[mercuryrising]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

You may know about the reticular activating system (RAS). It's a part of the brain cortex that alerts you to the presence of things in your environment which you would be interested in.

For example, if you are a doctor, you would be more likely to notice if you hear someone cough or sneeze. If you are a heterosexual man, you would be more likely to notice if a beautiful woman walks by. If you are a businessman, you are more likely to notice business opportunities. If you are an ad designer, you are more likely to notice ads.

And if you program your mind to notice XYZ, you will be more likely to notice if XYZ appears in your environment.

See, we all live in a complex, rich environment, full of stimuli. Our brains cannot process all this sensory data, so automatically we are filtering our perceptions all the time. In my lifetime, I have walked in and out of supermarkets numerous times, yet it was not until I was about to become a daddy that I perceived supermarkets to have a baby section and perceived the existence of such a stunningly wide range of baby-raising paraphernalia and equipment.

Some people make the mistake of dismissing LOA as an effect of the RAS. That is, they believe that LOA works simply as a result of the person becoming more attuned to things that were already there, but which he simply hadn't been noticed before.

This is an inadequate explanation for LOA.

I believe that LOA does regularly work by RAS. If you want something, and in fact it is already present in your environment, the easiest thing for the universe to do is to alert you to its presence. However, LOA is not merely RAS. Those of us who have used LOA long enough know that it is not.

RAS explains the kind of situation where you want to be an interior designer, and suddenly you start noticing job ads for interior designers.

RAS wouldn't explain the kind of situation where you want to be an interior designer, and suddenly out of the blue, before you even start applying to be an interior designer, people start calling you and asking you whether you wish to work for them as an interior designer.

I'm glad you brought up RAS. I think the rest of LOA works in a similar manner but does not have a biological component. As in your example, someone calling you about a job as an interior designer out of the blue happens because the idea "interior designer" is more clear on a purely mental plane of consciousness. In other words, you are "seeing" with a different pair of eyes... if that makes any sense.