dressed to go to a party, you might spend a lot of time imagining and predicting how you want to look, what the surroundings will be like, what you will do there, who you will see and who will see you, how they will react to the way you are dressed, and exactly how you want things to go.

But what if you showed up and found out that the party had nothing to do with what you imagined, or with what your predictions were, or with the way you had prepared yourself for it?

Enlightenment is like that party. Some people know that they want to go to that party. They have ideas about what it’s going to be like. They are making a lot of preparations to get ready to attend it.

One way of getting ready is to work on yourself. You find ways to become a better person who is more deserving of an invitation to this party. Perhaps using resources from the self-help industry, you think yourself into a new perspective, or you re-order your priorities, or you process your old patterns and hang-ups.

You might even control your behavior to emulate that of a saintly person. You tell yourself to have fewer attachments, or to be free from negative feelings, and so on.

This could make you into a better person, and I sincerely congratulate you for that. And all it means is that you have become a better person. It’s not enlightenment.

Enlightenment doesn’t mean that you better yourself to the point of being enlightened. It isn’t the final improvement on the list of improvements. Enlightenment is a change of identity that comes through yielding to eternal being.

As long as you engage with your unenlightened self, your attention is on your problems. To be enlightened, you need to go where enlightenment is and dwell there.

Answers From Silence says, “Everyone has an Enlightened Self. It is the part of you that already is enlightened, already knows peace, and already has attained the goal of your evolution.”

Engage with your Enlightened Self. Then your state of consciousness rises to approach its level. Finally, you inhabit that level, and the difference between you and your Enlightened Self evaporates.

How to do this?

One way is to practice silent meditation. Then you are simply communing with your Enlightened Self.

Another way is to have an active dialogue with your Enlightened Self. You can find answers about your daily life, the meaning of life, and everything in between. Meanwhile, your attention is turned in the direction of enlightened consciousness the whole time. There is a “how to” section in Answers From Silence about this.

Eventually, you don’t have to go anywhere to get to the party. You are the party. And you bring it with you wherever you set your foot down.

—JC

The Meaning of Being

When a certain celebrity came to my hometown a couple of decades ago, I had an exciting opportunity to be with him as he spoke to a group of people. But as soon as I took the last available seat in the room, I was urgently called away by someone. Her reason for interfering turned out to be something that I considered unimportant. Meanwhile, upon returning, I had lost my seat to someone else and was turned away.

I resented this combination of events. It burned me every time I that I thought about it for years afterwards.

My perception was that three things were bundled together: the presence of the celebrity, my desire to be in that room, and my meddling friend’s agenda. How they totaled up was that a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had been taken away from me.

I had added these events together and arrived at the conclusion that something unfortunate had occurred.

But what had really happened? Nothing. At least, not to me.

In the fullness of being, and when being is the self, nothing ever adds to or takes away from the self. And nothing ever happens that is a comment on the self, or that puts a dent in the self, or that labels the self. In fact, there is a sense that nothing ever happens, because the fullness of being brings timelessness along with it.

So, simply, three separate things coincided. I was there. The celebrity was there. My friend was there. In the playground of time, in the timelessness of our being, we brushed up against each other.

As Answers From Silence says, “Meaning results from one thing connecting with another thing. In timelessness, there is no duality, no ‘one thing’ to connect with ‘another thing’. Therefore, in timelessness there is no meaning, and there is no need for meaning.”

When a friend dropped her forkful of egg salad in a restaurant, she felt stupid and said to me, “You can dress me up but you can’t take me anywhere.” My only reaction was to start cleaning up. I reassured her, “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Two plus two doesn’t equal four. It equals two plus two.

—JC

Positive Thinking—And Beyond

I was listening to someone talking to a group about how to accomplish a particular project. I was waiting to hear what simple actions to take in order to accomplish it.

I was still waiting when the speaker said that positive thinking was crucial for the success of the project, and for everything in life.

This would apply if you are at the point where you need encouragement in order to begin taking action, or if you are feeling discouraged as the action is in progress.

And it would apply if you are in the habit of self-defeat. Positive thinking might be helpful for changing that habit.

Positive thinking is also an invocation to the positive forces in the universe, attracting support for the success of your activity.

I definitely affirm anything that works for you.

At the same time, it seems to me that there are a few more nuances to the topic.

For one thing, there is the common, everyday experience of doing something that you don’t feel like doing. Inwardly, you experience resistance, but you still decide to do what you know has to be done. And you do it.

This suggests that you can perform action regardless of your inner experience, positive or not.

As Answers From Silence says, “Feelings and actions are separate dimensions.”

For another thing, if you accidentally tip over a glass of water onto your dinner table, you probably won’t take any time out for positive thinking in order to convince yourself to do what needs to be done.

In fact, taking time out for positive thinking at that moment would be superfluous. And it would reduce your effectiveness by sidetracking your attention.

Instead, you will act instantly to contain the spill. And you won’t do any thinking at all.

This suggests that there is a part of you that is always ready for action.

So it seems to me that there can be something beyond both “positive” and “thinking”.

Item: beyond “thinking”.

You are not your thoughts. You were here before they were.

There is a more fundamental self that is you. It is characterized by silence.

Thoughts orbit around that fundamental self. But they are not the definition of you. Nor are they the identity of you.

Item: beyond “positive”.

That silence is positive, but not in the sense of “I get what I want” or “I am in a good mood”.

It is positive in the sense of wholeness.

Wholeness means that nothing is lacking.

When you move through life having embraced the inner sense of the wholeness of the silent self, where nothing is lacking, then you are beyond the qualities of positivity and negativity that categorize events in the outer world.

Your experience might be something more like having God carry you in His two hands through each day.

Bonus item: beyond “invocation”.

When wholeness is there all the time, then you never have to summon it.

—JC