First written about as the Law of Attraction in 1910 by Wallace Wattles in his groundbreaking book The Science of Getting Rich, this vibrational understanding has been around a lot longer than that. Wattles work later inspired Rhonda Byrnes' The Secret and countless other manifestation experts. But what is almost more interesting is that these universal laws are more mainstream and less woo woo than one might think. I mean, does science actually teach us that the law of attraction is real?
Born three months prematurely and small enough to fit inside a mug, Issac Newton was born in Lincolnshire in 1643. Designing a mouse-powered flour mill as a child, Newton showed that despite being small in stature, he was BIG in intellect. Later at the University of Cambridge, Newton failed to show his brilliance in mathematics. However, as luck would have it, in 1665 Cambridge was closed due to the bubonic plague and Newton was sent home. It was here, while sitting under a tree, that Newton's future dropped in his lap.
Since the beginning of time, the human race has been plagued with questions about the nature of reality. Man initially developed a theory that celestial matter was different from earthly matter. Thus, it was reasonable for apples and other earthly objects to fall, while the moon and stars did not. However, more modern sciences led by Issac Newton realised that there was no great difference in these objects and that they all did fall, but in their own way. Newton developed his theory of universal gravitation; one which realised that all objects were falling towards their respective centres.
Twentieth-century science replaced Newtonian science, which was the study of physical matter, with Quantum Sciences, which is the study of energy and energetic forces and fields. Classical physics suggested that everything should be predictable and controllable and thus, promoted mechanisms within science. It believed that time was a linear progression and that there was no absolute reality beyond three dimensions. Quantum Theory can be traced back to the year 1900 and essentially examines the smallest things in the universe, the atoms, molecules and particles that we don’t see in our everyday world of space and time but that form the underlying structure of our universe. The quantum world defies any description or definition that could be given to traditional space and time as here relative space collapses and linear time is unreal.
Quantum physics, which is now the cutting edge of science and scientific discovery is offering us a new world view. This new perspective is one of unity and oneness with all of creation. This allows us to fully understand the universe and offer us an expanded understanding how our own consciousness impacts the material world around us and how we draw to us what we repeatedly think about.
Spiritual teacher Dr Wayne Dyer explained that we don't attract what we want, we attract what we are. Consciousness is not something that we have, but rather something that we and the rest of the world are. Truly understanding that consciousness is not something separate from us but is us is a revolutionary concept with transformative potential.
Two of the most revolutionary breakthroughs in recent scientific history have been the discovery of Quantum Theory and the discovery of Relativity Theory. At the time these seemed almost opposing and contradictory and the scientific community could not reconcile these two theories as they found them fundamentally incompatible, yet each one compelling in their own way. They showed us that reality is non-local and is interconnected beyond the limits of space and time and at times offer complementary insights that are fundamental to the understanding of our whole world as they examine the nature of things on both the smallest scales and the largest scales. Neither, however, have been able to explain consciousness in a satisfactory way.
The theories that emerged gave us a number of powerful insights, such as the creative potential of observations and the duality of waves and particles and energy and matter. Now, the emerging view is coming in line with those of the ancient traditions as science is quickly discovering that information is more fundamental to our reality than space-time and energy and matter. Physicist Max Planck developed a scale to measure all of the forces of the universe, granting us insight into its lifespan through temperature, its birth through mass and its information through space-time. Planck, who was one of the pioneers of quantum theory, was quoted as saying “ I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness”.
Light, Light, Baby
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity emerged in 1905 explaining that space and time were not fixed, but something pliable. This was inspired by the work of Issac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, who were both concerned with light. Newton’s research used light to understand the visible colour spectrum and Maxwell discovered that unifying the fields of electricity and magnetism would give rise to a particle that would travel at precisely the speed that light does. Einstein imagined travelling on this light wave and time and space shrinking to zero, essentially making them the same event. David Bohm calls this the implicate order, and explained that “in each region of space, the order of a while illuminated structure is ‘enfolded’ and ‘carried’ in the movement of light”. Essentially light is omnipresent.
Departing from light briefly, in 1932 Werner Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize for teaching us that energy makes up 99.9999 per cent of all physical reality. Essentially, what Heisenberg discovered was that most of what we perceive to be our physical world is not really physical at all. Cosmologist Jude Currivan explains scale in an accessible way by suggesting that if we were to scale up the nucleus of a Hydrogen atom to a diameter of one centimetre its nearest orbiting electron would be about a third of a kilometre away. Furthermore, the quarks that make up the protons, neutrons and electrons are themselves not solid objects but are excitations in force fields. Considered as point particles with no physical reality of their own, these show that even at the small sub-atomic level there is no matter present.
As Lynne McTaggart explains “The Einstein Equation E=mc2 was simply a recipe for the amount of energy necessary to create the appearance of mass. It means that there aren’t two fundamental physical entities -something material and another immaterial - but only one energy. Everything in your world, anything you hold in your hand, no matter how dense, how heavy, how large, on its most fundamental level boils down to a collection of electric charges interacting with a background sea of electromagnetic drag force”.
Now You See Me Now You Don't
What gives the physical reality its apparent physical qualities are fermions. Sometimes referred to as matter particles, because they constitute most of what appears as matter these fermionic particles are bound by something called the Pauli exclusion principle. These excitations possess something called ‘intrinsic spin’ which prevents other particles from occupying the same quantum states. This means that particles occupying the same spatial probability distribution must have a different spin than its neighbouring particles. It is this principle that allows us to pick up and move around on what we believe to be physical objects.
Fermions are one of two types of particles, the other being bosons, that generally makeup things like light. These particles allow other particles to occupy the same quantum states and follow the Bose-Einstein principle. Essentially, both types of particles are contrasting types of information that manifest to us in differing ways and how information was being passed on or flowing. Entropy, which was once used to describe the order or disorder of particles, was transformed to address the information flowing and the order it created. When we think about subatomic particles, such as fermions, we imagine small rounded balls. However, this isn’t the case. These particles are in fact vibrating packets of energy that are trading energy and information with one another and with the energy field that acts as a backdrop to existence.
While we are only now understanding the complexity of information it has been theorised for most of the last century. Heisenberg and physicist Niels Bohr joined forces to develop the Copenhagen Interpretation which essentially stated that a particle did not exist in one state or another, but in all of its possible states at once. This led to some of the most famous theories such as Erwin Schrodinger’s cat box which proposed that a poisoned cat left in an enclosed box was both dead and alive prior to being checked on. While this concept seems somehow obvious most of us overlook the multitude of possibilities and probabilities in our everyday lives. What we now understand this to mean is that everything can be viewed as a quantum system and that while quantum system exists as evolving states of superposition or probabilities, so too does the information of its possibilities exist as superposed so-called qubits, or quantum bits until they are realised.
Essentially, this means that things emerge from a state of un-realness before they are observed or measured in some way. This was demonstrated in a 2007 experiment conducted by Markus Aspelmeyer and Anton Zeilinger in a quantum experiment involving two non-locally entangled photon pairs. This experiment was conducted assuming that these photon pairs were real prior to being observed and thus, had specific polarisations. However, Aspelmeyer and Zeilinger were surprised to discover that their results were not in line with the predictions of quantum theory. It was only when they repeated the experiment, this time under the assumption that the photon pairs were unreal did their results agree with the prediction of quantum theory. This shows that there is no objective reality, the universe is only real through a constant state of observation and we are part of that act of observation and creation.
Simply stated, this experiment displayed that the act of observing the experiment impacted its outcome. The photons within the experiment behaved in accordance with the expectation of the observer. Proving that the thoughts of an observer had a direct impact on the physical world immediately - as the observer was watching.
Philosopher Alan Watts stated it simply; “Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence."
A new paradigm is emerging based on the cutting edge of scientific enquiry. This examines how the parts, or quanta, interact with the larger aspects of the whole system which we know as the cosmos. This new paradigm is based on the idea of non-locality and begins with the basic function of reality. Einstein described non-locality as ‘spooky action at a distance’ and this radical realisation challenged the long-held assumption of physics that local events cannot influence those that are far away. Physical attributes are produced from these quantum particles due to something called Bell’s theorem, named after its creator physicist John Stewart Bell. Bell demonstrated that there were stronger statistical correlations in the outcomes of measurements that were further apart than any local theory. This showed that reality is created non-locally and is not bound by the limits of space and time. Our universe exists and emerges as a whole unified entity.
There Is No Time Delay in the Universe
French Physicist Alain Aspect conducted a number of highly controlled experiments in the early 1980s, showing that when particles are split their split halves remain in contact with one another no matter how much distance separates them. This discovery contradicts Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which suggests that light is the only thing that can propagate within the universe. Aspect’s experiments highlighted the quantum entanglement that underlies all of the universes and can be seen on every level of creation, from the smallest quantum components to the larger assumed separate components of our physical reality.
Light has been shown time and time again to be fundamental to our understanding of the universe. We have learned that the quantum components take their physical form when they are observed. This was first explored in 1802 by Thomas Young, who was investigating the wave behaviour of light. Until physicists, Germer and Davisson in 1927 were able to demonstrate that electrons actually have the same behaviours as light as both waves and particles.
Causality emerges through light. The universe, which is governed by space-time, has a universal speed limit known as the Speed of Light, named because light has no mass and thus, travels at a fixed speed. This is the speed at which information can be transferred. This is how there seems to be an unfolding and a sequential nature to the events of our lives. A human being can not understand something like the speed of light as light appears to only take time to move from place to place due to our perspective. In reality, light is a single transferable piece of energy and information. To light space-time is not something that is relevant, it appears where it is measured, or observed. As entropy evolves through the Planck timescale we see the past informing the present and informing the future. Likewise, our physical world comes into being through light.
Human beings have a unique experience with space and time and often what we think is true for everything may just be a facet of our humanity and the way that we are set up to observe reality While the presence of light represents the presence of potentialities, visible light is just a minute part of a much larger field. Electricity and magnetism were discovered to be mirror images of one another by James Clerk Maxwell. This became known as electromagnetic fields or EM field. These fields also travel at the speed of light and can be realised as such. This means that our universe is fundamentally simple, this is one of three key principles of our universe that light has helped us to realise. Light has also enabled us to realise that it is invariant, or unchanging. Einstein realised that since the speed of light is unchanging, speed will always be the same. Thus, physical laws are the same throughout the entirety of our universe.
Through his most famous equation, E=mc2 Einstein revealed energy and mass are equivalent. So it was understood at an early stage that all matter has a vibrational frequency and the higher the vibrational frequency of an object the greater the energy of something. Mass also slows things down in space and time, preventing them from travelling at the universal speed limit. Matter is not necessarily massless, it gains mass through its interaction with the field of constant energy.
Even still, everything around us, both light and heavy entities, are all vibrating. Popular schools of thought suggest that how one activates the law of attraction is to become a vibrational match to what it is you are attracting.
Energy in Motion
World renowned psychiatrist and spiritual teacher David Hawkins M.D. Ph.D. designed a Map of Consciousness over the course of 25 years of research. Using a form of muscle testing, Hawkins believes that our subconscious has access to a type of infinite intelligence that our thinking mind does not. The cool thing about Hawkins’ method is that you can get answers for absolutely anything. Probably even lottery numbers, but I don’t know if thats been tested.
The value of the responses are measured on a logarithmic scale of 1- 1000 that represent the spectrum of consciousness. Attitudes, values and emotions correspond to levels of consciousness, according to Hawkins, and the scale begins with lower vibrational emotions such as shame, fear and guilt and culminate with higher vibrational emotions such as love and enlightenment. Hawkins has demonstrated through years of workshops and events the power of muscle testing on a grand scale. An experiment will generally involve posing a question to a participant and measuring the ability of the participant to resist pressure applied to their outstretched arm. Hawkins believed that this method could be used to deduce the answer to all of life’s mysteries, including the most pressing which is the secret of enlightenment.
Using this methodology one could see that our reality is based on various vibrational levels of consciousness which manifest as an emotional feeling. Hawkins believed that these emotional manifestations affected how we viewed the world and this view affects our attitudes and motivations.
What all of this information confirms is that together we create the world in each moment. Physicist Amit Goswami explains that it is due to our collective capacity for creativity that our individual manifestations or desires for direct manipulation of the world may not come to fruition. However, jointly we have the capacity to manifest something that is really exciting and speaks about the potential that we have to live in a world where jointly we use our ability as creators to choose the kind of world we want to live in the moment by moment.
One pioneer in this field is Lynne McTaggart that, through her Power of Eight Groups, teaches people how to become conscious creators of their own lives in community. Through their groups of eight people, each member chooses a specific intention and the other members intend for them. McTaggart's groups have reported countless miracles and manifestations through the process.
Similarly, Dr Joe Dispenza through his workshops teaches participants to create their future by embodying their present now. First, Dispenza teaches participants about the quantum potentials of their lives, as he understands that belief is something important to the manifestation process. Dispenza's workshops are actively studied by many interested scientific parties, because like McTaggart, the results are impressive.
While the cynic in many of us may feel that actively manifesting through the law of attraction seems too good to be true, I think in part it may be because there are so many contributors and content creators in the field that produce their own individual take on the process. I think that this can take away from how simple the process actually is, maybe like light it is that simple!
