True story: Sally’s car breaks down on the way to a job interview. Instead of rescheduling the interview, Sally cancels, taking it as a sign from her angels that she was not meant to take this job.
Depending on your spiritual beliefs and education background you will either find that to be (a) inspirational and intuitive; (b) an example of the Law of Attraction; or (c) tragic. I vote for (c), tragic. She might have missed out on her dream job because of this.
Sure it COULD have been divine intervention, but it’s much more likely to be either a coincidence, or if you don’t believe in them, then it was her unconscious fear of success sabotaging her interview. It’s MUCH more likely to be her fear of how amazing the job would be, rather than a sign that she shouldn’t apply for it. Yet people, especially “New Agers” make these type of decisions every single day, often with life-changing consequences.
Every day people tell me stories which seem incredibly meaningful to them, but which in reality confuse fear, gut instinct or coincidence with magical intervention.
Today I hope to do some real service to the New Age community by clearing up the misconception between Divine Intervention and the Law of Attraction (LOA).
To set the scene, here are more true examples:
- John tried to pay for a course online but there was a failure with the PayPal button and he couldn’t pay for several days. John takes it as a sign from Above that he is not meant to do this course; [We get this a lot – mainly thanks to PayPal being so error prone! Then again PayPal saved us from an earthquake in Japan right?]
- Martin applied to get into Dentistry in a year that the South African universities implemented a black empowerment program. He was not accepted (but would have been in any other year). He took this as divine intervention that God didn’t want him to be a dentist. He became an engineer and remains miserable to this day. [If it was Divine Intervention then he was divinely screwed over.]
- On her wedding day, Jane is delighted to see beautiful clear skies, perfect weather. She has prayed for this as a sign that the marriage will be favored and that they will be blessed with many children;
- Sue was taking a spiritual healing course and just as the teacher was saying something really important the sun broke through the clouds and lit up precisely where the teacher was standing. This was clearly an act of divine intervention meaning the teacher was speaking a higher Truth;
- Sandra has an appointment with a practitioner to work on clearing trauma. Due to a mis-communication about times she misses the appointment. Sue takes this as a sign that she shouldn’t work with this practitioner (or modality).
- Chris’ grandmother recalls how a lava flow destroyed many houses but was diverted before it destroyed her Catholic Church. It’s a miracle! What bugged us about this version of it was that the priest declaring the miracle conveniently forgot all the houses that were destroyed and people who died. If “My God” was going to intervene it would be to spare a child, not a building.
What all these stories have in common is called “magical thinking.” People (often those who should know better) confuse correlation (things happening at the same time) with causation (things happening for a reason).
Another way to put it is to say that there is a general New Age misconception that basically says “I can’t explain how this happened, therefore it must be the work of a Greater Being.”
In philosophy we call this an Argument From Ignorance and I’ll be writing more about this subject soon.
A classic example of this on my blog a few weeks ago was a comment from reader Kim in relation to Divine Intervention. She said:
My husband also has beliefs very close to mine–I’m not sure I could have found him on my own, and I’m not sure I did. …
Of course, I tried not to choose my husband–but I was over-ruled. I have also been hit by debilitating physical symptoms … when I wanted to do something that was deemed in some way dangerous or inadvisable to me by my guides. As soon as my window of opportunity closed, the pain evaporated. I would call that intervention.
I would call this the “classic New Age” view. Kim thinks that she couldn’t have manifested her husband on her own; there must have been help. She also thinks that it’s her guides giving her gut instincts (pain relating to decisions) rather than just her own body mind/gut. (I wrote an article about gut instincts recently – “Are Gut Feelings Misleading”?
But what do you think? Is there a divine helping hand upstairs guiding Kim towards the right husband and the right decisions, or is it just Kim, attracting and manifesting and listening to her gut, as we all do all day long?
Tomorrow I will continue with my thoughts about Divine Intervention and I’ll propose a test that you can use to discern the difference between Divine Intervention and LOA.
For now over to you – what do you think?
Do you have any examples of magical thinking in divine intervention that would complement the list above? If so please share them here!
Blessings of non-divine intervention,
Simon
(Click here to continue to Part 2 – but don’t forget to leave a comment below.)
aya kim 
Liz Barnard 
Mindy Sawyer 
Just to clear something up, there’s an enormously wide spectrum of beliefs that can fit under the broad label of “new age”. The problem I have with the label “new age” is that it all tends to lump the entire spectrum of “new age” beliefs into the type of examples you gave and yet those interpretations of events are diametrically opposed to my beliefs. In fact the Abraham-Hicks material (of which I’m a big fan) would probably be labelled classic new age but their teachings are the complete opposite of the people in your examples. Whist their teachings describe LOA in terms of non-physical energy and the interaction between the physical and non-physical, their teachings also emphasize personal power and responsibility and that there is no assertion from outside yourself.
I agree that the examples you gave are fairly common in the new age community as people like to read meaning into things and sometimes go too far. However, as you pointed out, that’s quite different from LOA. In fact, it’s the complete opposite of LOA! There are times when you look back at something you thought was bad at the time but it turned out to be exactly what was necessary in order get to your present point. There’s always going to be a path from point A to point B and things will happen along that path that, at the time, may not make sense but make sense in hindsight. Trying to interpret the things along the way as divine signs misses the whole point and may actually throw you off the path. Instead of asking “I wonder I’ve got going on inside that attracted this” or “how can I take advantage of this unexpected situation” you become resigned to fate and abdicate your power to “the gods” or “the angels”. That belief implies that something outside yourself has asserted something into your experience but LOA says the opposite – it’s your personal vibration that attracted those things into your experience.
In my opinion a belief in LOA isn’t compatible in a belief in assertion from a divine source. Furthermore, a belief in assertion from a divine source is actually a very disempowering belief to hold and just the new age equivalent of victim mentality.
[Reply]
Simon Rose Reply:
April 7th, 2011 at 10:55 pm
Hi Shane
I agree.
I’ve always been quite anti-New Age but I have also known that many others would regard my fairly level-headed beliefs in Beingness and healing as New Age.
It is a poor description at best since there is no unifying theme or ideology for New Age-ism.
Nevertheless, I am choosing on this blog to analyze and deconstruct several common New Age fallacies. It is not my intent to “destroy” or even “attack” the New Age movement. I prefer the idea of reforming it from within!
Incidentally, whilst I share your enthusiasm for Abraham-Hicks, it leaves me feeling a little odd because channeling a group consciousness energy separate to one’s own Beingness is outside of my spiritual comfort zone. I’m agnostic on that issue. Still the material is great and I just choose to interpret it as Hick’s not Abraham’s.
SR
[Reply]
Shane Marsh Reply:
April 7th, 2011 at 11:50 pm
That’s fair enough. In fact there are even a lot of people who get in the “hotseat” to ask a question that have difficulty with the concept of “Abraham” and prefer to address her as Esther. I still sometimes have difficulty with the phenomenon of channeling so I share your agnosticism to a degree. Having said that, I’ve been listening to “them” now for about 12 years (as well as going back over some of the previous recordings) and I’ve picked a quite a bit that isn’t readily apparent from a casual listening or reading.
“They’ve” said on many occasions that they’ve described themselves as beings or group consciousness called “Abraham” more as a metaphor than reality as it’s difficult to describe what “they” actually are in a way that those physically focused can understand. So they use a lot of metaphors and analogies to aid in understanding the concepts they teach. However, they’re not actually “beings” or “entities” that somehow take over Esther’s body and speak through her. Rather, they’re the aspect of “source energy” that Esther’s able to tune into and that particular aspect of source energy has come forth through Esther because of the questions being asked. Blocks of thought or ideas are offered which Esther then translates into the physical word equivalent at an unconscious level. However, there’s no separation and there’s just one source energy of which we’re all a part. One of the aspects of their teaching is that there’s no separation but just difference of focus. What appears to be our physical separate selves is just the part of our broader consciousness that’s focused on the physical. However, from a broader perspective, we’re actually simultaneously physical and non-physical.
It’s difficult to describe but the overriding impression I get is a message of oneness rather than duality. One person in the hotseat said “so I’m essentially talking to myself then?” and the answer was “yes” although “Abraham” is a broader aspect of the same source energy that he and everyone (and everything) is. I guess the best way to describe it is the one consciousness multitasking so it creates the illusion of separation but it’s an illusion and everyone has access to the same consciousness because we are that same consciousness.
Anyway, that’s slightly off topic and I don’t want to turn this into a discussion about the Abraham-Hicks material. At the end of the day, it’s the material that counts, not the source of it and your view is perfectly valid.
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