My recent six-month journey across the country had a number of purposes. Most were known by everyone:
There was one purpose which I shared with no one except my wife:
There are so many successful individuals who fully endorse subjective reality and so many books written that guarantee the principles. I had to try it for myself. I determined that there was no better way to test the theory than embracing it wholeheartedly. I dove in head first.
Dive head first into an empty pool and you will get hurt. Luckily there was enough water in this pool to break my fall. I only received minor injuries.
I’m not going to write article after article of why I believe the idea of subjective reality is false. I believe in the motto, “If you can’t say something good, don’t say anything at all.” The problem is that I’ve previously endorsed the idea of subjective reality but now believe that I was wrong to do so. I could simply remove those articles from my blog and continue on but I’d like to keep those articles as a historical reference. Instead, I’m going to write this one article to explain my change of heart.
The Practitioner’s Failure
Steve Pavlina recently posted an article that states that if the LOA isn’t working for someone, it’s because that person doesn’t truly believe. He even went as far as to say that intentions are not bound by time and that, if a person will doubt the LOA in the future, it won’t work in the present. What a great safety blanket. There is no way the LOA can ever be shown not to work because it is always the practitioner’s failure that causes it to do so.
I wanted the idea of subjective reality to be true, I really did. Who wouldn’t? Morphing our physical reality simply using our thoughts… how cool would that be? But even Steve, an avid supporter of subjective reality, posts statistics that show how poorly the idea performs. Check out the update on his Million Dollar Experiment. Of 1,169 people who are intending one million dollars to come into their life, a grand total of $4 million has manifested. That’s a dismal 0.34% success rate. Or, stated a different way, $3,421.73 per person. They can’t quit their jobs yet.
I’d expect the amount manifested to be higher simply based on misattribution and random luck! This corresponds with what I discovered for myself. When I practiced the LOA, I was less successful than before. I believe this happens because the LOA states that everything is created by the mind. Following that premise, no physical work is necessary. I simply have to think about what I want and I will have it. So, instead of making sacrifices and working hard towards my goal, I simply think about what I want and then I slack off. This makes me less successful at achieving my desires, not more.
Inconsistent Results
The LOA doesn’t work consistently. To me, inconsistency is worse than outright failure. Outright failure is easy to recognize and the failing thing can be discarded without hesitation. Something that seems to work some of the time but not all of the time is difficult to diagnose. This difficulty is magnified with the LOA because the practitioner is looking for things to attribute to it, things that would have happened without any belief in the LOA.
There are truths hidden within the idea of subjective reality. Belief in a thing makes it more likely to occur. If I believe I can lose weight, I am much more likely to lose weight then if I believe I’m a fat slob who will never slim down. But the belief alone does not create reality. I must take action.
Like anything bad that stays around for long, there are good principles mixed with the bad that give enough counter-balance to make the false principles seem like they are true. The whole batch cannot be dismissed as false, only parts. The difficulty lies in separating the good from the bad.
Impossible to Disprove
To add to the difficulty, the idea of subjective reality is impossible to disprove. The fact that it cannot be disproved can be quite convincing that the idea must actually be true. But the truth of the matter is that being unable to disprove something does not prove that the thing is true. If I told you Martians are going to invade our planet would you believe me simply because you couldn’t prove I was wrong? And how long should I wait before tossing my own theory on the trash heap? Christians have been waiting for the second coming of Christ for two-thousand years. That seems reasonable. If Martians don’t invade by 4,000AD, I’ll discard my belief in a Martian invasion and find something else to believe.
A Recipe for Compelling Ideas
Looking for a new product to sell? Here’s a bulletproof tactic: Devise a theory that can not be disproved, lace it with small bits of truth, and sell, sell, sell.
The small bits of truth sprinkled throughout the idea of subjective reality make it very hard to evaluate the legitimacy of the idea as a whole. The idea rides on something that is true, and can be proven as such, but then adds an element that cannot be proven as false. It is like claiming, “Gravity pulls two bodies toward one another. To offset this force, two bodies of equal mass will be repelled from each other in a parallel universe that we have yet to discover.” The legitimacy of the first idea, plus the inability to disprove the second, gives a glimmer of credibility to the idea as a whole.
Farewell
Farewell subjective reality. It was fun taking this ride with you. I read some good books and watched some exciting movies. It was fun dreaming of the perfect world. Er, it was fun thinking it was possible to dream of a perfect world. Er, actually, it kinda sucked thinking the world could be perfect but wasn’t simply because I had yet to master my mind to alter reality to be perfect. Farewell.