Jean-Paul Sartre pointed out that we often take our questions to those who will support the answer we secretly want. The young man who is considering joining the French Resistance but feels torn because his aging mother needs him to care for her may seek out a priest for counsel, but then he is likely to get very different advice than he will get if he takes his question to a freedom fighter. So do our actions inform our path, and how we deal with a question about how to live often points to its answer.

Over the years, I’ve found that many of us frame questions along the lines of yes-answers. “Should I leave my marriage?” for example, isn’t at all the same question as “Should I stay married?” This is one of the reasons I listen closely when students ask a question—because the truth, meaning the truth of the student’s being, is already being confessed in how the question is informed. One of the most common questions, hiding between the words, is “What’s wrong with me?” The student has assumed that something is wrong, and has rounded up a posse to hunt down whatever varmint is responsible. The Field Center Course calls this “going on a witch hunt for an unwitting counterintention.” I suspect that the prevalence of the question comes from a generation that became obsessed with self-assessment and infatuated with psychotherapy. Of course, any therapeutic model presumes that something is wrong, as it is exactly this something wrong that therapy proposes to fix. Field training, being more interested in the underlying structures of consciousness than in any particular staging of them, looks more to the question itself and its underlying assumption of something-wrongness—because to the extent that one believes that something is wrong, then to that extent will the belief fulfill itself, and something really will be wrong. At the same time, however, we might point out that a very different sort of answer would follow from the question, “What’s right with me?” The question immediately takes its leave of anything therapeutic, for where something is right, there is nothing to fix. And we find that this is anything but a semantic difference. Students who start asking themselves what’s right with them begin to find reality just as eager to prove the new assumption. People who make this little journey for their own sake discover a source of confidence and well-being that their earlier question had missed. Parents who take up the stance inherent in the something-right question toward their children find almost magical improvements in the quality of their being-together. Like the young man who goes to the priest, they get out of the moment what they bring to it.

There’s a suggestion here that we can learn a great deal by paying attention to the questions we ask, how we ask them, and how we go about seeking their answers. The Course reminds us that “there’s no time off” from our consciousness. We can choose to move beyond our infatuation with what’s wrong and begin noticing all that’s right.

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At our Waves of Change Conference, which ended yesterday and was attended by a most remarkable group of Field training students, I shared an excerpt of an essay written by Adi Da, a well known teacher of things spiritual. The gist of the essay was that all is mystery, that we don’t know ultimately what anything is—an apple, a tree, ourselves, each other—and that really no one knows what anything is or how it came to be. Heidegger, the groundbreaking phenomenologist who was a student of the pioneering Husserl, suggested something similar when he posed what he regarded as the central question of metaphysics: “Why are there things rather than nothing?” This “why?” we soon discover, can’t be answered in the usual way that we answer “why?” questions, because it is a highly unusual question—a question that questions everything.

“Why are there things rather than nothing?” We can only answer this by allowing a deep shift in our very being. Something in us rises up to meet the question at the edge. Heidegger’s question, if we allow it, can carry us into a face-to-face experience with the mystery of things, not of why they are but that they are. This is the question’s true purpose—to rouse us from a kind of ontological amnesia, to awaken us from what Kant called “dogmatic slumber’ so that the truth of things, which includes the fundamental mysteriousness of being-here, stands forth once again, and in the moment that we gaze upon it, and see it gazing back at us, something in us opens—a door, a way into a new order, a freeing confession—and we find that with an acknowledgment of mystery, with an admission of that, as Adi Da tells us, comes joy.

Mystery is central to Field practice for two reasons. First, as the Course tells us, the Field operates in the truth, and mystery is the truth of our being-here, such that no model that fails to recognize mystery can be true. Second, uncertainty is an essential refuge in Field practice anytime we find that we’re giving ourselves to contradiction. And uncertainty is mystery’s twin. Standing before mystery, we all become the old master, Socrates, in that we suddenly know that we know nothing. Uncertainty is not a technique. It’s the truth, and in a real sense the truest truth, because mystery is the very foundation of our existence. Its gaze is everywhere, hiding in obviousness. To be soft enough, honest enough, willing enough to allow it to disclose itself again, to admit even to oneself the ineluctable truth of uncertainty is to return to innocence (literally, “not knowing”). As we release conclusions and come home to our innocence, our lives become like soft clay. The hands of the Field can work on them, fashion them into something beautiful, something wonderful. And all of this is made efficacious simply through the willingness to gaze upon and be gazed upon by mystery.

G.K. Chesterton writes that fairy tales tell us of rivers of wine and gold apples because in order to remind us how amazed we were the first time we discovered that rivers flow with water and apples are red—and states further that this is why we love them. In the end, to live without mystery is to live without living. All we think we know is a folly that counts against our joy. The omnipresence of mystery renders all our so called knowing a Pyrrhic victory, because the opinions, conclusions, and theories that we carry around in our head soon become baggage that weighs us down. The moment we admit that we don’t know something, we feel lighter, don’t we? Why? Because the truth of the world is mystery, and the truth of self is mystery, and the truth of all things is mystery, so that it is impossible to be on friendly terms with the world or the self or things without first befriending mystery. Such befriending opens us, lights us up, returns us to innocence and curiosity, restores the miraculous that got lost along the way of growing older and growing busy, turns water into wine and apples into gold, and allows a secret conversation with—Something—to begin.

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Happy new year, and welcome back to another year of Realities. This week, we want to look at the so called “law of attraction.” Many New Age sources make reference to this principle, according to which, as we’re told, we can attract things we want by visualizing, using affirmations, or doing something else with our consciousness. Now, from the Field training perspective, the principle is inherently flawed because it’s rooted in self-contradiction for the simple reason that one must first believe the desired thing to be distant in order for the idea of attracting it to make sense. But since belief is the generative force, and as there’s no time off from our beliefs, if one believes that the desired thing is sufficiently distant to need to be attracted, then one is already creating the distance. Distance from what we desire is equivalent to lack. There is no escaping the conclusion that anything we believe we must attract will remain far from us.

This distinction, not surprisingly, makes for very different approaches to living creatively. Field training tells us that the cornerstone of conscious creating is identity. At the end of the day, there is nothing we can do with our consciousness, no inner trick or technique that can veto the authority of who we are choosing to be. If we believe we lack something we want, then we are being the one who lacks it, and our creating already has been set in motion in the direction of the very lack that we wish to overcome. Therefore, there is nothing to attract in Field practice. There is only something to be. As we embody the identity that most pleases us, we find that what we want to experience is always at hand, and as the Course tells us, there is no waiting in practice. The desired identity is always immediately available, provided that we are willing to receive what we desire. Resting in our ideal, we leave all matters of expression, timing, and further fulfillment to the Field.

If one spends any time talking to people who have relied on the age approach based on attraction, one finds that more often than not it leads to waiting, frustration, and disappointment. I don’t say that it never works; one can realize some success with it commensurate with one’s belief in it—but the element of contradiction is there informing the process, and this explains why so many people reading “The Secret” and a host of other New Age books based on the principle of attraction are left wondering why this principle works so well for the authors but not so well for them. Virtually everyone who has come to the Field Center to study had experience, often many years of it, working with this putative law, and they discovered that if it is indeed a law, it must be a fickle one. Their years of attempts to make use of it led them to look for something more.

This something more is identity. We are not in the business of attracting things, because we do not set out by agreeing that the thing we want is sufficiently far enough to need attracting. Rather, we recognize that every desire, however subtle or even trivial, implies a corresponding identity, and that it is identity, and nothing else, that sets the creative hand of the Universe into motion. Having further recognized certain paradoxes and having incorporated them into our method, we are able to enter the game of deliberate intending innocently, without motive, and so to remain free of contradiction and suffering.

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It is a revelation of sorts to many that, as Field training tells us, desire alone is not creative. As though in a New Age dream, they had thought that desiring something, perhaps passionately, was all they needed—that, plus a little visualizing here, a little affirmation there. Then along comes Field training with the idea that it is not desire but something deeper in the psyche that finds expression, inwardly and outwardly, through the mysterious workings of the Law of Correspondence. This something, we call intention, which comprises that which we take to be real, and that with which we identify.

Our intentions do not, as a rule, look like psychic structures at all, but as “how things are.” Through us, they render reality, and a reality that appears in every respect to operate independently of us. So is the great secret of cause hidden from the eyes of Particle consciousness. How then, we might ask, can we become aware of our own intentions?

For one thing, we can see what keeps showing up in our experience. The world is a great mirror that reflects our beliefs about what’s real and who we are, a construct that arises out of our intentions. For another thing, we can ask ourselves not what we want, but what we’re willing to have, for willingness is the faculty of intention as surely as sight is the faculty of the eye, and hearing the faculty of the ear. Our creating then, whether witting or unwitting, is directed entirely by our willingness—and this certainly includes what we’re willing to settle for, put up with, and allow, even if by default.

Much becomes clear about the reality in which we find ourselves when we hold our experience up to the willingness standard—things that remains obscure and confusing as long as we continue to measure our world against our desires. Once we understand that we get what we’re willing to have, regardless of what we may want, at least our reality starts to make sense to us. Furthermore, this willingness need be nothing more than an acquiescence. Often, students find themselves suffering in a contradiction that they “went along with” rather than exercising their creative authority to say “no,” at which point invariably they revisit the choice. “He who writes can rewrite.”

Willingness is the true speaking of the word amen. Whatever we’re willing to accept as real and identify with has received our “amen.” It is not a word we speak in order to “make it so,” as Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Enterprise in Star Trek would say. It is already so by virtue of the creative power of our willingness. We may, therefore, do well to take stock of what we are agreeing with, for what we agree with carries the quickening authority of our creative nature, and inevitably finds expression.

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One conversation I have continually with students involves the willful clinging to the New Age idea that consciousness-as-cause is about creating conditions around us. Even advanced Field training students seem loathe to give up this mistaken notion. They talk about “making an intention” and continue to measure success of the method in terms of factual manifestation. So, I remind them that, as we say in the Course, “the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation,” and they wake up again from the New Age dream, let go of their will to make this or that happen, and return to Field practice, and lo and behold, the Field takes care of the rest, including the very conditions of fact that they willfully had been trying to change.

We know better than to try to employ consciousness-as-cause directly. You can’t work directly with paradox, and consciousness studying itself is ultimately paradoxical. As Augustine said, “What I’m looking for is what I’m looking with.” This is why New Age methods fail, however neatly they’re packaged, in strings and sealing wax and other magic stuff. They overlook something so basic, it’s been all but entirely overlooked—namely, that if belief is self-fulfilling, and you set out to use belief to create something, then you must first be believing in the lack of the thing, else setting out to create it would make no sense at all. And if you believe in the lack of it, then that’s what you created even before you took the first step. The game was over before it began. It is a habit of the New Age approach to do just that, however, to mistakenly presume that desire and will can overcome prior belief, and they simply cannot. Without an appreciation of paradox, the New Age consistently fails to understand its own language, because it’s so tempting to believe that we can close our eyes and visualize what we want, and that somehow this will compel the universe to deliver the goods.

By all means, don’t take my word for it. Put it to the test. Visualize and use affirmations all day if you like to try to create the thing that you secretly believe needs creating. Then you can open your eyes and begin looking for signs that it’s “coming.” You’ll find out fast just how much, to paraphrase Ram Das, the universe cares about what you want. And so we’re told that the Creator is “no respecter of persons.” It follows its own law, which is the law of correspondence, and correspondence always means correspondence to identity, not to desire or will or word.

And what is the fulfillment of the paradox of consciousness-as-cause? That we can have what we want when we let it go—and of course this utterly rules out letting it go in order to have it. How do we let something go when we want it with all our heart? By turning our attention to identity, because this and nothing less allows us to enter the desired state for its own sake, out of love for the ideal and not in order to make something happen. This is the only “secret,” if there is one, and it is the heart and soul of Field practice.

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Last week, on 25 June, the Associated Press ran this story: “The Secret: Big Sales, Loud Criticism. Here’s an excerpt: “While The Secret has become a pop culture phenomenon, it also has drawn critics who are not quiet about labeling the movement a fad, embarrassingly materialistic or the latest example of an American propensity of wanting something for nothing. Some medical professionals suggest it could even lead to a blame-the-victim mentality and actually be dangerous to those suffering from serious illness or mental disorders. . .. As with many publishing hits, the ‘Oprah Effect’ played a role. Winfrey devoted two shows in February to The Secret, and Larry King and Ellen DeGeneres also featured it on their shows. It was spoofed on Saturday Night Live when a man portraying a refugee in the Darfur region of Sudan was blamed for having negative thoughts. However, the fear that The Secret will lead to a blame-the-victim mentality is a serious claim of critics. For example, the book dismisses conditions such as a genetic predisposition to being overweight or a slow thyroid as ‘disguises for thinking “fat thoughts.”‘ And during times in which massive number of lives were lost, the book says, the ‘frequency of their thoughts matched the frequency of the event.’

So, according to The Secret, the victims of the Holocaust were responsible for their extermination, the rape victim is asking for it, and the people in Darfur are being murdered because of negative thinking. You see, this is a prime example of the sort of oversimplifications and confusions typical of the New Age approach to consciousness-as-cause, and one that Field training regards as particularly egregious and shameless. Our response when asked how we explain the Holocaust and other calamitous or tragic events is that we don’t. We recognize that decency places a limit on how far theory can or should be willing to go, and we don’t speculate about the experiences of people who are not present to take part in the conversation and present their experience firsthand. We don’t preserve our theoretical model at their expense. It is true that many who have come through Field training who endured and survived such experiences found that they were not beyond the reach of Field practice to revise and redeem, and that the principles applied even in such severe cases, but this was their call to make, not ours, and this is perhaps why our program doesn’t appear either on Oprah or Saturday Night Live.

The great mistake of The Secret and the many models, some of them far more rigorous and thoughtful, is the failure to recognize and incorporate paradox and what we call the “dialectic” into its principles and practices. As stated in Part 1 of this piece, believing in a problem sufficiently to set about “consciously creating” its solution already places one in a position of checkmate. The game is over, because belief, not willful intent, not visualizing, not prayer, not affirmations, not wishing or hoping or knowing “the secret” is what creates. This has a far-reaching implication, namely that we cannot use our creative consciousness to create conditions. We can, however, believe in the desired conditions for their own sake, or as we say, for the sake of alignment rather than manifestation. This is where practice must stop. This is the oasis in a desert of contradiction to which we banish our practice the moment we allow it to be strategic.

And this indeed appears to be something of a secret. At least the New Age doesn’t seem to know about it. This essential element of paradox—this is one of the first things we give our students, and it changes their view of who they are, of what it means to be conscious and creative, and as a result, their lives in many ways, all for the better. There is no “secret” that will bring us to anything that we do not earn through the willingness to live up to the version of self to which that thing corresponds, and moreover, to live up to it for its own sake. Conscious creating, it turns out, is an act of love, an act of giving the self to the ideal rather than trying to get things from the world. We cannot escape the assumptions of our own consciousness. When the creative moment is entered into lovingly rather than for some desired effect, then and only then are we operating at the level of cause. This means that it isn’t enough for us to visualize and such. We have to become the thing we want, until all experience of lack has vanished in the joy of our having come home to our ideal. Then, as far as we’re concerned, the world can come along or not. And the one who practices this way will discover a great secret indeed.

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I’ve had numerous emails asking me to comment on The Secret, the latest and massively popular New Age offering (available as a best-selling book and a DVD movie) on how consciousness allegedly can be used to attract health, love, and prosperity. First off, one has to hand it to Rhonda Byrne and the crew at Prime Time Productions, who put together this collection of New Age wisdom on the subject, for their keen sense of what would appeal to a mass audience. The packaging is unquestionably first-rate. Even a cursory reading of the book, however, reveals that if offers no secret at all, but only a reheated collection of the same instruction that’s been available in the New Age literature since the 70s on a cultural scale, and since the 1800s and early 1900s somewhat less visibly in the work of New Thought writers such as Phineas Quimby, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Ernest Holmes, Florence Scovel Shinn, Emmett Fox, and others. The essence of this teaching, to which Field training takes exception, is that one can, through visualizing or using affirmations or prayer or otherwise embodying a consciousness of fulfillment, create corresponding conditions in the world. Note that Field training does not deny that the outer world corresponds to the inner, but points out that one cannot use this “Law of Correspondence” by setting out to use it. There is an element of paradox built into the principle that Field training regards as central, and which the various New Age offerings on the subject, including The Secret, miss. This paradoxical element becomes obvious once it’s stated, but it is nearly invisible until then: If our belief creates reality, and we seek to create, say, prosperity, then it is unavoidable that we must already be believing in a lack of prosperity (else why would we set out to try to create it?) and this belief casts the vote of our faith, as it were, mobilizing the Law of Correspondence against our desire. It should be apparent that any attempt to use consciousness to solve a problem presupposes believing in the problem. Therein lies the paradox.

The idea that we can create conditions through consciousness techniques is nearly irresistible to anyone who has suspected that our inner life and our outer life are mysteriously commingled, but those who have made the experiment have learned quickly and sometimes the hard way that desire alone is not creative, and that visualizations and affirmations fail as a rule to have any creative effect on the world, which seems to roll on indifferent to our fantasies. We can want something with every atom of our being, we can visualize and affirm it till the cows come home, and still find the universe unresponsive. Of course, writing a book that tells us otherwise, that fosters and perpetuates the popular misconception that we can have, say, prosperity at the same time that we’re believing in its absence and consequently the need to create it—writing such a book may well fulfill the author’s expectation of prosperity, because there will always be a huge market for the idea that we can have what we want simply by wanting it, that “wishing will make it so,” but in such cases, the authors have made use of something like a pyramid scheme. As long as these writers can keep “selling” the idea, prosperity follows surely enough for them, but the tab ultimately is passed to those at the bottom of the pyramid who run out of customers, and are left wondering why this seems to work for others while they can’t get results. I don’t say that the authors of these books are doing this intentionally. My guess is that they got excited about an idea and mean well, but this is the effect nonetheless.

The fallback position for the New Age’s mistaken approach to conscious creating has been essentially the same as the fundamentalist’s, who infers from the failure of prayer that we must not have had enough faith. So, the New Age practitioner may wonder or even worry what he “did wrong” when the universe fails to deliver the goods. It doesn’t occur to him that the whole model is wrong, that the Law of Correspondence (also called Law of Assumption, Law of Attraction, Law of Creation, Law of Mental Equivalents, etc.) is elegant and unfailing but also in this sense ruthlessly thorough and efficient, and that he overlooked something essential, viz., that what we get in life corresponds not to what we want but to who we are. The person who believes he lacks prosperity sufficiently to be trying to create prosperity uses the law perfectly, and ends up with more lack, though this was not his aim. Here, then is the paradox: We cannot use the Law of Creation to create anything. We can, however, assume the identity we desire for its own sake, that is, solely for the sake of the inner fulfillment. Paradox requires that practice stop there. Anyone who could practice this far and no further would find the Law delightfully surprising him, and at that point indeed would have discovered a great secret.

A few weeks ago, I received an angry email from someone who had visited the Field Center site, looked at our “how we’re different” chart, and accused me of saying that other models “suck” as he put it. Most of what he found upsetting, I never said and wouldn’t. But even responding charitably, I don’t see anything wrong with stating that one approach is better, more revealing, more thorough, or more useful if it really is. And we don’t just allege this; we explain why. Furthermore, we don’t claim that Field training is the model. It’s a model, certainly not for everyone. That said, nearly every student who has come to Field training came from some New Age approach that, in the end, had not “worked.” What Field training gave these students was an entirely different standard for what counts as “working” when it comes to deliberately taking on the great adventure of living consciously, complete with its creative implications. It taught them that, as we say endlessly, “the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation.” It taught them to recognize, appreciate, enjoy, and work with the paradox of consciousness-as-cause. And it freed them from the pervasive and obviously still very popular misunderstanding that we can have anything in the world that we haven’t earned by right of identity. Instead, through their willingness to look beyond the popular model, they saw firsthand that identity is the generative force of creation, that what we want also wants something of us, that we cannot have anything we believe we lack, and that we cannot make an end run around these living principles through pretending, visualizing, repeating affirmations, or any other strategy.

More on this next time.

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