One of the challenges in using the Law of Attraction is that when you create an intention and then it eventually manifests, how do you know that your manifestation was actually a result of your intention and not just a coincidence?

This is an especially common issue when you hold fairly basic intentions like manifesting certain sums of money. If the money shows up, was it really due to your intention, or was it destined to show up anyway? After all, receiving money is a fairly common occurrence… unless of course you’ve been using your power to manifest the opposite by complaining about financial lack, but you’re smart enough not to make that beginner mistake, right? 😉

Of course, there’s no real way to be sure where these manifestations are coming from. For that reason I tend to regard the LoA as a perspective more than a law. It’s simply a lens through which reality can be viewed. It’s also a means of using your power to make changes to your reality. It’s a perfectly valid perspective, and as such, it requires no proof because a perspective cannot be proven or disproven. It just is. You can either pick up that perspective and look through it, or you can disregard it. There’s no right or wrong answer. Asking for proof of the LoA is like asking a blue lens to prove itself to you. The lens really doesn’t care about your request for proof, so it will generally ignore you… whilst continuing to be what it is — blue. However, you can choose to look through the lens to verify that it does indeed offer a perspective that is… you guessed it… blue.

However, I know that despite the impossibility of proof, some people still get pretty anal about demanding proof of the LoA. Again, such requests for proof are nonsensical to an extent, but that doesn’t stop people from seeking it out. So upon hearing such requests, what does one do after one’s eyes tire of rolling in circles?

Although you can’t really get proof of the LoA as a law, you can at least validate it as a perspective. You can look through it and see that the world as viewed through the LoA still makes sense. Or you can refuse to look through the perspective of the LoA and continue to complain that it hasn’t proven itself to you. If that’s your choice, I hope you enjoy cricket sounds. The LoA doesn’t concern itself with muggles.

But for now, let’s assume you’re open-minded and playful enough to be interested in validating the LoA as a perspective through which you can view and interact with reality. Otherwise feel free to stop reading, since we’re getting into the how-to portion next.

Intentional Tracers

Intentional tracing is one simple method you can use to help validate your experience of the LoA.

I haven’t heard of anyone else using this method per se — it’s just something I made up, largely for fun. It’s not that complicated an idea though, so it’s entirely possible that someone else has shared a similar method. I’m just not presently aware of anyone who’s done so.

Here’s how it works.

When you form a new intention, add something a bit unusual to it, and integrate that unusual element into the intention itself. The unusual element works like a radioactive tracer, such that when your intention manifests, if it shows up with the tracer in a synchronistic fashion, then you can feel more confident that the manifestation was indeed the result of your intention and not merely a coincidence.

Think of it like ordering a drink with a polka dot umbrella. Your main intention is the drink, and the tracer is the umbrella. If your drink shows up, and it comes with the umbrella, you can be pretty sure that the drink that arrived was the one you ordered.

A Real-World Example

First a bit of background to set up the story…

My girlfriend Rachelle is absolutely amazing when it comes to manifesting coins. I thought I was pretty good at it, but she totally puts me to shame. Whenever we’re out together, she’s always finding pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, often in the strangest places. Quite often when we’re walking down the street, she’ll dart off to the side because she caught a glimpse of a stray penny in the shadows some 10-15 feet away. She even does this at night, spotting coins in places I can’t even see. It’s like she has built-in coin radar.

Recently she shared a blog post telling the story of how she found a total of $1.09 in loose change in airports while flying from L.A. to Canada. I encourage you to read it if you’re into the LoA because it’s a fun and entertaining story. I can attest that she does this kind of thing all the time. I feel like such a slacker when I only find 3 pennies in the time she finds 10.

In terms of manifesting money, Rachelle is pretty much where I was in the Summer of 2006. I was finding coins almost every day, starting with pennies and gradually working up to quarters. By the end of that year, I was up to a $10,000 manifestation. These days I can regularly manifest $50K sums, and currently I’m holding the intention for a $100K chunk. In principle, manifesting larger sums is the same as manifesting smaller sums, but for larger sums it can take more time to work through your limiting beliefs and to become a vibrational match for those amounts coming into your life. (If you want to know more about how to do this, watch my free videos on Creating Abundance.)

In any event, I’ve been encouraging Rachelle to try manifesting larger amounts. I can tell she’d be good at it, and I know it would be fun to watch. So we stepped up to a dollar. But since a dollar can show up so easily, I said that we were going to hold the intention of manifesting “ketchup and a dollar.” Ketchup was the tracer. I don’t know why I picked ketchup — it just randomly popped into my mind, like the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man (dammit Ray!).

So the idea is that we were going to manifest a dollar that we could have, free and clear, and ketchup would somehow show up along with the dollar as part of the synchronicity of the manifestation. This doesn’t mean we wanted to keep the ketchup. The ketchup was simply supposed to be present in our reality when the dollar showed up.

So we were walking around Hollywood, acting overly goofy and enthusiastic as we kept saying out loud, “ketchup and a dollar!” It’s good to be silly and playful when holding new intentions, especially since that’s the vibration we expected to feel when the dollar and the ketchup eventually showed up together.

Several minutes later, Rachelle found a penny on the ground, and then she found 50+ cents in loose change sitting on a public pay phone, along with a bus token. And then some minutes after that, we saw an empty packet of ketchup on the ground. This wasn’t the manifestation of the intention though. I considered it to be the alpha reflection, our receipt from the universe letting us know that our intention was been received and acknowledged. (For more on alpha reflections and how they work, see the article How Intentions Manifest.)

A few days later we got our manifestation, but it came in a funny way. It showed up in the form of a free vegan blueberry pancake, which was worth a few dollars. We were having breakfast at M Cafe on Melrose, and my breakfast order got messed up initially, so the restaurant gave us a free pancake as compensation. At the same time, Rachelle noticed there was a strange pink substance on her breakfast panini. She couldn’t discern what it was, so I encouraged her to go ask. It turns out that it was the restaurant’s own homemade ketchup, but ketchup wasn’t listed on the menu as one of the panini’s ingredients. So we got a free pancake (worth more than a dollar), and it manifested with ketchup, in a such a way that we were compelled to make a big deal out of noticing the ketchup. You might not be willing to credit this to the manifestation, but the situation was odd enough that we opted to give the LoA credit for it. I found it especially telling when the order taker kept looking at the order she messed up, shaking her head in disbelief and saying aloud, “I can’t believe I did that. I remember what you ordered, but I just punched it in wrong for some reason. I NEVER do that though. NEVER! I don’t know what’s wrong with me today!”

I thought to myself, Sorry ’bout that. I didn’t mean to LoA you so hard. 🙂

(Side note about the diet stuff: Since I expect some people will ask about, let me note that I tend to eat raw while at home, but I eat more cooked food when I’m traveling. Overall I’d say I’m about 90% raw these days. This is certainly no secret, and I’ve shared this info previously, but I know that some people who haven’t kept up with my blog are under the mistaken assumption that I’m still 100% raw. Heck, some people still think I’m doing polyphasic sleep, and I stopped doing that in 2006. I was 100% raw for several months, starting in 2008, but I re-incorporated some cooked vegan food in 2009 because I found it gave me more flexibility without sacrificing too much. I’m always trying new experiments, so my diet is constantly shifting as I make new distinctions. Later this month I’ll be attempting a 30-day trial of a low-sugar raw diet. The main reason I favor raw foods is the amazing mental clarity it bestows; eating raw is why I can typically write articles at a pace of 1000-1500 words per hour, including idea time and editing time.)

Now back to our story…

As we were driving back from that breakfast, I encouraged Rachelle to progress to a larger amount. We settled on $100, with a lime being the tracer. So we playfully held the intention, “$100 and a lime.” Our intention was for the $100 to go to her, free and clear, and that it would manifest with a lime being present in some fashion.

Well, that’s a long story, and it took a few weeks to manifest, but she did indeed have $100 come to her through an interesting turn of events this week, and just yesterday when I went to the Facebook page of the person responsible for the $100 showing up, I immediately noticed that the profile pic of the first friend we had in common was that of a citrus fruit. Unfortunately since I’m colorblind, I couldn’t tell if the fruit was green or orange. So I send the pic to Rachelle and asked her, “Is this a lime?” She confirmed that it was indeed a lime. I then reminded her that we just manifested $100 and a lime. So cool!

Now who the heck uses a lime for their Facebook profile pic? I mean really…

I asked Rachelle if she wanted to keep going. Would she like to try manifesting $500 or $1000 next? She said she wanted to go for $1000. Greedy bitch!

Then I asked her what she wanted to use for the tracer, and she said a watermelon. So her current intention is to manifest $1000 and a watermelon. That should be fun to see when it shows up. I wonder if it will be seedless or not…

Personally I don’t usually use tracers for my own intentions. I don’t feel any particular need to validate the LoA’s presence in my life. Been there, done that, wrote many articles about it… and some cast members of The Secret are friends of mine. I’m practically swimming in the LoA as it is. But I do find it fun to use a tracer when doing intention-manifestation with someone else for the following reasons: 1) It’s more playful, which helps us hold the right vibration, 2) It’s more creative, which helps us put more energy into the intention, and 3) It’s a lot of fun when the intention manifests along with the tracer. Plus as a bonus, it makes for a cool story to share with other people afterwards.

Tracers and Power

Intentional tracers help you exercise more power over your reality. If you’re accustomed to setting wimpy or boring intentions, adding a tracer helps you step into your power a bit more. By adding the twist of a tracer, you have to have that much more confidence that you really can manifest your desires, especially if you’re going to put yourself on the spot and share your intentions with other people.

Keep in mind that sheer coincidence is also a perfectly valid perspective. So your intentions will manifest in ways that they can still be explained by coincidence, even if the odds appear to be exceedingly remote. Another valid perspective is to say that your intentions manifested as a result of your reticular activating system (RAS), meaning that you somehow programmed your brain to notice the synchronicities you desired. And still another valid perspective is self-hypnosis, as if you programmed your subconscious to cause the effects you intended. It’s like when Data subconsciously plants the number 3 all over the Enterprise in the ST:TNG episode “Cause and Effect.”

Tracers also help you become more creative and playful. When I come up with a tracer, I generally go with the first odd thing that pops into my mind. Maybe I’m just making it up on the spot, or maybe I’m somehow intuitively getting a read on the future manifestation. However the process works, it’s fun to play with and experience. Playfulness is an excellent frequency for manifesting — it works a heck of a lot better than desperation or neediness.

That “holy crap — I did it!” moment of manifestation is that much cooler when your intention shows up with the tracer. It gives you more validation and helps you give yourself more credit for having kickass manifestation powers. It boosts your belief in your creative abilities. And that in turn encourages you to set new intentions and keep on manifesting your heart’s desires.

I Frakkin Love the LoA

Having worked with the LoA very deliberately for several years now, I must say that I’m still floored when my intentions show up. I still don’t fully comprehend how it works. Sometimes it seems like pure magic. But when I put myself in that place of knowing that it does work (which gets easier the more you practice), it just works so amazingly well.

Being able to use the LoA to create what I want is one of the reasons I’m so disgustingly happy right now. My desires just keep showing up. I love my work. I have tons of freedom. And I’m doped up in New Relationship Energy since I’m in love. (Have you noticed a difference in my writing style lately?) Life is wonderful. And the reason it’s wonderful is that I diligently practice focusing my thoughts on what I most desire — every single day. I’ve done a good job of making this a daily habit. During those years when I did the opposite — dwelling on my problems and mistakenly thinking that such an obsession would help me solve them — my life was just the opposite. It was filled with problems like massive debt, bankruptcy, a badly screwed up business situation, working 60-80 hours a week and having little to show for it, car problems, stupid annoyances, and lots of stress. I’d really like to help you avoid that kind of situation if possible by repeatedly stressing the critical importance of focusing on your desires as a daily practice. And do it with playfulness and curiosity and gratitude — not attachment and neediness and desperation. You have the power to make it so.

Currently I’m in the situation where the LoA works so well, I often have to apply the brakes to give myself time to fully experience and enjoy what has already arrived. I literally have to create counter-intentions to slow things down now and then. Otherwise the pacing at which my intentions show up is too fast, and I begin to feel overwhelmed. Too much of a good thing can actually be stressful. It takes a while to adapt to change — even positive change.

If you’re currently in a situation of lack, I encourage you to follow a path similar to what Rachelle is doing… and to what I did in 2006. Start with manifesting pennies. That’s a believable manifestation for most people. Pennies are tangible and easy to recognize. Then after you’re doing great with pennies, able to consistently manifest at least 1-2 cents per hour when you’re outside walking around, move up to nickels, dimes, and quarters. Do that for several weeks until you feel really confident in your ability to find coins whenever you’re out and about. See if you can reach the point of being able to freak people out with how much spare change you’re able to find, just as Rachelle is able to do. Then progress to $1.. or some equivalent unit if you’re in a country with a different currency. And keep going up from there. There’s no rush. You can take months or years to build up to a really cool level. I went from pennies to $10K in about 4-6 months, but I get to do this sort of thing for a living (isn’t that a hoot?), so if you have some crazy job or something that treats you like a disempowered slave instead of a kickass manifester, your rate of progress may be slower. This isn’t a competition, so find whatever pacing works for you.

If you get stuck at some point, back off and return to your previous level for more practice. Be playful. Experiment with different tracers. See if you can manifest a penny and a grape or something like that. I have no idea why I keep picking fruit, so don’t ask.

One problem some people have with large sums is that they begin to take the amounts too seriously. It’s very important to stay playful; don’t let yourself become overly attached. And don’t be a greedy bitch either. This isn’t a race, so pace yourself. I know it may not seem possible at times, but you actually can go too fast. If your desires aren’t showing up, you aren’t a match for them yet. And again, if you need more help with these concepts, watch the free Creating Abundance videos. I think they do a pretty clear job of explaining how this process works.

Now where’s that sneaky $1000 watermelon? 😉