Whatever association you want to wrap around ‘The Secret’ as a presentation of the Law of Attraction — or how much you understand or believe it — all I can take is my own experience of specific times in my life when my thoughts have manifested an outcome that can hardly be explained by logic or reasoning.

• The big example for me is the time when camping with family, we became “rained in” and I decided to walk into town to look for help. Town was about 58km away. To break it down, we had 6km of waterlogged paddocks to cross, a 21km stock route to finally meet the main road to town (Moulamein NSW). For about a dozen years we’d been camping in the area, and, although I didn’t go into town all that much, I know that the stock route was very little travelled — no wonder it was full of potholes and just a single lane country route.

  To jump to what happened, my cousin Peter came with me and the paddocks took quite some time to get through, as footing was pretty slippery. We finally got to the stock route, it had been raining all the time and we were glad for a firm surface. But here’s the key. We’d been on the stock route for no longer than about 5 minutes when I heard a car coming along. It was a ute with two young guys in it, been out the night before and were using the stock route as a shortcut home. Not only could they give us a lift (and I got to sit in the back tray of the ute, under the tarp with a farm dog and her pups) — but they actually gave us a lift all the way into town — more than 50km.

  Had we come along 10 minutes later, the car would have been gone before we got to the stock route. Whatever you want to call it, the law of attraction came true on that day. We got to town, and less than 24 hours later we were all on the way home.

• There are 4 specific times I can easily recall where I have driven my car to a town, suburb or place I’d never been to before, and found exactly the place I needed, without extra time driving around, without looking at a map or without planning in advance.

  The first time I ever drove to Sunbury, I needed to go to the printers to pick up some business cards. Not only did I drive into the right street, but I parked, and then looked around to find where the printer might be. The shop was right in front of my car, without consciously planning it!

  The same thing happened driving from Sunbury (where I ended up living for six years) to Dandenong. If you know Melbourne, you know they’re a long way from each other. I drove to a computer store, found the right street and parked right out the front without deliberately thinking about it. It also happened in Geelong when looking for a particular store (first time driving through, finding the street and getting a park literally out the front — right in the middle of Geelong’s CBD). And it also happened once when I needed to drive to Station Pier — it was like I was nearly driving on auto pilot — without ever having driven to that place before (or having been a passenger for any of these examples).

The example that David Schirmer uses in The Secret presentation is right — not just about car parking — and these are specific times I know when the law of attraction worked for me.

Whether it’s psychology, creative visualisation, deliberate NLP techniques, creative processes like what is explained in the Secret — however you describe it, the law of attraction abounds.