Despite the title of this article, this is not an essay about karma or some kind of rumination on the law of attraction. Rather, it is about a phenomenon that I have observed.
It seems that in the realm of spirituality (including such things as religion, meditation, magic, etc.) you get what you’re looking for.
Those who meditate under a Theravadan Buddhist framework and have expectations about reaching states of bliss, rapture, etc. (i.e. the jhanas) seem to experience exactly that.
Those into Zen who are (non-)aiming for a state of open awareness and bright lucidity seem to get such experiences in the form of kensho or satori. Some Zen practitioners will even tell you that Zen is good for nothing. Naturally, they therefore experience nothing.
Yogis who are after a steady Samadhi wherein the mind is completely concentrated and absorbed into the chosen object of meditation seem to receive that as well.
Christians who sit in quiet prayer, hoping to experience the presence of God, seem to eventually be graced by a visitation of the Holy Spirit, or even receive a vision of Christ himself.
Yet, very rarely is it the case that when a Christian sits with great expectation to “see the spirit”, they instead experience the lucid, wide-open state of satori.
And similarly, very rarely does it happen that a yogi is suddenly visited by Christ while his gaze is sternly set on the flame of a candle as he practices trataka.

This extends beyond meditation experiences, of course.

Take, for example, Christian Orthodox monks who are always busy battling demons, it seems. At night when they’re laying in bed, they get coaxed out of their sin-filled physical bodies and pulled into the spiritual realm by horned lizard-men with scaly skin, who they then proceed to fight off by donning the breastplate of righteousness and the sword of the spirit.
Conversely, middle-aged white women into Reiki always receive visitations from Ascended Masters and tall, blue-eyed, blond-haired angels wearing tunics and sprouting wings.
Buddhists, on the other hand, have their own visions.
If they’re Theravadan, a vision of Mara might tempt them in the form of a gaggle of nubile bare-breasted dancers. If instead they belong to some Mahayana sect, a bodhisattva might appear to them instead, or a vision of the Pure Land with its gem-studded golden roads.

Many more examples like this could be given, but that is beside the point. It is not my attempt here to give an account of cross-cultural mystical imagery.
What’s much more pertinent is why this seems to be the case in the first place. You might rather reductively say that it is a simple trick of psychology. You expect Jesus, and your brain gives you Jesus.

As a materialist explanation, this might be sufficient enough. The mind adopts symbols and imagery, stores them in the unconscious, and they then become the building blocks for future experience; after all, how could a Buddhist see a vision of Jesus if they grew up in a remote Tibetan mountain range and has never heard of, or seen, the Alexandrian wizard of note?
The problem is that scientific materialism is a dud, of course. That much is a given if you’re a reader of this website. We have to take these experiences at face value. Demons, the astral realm, and Jesus all exist, I’m afraid.
Christian Orthodox monks are, in fact, fighting scaly devils, that I don’t doubt. Or, at the very least, they are having the experience of fighting devils and demons and, for our purposes, that makes it as real as anything else (for everything is but “experience, as if”).

To say that the brain, as a physical organ, is merely generating the experience is a rather retroactive form of reasoning. The experience has happened, and is every bit as vivid as so-called “real life.” Someone philosophically untrained and simple-minded (no, not you of course) might object that it is simply the brain creating the experience. But how do we know that the brain is creating one experience while merely receiving another? We experience both in precisely the same immediate fashion. If a spiritual skirmish with the devil is phenomenologically indistinguishable from any other “ordinary experience”, on what grounds do we declare one “real” and the other “unreal”? What makes reality more real than “un-reality”? Nothing at all, of course. It’s quite simply a self-defeating argument.

So, what do we make of this?

Well, quite frankly, we should perhaps consider the fact that consciousness itself might play a part in the creation of these experiences. That there is an awareness in which these experiences take place is a given; that this awareness might shape these experiences is a consideration worth entertaining.
It is quite easy to say that if you are primed to experience bliss in meditation, you will experience bliss. But why does the mind incline itself so easily towards certain phenomenological experiences, merely by being introduced to a certain conceptual structure through semantic instructions; and how far does this extend?
If I told you that the purpose of meditation was to experience contact with killer clowns from outer space, would the mind supply such an experience? If not, why? Why can it supply you with the felt sense of a mighty creator god filling up your living room or a vision of a swarthy Nazarene sorcerer, but extra-terrestrial clowns are a step too far?

If the mind does willingly supplicate itself, what does that say about the malleability of cognitive experience? How can we trust that our spiritual explorations are genuine? Should we torture ourselves with constructs of spiritual warfare wherein we battle with demons every night? Or should we take the easy way out and construct a little bubble of bliss for ourselves, or perhaps even a phantasmagorical castle in the astral-Orient, filled with Turkish delight and svelte belly-dancers?
Is an Orthodox monk waging constant spiritual warfare on behalf of our souls more noble than a blissed-out yogi? Maybe from his point of view he is, and that’s all that matters.

In the end, this is one of the pitfalls of spiritual practice. After stumbling and taking a foot on the path of spirituality, we often times feel, for the first time in our lives, that we have started to uncover some kind of falsehood; that after a lifetime of delusion, we’re finally arriving at some capital T truth.
Then we get at something, some kind of experience, often times fantastical, that feels realer than real, that pulls back the veil on reality.
Yet we can never be quite sure of what we’ve arrived at; is this “real”-reality, for real this time? Much like ogres, the universe is not unlike an onion; there’s layer after layer.
But just because an experience is grand, blissful, fantastical, that does not mean it’s any more true than our “mundane” lives. It’s just a different type of experience, is all.
And maybe we’re the ones shaping that experience? Does reality simply shape itself around our attention, and are we therefore stuck in an infinite loop of creation, always looking ahead at some destination, and then actually arriving there before setting our gaze on some other spot on the horizon?

Maybe. Whatever the case may be, it seems to me that you get what you ask for: so ask carefully.