“We can’t become anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it. If we are born to paint, it’s our job to become a painter. If we are born to raise and nurture children, it’s our job to become a mother. If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice in the world, it’s our job to realize it and get down to business.”–Steven Pressfield

This quote might seem to contradict standard metaphysical principles, which would encourage the thinking that one COULD indeed be anything one desires, but it doesn’t. It is a reasonable statement of the nature of our limitless potential and the context in which that potential can be realized.

Each morning, I read from three books to align my thinking according to some specific goal I have for my personal growth each day. Currently those books are:

• Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This book explores how to more intentionally achieve the mental state of “optimal experience” and, thus, improve the quality of life experience by managing consciousness to ensure happiness.
• Law of Attraction, by Michael J. Losier. This short book provides a practical guide to the application of the Law of Attraction to manifest our desires intentionally in our lives.
• Real Magic, by Wayne W. Dyer. This book focuses on how to create miracles in every day life, starting with the recognition that we are spiritual beings having a human experience and using our spiritual nature to affect change in our human existence.

These three books provide different views of the same phenomena rooted in the truth that our life experiences and what we perceive to be the quality of them is exclusively controlled by our own minds. Events that happen in our lives have no intrinsic meaning. Rather, we attach meaning to events, and that process shapes not only our human experience but the basis upon which we make future decisions about intent and how we choose to expend our psychic energy.

All three of these books make the point that at every moment of every day–and, after all, we always only have the present moment in which to act and have experience–we make decisions (consciously or unconsciously) about what enters our consciousness and how what we give attention to will affect us. Our happiness throughout a lifetime–or at any particular moment–is exclusively dependent on these decisions and nothing else. We control our own lives in every conceivable aspect.

3 Steps in Intentional Exercise of Law of Attraction

The intentional exercise of the Law of Attraction can be broken down to the following three steps:

1. Identify your desire. One must clearly identify what they want, and that desire must be logical.
2. Give your desire focus and attention. Next, one must gives desires positive attention, energy, and focus.
3. Allow it. Simply put, one must believe fervently that the Law of Attraction is working for them to attract what has been identified, removing all doubt and other negative vibrations caused by other negative emotions.

What one allows into their awareness dramatically affects one’s ability to exercise these three steps successfully–especially the third. Emotions are an important indicator as to the degree with which we are succeeding in this effort. Negative emotions block the law from working for us, which positive emotions feed into the law to bring forth our intentions much faster.

The Elements of Enjoyment

Our emotional state is an important part of our realization of happiness. We must enjoy the moments in our lives in order to be happy, so properly defining what enjoyment actually means is critical. In exercising the second step of the Law of Attraction, a task list usually emerges where we give focus and energy to the steps involved in creating things in our lives. We must derive enjoyment in these tasks to continually feed both the management of our positive mental state as well as the Law itself. In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, identifies the following 8 “Elements of Enjoyment” based on a worldwide psychological study he conducted regarding the nature of optimal experience:

1. We must choose tasks and goals we have a chance of completing–thus logical.
2. We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Give focus in the absence of negative emotions or experience.
3. The goal must be clear.
4. The task associated with the goal must provide feedback. This ensures that concentration can be maintained.
5. One acts with a deep but effortless involvement the removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of every day life.
6. One has a sense of control over their actions.
7. Concern for self disappears, yet reappears more strongly once the goal is achieved.
8. The sense of duration of time is altered. Hours pass like minutes, and minutes slow down to seem like hours.

A Convergence of Ideas

Wayne Dyer’s book follows up with a discussion of the 14 keys to a miracle mindset, which I will talk about more extensively in another post, but my point here is to highlight the convergence of the ideas from three different books coming from different perspectives to a single concept. That concept is the fact that our lives are executed in our own minds, and we have complete control over the nature of our life experience by exercising control over consciousness–what we pay attention to, what we intend, and what we allow to affect us negatively or positively.

Eliminating the Negative

Negative emotion and “psychic entropy” (as Flow describes it) is our biggest enemy, and much of this negativity is rooted in false beliefs about ourselves that introduce doubt, thus preventing the exercise in the third step of the Law of Attraction. Consistently redirecting our thoughts away from doubt and other negative emotion is a key component to consistently ensuring a high quality of life and achieving the things we want.

“Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should go and say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week.’ Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.”–Joseph Campbell

Think on the positive things about yourself and your life each day, and you will experience more of those things as a matter of law. Law of Attraction.

In reading this, my mind travels back in time almost immediately to those moments and days after Brayden was born that inspired it.

Brayden’s Poem

I saw you smile this morning,
Your face glowed, beamed, eyes closed,
An angel was in your ear,
Whispering…


I could see God in your eyes,
Loving, pure, softly caressing you…
Never have I been so proud…
My child is an angel…

Your little breath brings me peace…
I know why I am here,
I know my purpose,
And I have no fear.

You are everything I wish I was,
You will be everything I wanted to be.
You are every good thing your mother is,
You represent all that is good in me.

You have your mother’s eyes,
Caring, kind, sincere…
Never have I seen such a mother’s love…
Your mother is an angel…

I listened to you breathe tonight,
Holding my cheek, pausing against your lips…
My little angel spoke to me…
Whispering…

Travis James
12/7/2002

Children are a blessing.

A commenter mentioned an open source library called ASIHttpRequest, which uses the lower level CFNetwork API, which enables the library to provide advanced features like throttling for bandwidth when streaming large data sets.

“The pain that’s created by avoiding hard work is actually much worse than any pain created from the actual work itself. Because if you don’t begin to work on those ideas that God has blessed you with, they will become stagnant inside of you and eventually begin to eat away at you. You might seem OK on the outside, but inside you will be ill from not getting those ideas out of your heart and into the world. Stalling leads to sickness. But taking steps, even baby steps, always leads to success.”–Russell Simmons

About the Author

The above quote is from Russell Simmons’ book, Do You. Russell Simmons is an Afriican-American enterpreneur most noted for being the creator of Def Comedy Jam.

“From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.”–Albert Einstein

I came across this great quote that really crystalizes the meaning of “suffering” as well as how we might interpret events in our lives in a manner that always results in our betterment:

“Do you want a sign that you’re asleep? Here it is: you’re suffering. Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.”–Anthony de Mello

The Author

Anthony de Mello was a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist known mostly for his books on spirituality. One of his most noted conferences, “Wake Up To Life,” is the only full length conference he permitted to be recorded. He died suddenly in 1987, after which many of his teachings were questioned by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) in 1998 as being distanced from the Christian faith and the teachings of the Catholic Church. Considering spirituality–and not religion–was the main point of his teachings, this is not a surprise. After all, if everyone took responsibility in full for their own spirituality, why would we need a church?