The 6 Laws of Attraction Nobody Told You About (Ep.3)

You've heard that meditation, Buddhism, these spiritual practices can help you to attain happiness. Well, that's a core principle. How do you attain happiness?

Welcome to The Meditate More Podcast, where it's all about helping you to meditate more consistently, so you can reap all the incredible magical benefits that meditation can bring to your life today. And here is your host, Manny Mandala.

Hey, and welcome to Episode 3 of The Meditate More Podcast. I'm Manny Mandala. And if you're here for the first time, make sure you subscribe because we have a great show for you here today. We have some power-packed content.

And today we'll talk about how the mind creates our reality and our experience of reality. So since we're working on the mind every day with our meditation practice, this is a crucial topic for shaping our life and for lifestyle design even. We'll also talk about how meditation can end suffering.

In Episode 2, we talked a lot about the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, which is suffering. So now what? Today we'll talk about what do we do about it, how do we end suffering. Second, we'll talk about the nuts and bolts of meditation, the practical stuff. And if you've ever felt like you're bad at meditation, I hear that a lot, people tell me, "I'm just not very good at meditation. My mind is all over the place." If you've ever said this or thought this, we'll solve that today so you don't want to miss that.

And you may have heard that thoughts manifest our reality, or at least that the mind creates our experience of reality. Is that true? How does it work exactly? And how can you make it work for you to design an amazing life, to get everything you want out of life, be it more money, be it fitness and health, the relationships you want, or spiritual goals.

So if you've tried it and it hasn't been working, or it's been working but not quite right, maybe you got what you want but there was always a hitch, there was always a snag, maybe you got the job you wanted but then you sat across the desk from someone you didn't get along with, or maybe you got your dream relationship but it was long distance, somehow it never seemed to really work quite right, that's because there are also missing pieces when it comes to the law of attraction and the way it's being talked about these days, the way it's being discussed and taught.

In Episode 1, I shared with you the missing key to meditation and spiritual practice. And there are actually six pieces missing from the Law of Attraction, the way most people talk about it. Maybe you've heard of two or three of them, but I can pretty much guarantee that you don't know all six. So stay tuned because I'm going to share all six with you today in this episode.

So we'll talk about all that. Should be a pretty awesome show. Before we do, I want to remind you to listen to this podcast at 1x speed. And I know everybody's used to listening to content fast these days, even voice messages from friends and family, but I recommend you listen at 1x speed, at least to The Meditate More Podcast.

And I say that for several reasons. I talked about all the reasons in Episode 2, but in short, fast listening is basically anti-meditation. It makes the mind more frantic and hectic instead of more present. And I used to listen to everything at somewhere between 3x and 3.4x speed. I don't do that anymore and I would only recommend that for targeted studying. Maybe an hour a day if there's something you really need to study, fine, blast through it, but it's not a habit to get into doing all the time.

Next, if you haven't listened to the previous episodes yet, I would urge you, go back to Episodes 1 and 2 right now before listening to this episode because they set the foundation for Episode 3. Just like in a TV show, every episode kind of builds on the previous one.

In Episode 1, we talk about the missing key to meditation. And this is actually the most important principle of meditation practice and spiritual practice, and it's missing from most meditation teachings today. In Episode 2, we talk about the very foundation of spiritual practice. And without this foundation, you cannot tread the spiritual path successfully. You cannot make any real progress on the spiritual path. And according to a recent survey in the US, 57% of people are missing this foundation.

So make sure you listen to Episodes 1 and 2. If you haven't done that yet, hit pause and check that out right now and then come back and Episode 3 will make all the more sense.

On top of all that, I also created The Meditate More Challenge for you. This is for you if you've ever said, "I know I should meditate more, so why don't I do it?" This is for you if you've ever struggled to establish a consistent meditation habit, if you've ever felt frustrated that you can't make a meditation practice really stick every day. I used to have that problem, I don't anymore and I'll show you how you can solve it. So go to meditatemorechallenge.com to check that out.

I'm going to sell that in the future because it's taught via email and my goal is to only have serious students on the email list. So if I charge a small amount, then students have at least some skin in the game. But for now, since this project is new, I'll give it away for free. And in return, I hope you give me feedback if you apply it and help me to improve it. So make sure you go to meditatemorechallenge.com to get that.

All right. With that out of the way, I'm going to share a quick glimpse behind the curtain of The Meditate More Podcast, a bit about what's going on behind the scenes. First of all, it's the rainy season here in Central America where I'm recording today's episode, so I hope there's not going to be too much noise in the background from the rain. If so, we'll power through that. We'll fix it in post, as they say, right? But that's the situation.

I also bought a new microphone, not the one you're listening to right now, but hopefully I can use it soon. It's actually the same microphone Joe Rogan uses. So hopefully this podcast will be as big as Joe Rogan's podcast or bigger, because that's what it's all about, right? It's the right microphone. That's what makes the difference.

Anyway, there's still a cable missing. So I ordered that and we'll see how long that takes in customs this time. Got to love the bureaucrats that slows everything down. For now, it's still the old microphone. But anyway, we're going to move on, we're going to get into the show, and dive right into our topics for today.

And the first thing we'll talk about is suffering. It's the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, and more specifically, we'll talk about how meditation can help you to end suffering.

So the first Noble Truth of Buddhism is suffering, and we can find that in the Pali Canon. The Pali Canon, again, that's the main scriptures of the original form of Buddhism, the Theravadan Buddhism. And specifically, among other places, we can find it in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta that translates as the Discourse on the Turning of the Wheel of Dhamma. 

The Turning of the Wheel of Dhamma. That sounds so dramatic. The turning of the wheel, right? It's like getting crushed under the wheels of history, the wheel of reincarnation. Very dramatic concept here. You can actually see this wheel throughout Asia. It's a very common symbol used everywhere for Buddhism. You can see it in many places. It's a wheel with many spokes.

So in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Buddha says, "Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering. Association with what is displeasing is suffering, separation from what is pleasing is suffering." Not getting what one wants is suffering. Getting what one doesn't want is suffering.

Suffering, suffering, suffering, right? It's like the Buddha had no chill. That's all he talked about. But when you really think about it, it's reasonable to talk about it, because there is a lot of suffering in this world, and the way most people deal with it is to just ignore it, to just pretend it's not there. Let's just try to get through life the best way we can and with as little suffering as we can. And there's nothing wrong with that, but a lot of people live in denial. and have their heads in the sand and don't even want to look at it, right?

And I talked about this story a little bit in Episode 2. That's what started the Buddha's process of awakening. He said, "Look, there's all this suffering in the world. What are you doing? How are you just all ignoring this" Because it's not just our own suffering. Other people are suffering too. So one could say there's a lack of compassion when we ignore suffering because it doesn't only affect us. Even if we're not affected by suffering right now, it affects others right now. So we shouldn't ignore it.

But there is a bit of a misconception about Buddhism, that Buddhism is the religion of suffering and Buddhism is all about suffering. Actually, the Buddha didn't say life is suffering. What he said is that life contains suffering. There is suffering in life, right?

And the second point is suffering is only one of Four Noble Truths in Buddhism. There are four. And the third Noble Truth is that suffering can end forever. No more suffering ever. And that's why we meditate, right? That is why people are attracted to the path of Buddhism, because Buddhism has that promise that suffering can end, and anybody who's really suffered before will be attracted to that promise. So let's talk about it.

One of my meditation teachers actually talks about two of his students who both had very serious illnesses at the end of their lives. And one of his students was a very dedicated practitioner of meditation. He always meditated with consistency. He was just really dedicated to the path and practiced every day. And it turns out, the student was really able to deal with this end-of-life illness pretty well.

Not that he was completely free from suffering, right? He wasn't a fully enlightened master. But he was able to deal with the pain much better than most other people, because he was able to separate out all the different unpleasant sensations and not get tangled up in them, not get swept away with them, right?

Just like when we meditate, we realize that we're unable to stay present. We get swept up in the mind and the mind drags us away. The same thing happens with suffering, right? If you can stay present instead of getting dragged away by the suffering, it takes your consciousness over and does with it what it wills, then the suffering is a lot more intense than if you can really stay present with it. That state of presence with suffering, where you have an experience of it that doesn't cause you to lose your balance, is called equanimity.

And the same teacher had another student who was always just dabbling in meditation. Maybe he was kind of interested in the topic, maybe he practiced a little here and there. And he also ended up having a very painful illness at the end of his life and he was completely unprepared. He just wasn't able to really deal with it any better than a layperson.

So that's why it's so important to meditate consistently, right? And like I said, people don't even like to think about this train that might be coming for many of us, right? A lot of people die of painful illnesses at the end of their lives. It's a tragic reality of life. But the good news is we can prepare for that.

I've had a small taste of that during the pandemic. I spent the pandemic in Mexico and had a friend who's a naturopath. And we were at a restaurant one night and I had some kind of health issue. I don't remember what it was exactly, but since she's a naturopath, she said, "Well, let me try something." And she took my hand and she worked with some technique where she was painfully massaging pressure points in the hand with a lot of pressure on specific points that will cause a lot of pain. I don't know if it was reflexology or acupressure. It was one of those techniques.

And after a few minutes, she looks at me and she says, "That's weird. You're not feeling any pain? It seems like it's not working." And I told her, "No, actually, I went into Vipassana meditation when you started doing your technique and I was able to get into a state of equanimity with the pain. So the pain is there, it's working, believe me. But I was able to deal with it better than I would have been able without my experience in meditation."

So I've had some small taste of this effect myself and I can vouch that it's real. And I have absolute faith that the more you practice and the more you build up your equanimity, your ability to stay present, even with unpleasant sensations, the less they will affect you in a negative way, the less they will throw you off balance.

So that's why I called this podcast The Meditate More Podcast. Meditate more to get that benefit, right? You want to meditate more to be able to deal with suffering, to be able to deal with pain when it inevitably comes.

And so I hope that story will inspire you to be more consistent with your practice as well, because that benefit alone, for me, that benefit alone would be worth it. If meditation had no other benefit but this one, that whenever we do have a painful situation or a situation that causes us suffering, it'll affect us less. That would be worth the price of admission already. And it's not the only benefit, of course. It's just, again, we're just scratching the tip of the iceberg here.

And on that note, let's get into the nuts and bolts, the practical part of the podcast, the how to meditate more. And today we'll talk about what to do if you're "bad at meditation". But before we do, I just want to follow up real quick on the POM technique that I talked about in Episodes 1 and 2, because I got a comment from a listener and it made me realize that I need to clarify something.

The POM technique is not only for beginners, right? I said, you can use the POM technique if you're a beginner, or if you're very busy and start with just one minute per day. But here's the thing, even if you're more advanced already, if you already have a consistent meditation practice for years, and maybe you're perfectly comfortable to meditate 40 minutes a day, I still recommend you use the POM technique, the progressive overload meditation, to gradually push the envelope, to gradually increase the amount of meditation you can do. Because otherwise you might find yourself stagnating and your progress will be a lot slower than it could be.

I personally consider that meditation is never an opportunity cost because you get the time back. You get so much more benefit than what you put into for up to two hours a day. That's what I would say for a layperson, for somebody who still has a normal life, job, family, friends, relationships, whatever. I would say up to two hours, there is no worries about opportunity cost because you get more back than you put in.

So, anyway, back on topic. What do you do if you're "bad at meditation"? Do you ever feel like you're bad at meditation? Because I hear that a lot. People tell me, "You know, I'm just not very good at meditation. My mind's all over the place." And if you've ever had that thought, I can offer you one simple mental shift that will solve it for you.

So here's the shift. Are you ready? It's very simple, but it'll fix it. You just got to realize one thing. Every time you notice that the mind is running away and that you're not focused on the breath or whatever the object of your meditation is, that is actually you being good at meditation. So you just bring the mind back to the object of your focus, which for most people I recommend to make that the breath, and that is the meditation, right? The mind wandering isn't being bad at meditation. The mind wandering and you bringing it back, that is the meditation.

It's kind of like in the gym when you lift weights and you say, "Well, I'm just not very good at lifting weights. I can't lift the really heavy ones. And every time after weightlifting, my arms hurt." The thing is the arms hurting, that is what makes the muscle grow, right? The exercise breaks down the muscle. And then when you sleep, the muscle gets rebuilt stronger.

So just like being sore the day after a workout doesn't mean you're bad at working out, the same way, if your mind is wandering, that doesn't mean you're bad at meditation. The mind running away and you're bringing it back, that IS the meditation. So long as you bring it back every time you notice it, you're actually being good at meditation. And with time, it will happen less.

A related point. Sometimes people say, "Well, yesterday I had a really good meditation, but today my meditation was bad." It's the same concept. Maybe today the mind was all over the place and yesterday it was more calm. But as long as you brought your mind back whenever you noticed it, that is a good meditation.

The only bad meditation I would say is when you don't even make the effort, right? Maybe you sit down and you're just daydreaming and you notice you're daydreaming, but you don't bring the mind back to focus. You don't bring it back to presence. That would be a bad meditation. But as long as every time you notice that the mind has drifted off, you do bring it back to the point of attention, I would call that a successful session.

And you know what? If tons of stuff comes up during your meditation, wonderful. You noticed it and you come back to the breath. Just work with whatever comes up that day, whatever surfaces from the mind, work through that, observing it, letting go, bringing your focus back to the breath and move on. And just keep doing that for as long as you're meditating that day until the timer goes off. And that is a good meditation. That is you being good at meditation. And with time, it'll get better and you will become more focused and more calm.

So I hope that's helpful for you. But I want to get to the most important part of the podcast, the Dhamma Discourse. Let's talk about the Dhamma. The Dhamma is the core teachings of Buddhism. And I'm not a Buddhist, but the West got meditation mostly from Buddhism, so it's worth having a look at the source, at the origin, of this practice we're all participating in, meditation.

And today we'll talk about the real law of attraction. You've probably heard about the law of attraction. It got very famous after 2005 because of the movie The Secret. And as it turns out, this is part of the Dhamma as well. The law of attraction is actually part of Buddhist teachings as well. But the idea has been around in self-help literature for much longer than the movie The Secret. You can find it as far back as the mid-19th century.

One of the most famous authors who wrote about it at the time was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Another really famous book about it from over 100 years ago is As a Man Thinketh by James Allen. I highly recommend you check that out.

There is, of course, the famous Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. Must read. Everybody has to read that book. If you haven't read Think and Grow Rich, I don't know what to say other than, what are you doing? Why are you not reading this book? It's been life changing for many successful people that I know personally, and many more around the web vouch for how important this book has been to their success in life. Another very famous one is Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking.

But as it turns out, The Secret, the law of attraction has been around even longer in the mystery schools, such as Hermeticism. And in Hermeticism, it's actually considered the first law. The first law of Hermeticism is the law of mentalism. And the law of mentalism is basically the law of attraction. And you can read all about that in the esoteric book, The Kybalion, which is another must read. And Hermeticism is actually around 2,000 years old. It comes from ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. And you know what, if you really dig, it goes even far beyond that.

So we're dealing with a very old idea here, right? You've heard that there is nothing new under the sun, but these ideas do get lost, at least they get lost in public consciousness. And in 2005, it surfaced again. It gained a lot of mainstream attention with that movie, The Secret. And The Secret is all about manifestation, visualization, affirmations, the law of attraction. And most people use that as a way of getting rich, of attracting your dream partner, of getting in top shape.

So we'll talk about what it is, how does it work, and why doesn't it work when it doesn't work. And the reason is because there's also some missing pieces in the way it's being taught these days. And I'm not talking about visualization and I'm not talking about feeling. Many people are missing those, but there are four other missing pieces, and I will give you all of them today.

And I've used the law of attraction extensively in my life, but not how you probably think. And the way I used it, it really worked for me very powerfully. And before I used it, honestly, I wasn't really going anywhere in my life. I was kind of stagnating, like a lot of people are. And it's been a life changer. It's been a game changer. So I want to share it with you.

So as I said in the previous episode, one of my first introductions to meditation and to Buddhism was the famous nun, Tenzin Palmo. And she said in one of her speeches that I heard live in Singapore almost 20 years ago now, she said that whenever we seek happiness for ourselves, we reap disappointment. And whenever we seek happiness for others, that's when we also find happiness for ourselves, right?

You've heard that meditation, Buddhism, these spiritual practices can help you to attain happiness? Well, that's a core principle. How do you attain happiness? When you do good, you feel good.

And there is actually a scientific and a biological reason why that works, is every time we do something for someone else, our system releases beta-endorphins. And beta-endorphins are natural peptides produced by the body. It binds to opioid receptors in the brain and acts as a powerful mood enhancer. Homemade, right? Our own pharmacy in our own body. Amazing. Most people are in a selfish mindset, let's be honest. Most people are looking for what they can get for themselves. And so they miss out. And that was me too.

I heard Tenzin Palmo talk about this and I remember thinking, yeah, that makes sense, right? That makes sense but. And that's the ego. The ego loves to say, "Yes, but." Yes, but. So my ego said, "Yes, but I'm young now, so let me have some fun. Let me pursue the pleasures of the world and do all that spiritual stuff later, right?" So I wanted to achieve worldly goals first, material goals first, and I used the law of attraction to do that. So if there are some things you want in the material world, I think I can help you with that. I can give you some tips on how I made the law of attraction work for me.

So, for example, I used the law of attraction to get gigs as a musician. I was a professional performing artist and I used these techniques to play at the Sydney Opera House, to get myself on TV a bunch of times, to play the piano on a cruise ship and in luxury hotels in Dubai, in São Paulo, in Madrid. So, basically, I used the law of attraction for my career as a musician, for selfish purposes, right? For a material worldly purpose.

And then when that got old, I used the law of attraction again. And this time, I used it to build an online language school. So I learned a lot of different languages on my travels and I invented a method for learning foreign languages and sold that as an online course. And again, I used the law of attraction every single day to build that course. And in the end, more than 300,000 people took my course. It's called Formula Fluente. It's available in Brazilian at the moment. I'll probably make it available in English at some point soon and let you know about it.

But all this just to say, I can say from experience, there is something to this law of attraction. I've used it and it worked. But more importantly, I can also say from experience, Tenzin Palmo's right, okay? The worldly success was a lot of fun, a lot of parties, bottle service in the clubs, by the beach, a lot of fun nights out, a lot of travel, and I lived like that for years of my life, but guess what? It doesn't bring lasting happiness or fulfillment. Who would have thunk?

So I focused the law of attraction on material goals and walked the path of hedonism, of pleasure pursuits, and eventually I hit a wall. And everyone does. This is just not sustainable. That's one of the truths that Buddhism teaches us, Annica. Annica is impermanence. Everything changes. Nothing in this material world lasts. So that's why , by definition, it's not sustainable to pursue these kinds of goals.

And to be honest, that drove me into a bit of an existential crisis. And in 2016, I said, "Okay, I'm going to refocus on the spiritual." I'm going to really pursue the spiritual path again, right? I had neglected that for a few years. I'm going to go back to meditation and to spiritual study. And now I'm using the law of attraction for spiritual goals. And I will talk more about that in future episodes.

So, hopefully, you'll use the law of attraction more wisely than I did at first. And don't just focus it on material and worldly goals. But whatever you do with it is up to you. And I'm going to now give you the six missing pieces to the law of attraction that are not being talked about. So I'm now going to give you the seven keys to the law of attraction. And one of them is very commonly known and six are missing from most teachings about the law of attraction.

The piece that everybody knows, the first key of the law of attraction, is the idea that our thoughts create our reality, right? That's the idea that manifestation is based on thought. Everything is based on mind.

A simple example would be the chair I'm sitting on. Well, you couldn't have a chair without a mind. Somebody had to think of the chair first. Somebody had to think in his head what it would look like. Basically, we couldn't have a chair without mind. So the origin point of the chair I'm sitting on is mind. And so the concept that our thoughts create our reality is basically that the origin point of everything is mind.

Now here's the thing, and this is important. If the origin point of everything is mind, then it stands to reason that we have to clean up the mind, right? And that's why we practice meditation. And that's why meditation will help you so much with using the law of attraction and with manifestation. Because if all manifestation springs from the mind, then that means when we have a messy mind, we get messy manifestations.

If you look at your life, is it messy sometimes, or parts of it messy? If we look at the world, is it messy? All the time. Like Shakespeare says in Macbeth, "Life is a tale told by an idiot." We're the idiots telling the tale. The unmeditative mind is the idiot telling the tale, and the tale is the world. The tale is the world we see around us.

I mean, just look at the world. Things are a mess. We got war, we got pandemics, allegedly, we got famines. War, pestilence, and famine. That's the three horsemen of the apocalypse are upon us. But everything's fine. Just relax. Everything's cool. Just meditate and don't focus on the bad stuff, right?

Anyway, we'll get into that topic in a different episode, right? What's the right balance to strike there? But the point being, the world's a mess because our minds are a mess collectively. And that's the reason why I started this podcast, The Meditate More Podcast. Let's clean up our minds so we can clean up this mess.

Now, I want to have a quick look at scripture again just because it's interesting to trace this stuff back to these old wisdom traditions and what people said about them thousands of years ago. And again, we're going to have a quick look at Christianity and a quick look at Buddhism.

In Christianity, it says in Proverbs 23:7, "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." That's actually what the title of James Allen's book is based on, As a Man Thinketh. That's a book from 1903, and the title is based on this verse in Proverbs. "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he."

And you know where we can find the law of attraction in Buddhist scriptures? We can find it in the Pali Canon, which is the core of the traditional original Buddhist scriptures. And inside the Pali Canon, we can find it in the Dhammapada, which is basically the Buddhist Gospels. The core of the teachings of the Pali Canon is the Dhammapada.

And can you guess where in the Dhammapada we can find the law of attraction? Verse 1. It's the first verse in the Dhammapada. In the most central teachings of traditional Buddhism, it's the first verse. And it says, "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts. It is made up of our thoughts." So that's Dhammapada verse 1.
And in the ancient mystery schools, this is known as the first Hermetic Principle, the law of mentalism, where it says, "The all is mind, the universe is mental."

Okay, I hope that got your attention. So the law of attraction isn't just some New Age idea from this goofy documentary from 2005 with all these self-help gurus.

But, see, this is only the piece that everybody knows. The idea that our thoughts create our reality. That's the first of the seven keys, and that one most people know. But there are six other keys that most people are missing. Three of them are openly missing, which means you can still find them. If you do a lot of reading about this topic, if you read a whole bunch of books, you can probably piece together three of those.

But there are three other keys that are very hidden. One is hidden in the esoteric mystery schools and rarely revealed to the uninitiated. Another one you will find in books in a different field of study. I'll get to that later. And then another one relates to the missing key to meditation, which I talked about in Episode 1, but let's analyze them one by one.

So to lay the groundwork, our thoughts create our reality, our mind creates our reality. There is an important concept to consider here. And that's the distinction between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. You may have heard that our mind is like an iceberg and our conscious thoughts are just the tip of the iceberg that we can see above the waterline, but the subconscious mind is 90 to 95% of our mind.

I would almost say as an analogy that if this was the matrix and we're living in a simulation, then the subconscious mind is like the source code of that simulation. So you have to program the source code. You have to program the subconscious mind. It's not enough to program the conscious mind. You have to get into the source code of your life, into your subconscious mind, and change that to really make the law of attraction work for you.

And if you want to go in depth on that topic, I recommend books by Joseph Murphy, PhD. He has written extensively about the subconscious mind. And if you're interested in this topic, definitely check out his books.

So here's the first missing key. We already know the key that our thoughts create our reality. Here's the second key. The second key is programming the subconscious mind. And there are a number of techniques for that. The most famous ones are probably affirmations and autosuggestion.

But the important part is that we have to get past the critical factor. The critical factor is basically the BS detector of your mind, right? It protects you from believing any nonsense somebody tells you. If we didn't have the critical factor, somebody could tell you, "Hey, if you jump off this roof, you will be able to fly," and you might believe it. 

But the critical factor filters any information that goes into the mind and it's there to protect you. But if you want to bring an idea into your subconscious mind that doesn't currently make sense to you, your critical factor will reject it. So you have to find a way to sneak it past that guardian, right?

So, for example, if you're currently struggling financially, and you do an affirmation or an autosuggestion, telling yourself, "I'm a millionaire," your mind will reject it. Your critical factor will reject it. It will not be allowed into your mind. So how do we get past the critical factor? I'm gonna give you three techniques to get past the critical factor.

Number one, repetition. If you hear something often enough, the repetition will get the idea past the critical factor and into deep levels of your mind. So when I was using the law of attraction, like, for example, I'm the resident pianist in a luxury hotel in Dubai. I was doing a lot of repetition. Every day in the morning for 10, 15 minutes, I would write out this affirmation with pen and paper.

The second way to get past the critical factor is to use these techniques when your brain is in the right state. When we're wide awake and wide alert during the day, the critical factor is very active and it's very prone to rejecting ideas that don't seem to make sense immediately. But when the brain is in alpha, it's much more prone to programming. So affirmations are more effective if you do them right after you wake up, right before you go to bed or right after a long meditation session.

And the third way to get past the critical factor is a technique called dual induction. That means you program the mind with the ideas that you want to get into your subconscious mind in two ways at the same time. That overwhelms the critical factor. The critical factor can't even pay attention to both of them. So one of them goes in, right?

The way I did that is I wrote out all my affirmations, everything I wanted to achieve, and I recorded them. I voice recorded them and then I would read them out loud while listening to the voice recording. So that way every single one of these ideas went into the mind on two channels at the same time. I hear myself speak them and I hear the recording say them. And since they're not even in sync, right? Maybe you will read the third sentence of your affirmations while you listen to the 15th sentence of your affirmation. Since they're out of sync, the conscious mind can't even pay attention to both of them, so the critical factor cannot protect against it, and it goes on.

But let's move on. The second missing key to the law of attraction, and this is one you may have heard about, is visualization. It's one thing to just think about the things you want to achieve and manifest, but if you visualize them, it works that much better. The visualization activates the right brain, it activates the creative part of your mind, and it makes things more real than just words.

And if you're one of those people who say you're not good at visualizing, just think about this. What color are your shoes? And for most people, they will know what color their shoes are because an image of the shoes popped up in their heads. So that's how you can get good at visualizing. You start small with simple objects. You just look at an object on the table, like a pen, close your eyes, and then call that image back to your mind. Practice small and work your way up to bigger goals you want to achieve.

The fourth key to the law of attraction is one that you may also have heard if you've read extensively about it, and that is feeling. There's a famous book by Neville Goddard that's very interesting and worth reading. It's called Feeling Is The Secret. And that's very true. Emotion definitely drives these thoughts deeper into the subconscious mind and helps you to program yourself, to program the source code of your mind. And I'll talk more about in future episodes how we do that. But basically, you want to visualize what you want to have happened and then feel as if it had already happened.

One tip I can give you is, in many cases, the emotion you would experience is relief, right? So, for example, say you have a lot of bills right now that you can't pay and the goal you're visualizing is financial abundance. Then in that visualized scene, you would probably feel a sense of relief. The stress is gone. The bills are paid.

Another emotion that's very powerful to use for this fourth key of the law of attraction, which is feeling, is gratitude. Gratitude is a powerful emotion for manifestation for using the law of attraction. You may have heard of that one as well.

So before I go into the three hidden keys of the law of attraction, I want to give you a quick summary. The first key is that our thoughts create our reality, the concept of mentalism, right? The second key is that the subconscious mind needs to be programmed as well. For that, we need to get past the critical factor, and I've discussed some techniques for that. The third key is visualization. Start small, practice small, and work your way up. And the fourth key is feeling. And the best feelings to work with are relief and gratitude.

And now I'm going to go deep into the actual hidden parts of the law of attraction that most people don't even know exist. And the next one, the fifth key to the real law of attraction, is the esoteric trinity of thought, emotion, and action. These are the three aspects of human consciousness. If you've done a lot of study of self-help literature, you may have come across the concept of the triune brain.

I'll go into more detail into that in future episodes as well. But basically, the human brain has three parts. And one part is the reptile brain. One part is the mammalian brain. And one part is the neocortex, the human thinking mind. And the reptile brain is the part of the brain that we share with reptiles. It's the fight-or-flight response. It's about food. It's about procreation. It's a very primitive instinct. The mammalian brain is the part that lets us feel our emotions. And the neocortex is the part that thinks logically and rationally.

So you can see how these map over. It's basically mind, body, and heart. It's thought, emotion, and action. Now, here's the thing, and most people don't talk about this. You have to engage all three aspects of the esoteric trinity, all three aspects of human consciousness, to manifest a goal in this world.

In order to manifest anything in this world, you need to engage your thoughts, we've talked about this, you need to engage your emotions, we've touched upon that in the fourth key. And here's the fifth key: you need to engage your action. You need to take action. Have you noticed that the law of attraction is being sold as something that you can just sit and visualize and it'll happen? It's a complete bunk.

And I'll prove it to you with an example from the movie The Secret itself. In the movie The Secret, they give an example where it says, "Practice small, manifest something small first, just so you can prove to yourself that you have the ability to manifest. Manifest just a cup of coffee, right? We're not doing a Ferrari yet, we're not doing a Lamborghini yet. Start small. Manifest a cup of coffee."

Now, tell me, how in the world are you going to manifest a cup of coffee without taking any kind of action? Let's say you sit alone in your room, you think about the coffee, you visualize the coffee, you feel the emotion of, I want the coffee, you imagine you already have the coffee, you imagine the satisfaction of drinking the coffee, you feel, you get into the feeling of it, you visualize, you feel, you think. What's missing?

Action is missing. Without taking action, you can't even manifest a cup of coffee. At the very least, you're gonna have to get up off your chair and go to the kitchen and make the coffee. You're gonna have to go to a coffee shop and buy the coffee, right? Some kind of action is required for manifestation. Maybe at some point in the future, we'll have replicators and it won't be necessary, but for now, action is required to manifest things in the physical world.

Let's move on. The sixth key to manifesting, the sixth key to the law of attraction is strategy. So, for example, if you want to manifest wealth with the law of attraction, you're going to need the right strategy as well. You're going to need to learn about entrepreneurship or advertising, about hiring, about franchising. And this is simple to prove.

You may have heard that 95% of businesses fail within the first, what is it, five years or ten years? There's an inverse statistic. Something like 95% of McDonald's franchises succeed. Why is that? Because they have a proven strategy, right?

So if you want to manifest wealth, you need a strategy. If you want to lose weight, you need a strategy. You can't just keep eating cakes and never working out and sit in front of the TV eating Cheetos and just visualize yourself getting leaner. It's not going to happen, right? This should all be common sense, but this is how confused the spiritual community is these days. There's a lot of people that think you can just think about something and it'll happen.

And here's the last key to the real law of attraction, key number seven and the most hidden key of the law of attraction. You ready? It's karma. I talked about this extensively in Episode 1, so I hope you did go back and listen to Episode 1 before this one. But don't underestimate this one. How does karma play into the law of attraction? How does karma play into manifestation, into manifesting our goals and into designing our lifestyle and into our reality?

This has best been explained by success coach and motivational speaker, personal growth guru, Zig Ziglar. And he has the best quote about how this works that I've ever heard. Zig Ziglar says, "You can get anything you want if you help enough other people to get what they want."

Stated in a more down to earth way, in a more practical way, in a quote by Joe Polish, he says, "All money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation." You create value for other people, other people will create value for you. You create value for a lot of other people, a lot of value will flow back to you, again, if you use the other keys as well, the right entrepreneurial strategy and so forth.

And this is something I have personal experience with. I can absolutely confirm that this is how it's worked out in my life. There's been phases in my life when I didn't have much money, but I was helping thousands of people with my language newsletter and I had everything I wanted. Everything I wanted to manifest, anything I wanted to manifest came true.

Then there was another stage in my life when I did have a fair bit of money accumulated, but I wasn't helping people. I was frustrated with the language newsletter and I had shut it down, and I was focused on other things, and the manifestation wasn't working either. Is that a coincidence? But it brings me back to Tenzin Palmo's quote, "Seek happiness for others and you will find happiness for you." Or in the words of the famous Tony Robbins, "The secret to living is giving."

So now let's bring it back to the practical and help you to apply it in your life. What is something you are good at helping other people so you could help them to get what they want? Do that as much as you can for as many people as you possibly can. Use the internet to scale it to reach as many people as possible to help them. And you will get the thing you want as well.

And yes, the law of attraction is not a new self-help fad or a New Age spiritual fad. It's in all the ancient mystery traditions. It's verse 1 of the Dhammapada, the core scripture of Buddhism. You can find it in the Bible. You can find it in the mystery traditions of the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians, and even before that. And karma, action, those are part of these ancient teachings as well.

So, in summation, the law of attraction has seven keys. Most people know only one, some people know two or three, maybe four, but when you put all seven pieces together, that's when you're cooking with fire. That's where you're going to see some amazing results.

And again, I want to encourage you to meditate more because it'll make it work better, right? The first law is that our mind creates our reality. Our minds are a mess. You just need to sit down to try and meditate for five minutes and you'll quickly realize what kind of a mess our minds are in. So meditate more and it'll help you to make the law of attraction work better.

And something else I want to encourage you to do. Rekindle your dreams. Think back on when you still had big dreams, when you still thought of an amazing life you could create for yourself. Don't give up on your dreams. Hold on to them. Because the law of attraction is real. I speak from experience. Write down what your dream life would look like.

Imagine a cloud opens and a voice speaks from the clouds and says to you, "Hey, you know, I know you've been going through a lot. You've had a really tough time, especially these past few years. And you've been really doing your best. You've been struggling and hanging in there and doing your best. You deserve a reward. You're going to get any wish you want. You're going to get your dream life. Whatever you choose, it'll happen."

Take a piece of paper and write down what you want your dream life to look like. And dream big and apply all seven keys of The Secret to this dream life that you want to manifest, okay? And then send me an email and let me know about your results. That's manny@mannymandala.com. I can't wait to hear from you. I can guarantee you it works. I have used it myself countless times. I've used it all my life. As soon as I learned about it, I started using it and I vouch 100% this is real. And the only way you can find out if it's real or not is by proving it to yourself.

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Meditate More Podcast with Manny Mandala. I had a lot of fun creating it for you.

And if you're one of those people who say, "I know I should meditate more, so why don't I do it?" If you struggle to make your meditation practice really stick, I used to have that problem, I don't anymore. And that's why I created The Meditate More Challenge for you. It'll show you how you can solve that problem. I want you to have that too. 

And you can get that for free. Just go to meditatemorechallenge.com and sign up for the challenge. Because it's only this kind of consistent meditation practice that will actually help you to clean up the mess that we all have in our heads. And since our mind creates our reality, this is so essential to creating a good life, a good reality, a good life experience.
So in The Meditate More Challenge, I'll teach you seven concise power-packed lessons that will take your meditation to the next level. I think you will love it. It's free for a limited time. I want to charge for it at some point, so only serious students sign up. And if you listen to the episode later, it may not be free. But at the time of recording, it's still free, so check it out now at meditatemorechallenge.com.

Also, if you know someone who might enjoy this kind of content, who might find this interesting, please tell them about it. Because the more you spread the word about The Meditate More Podcast and Manny Mandala, the more episodes I can make for you. I have content for thousands of episodes like that, and there's so much gold I still want to share with you. So please share the podcast, subscribe.

And in the next episode, we'll talk about specifically how meditation can help you to become healthier. You've heard that meditation is good for your health. We'll go beyond that. We'll talk about specifically how it can help you to become leaner, in better shape, and how it can help you to lose weight. And we'll talk about specifically what you need to do to make that happen.
In the next episode, we'll also talk about how you can use meditation to make your brain faster, how you can accelerate the processing speed of the CPU that's in your head. And in the next episode, I will teach you the lost truth discovery method from the ancient mystery schools.

I touched on this briefly in Episode 2. Episode 2 was all about the topic of truth. Episode 4 will be about how to find truth, what is the lost truth discovery method? We'll talk all about that in Episode 4. For now, go to meditatemorechallenge.com and sign up. You'll get seven concise, powerful meditation lessons. You'll get some of my best content free for a limited time. So go to meditatemorechallenge.com.

Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you on the next episode of The Meditate More Podcast, so make sure to subscribe to the podcast now. And remember to meditate more, meditate more, meditate more, because it is so, so worth it.