The So-Called "Law of Attraction"

I spent too many years when I was young in magical thinking. I dreamed and day-dreamed about things just coming my way as time moved on, including the naïve notion that my marriage would simply work out as we got older and, naturally, matured. Then I thought that we must "make" things happen. But it seems to me that what we see in human life on earth is that (1) there obviously is serendipity, (2) sometimes we pull off something completely through our own efforts while, at other times, accomplish things we could not possibly have done alone and are due at least as much to other people's dreams, and (3) some things we think about "all the time" and work for never happen.

I lump the recent popularity of belief in the alleged "Law of Attraction" in with "magical thinking." It is also self-focused and myopic. On the one hand, it is obvious that much of what becomes manifest in our lives are things we've given a lot of thought to. Duh. On the other extreme, I ask you, don't you think there have been billions and billions of humans throughout the history of our species who have spent weeks, months, years, perhaps their entire, short lives praying for the war to go away, for their children not to get killed or die of plague or be taken into slavery, for some food or water where there's hardly any, to not be raped or have their village burned and/or plundered? And that they prayed and thought about these things all the time? That their hopes, their requests to their god(s) or to God were foremost in their consciousnesses in a more sustained way than most of us have ever thought about anything? Yet, for billions who have done this, relief did not come, right? They were raped, they did starve to death; war, famine, disease or scoundrels swept away their children; their lives or villages were destroyed in spite of their prayers and supreme focus on what they wanted.

If there is some kind of attraction between our thoughts and the things we want to manifest in our lives, it is certainly no Law. Laws don't have gross and glaring exceptions like these.