Beware of Counterfeit Attractions

Willpower, blind beliefs, and making things happen are dangerous.

When I was ten, my parents purchased their first home. As soon as we settled in, my dad planted a little garden. Every summer night, he would come home from work, change into his shorts, and tour that little garden with me.

Once we purchased a home, my love for gardening bloomed again. We added plants to our yard that attract butterflies, so seeing our first spring butterfly dance across the lawn was a happy moment.

The key here is the word “attracting.” We can’t make butterflies do anything.

We can’t round them up and usher them into our yard, hoping they will stay.

We have to build an environment that attracts them and then supports and sustains them so that they will remain.

This is a multi-dimensional idea.

If we don’t want something, we shouldn’t build an environment that attracts it.

In fact, the more we build an environment that suits who we are, the less likely it is that what we don’t want in the form of events, people, or things will be attracted to it or stay in it since there won’t be anything there to support and sustain them.

How does this relate to spiritual perception?

In planting our garden, I appear to be doing the work of attracting, but I am not.

What is doing the attracting are the qualities of the plants in the garden.

If I were doing the work of attracting, I might sit and think, using my mind or willpower, to convince the butterflies to come and stay in my garden. Instead, I trust nature's natural order to do what it does by simply being.

My job is to care for the plants, not to force butterflies into our yard.

Taking this symbol to a larger arena, it is not our job to attract what we need, from companionship to money.

That is the One Creator’s quality, and it works without our needing to step in and try to manipulate people and situations using a material counterfeit attraction.

Since there are many proponents of this counterfeit attraction, we can easily be fooled and fool others.

People extensively market the use of counterfeit attractions. It appears to be easy, and we may be good at it for a time.

However, this counterfeit attraction exists within the material realm, is not the practice of spiritual perception, and is therefore unsustainable.

We play a dangerous game when we use our mental force or willpower to make something come to us.

When we give power to our human mind, we give it the power to do both good and evil.

In addition, we have opened the door for others to play that game with and at us. When we give matter power for good, in the dualist place, this also gives it power for bad.

It is dangerous and a small, limited, cramped, and tiny playing field compared to the Divine’s attraction to unlimited possibilities.

Material attraction is always hard at work, luring us into its limited and false-front environment. Although temporarily pleasant, this attraction to finite and material means and ends always leads to a dead end.

Butterflies leave environments that do not support them.

We can also leave environments that don’t support us, which is always the environment of counterfeit material attraction.

Spiritual attraction is the open door to experiencing the infinite and our relationship within it.

What is our “job” in this spiritual garden of life?

It is to tend and care for the life within it, beginning with our own, and from there, broaden our outreach, our garden, filling it with the qualities of intelligent Love.

Within our home garden, we marvel at the beauty of everything, from the tiniest element to the largest tree.

In the garden of the Divine, we can pause often to marvel at the infinite attention to every detail of life, attracting only expanding good for every living thing.

Stop working at the counterfeit attraction and look, with a spiritual perception, at the only attraction that is really going on.

Expect that everything you need has already been provided for you. Expect that only good will come your way because that is the only attraction.

There is only one cause and creator, only one attractor, only one power, and only one infinite holding all of Its creation within Its unlimited loving care.

As spiritual beings, we are the qualities that attract, just as the plants are the qualities that attract butterflies.

All we have to do is acknowledge, possess, and live as those qualities and leave the rest up to the Principle of attraction in action.

“Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities — always see them, for they’re always there.” Dr. Norman Vincent Peale