The Law of Attraction: The Ancient Teaching Behind the Modern Phenomenon

New Thought Magazine, edited by Benjamin Orange Flower and William Walker Atkinson -- the periodical of the movement that, a century before "The Secret," was articulating the principle that mind shapes matter

In 2006, a film and book called The Secret swept the world. Endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, translated into dozens of languages, and eventually selling more than thirty million copies, it presented one central idea: that thoughts attract circumstances, that the universe responds to the frequency of your mental state, and that by focusing on what you want with sufficient clarity and faith, you can draw it into your life.

The response was predictable and divided. Millions found the teaching transformative. Critics pointed out that it risked blaming victims for their own suffering -- that cancer patients, the poor, and the abused were hardly suffering from insufficient positive thinking. Philosophers noted that it misrepresented quantum physics. And esotericists observed, with varying degrees of patience, that "The Secret" was neither secret nor new.

The principle now called the Law of Attraction -- in its various formulations, the idea that like attracts like, that thoughts shape reality, that consciousness participates in creating the circumstances of one's life -- is among the oldest teachings in the Western esoteric tradition. It was articulated in Hermetic philosophy two thousand years before Rhonda Byrne was born. It was developed systematically by the American New Thought movement in the nineteenth century. And beneath the marketing, the vision boards, and the luxury car visualizations, there is a genuine philosophical insight that deserves to be understood on its own terms.

The Hermetic Roots: The Mental Universe

The philosophical foundation of the Law of Attraction is the first of the Seven Hermetic Laws: Mentalism. From the Kybalion (1908, published pseudonymously as the work of "The Three Initiates"), the authoritative New Thought synthesis of Hermetic teaching: "The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental."

This is not the claim that the physical world is an illusion. It is the claim that the substance of the universe is fundamentally mental in nature -- that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter, a late and accidental development in a fundamentally non-conscious universe, but the ground of being within which matter appears. The physical world is real, but it is not primary. Mind is primary.

If this is so -- and it is the founding claim of every serious idealist philosophy from Plato to Kant to Berkeley -- then the relationship between thought and circumstance is not magical intervention but intrinsic participation. Consciousness does not stand outside reality looking in. It participates in reality's structure from within.

The second relevant Hermetic law is Vibration: everything in the universe is in constant motion, vibrating at specific frequencies. Different states of consciousness vibrate at different rates. The principle of Correspondence ("as above, so below; as within, so without") suggests that inner and outer states resonate with each other, not through direct causation but through a deeper structural correspondence.

These are the esoteric roots of what later became the Law of Attraction -- stripped of their philosophical complexity, democratized, and in some formulations, simplified to a degree that would have made the Hermetic philosophers wince.

The New Thought Movement: American Spiritual Innovation

The systematic development of mental-spiritual healing in the modern West began with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), a New Hampshire clockmaker turned mental healer. Quimby developed a practice of healing through conversation and the modification of belief, which he called "Christian Science" (later a source of legal dispute). His core insight was simple and radical: disease originates in the mind, specifically in erroneous beliefs held about the self, and can be cured by correcting those beliefs.

One of Quimby's patients was Mary Baker Eddy, who went on to found the Church of Christ, Scientist (1879) and to write Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875) -- one of the most widely read spiritual texts of the nineteenth century. Quimby's influence on Eddy, and the extent to which Christian Science derives from his work, was disputed in his lifetime and has been debated by scholars ever since.

The broader New Thought movement -- which divorced Quimby's insights from specifically Christian orthodoxy and developed them into a more eclectic philosophical framework -- flourished through the work of Emma Curtis Hopkins (called "the teacher of teachers," who trained many of the movement's most prominent figures), Charles and Myrtle Fillmore (founders of the Unity movement), Ernest Holmes (Religious Science, "Science of Mind"), and scores of others.

The most intellectually rigorous figure in early New Thought was William Walker Atkinson (1862-1932), a lawyer-turned-mystic who wrote prolifically under his own name and several pseudonyms -- including "Yogi Ramacharaka" for his books on yoga, and "The Three Initiates" for the Kybalion. His Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World (1906) gave the modern movement its name and its central metaphor: that thoughts are vibrations, that similar vibrations attract each other, and that a disciplined mind can use this law as consciously as a scientist uses any other law of nature.

Wallace Wattles and The Science of Getting Rich

The text that most directly inspired The Secret -- the one Rhonda Byrne has described as the starting point of her research -- is The Science of Getting Rich (1910) by Wallace D. Wattles (1860-1911). Wattles was a relatively obscure New Thought writer who died the year after his most famous book appeared. He could not have imagined that a century later, a filmmaker in Australia would read it and begin assembling a global phenomenon around its core ideas.

Wattles's formulation is characteristically New Thought: there is a "Thinking Substance" -- a formless, intelligent medium underlying all matter -- from which all things proceed and into which all thoughts are projected. To attract wealth (or anything else) requires thinking in a specific way: holding the desired result clearly in mind, with faith, with gratitude, and without contradiction from thoughts of doubt or lack. The universe, being mental in its ultimate nature, responds to the mental image held by the consciousness embedded within it.

The specific detail that distinguished Wattles from his contemporaries -- and that has given his book unusual durability -- is his insistence on the combination of inner work and outer action. Desire without action is fantasy. Action without desire and vision is labor without direction. The complete method requires both: a clear mental image held with faith, and vigorous, purposeful action in the physical world.

Napoleon Hill: The Century's Most Influential Self-Help Book

Napoleon Hill with "Think and Grow Rich" (1937), which has sold an estimated 100 million copies and remains the single most influential formulation of the Law of Attraction for practical success

Napoleon Hill (1883-1970) was commissioned by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie to interview five hundred of the most successful men in America -- Carnegie, Edison, Ford, Rockefeller, and many others -- and distill the common principles of their success into a practical system. The result, after twenty years of research, was Think and Grow Rich (1937), which has sold an estimated one hundred million copies and is still in print in virtually every language on earth.

Hill's system synthesizes New Thought principles with practical business philosophy. His key concepts:

Definite Chief Aim: the specific, precisely formulated goal that the aspirant commits to, written down and reviewed daily. Vague desires produce vague results. Precise intention focuses mental and physical energy.

Burning Desire: not mere wishing but an obsessive, consuming commitment to the goal -- the state in which failure is not an acceptable outcome and the goal is experienced as already achieved.

Faith: not religious faith but a trained conviction that the goal is attainable -- a state of mind that can be induced through autosuggestion (repeated self-instruction) and that transforms possibility into expectation.

The Master Mind: the deliberate cultivation of a group of people who share the same purpose, whose combined mental and practical resources produce results no individual could achieve alone. Hill describes this as literally creating a "third mind" -- a group consciousness -- that transcends the sum of its members.

Thomas Edison and Napoleon Hill, c. 1920s. Edison was among the five hundred successful individuals Hill interviewed for his twenty-year study of success that culminated in "Think and Grow Rich"

The Secret and the Modern Phenomenon

Rhonda Byrne's 2006 documentary film and book The Secret presented the Law of Attraction in its most accessible -- and most criticized -- form: that the universe is a wish-fulfillment machine, that sustained positive thought literally causes corresponding physical reality to arrange itself, that poverty, illness, and failure are products of wrong thinking.

The genuine insight within this formulation: what we attend to consistently tends to grow. Sustained focus on a goal increases the probability of achieving it, not through cosmic intervention but through the well-documented mechanisms of directed attention, motivated behavior, pattern recognition, and the psychology of expectation. The person who believes they will succeed prepares differently, perceives opportunities differently, and persists differently than the person who doubts.

The genuine problem with the formulation: correlation is not causation, and the universe is not a vending machine. Thoughts alone do not cure cancer or summon wealth. Victims of systemic injustice are not responsible for their own victimization through insufficient optimism. The packaging of a genuine philosophical insight in commercially attractive but philosophically careless terms has done real harm to real people.

Carl Jung and Synchronicity: A Deeper Framework

A more sophisticated account of the relationship between inner and outer states is Carl Jung's concept of synchronicity -- which he defined as "meaningful coincidence," the occurrence of causally unrelated events that are nonetheless meaningfully connected.

Jung observed that certain inner states seemed to precede or coincide with corresponding outer events -- not because the inner state caused the outer event, but because both expressed the same underlying pattern in the psyche-world continuum. When this happens, the world seems to respond to the interior: the book you needed appears on the right shelf at the right moment, the person you were thinking about calls, the solution arrives from an unexpected direction.

This is not the same as "thoughts attract things." It is the observation that consciousness and its circumstances are not as separate as they appear, and that sustained inner engagement with a question or direction seems to activate a corresponding movement in the outer world -- through what mechanisms, Jung declined to specify, acknowledging that he was pointing at something real that his framework could not fully explain.

This is closer to what the more careful Law of Attraction practitioners actually describe: not that thinking about a car makes a car appear, but that sustained clear intention seems to activate something -- in behavior, in attention, in the subtle environment -- that increases the probability of the intended outcome.

The Inner Meaning: Attention and the Shape of a Life

The genuine esoteric teaching beneath the commercial formulation is this: you do not attract what you want. You attract what you are.

What this means is not that your current circumstances define what you deserve. It means that the habitual state of your consciousness -- the emotional register you live in most consistently, the beliefs you hold about what is possible for someone like you, the story you tell yourself about who you are and what the world is -- shapes your perception of possibilities, your willingness to act, and the quality of attention you bring to each encounter.

Change those, and the world begins to look different. Not because you have changed the world, but because you have changed the lens through which you see it -- and a different lens reveals different possibilities that were always there.

The ancient Hermetic formula -- "as within, so without; as above, so below" -- is not a promise that positive thinking will make you rich. It is a description of the deep structural correspondence between the state of consciousness and the quality of life that consciousness experiences. Tend the inner. The outer will follow -- not magically, but structurally, over time, through the ten thousand small choices that a changed inner state makes possible.

That is the secret. It is not a secret. It never was.

- Lux Esoterica