The Law of Attraction does not judge the value or worth of your thoughts. It cares not whether they are harmful or well intentioned, nor does it value whether your thoughts arise from a particular belief system. You may eschew religion and be an atheist or agnostic or you may be deeply religious. Knowledge and practice of a spiritual tradition (or lack of belief) doesn't concern the working of the law. What matters is how you feel about what you are thinking.

Gratitude plays a role because of how it makes you feel. For example, when you are grateful for having something, you feel good and the thoughts of possession and the positive feelings of possession bring more of the same. The law always responds to what you focus on in your thoughts and the emotion you generate in response to those thoughts; feeling strengthens the attracting power of thought.

At the beginning of this chapter, you read about the young mother who wanted a cast-iron skillet. If she had felt an abiding desperation that she was doomed to always be poor and never have the basic necessities, her fears would have manifested that lack. Her thoughts of poverty would have brought more lack in her life rather than the skillet she desired.

Biblical Figures

Consider the biblical figure of Job, a successful man with a large household that included his ten children, wife, and servants. Well-respected by his neighbors, Job owned many acres of land and herds of sheep, donkeys, and camels numbering in the thousands. Then one day, the good things in Job's life began to go away. A wind blew down the house and killed his children. Thieves took away his herds. Even his health failed him. Boils appeared upon his body and erupted into weeping sores that he cleaned in the shade of a tree with a piece of broken pottery. With his possessions, relationships, and health gone, Job cried out, “The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.” (Job 3:25) God gave Job a mind, perhaps the most powerful creative tool in the universe, but Job quite possibly did not understand that his positive thoughts had brought him good fortune and his fear and dread had taken them away.

Solomon, the wise son of ancient Israel's King David, surely understood what Job did not, for he wrote: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he ….” (Proverbs 23:7) In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul exhorted the Christians at Ephesus to do good, “Knowing that whatever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive ….” (Ephesians 6:8) Thinking good thoughts instead of dark or evil ones is a way of doing good. When you silently bless others, that is a good thing and good is attracted back into your life. You've no doubt heard the phrase “What goes around comes around.” It comes back to magnetic attraction. When you pray and do good deeds — acts of kindness such as putting money in a stranger's expired parking meter — your thoughts and actions bear the fruit of goodness. Consider for a moment what kinds of thoughts and feelings, mental images, words, and deeds you are sending out. What is in your life that you don't like? What would you change? What do you desire?

Deliberate Intention Takes Focus

Think of how something looks under a magnifying glass or a microscope. The subject being studied comes into crisp focus and is magnified many times. This is what you do when you work with the Law of Attraction. With deliberate intention, your thoughts necessarily become not only highly focused but more concentrated and energized. You must have the intent of receiving what you wish for and not waver in your belief that the manifestation is already in the works. Dream what may have been impossible for you before you knew about the Law of Attraction. Now you understand that anything you desire will be possible to achieve or obtain. The Law of Attraction is continually responding to whatever you are thinking and feeling.

The Law of Attraction is unbiased. Whatever you think about is manifested. Careless thinking about negative events can just as easily draw similar negative experiences into your life. Most likely you'll protest and declare that you would never want those things to happen; you would never have deliberately drawn them to you. But when you begin to correlate your thinking with events that have happened or that are occurring in your life, you will begin to see how your thoughts influence your life experiences. If you think you are doing everything correctly to manifest your desires but they haven't come to you as yet, perhaps you need to clear some clutter and make a space for it — in other words, create a vacuum.