Chapter 1 – The Concepts Behind the Formula

 

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

~C.S. Lewis

 

There is an old story of a wise Cherokee speaking to his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

 

He said, “My son, the battle is between two “wolves” inside us all. One wolf is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

 

And so it is with each of us. The attitudes we nourish, thoughts we entertain and our habitual focus creates our lives – not figuratively but literally. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” is a consistent cornerstone in a majority of the great religions and philosophies on earth. It has been repeated in just about every conceivable form in ancient texts from Christianity’s Holy Bible and Buddhism’s Dhammapada to more modern works such as Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” and Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret”. Hundreds of books written at the turn of the 20th century and considered part of the New Thought movement relied heavily on the concept. It has been called many things but the most common label in the west is The Law of Attraction. It has been employed, both knowingly and unknowingly, for millennia with stunning results- both wanted and unwanted. We are going to explore in depth what The Law of Attraction really is, how it works, why it works, what has science learned about it in recent times and how it’s power can be harnessed, focused and deployed to create whatever you desire in your life.

 

As I mentioned in the introduction, I will not ask of you a leap of faith. The footstones of the journey we will take together are those of scientific evidence, verifiable examples and experience – not only mine but the experiences of many others along with their own personal stories. So, with that said, let’s get underway shall we?

 

I am going to use a portion of my own story as our jumping off point. In my job as a technology executive, I spent a great deal of time in airplanes. For many people this is a very distasteful experience, not at all the glamorous “travel lifestyle” so many envision. Contending with airport security, delayed flights, middle seats, very long days (and nights) one hotel and city blurring into the next, separation from home and family… it isn’t very glamorous to most folks. I, however, had a bit of a different perspective. It gave me hours of (somewhat) uninterrupted time to study, listen to audiobooks on my iPhone, make notes, write and the like. I learned to love the time and to use it productively.

 

It was on one of those late night flights that I began working on my goals list and vision board (more on vision boards later). I was very specific regarding the goals on the list, very detail rich.  The list included business goals, spiritual goals, health goals and, of course, material goals. Among the material goals were a very specific house and a very specific boat. They were described to the last detail to be certain that the universe got the order right. Well, did it ever! Less than 90 days later, my wife and I were living in our new house that fit the description of the house on my list exactly. We had been dealing with realtor after realtor, seeing wrong house after wrong house. It seemed as if the house we were looking for at the price we could pay just wasn’t out there. After putting it on my list and focusing my attention in the correct way, it literally fell into our laps, virtually effortlessly. The boat?…you guessed it, it’s sitting at our dock as I write this…it happened just the same way. There are untold numbers of stories just like this that all have one common denominator- The Law of Attraction.

 

Albert Einstein suggested that science will toil to scale the mountain, eventually reach the summit only to find God sitting there waiting. An interesting perspective to be  sure, especially as it relates to science and the law of attraction. Until fairly recently (early 20th century), all the evidence to support the Law was anecdotal; which, by the way, was exactly the kind of evidence we had for just about everything else as well. Then in the early 20th century, a group of physicists including Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr and Max Planck began theorizing some very interesting things that would eventually lead to a discipline of physics called quantum mechanics. Don’t let the term scare you. We are not going to do a deep dive into the complex mathematics of the quantum model. What we are going to do is lay a bit of foundation upon which you can build a thorough understanding of the science behind The Law. This is going to get a bit dicey and weird at first but, hey, so was riding a bicycle when you first did it but once you had it, you had it, so bear with me.

 

We’re  going  to  start  by  talking  about  matter,  or  as  we  have  typically  come  to understand it, the substance that me, you, trees, stars and the universe are made of. Thanks to Neils Bohr, Nobel Prize winning physicist, we have a model of what comprises matter – atoms. Atoms, much like stars and their associated solar systems, have a nucleus, particles like protons, neutrons, and orbiting electrons….or do they? This is where it gets a bit tricky. Things in the sub-atomic world seem to march to the beat of a different drum than things we are able to sense in our macro or physical world through our five senses. Quantum mechanics suggests that the particles orbiting the nucleus of an atom can be in an infinite number of places at one time. Physics calls this phenomenon “superposition”.

 

Think of it like a fan. You have blades spinning around the spindle such that at full speed you see the spindle clearly however, the blades become a single, circular blur. Jam a stick in the blades to stop them; then you can then see their position. That brings us to the nature of light.

 

More than 300 years ago Isaac Newton speculated that light was simply a stream of particles. Other physicists disagreed with him throughout the years believing that light existed as waves. Then a physicist named Thomas Young devised and carried out the double slit experiment and stunned everyone. Electrons behave differently depending on how we look at them. Electrons going through two slits in a plate, scatter in such a way that they demonstrate their fundamental wave nature. If we watch carefully to see which electron goes through which slit, the wave nature apparently disappears and a particle behavior predominates. This phenomenon is also known as The Copenhagen Interpretation  which  essentially  states  that  multiple  probabilities of  matter  exist  until  we measure and the simple act of measuring or observing causes the probabilities to collapse into only one – the one we happen to be looking for. A simple YouTube search for “double slit experiment” will deliver several results that will allow you to actually see the experiment in action. I highly recommend you take a few moments now to check it out.

 

So, what does all this mind-bending physics have to do with creating the life you want? Plenty. What it means is that every possible outcome (probability) of your life already exists in a quantum state. Remember “superposition”? It is our consciousness, our focused attention that collapses all the outcomes you don’t want and brings what you do want into physical reality just like our stick in the fan.

 

Next, let’s move our attention to magnetics, vibration and frequency. As we have seen, everything in the universe is made of the same quantum stuff – the same stuff that comprised the infinite smallness and density of the singularity that became known as the Big Bang. What differentiates you from your cat, your cat from your coffee table and your coffee table from a planet or a star is vibration or frequency. Things that we perceive as solid really aren’t at all; they simply vibrate at rate that causes us to perceive them that way. In actuality, the vast majority of the universe and everything in it is made up of the empty spaces between sub-atomic particles. Only about 0.0000000000000000000042 percent of the universe contains any matter.

 

Vibration or frequency plays a huge role in the law of attraction. Remember the simple science you learned in grade school regarding magnetics and attraction? Well, it isn’t confined to the cool little things stuck to your refrigerator door; it is everywhere, all the time. It is at the very heart of the relationship between consciousness (thoughts) and matter. It means that consciousness that is vibrating at a specific rate attracts matter of a similar vibrational rate. It is how your environment and your experiences function as a mirror of your thoughts. It is, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” It is how an acorn manages to attract all of the things it needs from its environment to become an oak tree. It is the undisputable law of the universe. Frankly, you are not much different in function (form either for that matter) from your TV or radio. When you set the dial or channel to a specific frequency, you receive back signals that are vibrating on that frequency. Change the dial or channel and you get something entirely different back – such is it with your thought forms. That which you set your frequency to will attract matter back to you of a like frequency. It is in this way that your thoughts literally become things.

 

 

Many philosophers, teachers, shaman, religious leaders and certainly many texts, both ancient and modern share the idea that creation is not the sole domain of God or the universe. They believe that creation is a never ending process that we are all engaged in all the time. Every choice we are faced with is an opportunity to create and learn and we will engage in this process regardless of whether we are consciously aware of it or not. Every time we choose, we create. We collapse the quantum possibilities into but one, the one of our choosing. If we are in fact conscious of this, we tend to create what we want. If we are not, we are at the mercy of whatever frequency we happen to be on at that particular moment.