There are many definitions of this proposed ‘law’ some of which make more sense than others. There are too many to list here sensibly; you’d be bored before you got very far and that would be a shame.
What do the Scientists say?
Many scientists refute the basis on which the ‘law’ is said to be built - that is that thoughts have energy and attract like energy. They also refute the proposition that this ‘law’ is based in quantum physics because, they say, that whilst thoughts do have a measurable (in the laboratory) energy it’s too small to have an effect.
The Placebo Effect
But how then does that explain the ‘placebo’ effect? This is the phenomenon of healing serious diseases without true medication. For example, where a patient is given a sugar pill and told it’s the very latest and greatest wonder drug which will definitely cure whatever is wrong with them. The placebo effect is so great that drug companies, when testing new drugs, have to take it into account and prove that their new wonder drug performs better than a placebo!
It’s not only pills that can have a placebo effect, surgery can too. There are numerous studies that show simply pretending to do surgery by giving the patient a full anaesthetic and surgically just cutting the skin and stitching it back together can have the same effect as the surgery it replaced.
The common theme in this is that measurable physiological changes happen in the body; changes that are caused by the patient’s ‘belief/thought’ that whether a pill or surgery, the medical intervention would work.
So let’s look at perhaps a more acceptable reason for the ‘law of attraction’ to work. Our minds see patterns, we’ve evolved to be pattern decoders, to do this we have a complicated and awesomely powerful brain.
Sea of Information
Every second of every day, waking or sleeping our brains are bombarded with information. Some scientists put the number of ‘bits’ of information at around 4 million per second. Our conscious mind cannot process that much of course, if it did, we’d never move because we’d never be able to take our attention away from the incoming information long enough to do anything with it.
So our unconscious takes care of that for us, leaving our conscious mind to handle around 2 thousand bits per second; of that 2000 bits of information we can only ‘attend’ to plus or minus 7 so that is between 5 and 9 bits per second.
Priming the Mind
Now depending on how our minds are primed, we’ll put our attention on some bits of information and let others sink back into our subconscious. We don’t lose them, they just get filed away in the vast cavern of our unconscious mind.
So, thinking about the ‘law’ of attraction. Let’s say your mind is primed to think about all the money you owe, all the debts you have and all the things you can’t afford. What patterns do you think your conscious mind is going to spot?
It’s not that you’ve attracted more debt and “lack of” because that’s what you’ve been thinking about but rather that you just notice more of it and see more evidence for it than you see evidence of all the things you have and value in your life.
In this context then thoughts have a very powerful effect on you and your life and because of that, changing the way you think can also have a very powerful effect on your life.
Feeding your thoughts
Think of it like this. Attention or energy is like food for thoughts, the more food (attention/energy) you give them, the fatter they become. So, if you feed your negative thoughts, they’ll grow so large that there will be no space or food (attention/energy) left for positive thoughts. And that would be a shame because research shows that people who think in a predominantly positive manner are happy, healthier and live longer, more fulfilling lives than those who mainly think negatively.
So which of these lovelies do you want to 'feed' the most? Because the choice is yours, you're the only one who has the power to direct which thoughts you 'feed' even when you think someone else is to blame, they can't 'make' you think fearful or angry thoughts unless you decide to allow it!
That is not to say of course that you should strive never to have a negative thought because that would be pretty near impossible. Besides, the negative thought “Oh no, that bus will knock me over and kill me if I don’t move” actually has a positive outcome, it saves your life! The trick is to observe your thoughts and give food to the ones which are going to have a positive effect on your life.
Imagine that you have your own personal web bot that searches all the information stored in the vast cavern of your subconscious. You input the search query by focusing on a particular stream of thought. Let’s say, for example, you’re looking for a new job. The query goes in and results get returned. Just as in a search engine, some of the results make no sense (random thoughts) and some do. Of the ones that do some ‘pop’ out more than others.
This is how your mind works. It gives you results you want interspersed with random thoughts that can distract you. In the example above where you’re looking for a new job, one of the random thoughts may be “what’s the point – there are no jobs out there anyway”. Obviously a negative thought and one that’s totally NOT true. Now it may be true that there are fewer jobs OR that there is more competition but it’s not true that there are no jobs.
What happens if you follow that random negative thought? Once again you will have focused your mind on the difficulties of getting a job and, true to form, your web bot will bring to your attention all the information that supports your negative thought.
How do you think it would be different if the thought you follow is “I may not know where but out there is the job of my dreams – I just have to look for it!” Now your web bot is targeting much different information to bring to your attention and, yes, you will still have random thoughts but now you know what to look for and can let the negative ones go. Some of those random thoughts will be new ideas and perspectives, they may be thoughts of starting your own business, or changing professions or trades, you may find that those random thoughts show you how you can look at the job you have in a different was and then be happy in it.
The result will be far different don’t you think?
