A New Thought Idea in Modern Packaging

The law of attraction holds that a person's thoughts and feelings exert a direct causal pull on real world outcomes, so that sustained, focused attention on a desired result is claimed to make that result measurably more likely to actually occur. The idea did not originate with any of its recent popularizers. It traces to the New Thought movement, a mind healing current with religious and metaphysical roots that took shape in the United States across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on influences that ranged from Platonism and Swedenborgian thought to Hegelian philosophy and elements of Hinduism and American Transcendentalism, and holding generally that incorrect thinking causes sin, illness and disorder while correct, constructive thinking carries genuine creative power. The specific phrase and doctrine reached an early wide readership through William Walker Atkinson's 1906 book Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World and through Wallace Wattles's 1910 The Science of Getting Rich, and it reached by far its widest modern audience nearly a century later through Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book and film The Secret, which repackaged the same core New Thought claim for a mass contemporary market.