• Richard Spitzer

From Skeptic to Convert - Positive Thinking is True

Updated: Jun 30

I’ve converted I now believe that the concept of the “power of positive thinking “is mostly true. Positive thinking, in its many forms of self-help practices, manifestation, synchronicity, the overly popularized law of attraction, all tried to sell an age-old concept with new ways to market the principles

I changed my mind through a combination of research, personal experience, and reassessing many people that I’ve known and worked with, in the context of how they achieved their goals.

With regard to the pop psychology of positive thinking, I realize now that my skepticism was really my first inclination to shoot the messenger before trying to understand the message.

In 2019 I published a book about a modern, practical approach to manifestation, The Manifestation Formula, available on Amazon) that fully describes my research, retrospective, and current analyses. I also propose a new approach to what I’m calling manifestation, the inherent human desire and ability to have thoughts that things we want and now the various processes for how we pursue our goals. There are thousands of quotes in a genre of “you are what you think,” and “you attract what you think about.” You can also read about my manifestation applications and programs on two websites:

www.manifestformula.com covers the broadest scope of manifestation applied to personal change in goals.

www.wellness68.com focuses on how we can use the power of our positive thoughts and manifestation to achieve while most important issues throughout the world today, improving the state of our physical and emotional wellness.

This post is not going to replay all the content of the book, but describe how I first began to reassess my views about the often-called magic of how to achieve our goals and get what you want in life.

I started my serious metaphysics inquiry in 2005, and have learned more and expanded my vocabulary. The following commentary is from my earliest writing about how I converted from a skeptic to a believer. I’ve updated some of the statements, and I use the term manifestation more than the law of attraction, but I retained the basic questions that I ask myself and searched to find answers that would satisfy me

The first step in my conversion.

If you have had doubts about the Law of Attraction. If you have read articles that the Law of Attraction is a fake. If the Law of Attraction has not worked for you. Then you are like I was until a few years ago.

I changed my mind from being a skeptic to a believer. I now believe that what many people call the Law of Attraction (LOA)is a real human ability. I’ve made loa/manifestation work for me by investigating the process and revising the description to its real intention -Manifestation. And believing is what you need for LOA and manifestation to work for you. If I did it, and I’m usually a professional skeptic, then you can change your thinking too.

The first step is to realize what you are skeptical about, and why LOA should be more believable than many other things we all accept.

First, the term Law of Attraction describes only one part of the overall universal principles, which includes manifestation and synchronicity. One reason that LOA may not be successful for some people is that we think of “law” as a fixed condition that must work and be true. Principles are more appropriate for “thoughts” because the thoughts are in all shapes, sizes, and desires and can change.

I’ve been skeptical of many things in life that make extreme positive or negative claims. I don’t believe one pill will triple my memory or help me lose 30 pounds. And I don’t reject the possibility that there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe.

But I was skeptical of concepts like the Law of Attraction, which claim that positive thoughts will bring you positive outcomes and that you attract what you think about. It was too simplistic. Like everyone else, I’ve had thoughts that did not produce results. But I never understood the concept and the universal practices to make successful use of the principles.

So, let’s cover the nature of skepticism, which is a first cousin of fear and doubt, the biggest obstacles to successful attraction and manifestation.

“I mean, you could claim that anything's real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's proved it doesn't exist!” J.K. Rowling

Do a Google search on why the law of attraction does not work, and you will find many websites devoted to skepticism and debunking all types of claims.

So here is my challenge to skeptics of all types:

Almost everyone, including professional and scientific skeptics, believes in the most incomprehensible and unprovable things in the universe--yet readily dismiss the simple idea that you can transform thoughts to achieve the desired outcomes. And I’m not focusing only on “positive” thoughts; I agree with many other writers that manifestation is non-judgmental, the universe does not take sides, it only operates according to its inherent rules.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Carl Sagan

Here are some examples of scientific statements, even facts, that no one knows for sure or understands how or why, but that even skeptics accept:

· The universe is about 14 billion years old, but we don’t’ know for sure, or what existed before it came into existence, or how long it will last.

· A simple acorn has all the information in its own “DNA” to grow to be 150 feet tall, absorb sunlight and water and nutrients from the soil and live to be hundreds of years old.

· Light travel at 186,000 miles per second. Why not 192,000 miles per hour, or 100 miles per hour?

· Water naturally freezes at 30 degrees and boils at 201 degrees-why those temperatures?

· We all have thoughts, but we don’t know where thoughts come from. We can observe neurological brain activity, but we have absolutely no idea how the brain works in the way that we understand how an electric motor works.

· And there are thousands of similar things we accept, are taught, can often observe as true.

As the Noble winner physicist Leon Lederman said: “ to believe something while knowing it cannot be proved ( yet) is the essence of physics.”

“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the clear majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.” George Carlin

Over thousands of years, we’ve developed the vocabulary to describe processes that have been observed by philosophers, scientists, teachers, and everyday people. We see that some people have a goal, a creative idea, and by a combination of belief, work, what we call luck, and other factors successfully achieve their goals. We also see many other people who have similar ideas and ambitions but do not even start their quest, or if they do, it fails. Terms like The Law of Attraction is just the most recent verbal hyperbole to try to decipher ancient observations about an activity that we know works, but are still trying to decode.

We have not been created to move at the speed of light or become an oak tree -we are meant to think and turn our thoughts into tangible results.

We humans are here. We do have thoughts. It’s very clear that we are created, or evolved, with the ability to wonder about why everything exists or what could exist. We were created with the ability, both mentally and physically, to have thoughts and take actions to transform them into tangible things. It can be a jet plane or a book of philosophy or a telescope and the math to estimate there are 200 trillion galaxies.

We humans can conceive a thought and from it create a real, measurable, observable outcome.

Let’s look at thoughts in a more personal and internal perspective.

Have you ever thought about something bad happening to you in the future, and you get the chills, your stomach churns and gets in knots, maybe you get nauseous, your breathing changes, you feel weak, you get strange sensations throughout your body?

Or you can have a very positive thought about a new job, get a promotion and a raise, a date with the possible love of your life, or going on a vacation you have been planning forever. You feel energized, awakened, confident that you can do anything, and the world is wonderful, and everything is going your way.

So, we do have thoughts about imaginary situations, and they directly influence our psychological, emotional, and physical being. We feel the result of our thoughts!

Let’s go one more step. We all know people personally or in public life who have been committed to a goal and achieved great success. Most celebrities in entertainment, sports, business, and politics started from ordinary beginnings and were able to achieve their goals. When they are asked how they were able to succeed, they universally express a common theme, “you can achieve whatever you want in life if you really want it.” “My grandmother/mother/father/teacher/coach told me I could do anything I set out to do if I want it bad enough.”

As Henry Ford said, “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.”

Throughout history, someone’s thoughts have created everything we now have — the invention of the wheel, the creation of algebra, how to make wine, how to do a heart transplant, how to fly to the moon, how to measure the speed of light, how to write a book, how to help other people and unfortunately how to do evil things. Every single physical object and every single religious or philosophical concept— all originated with a first thought that was transformed into reality.

People have always lived in a time when full of skeptics or unbelievers who did not understand why and how something was possible or were afraid of an unpopular explanation. Our entire history is a cliché of how denials eventually became believable. The world is not flat. Bleeding a sick person will not make them better. A human in a horseless carriage going 20 miles an hour will not suffocate because they cannot breathe at such a high speed.

I believe there are universal processes as manifestation, the ability to transform ideas into reality, and that there is a fundamental base of managing our thoughts according to principles that can be drawn from what we accept as hard science. Over the last 100 years, there has been a convergence of historical metaphysics principles with evidence from quantum mechanics and other scientific disciplines. But many mysterious beliefs and unusual ideas have become surrounded by intentional and unintentional claims that are incorrect, exaggerated, incomplete, and so do not deliver the results promised.

We do know a few new things from current science.

“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that

imagination itself could add nothing to them.” Jules Verne

It is now universally accepted that everything in the universe is composed at its most fundamental level of some form of energy, which contains some type of information that determines its nature and how it interacts with other forms and constructions of energy.

We, humans, are part of this universe and its forces; we are made of the same energy that exists everywhere in the universe. One of the core principles is that we are physical beings composed of some irreducible form of energy that vibrates, contains information, interacts, and combines with other energy elements. Thus, humans broadcast a level of energy that has some capabilities that can interact with other levels of energy that are in a different form. Our energy-driven abilities are in our DNA. But the history of the universal principles has been largely misunderstood, denied, suppressed, kept secret, and misused, so there is much more to discover, learn, and in some cases, unlearn.

I’ve been doing my research for several years, and it’s not completed. I’ve reconsidered many people and events I’ve encountered and reassessed my own life in the context of the universal principles. I now believe in the Manifestation/ Law of attraction principle, but not all the hype surrounding it. I have not mastered the principles, but I now understand how it’s supposed to work, what I was doing wrong and what I need to do correctly.

Rich Spitzer

#manifestation #law#attraction #positive #thinking #metaphysics #transformation

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