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Wednesday, 20 May 2026
INDEX/Lexicon/Concept/Law of Attraction
/lexicon/law-of-attraction

Law of Attraction

Concept
Definition

The proposition — central to the New Thought movement and its descendants — that thought and emotion held with sufficient feeling tend to manifest as the corresponding outer circumstances. Articulated in clear form by Wallace Wattles (The Science of Getting Rich, 1910), expanded by Napoleon Hill, Joseph Murphy and Neville Goddard, popularised by Esther Hicks (Abraham) in the late twentieth century, and brought to a global mainstream audience by Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006).

written by editorial · revised continuously

The honest version

Strip away the marketing layer and the working claim is something like: the felt internal state a person spends most of their attention in tends, over time, to bias their perceptions, decisions and actions in directions that produce more of the same state. That is empirically defensible — it is roughly what cognitive psychology calls the negativity bias and confirmation bias rotated into spiritual vocabulary. The classical New Thought writers understood this; the popularisers often did not.

What it isn't

The dishonest version — the think it and the cheque arrives version — is what serious teachers in the tradition have spent a hundred years pushing back against. Neville Goddard insisted that the practice is feeling the desired state as accomplished, not visualising the object; Joseph Murphy warned against the autosuggestion as wishful thinking trap; Wattles built his case around aligned action, not magical bypass. Read the originals before reading anyone who came after them.

Where to encounter it

In the index, Bob Proctor's *The Law of Attraction Explained* is the most direct short-form statement of the popular version, and his guided abundance meditation is the practice form. For depth, go upstream to the actual texts — Wattles's *Science of Getting Rich*, Murphy's Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Goddard's Feeling is the Secret.

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