I've avoided this thread so far because I've had other things on the go, but I'd like to make a couple of observations if I may:
The sense I get from almost all sides of the argument goes much along the lines of the Harley-Davidson rider ethos: If you ride one, you'll understand. If you don't, you can't understand.
OK, so maybe the analogy isn't perfect, but I think you probably get the drift.
My personal experience with LoA has met with extremely limited success. Little stuff seemed to work, but most of them could be easily subscribed to coincidence. But stuff that really mattered - relationship issues, financial issues, employment issues - came up zilch. Nada. It's been a tough row to hoe to try and climb out of the resulting mess, and it's not over yet.
Undoubtedly there'll be a chorus of well-meaning advice about "detachment" and "desire" and "limiting beliefs" and all the rest. But an honest interpretation of my own personal experience tends to support the idea (and it's mentioned in this thread somewhere, I just can't find it at the moment) of hit-counting; that is, you count the times when it seems like it's working and discount the times that it doesn't seem like it's working.
By no means am I any sort of LoA guru, far from it actually. But, like our friend ALG here, or Mr Wang of whatever he calls himself, I put it to the test. His experiment worked. He got his 10 grand. (How about sharing the wealth, my friend?
) Mine didn't, and the result was little short of disaster.
So clearly, LoA - if it exists at all - is haphazard at best. If "the universe" is so finely tuned that LoA practitioners must do A, B and C in a certain order in a certain timeline and in a certain way and feel certain feelings while doing it, well, that hardly makes it a reliable process, does it?
Those who are True Believers simply will not be swayed by evidence to the contrary. There's almost a religious-like fervour to it, one that I find more than a little disconcerting.
Sceptics, like our friend Mrs Cogan, tend to discount possibilities and put almost all their eggs in one scientific basket and won't accept anything short of repeatable, double-blind experimentation to develop a theory.
Both sets of opinions, and varying degrees of them, tend to lead to an "us versus them" mentality. If you're a True Believer and your LoA experiment didn't work, then you must have done something wrong. If you're a sceptic and your LoA experiment did work, then it must have been a coincidence.
I don't have any answers one way or the other. I waffle back and forth on this depending on how decent my breakfast was. But clearly, if there's anything to be learned here, it's probably more along the lines of how to investigate and learn about our own human nature than it is about whether we can "manifest" a jelly donut.
Or a Harley-Davidson.