“Uh-oh, you have ‘but-face‘…You look like you’re gonna say ‘but.’” – Buffy

When people talk about why Cosmic Ordering (or the Law of Attraction) isn’t working for them, you can pick up a lot of clues about why that is if you listen to the words they use.

One of the most important clue words is “but.”

For instance,here’s Fred: “I want a new Jaguar, and I do affirmations and visualizations of me in the car every day, but I worry abiut whether I’m doing it right. I know the Universe will provide if I really believe, but I don’t know where I’m going to get that kind of money!”

Do you think Fred’s going to be tooling down the highway in his shiny new red Jaguar any time soon? Probably not.

Why not? Easy – he has a ‘but’ problem.

The word ‘but’ used this way tells the listener (and the Universe) “ignore everything I just said in this sentence; the stuff after the ‘but’ is what I really think!”

We think of the “but” part of a sentence as an afterthought, just something you added on to your main thought; but it’s anything but!

Really, the part of the sentence that comes after the ‘but’ holds the main meaning of the sentence. The tail is wagging the dog, semantically.

In terms of the law of Attraction, it’s even more important, because your words shape and reinforce your thoughts and your thoughts attract your reality.With that one word, you block whatever was in the first part of the sentence out of your life, and open the door to whatever came after the but.

The good news is, now you know this. You can look for buts (your own and other peoples’) and see what you (and they) really think.

Do you have a ‘but’ problem?

Write a few sentences about the things you’d like to manifest, or talk to someone about them (your cat or the wall will do – you just want to pay attention to what you say.) If you talk a lot and tend to not pay attention, talk into a tape recorder (or your computer, if it’s capable of recording.)

Then play it back and look for buts (you can also do this with a friend or a manifesting group.)

See what you’ve been blocking, and what you’ve been letting in. It will be illuminating, to say the least!

The next step is to watch your buts. If you feel a but coming on, see if you can just stop the sentence right there. How does it feel?

If you have friends you want to share this idea with, you can watch each others’ buts. Once you get into the habit, you’re going to find your life moving along a lot more smoothly.

OK, sometimes they do. But it’s pretty random, isn’t it? Or at least it seems that way.

People often gripe that affirmations work just great for the little stuff, but when it comes to the big things they really want, the things that are really important, well.. . they usually conclude something about screen doors on submarines or wart hogs of unusual anatomy.

At the most basic level, for instance, you may be saying “I have eleven million dollars in the bank,” and then there’s that other part of your mind that’s saying “Yeah right.”

Or you may be going about it in a more sophisticated way, listing out all the “yeah right” responses and making new affirmations to counter them (and then, countering the “yeah right”s for those affirmations, ad infinitum…)

But the bottom line is that when you say or write an affirmation, your brain is not stupid. It knows what you’re doing. It knows you are making a statement about something that you want (maybe) but do not have (definitely.) And it makes a note “Yup. Still don’t have 11 million dollars in the bank.”

So why does everybody say it works? Well, to sell books, audio programs, and workshops, for three. And, because it can move you closer to what you want (and even get you there) to the extent that your affirmations – when worded properly, and you know all that – get you thinking more about what you want than what you don’t want. (And if they don’t do that – if they only get you thinking about what you don’t have – they can actually make things worse.)

It’s all in the attitude. If you want to use affirmations, and you want them to work, you need to come up with wording that’s going to put you in the state where you have what you want, of course, no question.

Say you know you have milk in the fridge. If you think about going to get a glass of milk (or, OK, chug it out of the container) your brain never kicks in to say “Nope, still don’t have 11 million gallons of milk in the fridge.” You just have a feeling of of-courseness about it.

So don’t spend your time telling your brain how much money you have in the bank. Catch it off guard by occasionally wondering if you should order your Tesla Roadster now, or clean out the garage first so you have a place to park it.

Have you ever been talking to someone and some word or phrase just comes into your mind, and you say it?

And they look at you like you’re a Martian, because that is the exact word or phrase crossing their mind at the moment?

Now, if you could do that consistently, you could… well, you probably couldn’t get a job in Washington, DC but it sure would come in useful just about everywhere else.

With all the new info about the (old) Law of Attraction and Cosmic Ordering, you might think that these are the cheat codes for the game of life that you’ve been looking for. And they are, if you like having what you want delivered by a series of coincidences and luck. Face it, that stuff is fun.

But if you’re old school, I bet you remember trying to telekinetically play a piano key or knock that book off the teacher’s desk. Or read the mind of that cute guy (or girl.) You know, the real cheat codes.

In that spirit, you’ll want to take a look at these resources:

Hypnotic session for developing telekinesis. Really.
A comprehensive course on developing psychic powers; it covers everything.
OK, if you’re really a glutton for this stuff, holy cats! A whole store! Dang!

People generally don’t really want to change. Yeah, it’s that simple. It also explains why, if you do start to get results with one system or other, you will usually continue to get results with that system.

Most systems work for somebody. However, most systems don’t work for most people.

You can usually find where a program stops working for you by looking at what was going on when you lost interest. Yes, haul out all those books and tape and CD sets. You probably started out with enthusiasm, doing the exercises and really thinking about the content. But if you’re like most people, there will be some point where you felt less excited, you started skimping on the exercises or maybe quit reading or listening altogether.

This is why there’s that workshop bump – you go to a workshop and (since you paid for it!) you hang on till the end. You actually feel like you’ve changed, that great things are going to happen from now on.

But a few weeks later, just like in the sitcoms, everything is “back to last Thursday.”

Why the heck is that?

Chances are, when you get right down to it, you like being you. And you resist change because you won’t be you anymore.

Your personal self-help-system archaeology can help. Look at where you usually stop. Is there something in common? I tend to drop a system when the author’s personal judgements about what kind of changes I should be making kick in.

I remember reading a beautiful little gem of a book with wonderful visualizations; later I wondered why I’d never finished it, and went back to it and found the bookmark. It was right about where the author said you shouldn’t visualize for anything that wasn’t for the highest good, and it couldn’t be just something selfish, it had to be in service to others too. Gahh! It’s not that I don’t want what I want to also work out for others, it’s just that it’s not my job to decide what’s best for anyone but me. And it’s certainly not up to the author to decide (which he did, at length) what sort of things one should be all visualizy about, and what sort of things were off-limits.

Foo. Ruined a perfectly good pile-o-techniques, at least for me.

Now, that’s me, that’s the kind of thing I react to. If I think I’m being pushed, that a teacher or author has a particular agenda that they’re not totally upfront about, I check out. Your mileage will vary, but if you’re having problems making a system stick for you, look around for your own check-out triggers..

Now, let’s get back to identity. Who really is this you that you’re protecting so fiercely? Are you the same you you were at age 6? I know if I time-traveled to my 16-year-old self, and I happened to be wearing my geeky biking clothes, my proto-goth-angsty-wiccan-teenage self would certainly not claim me as her future self, but here I am, and I’m still me.

The key to successful change is to realize that you are not a singular you, but a serial you who makes changes all the time without losing your essential I-ness.

To make a lasting change, become comfortable with the self you will be when you make the change. Claim that self as your own.

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More info about self, identity, and other weirdness:

And this is an interesting audio program by a hypnotist that explains just what has to be going on for you to successfully make a change that will stick. It isn’t a hypnotic track, it’s an in-depth exploration of the subject.