The Law of Attraction is a growth industry, as the number of places it’s mentioned and coaches promoting its use demonstrate.

Yet its success isn’t stunning for all of its followers, if the number of google searches under “law of attraction isn’t working” is any indication. A recent search turned up 14,800,000 entries on this subject.

So what’s missing from the Law of Attraction? “Just think that you want something and it will appear” seems to be the essence of its message. But is that enough? Is it more than mere positive thinking 101 with a new age gloss on it? Does it really work? The legions of dissatisfied seekers on the Internet could suggest it isn’t.

Access Consciousness, a 20-year-old self-improvement modality the target of which is consciousness, has some different points of view and tools that can be used to make the Law of Attraction work even better-and explain why it doesn’t work when it’s not working.

In short, Access Consciousness has taken a more rigorous and pragmatic look at how things actually get generated in the world. Access founder Gary Douglas, who has developed additional tools to make creation of our desires more effective, has discovered some of what the Law of Attraction has missed.

One thing that Douglas has noticed is the role that language plays in what we create. “Everything that we are not happy with, we create,” says Douglas. “Be aware of being exact in how you speak your language,” he continues, “because exactly what you speak and think is what you’ll get.”

One word that is counter-productive in our efforts to have what we’d really like is the word “want.” In the movie “The Secret,” Bob Proctor very sincerely stares right into the camera and says repeatedly, “What do you WANT? What do you WANT?”

What Douglas has noticed is that words have energetic meanings, whether the users of those words are aware of the energetic meanings or not. The word “want,” for example, historically has 27 meanings which mean “to lack” and just one that means “to desire.” Even though what’s written in dictionaries has been changed to reflect common usage of “want” to mean “desire,” that does not change the energetic meaning of the word. Want energetically means to lack. Whenever we say, “I want x,” we are correct, we lack it.

Don’t believe this? Try this: say, “I don’t want money 10 times.” At the end of saying it, do you feel heavier or lighter? It’s a law of the universe that what’s true for you will make you feel lighter, whereas what’s not true for you will make you feel heavier. If saying “I don’t want money,” makes you feel lighter, then that’s true for you. You don’t lack money.

People who actually have money, Douglas observes, seldom use the word “want.” It’s not part of their vocabulary, and lack is not part of their lives. They simply choose what they’ll have, and say they’ll have it. In their universe, no other outcome is possible and no other outcome turns up!

A second discovery of Douglas’s is that thinking, far from holding the solution to your problems, only reinforces your limitations. “If thinking about what’s keeping you stuck were really the way out of it,” he says, “wouldn’t you have solved all your problems a long time ago?”

All that thinking can do for you, according to Douglas, is to define the limitations of what you already know. “If you’re thinking, you’re stinking!” he reminds clients in his seminars. “Your mind is a terrible thing, waste it!”

By mind, Douglas means our logical thinking mind. One source of our difficulties does lie in our mind, Douglas admits, but it’s in our crazy mind. The crazy mind answers “make no sense” but they are how we create our entire reality and our lives.

One way in which Douglas uses this distinction between the logical thinking mind and the crazy mind is in working with people who have incurable diseases. Whenever something shows up in our lives again and again, there must be something we love about it, he points out. Otherwise we wouldn’t keep creating it.

When someone consults him about a disease like cancer, Douglas asks him or her what they love about it. The logical mind answer comes up first. “Of course I don’t love having cancer!” they will insist. Douglas persists, asking the question again and again, looking for the crazy mind answer and until the energy of what is being discussed matches what comes out of their mouth. Often the crazy mind answer is that their disease is a way to get out of their relationship, or some other aspect of their life that isn’t working for them, that they feel they have no way to change.

If his client is willing to find and dare to say the “crazy mind” answer, then the prognosis for changing the cancer is good, Douglas has found. Identifying the “crazy mind” cause allows them to make a different choice. People who will not look at that or express it are those unlikely to recover, whether from using the tools Douglas teaches or from any other approach or treatment.

Yet another tool Douglas has discovered that goes far beyond The Secret and the Law of Attraction is something he calls the clearing statement. “Ask and it shall be given,” is one of the truths in the Bible, he points out. The Access Consciousness clearing statement he uses is a set of phrases, each of which represents an energy that he asks the universe to clear. These phrases have the effect of going far beyond here and now to the real source of the problem, the point of creation where it began.

We are addicted to asking the question “Why?” he observes, in the deluded belief that if and only if we know WHY we are doing something can we change it. Not true, says Douglas. All you have to do to change something is to make another choice.

Similarly, you do not need to know the point of creation of what you’re trying to change or get rid of. All you have to do is ask the universe to go to the point of creation of the problem and change it. It’s like going to the seed of a tree, he says. If you’re having a problem with a big tree and you travel in time and space to where the seed of that tree is and make it vanish, none of the subsequent problems with the tree can continue to exist. The seed is the point of creation of the tree. Using the clearing statement goes to the point of creation of your difficulties, without you ever having to know where or what that point of creation was.

Another block to success with the Law of Attraction that Douglas has discovered is something called secret agendas. Secret agendas are some decision or conclusion you have settled upon, and then made secret even from yourself. This very secrecy makes them difficult to find and change. Do you remember every such decision you made as a child this lifetime? How about past lifetimes?

If you cannot remember every single past life you have had, then you have secret agendas that are keeping you stuck in that particular area. Like the point of creation, you do not need to know what every secret agenda is to change them. Just ask for all the secret agendas you have in the particular area you’re looking at and destroy and uncreate all of them. (Douglas uses destroy AND uncreate because uncreate is actually the opposite of create, and destroy has a similar but energetically slightly different meaning. It’s like getting different facets of a diamond.)

What would you like for your life? What if it were really possible to have it, using these tools, and it was easier than you imagined possible-you could even stop wanting it!

Classes in Access Consciousness are taught worldwide by Douglas, his business partner Dr. Dain Heer, and 200 licensed facilitators. Information about these classes, which teach you to use the tools mentioned above and hundreds more, is available at the website, www.accessconsciousness.com. Books and recorded seminars are also available from the website.