Why I’m not falling for the Genie Script but I do have some sympathy for the Law of Attraction. In this blog, I examine the concept of manifestation through the lens of NLP…
You may have seen something in the news recently about an influencer called Wesley Virgin, who talks about a “Genie Script” that unlocks the secret to powerful manifestation. He alleges it’s a missing page of the Hebrew Bible containing 20 words that will change your life, and he’s using celebrities to endorse his claims – the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Piers Morgan and the Domestic Goddess herself, Nigella Lawson. Unfortunately, the celebrities are actually deep-faked videos and according to a professor at the University of Cambridge, the Bible to which Virgin is referring is the Codex Sassoon – an early version of the Hebrew Bible which sold at auction for $38m, and which just happens to be damaged and has some pages missing, but not pages containing a 20-word “magic” script.
This all reminded me of The Secret – a 2006 self-help book by Rhonda Byrne that was turned into a film and became a worldwide phenomenon. If you’ve not come across The Secret, it’s basically about positive thinking and the Law of Attraction. As with Virgin, there are the followers who are desperate to believe, and the naysayers who think it’s stuff and nonsense. In the case of the Genie Script, I’m definitely in the latter camp, but I did rather love The Secret and I want to explore some aspects of the Law of Attraction through the lens of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming).
In essence, the Law of Attraction boils down to three elements: Ask, Believe, Receive. It revolves around the concept that our thoughts are energy, and that we can direct that thought energy out into the universe and attract like energy back. This is also commonly referred to as manifestation. It’s true that we are all energy – a composition of atoms comprising electrons whizzing round nuclei – and we are sensitive to the energy around us. You’ll know this if you’ve ever walked into a room and detected an atmosphere. But the idea that you can put your energy out there and receive like energy back is a bit of a stretch for me, although I’m all in favour of energy clearing techniques when I feel weighed down by the negative energy of others.
For me, there’s a missing piece in the Ask, Believe, Receive concept and it’s the bit where you take action. There needs to be some doing between the Believe and the Receive, otherwise it’s merely wishful thinking. In NLP terms, I see the Ask bit as being your Well-Formed Outcome (WFO) – what exactly do you want? The WFO process is very rigorous in exploring what you want and asks lots of questions, including my favourites, the Cartesian coordinates: what will you gain by having it, what will you lose, what will you gain by not having it, and what will you lose by not having it? If it sounds like these are the same two questions repeated, they’re not, and the subtle difference often prompts some surprising insights.
The Believe part is beautifully summed up in Henry Ford’s most famous quote: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Your beliefs about your desired outcome are incredibly important because they will drive your behaviour at a subconscious level. If you don’t think you deserve the outcome you seek, then you will probably self-sabotage.
Once you have the Ask and the Believe parts sorted, you’re ready to prime your RAS. “My what?” I hear you ask! RAS stands for Reticular Activating System and is a network of nuclei in the brain stem that act on the cerebral cortex. In NLP, we talk about our RAS as being like an antennae that has been tuned to a particular frequency. So if you’re thinking of getting a dog, for example, you will suddenly notice how there seem to be lots of dogs around of the breed that you’re interested in, not to mention adverts for dog food and pet insurance seemingly at every turn. Actually, it’s unlikely that there are any more than usual – it’s simply that you are now noticing them instead of filtering them out as irrelevant. Priming your RAS means being more deliberately focused on what you want by reminding yourself of your goal, visualising success, using affirmations, and so on. It has the effect of instructing your subconscious to find things that will help you accomplish the outcome you seek.
Now that we have the Ask and the Believe, and we’ve done some RAS priming, it’s time to take action…and be prepared to fail a few times in the process. It’s said that Edison tried over a thousand different ways to make a lightbulb. When asked what it felt like to fail a thousand times, Edison replied that he didn’t, the lightbulb was an invention with a thousand steps. In NLP, we have a principle that there’s no such thing as failure, only feedback. So we persevere, we may refine our goal and work some more on our beliefs, and we keep going until we succeed.
The Law of Attraction doesn’t offer us a shortcut, but it can remind us of the power that comes when we truly focus on a desired outcome and put the work in to get it.
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