The 2006 movie, The Secret provided an introduction to the metaphysical Law of Attraction, whereby thoughts and feelings attract an individual's circumstances.
The Law of Attraction is now mainstream and big business. An Amazon search on the topic of the Law of Attraction brings up dozens of titles. These books promise to teach the means to attract abundance, love and happiness. Yet, amidst a serious global recession, it appears that people are not attracting better circumstances in great numbers.
What is the Law of Attraction?
The Law of Attraction is a metaphysical law by which, like attracts like. It predicts that an individual’s predominant thoughts and feelings create his or her experience. A change to better thoughts and feelings should yield improved circumstances. More specifically, emotional and expectant thinking about a thing will attract it into an individual’s experience.
Skeptics call it magical thinking and yet many people report having experienced the Law of Attraction in action – at least occasionally. In Joseph Murphy's The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, stories abound, in which people get just what they need, when they need it, against all odds, through the Law of Attraction.
Physicists have discovered that, at least on the quantum level, an individual’s attention does affect matter. Physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg concluded that an electron exists only as a potential until it is measured or observed. If observation on the level of the electron can determine its existence, can people affect matter on a larger scale?
Mind Over Matter and the Law of Attraction
Journalist Lynne McTaggart reports in The Field, on a number of scientific studies that show that intentions do affect experience. Experimenter Helmut Schmidt found that subjects could influence the output of a random number generator with their intentions.
It seems the intentions of animals can also affect events. McTaggart reports a study in which chicks were imprinted on a robotic hen, so saw it as their mother. Robo-hen was programmed to move randomly, but moved toward the chicks far more often than chance would predict. In Dogs Who Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, Rupert Sheldrake reports a similar study with rabbits. A threatening robot programmed to move randomly outside their cage moved away from the rabbits significantly more than expected.
What is the difference between animals that control robots and those on the side of the road? What keeps gamblers from influencing one armed bandits more often?
Conditions That Support Mind Affecting Matter
McTaggart reports that researchers Jahn and Dunne replicated the studies with random event generators and found that attitude was a factor. Optimistic subjects influenced events as they intended, while pessimistic subjects influenced events in reverse of their intentions.
It appears that focus of intent and the engagement of the emotions are also critical factors. Dean Radin has studied the output of random event generators and found that it is most affected when attention is fully engaged and focused. Output becomes less random or more coherent when attention is focused on emotional events such as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial or the attacks of September 11, 2001.
It appears that optimistic, focused intention, with the emotions engaged is conducive to influencing events.
Sources:
- Katz, Debra Lynne. Freeing the Genie Within. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Worldwide. 2009.
- McTaggart, Lynne. The Field. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins. 2002.
- Murphy, Joseph. The Power of Your Subconscious Mind revised and expanded edition. Paramus, NJ: Reward Books. 2000.
- Radin, Dean. The Conscious Universe. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins. 1997.
- Sheldrake, Rupert. Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. 2000.
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