Why don't actors get what they play out?

well dont forget that whenever you hear a bell ring.. thats when an angel gets his wings ....

I know it sounds like a cop out, and leaves a lot of people unsatisfied but I do think that it comes down to subconscious belief.

People don't like the answer because then anything you want but fail to manifest or when you manifest things you don't want it can just be attributed to your subconscious and there really isn't any way to prove you have or don't have a subconscious belief about something.

Listen to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGi8KFraN-U

He's saying our subconscious is in control over 95% of our life.

You are right, Phantasm, the whole LoA process is supposed to be pretty straightforward: Ask, Believe, Receive. But that "Believe" step is much more complicated than we like to think.

People want a specific formula like a recipe that says if you do X and Y you're guaranteed Z. And it can work like that sometimes. But other times it clearly doesn't.

I actually have a lot to say about it. I'm not so sure I have all of the answers, because even much more enlightened folks than myself have yet to come up with satisfactory explanations.

Yes, it does sound like a cop out (and doesn't answer all of my questions). It's one of those arguments you can't beat, unfalsifiable, because you can't actually do fMRI scans of someone's brain to see, oh look, they had the wrong subconscious belief here and here and that's why it didn't work out. I do see where you're coming from though. Nonetheless I'd be interested in hearing more/having more discussion.

I actually think having some mystery about how the Universe works helps make life fun and exciting. If we knew all of the answers there would be no surprise and no room for the unexpected.

I get that the idea of life being like a computer that you can program and get exactly what you request would be appealing, but I honestly think after a while it would get pretty boring. And think about how limiting it would be. Think of the times when you got what you wanted and it wasn't as fulfilling as you thought it would be. Think of all of the stuff you got that was better than you imagined. And think of the times you got things you never even knew you wanted. So I like the idea of a "higher self" being at work to keep things interesting!

Let's look at the issue of a person with mental illness. We know that there was at least some period of time where they didn't experience the mental illness, right? I am no expert but as far as I know these illnesses (like schizophrenia) aren't expressed in young children. We also know that if they take medications and/or obtain treatment that they can get back to "normal", right? So that could be evidence of a subconscious mind that isn't affected by the mental illness, right? And if that's the case they could have a subconscious belief system that is the same as everyone else's.

I think the issue that you bring up about "blaming the victim" and trying to explain why say, a toddler would get cancer are definitely worth discussing. But again, I don't know if there are good answers. Can we really say that a natural disaster that ends up killing a lot of people was brought about by negative beliefs? Is a sick child the result of negative beliefs being projected by the parents, or are we already born with a deep rooted belief system? I honestly have no idea. There definitely are schools of thought that attempt to explain all of this but again, they may not be satisfactory or may conflict. So it might be one of those things where you either find truth in one of the explanations or you have to get comfortable with some things being unexplained.

Ha, I still have more to say about this whole topic if anyone is interested.

i'd love to hear more please Kazoo

I'm always interested in reading more.

Phantasm wrote:Well yes, your second paragraph there is a case in point. In fact I've read plenty of stories of pessimists actually ending up with results they never expected, while the few times they did expect to get what they wanted they didn't, for example.

I've also read that - even though worrying's bad for your health - worriers tend to be higher achievers and generally more successful in life than non-worriers, exactly because they take everything so seriously. It was in New Scientist I think, maybe in 2008, 2009.
They don't attract their worries into their experience. Their worries make them work harder and thus achieve better results. Objective reality. Results.

Worrying is bad for the health, so do hypochondriacs actually encounter all the illnesses they believe they have?

Have you ever met pessimistic people that always expect the worst, but in reality they actually believe that by expecting the worst, it will not happen? They believe that if they hope for the best they will jinx it and actually go out of their way to paint the worst picture possible to avoid any feelings of disappointment.

I remember when I was about 6, my mom knocked on something and then explained to me that if you talk about something bad, but don't want it to happen, you knock on wood. In  my mind it somehow translated into "If I don't knock on wood, all these horrible things will happen". Even though my mom knocked because she had said something like "Thank goodness I haven't caught cold in a long time" or something along the lines, I took it way further.
So for a good few years I developed a compulsive habit of having to run through all sorts of horrible scenarios and then knocking on wood to make sure it would not happen.
So I would be going
"Our house will catch fire and burn down"- knock on wood
"A man will break in and kill us all" knock on wood... and so on
every day I would come up with another gruesome scenario and that would then need to be added to the list so every day the list got longer and longer. I seriously probably believed that if I don't do it, these things might happen. Not that it would be guaranteed to happen, but in my mind what I was doing was like a guaranteed protection that it will definitely NOT happen.
In that case- I visualized and affirmed every day in a positive way a la "Our house will burn down" and the only negating action would be the knocking.
LOA principles say that you need to always affirm in positive and that the universe doesn't recognize "no"- if you think about debt or "I don't want debt" then all you get is debt because the energy flows where the attention goes. In that case- I was affirming daily for years all the horrible scenarios, but my BELIEF that I was actually by affirming guaranteeing the opposite of it over-rid the affirmations and act of visualizing. needless to say non of my list ever manifested in my reality.

Lunar you've just described the ocd flavour called magical thinking!

i had health anxiety for a long time.. i can safely say no i didnt catch all the illnesses i believed i had

as soon as my mind moved onto a new fabricated illness it would drop the previous one

So I can't remember if we ever settled it and I'm too lazy to read all the discussion history... why don't actors get what they play out?

They way I see it, method actors don't always attract what they play out because deep down they know it's just acting for the sake of acting, it's not real. Their intention is to ace a play or a movie, to really make their role the best, so living in that role isn't designed or intended to attract the lifestyle of the character, but just the success and satisfaction of the actor, play/movie, and audience. For them, the underlying emotion/thought/vibration of acting is fun, satisfaction, drive, artistic passion, etc. so they may be attracting more of these vibrations to them as in other passionate co-actors, the crazy director with no sense of budget, the nutty screenwriter who gets ideas from cocaine and hookers (yeah, Quentin Tarantino), and the feelings of success and fulfillment in their work may be generally attracting more success (money, fame, Oscars, mansions).

I took a drama class in freshman year of college for an art requirement. A friend wrote a 15 min play about Brooklyn's best Mafia hitman, and picked me to play him. Of course, after years of watching The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos, I knew how to do it and everyone loved my acting, but after a week of rehearsal, you'd think I'd attract violence, money, blood, drugs, and crime, right? No. My intention and desire was to do the best job possible, I did that, was satisfied, and attracted praise because of it. Plus, I had fun with it, so I attracted more fun with it - fun people to work with, people liking me, etc.

With that written, what if you visualize the very thing you're afraid of, or act it out? Some people call it "exposure" - when we expose ourselves to our greatest fear, and embrace it, we are released from it. Change follows acceptance. On one hand, some people think visualizing the worst case scenario, let alone thinking of it and exposing yourself to its feelings, will attract it. But if we spend all day avoiding the feeling of fear with distracting thoughts, wouldn't that fear still remain with us at a deeper level or even rise to the surface in psychosomatic illness? My theory is that feeling afraid for a long time can attract more situations where we're afraid of this thing, but accepting emotions of fear, and not shoving them away, and being decisive to face them, that is "exposing" them to yourself, can help us release the fear. If our intention and desire is to release fear by facing it head on, to accept it and heal it, would feeling fear necessarily attract more of it?  Basically, it's kind of like method acting, but we're acting out the facing of fear in our mind....

A nicely reasoned pressie Pressie.

President Roosevelt wrote:With that written, what if you visualize the very thing you're afraid of, or act it out? Some people call it "exposure" - when we expose ourselves to our greatest fear, and embrace it, we are released from it. Change follows acceptance. On one hand, some people think visualizing the worst case scenario, let alone thinking of it and exposing yourself to its feelings, will attract it. But if we spend all day avoiding the feeling of fear with distracting thoughts, wouldn't that fear still remain with us at a deeper level or even rise to the surface in psychosomatic illness?

THIS. This this. I'm still not a 100% blue-chip LOA person but even if I were... this!! I've seen so many people over at PLOA give advice along the lines of "no you mustn't think that, remember you'll attract it, you must be strong and think good things all the time"...  which would be wonderful advice apart from the fact that it actually means committing violence against your own feelings in pushing them under, where they fester and become far more dangerous than before. And Kazoo's written some great stuff about our subconscious beliefs...  well if subconsciously our fears are still there, and are in fact getting stronger because we won't face them.... then what? There's no logic in avoiding fear. You need to stand firm and look it in the eye.

“Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with fear. She didn’t want to do that. It seemed too aggressive; it was scary; it seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her the instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side, and fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small, and fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went toward fear, prostrated three times, and asked, "May I have permission to go into battle with you?" Fear said, "Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask permission." Then the young warrior said, "How can I defeat you?" Fear replied, "My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power." In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear. ”

― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

President Roosevelt wrote:I took a drama class in freshman year of college for an art requirement. A friend wrote a 15 min play about Brooklyn's best Mafia hitman, and picked me to play him. Of course, after years of watching The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos, I knew how to do it and everyone loved my acting, but after a week of rehearsal, you'd think I'd attract violence, money, blood, drugs, and crime, right? No. My intention and desire was to do the best job possible, I did that, was satisfied, and attracted praise because of it. Plus, I had fun with it, so I attracted more fun with it - fun people to work with, people liking me, etc.

I would've loved to see that play lol.

President Roosevelt wrote:Basically, it's kind of like method acting, but we're acting out the facing of fear in our mind....

Merry Friday to you sir.

This is something that hasnt really sat well with me either, the whole oh dont think this or that or thats what you'll manifest, for me it kind of automatically puts you in a place where you start to fear your own thoughts, but in a different way to normal, because everytime you have a worry or a doubt, or get nervous, it just doubles it because you're then thinking, omg no no no dont think that and beating yourself up for thinking negatively... so you're literally worrying about worrying....