← The 369 Rabbit Hole Hermeticism · Question 06

Hermeticism · Manifestation

Is the law of attraction real?

The mind part is real, the magnet part is not

Partly. What your mind does changes what you do, and that changes results: expecting to succeed predicts effort, if-then plans have a medium-to-large effect across 94 tests, and your goals decide what you notice. What has no evidence is the core claim, that thoughts send out vibrations that pull matching money, people or events toward you. And the most popular method, picturing the dream already come true, predicts worse results in controlled studies. Try the attention test below: it is the real effect behind “once I wanted it, I saw it everywhere.”

The attention test7 seconds

Your goal decides what you see

Ready

Count only the copper squares. Ignore the rest.

What the research says

Dreaming it is not the same as doing it

Positive fantasy backfires. The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen spent decades testing the core manifestation habit: picturing the wished-for future as if it were already here. In one study, German graduates who fantasized most positively about their job hunt sent out fewer applications and, two years later, had fewer job offers and lower salaries. In others, students with a crush and patients after hip surgery did worse too. Another study found that positive fantasy lowers energy, measured as a drop in blood pressure: the mind tastes the goal and relaxes. Over months, it also predicted more symptoms of depression.

Expectation works. In the same studies, believing a good outcome was likely, as opposed to daydreaming about it, predicted more effort and better results. Confidence based on your real chances helps. Pretending the future is already here does not.

Plans work best. An if-then plan, “If it is 7 a.m., then I run,” had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals across 94 tests (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, d = .65). Oettingen’s method joins both findings: picture the wish, then the obstacle inside you, then the plan to beat it. A 2021 review of 21 studies found it works, with a small-to-medium effect. That method is the WOOP planner tool.

Picture the steps, not the prize. Students who spent a week imagining how they would study got better grades. Students who imagined getting the grade did not.

The scorecard

Every claim, checked

Claim	Status
If-then plans help you reach goals.	Real · d = .65, 94 tests
Wish, obstacle, plan (mental contrasting) helps.	Real · small to medium, 21 studies
Expecting success predicts effort and results.	Real · Oettingen and Mayer, 2002
You notice what you are looking for.	Real · selective attention
Belief can ease pain and nausea.	Modest · placebo, self-reported symptoms
Other people’s beliefs about you shape your results.	Small · teacher expectation studies
Picturing the goal as done makes it happen.	Backwards · predicts worse results
Your reticular activating system “programs” your goals.	Pop science · the RAS runs wakefulness
Thoughts send out vibrations that attract matching events.	No evidence · no known mechanism
Quantum physics proves the mind shapes reality.	No · detectors, not minds

Where it came from

From mesmerism to The Secret

New Thought. The law of attraction grew out of New Thought, a 19th-century American movement usually traced to Phineas Quimby, a mental healer who studied mesmerism and found he could heal “by suggestion.” The phrase “law of attraction” in this sense is reported as early as 1855, in a book by the spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis. In the 1880s Prentice Mulford’s essays made “Thoughts are Things” a slogan.

Chicago, 1906. William Walker Atkinson, the man who almost certainly wrote The Kybalion two years later, gave the idea its modern form in Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World: “When we think we send out vibrations of a fine ethereal substance, which are as real as the vibrations manifesting light, heat, electricity, magnetism.” Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich followed in 1910, and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich in 1937.

Neville Goddard. Born in Barbados in 1905, Neville Goddard taught that “Realization of your wish is accomplished by assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled,” now called the law of assumption. His short book Feeling Is the Secret appeared in 1944. He died in 1972.

The Secret. Rhonda Byrne’s film came out in March 2006 and the book that November. She said it began when she read Wattles’s 1910 book. Its publisher claims over 34 million copies sold.

The physics claims

Quantum, vibration and the RAS

“Observation changes reality.” In the double-slit experiment, particles make a striped pattern until something records which slit they went through. As Richard Feynman explained, any apparatus able to tell the path must disturb the particles enough to wipe out the stripes. It is the physical recording that matters, not a mind: heated molecules lose their stripes by giving off light, and stray gas molecules do it by bumping into them. The 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!? linked this to consciousness. The physicist-philosopher David Albert, who appeared in it, said he was “edited in such a way as to completely suppress my actual views.”

“Raise your vibration.” Atoms do vibrate, and faster when hotter. Brains do run on electrical rhythms. Nothing measures a feeling as a higher or lower frequency, or shows one leaving the body to act on the world.

“The RAS filters for your goals.” The reticular activating system is a brainstem network that controls waking and sleep. Noticing what fits your goal is done by attention networks in the cortex, and remembering the hits while forgetting the misses is confirmation bias. The red-car effect is real. The brain part named for it is wrong.

And the cost. A 2023 study of over a thousand people found that more than a third held manifestation beliefs, and the strongest believers were more drawn to risky investments and more likely to have been bankrupt.