[gesman]

This touches on the whole universe of knowledge of how to manifest desires.

Luck is a final jump into desired physical manifestation of desire.

What author is touching upon heavily - is physical part - doing (something).

Another integral part of manifesting is removing conscious and subconscious blocks (beliefs) and practices of being in the state of already manifested desire.

[passion__desire]

Law of attraction is bs.

[_yb2s]

It seems like BS on the surface because it’s explained as a supernatural thing that gets results without effort. That’s not at all what it really is, really it’s a mental hack to align your unconscious with your conscious goals so you can stop self sabotaging, and actually take the real world actions that bring about the outcome you want. It’s simple, real, and works.

The magic part is a way of getting modern people that aren’t even aware they have an unconscious to directly work with it, by feeling they are working with some external magic.

[passion__desire]

If you think you have so much control over the unconscious as you are claiming, try asking your unconscious to internally swap the conscious perception of red and green colours. If you can't even do this basic task, forget about aligning external world.

[_yb2s]

Your reply doesn't make sense to me. I'm not sure what you mean by "aligning external world." I am talking about aligning the goals of your consciousness with the goals of your unconsciousness, e.g. internal alignment so you aren't self sabotaging without even realizing it.

Importantly, the ability to do this is not something one can automatically do, but requires lots of training and practice, and is also a key goal of most systems of psychological therapy and religious practice. My assertion is that "The Secret" is one such system, and can be viewed as a type of meditation technique.

There are a huge number of psychological methods that aim to work on this goal, whereas the 'swapping colors' thing you mention is not something I have ever seen as a claimed possibility of any method. I'm not sure why you would expect to be able to do that, or why not being able to do that would mean you wouldn't be able to do anything else.

[passion__desire]

I gave you a simple task for the unconscious which as far as we know you can't physically do. i.e. align your subconscious to switch red and green perception.

[_yb2s]

We have no idea how the unconscious works, all we have is a bunch of hacks discovered by trial and error that do specific things, sort of like discovering easter eggs or exploiting bugs in a closed source software program.

Some of the things we can do are really shocking and cool, but they are still pretty random and mostly discovered by monks, monastics, etc. that were basically exploring random things within themselves. For example, Tummo meditation allows us to raise our body temperature and withstand extreme cold. But we lack a mechanistic understanding of how it all works, so we still can't develop even the simplest things on purpose.

[swyx]

(author here)

one of my favorite classes at Wharton was Richard Shell's the Literature of Success (https://apps.wharton.upenn.edu/syllabi/2016A/LGST227001/) where we, no joke, studied The Secret as a way to understand the "Think and Grow Rich"/manifestation philosophy of success

my favorite joke of his about the topic is "when two sports teams compete against one another, if both manifest their desire really hard, only one can win"

[gesman]

Or both win :)

Welcome to the world of parallel realities which is beyond the scope of this thread.

[passion__desire]

Depends on the amplitudes of the possible parallel realities. Yes many worlds predict each possible world to exist but amplitudes matter as well.