Alongside the Law of Attraction, New Thought produced a second, closely related teaching that has had its own long afterlife: the Law of Assumption, associated above all with Neville Goddard (1905-1972), a Barbados-born teacher who lectured in New York and Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1970s. Where the Law of Attraction speaks of attracting what one dwells on, Goddard's formula is sharper and more inward: assume the feeling of the wish already fulfilled, live in that assumption as a present fact, and the outer world is said to conform to it. "Imagination creates reality" is his summary. His short books, Feeling Is the Secret (1944) and The Power of Awareness (1952), are the primary statements, and his lectures are the direct ancestor of a great deal of what circulates now.
The techniques that fill contemporary manifestation culture are mostly recent packagings of these older ideas, and can be dated:
- Affirmations, repeated present-tense statements of the desired condition, descend from New Thought and from Emile Coue's autosuggestion of the 1920s ("every day, in every way, I am getting better and better").
- Vision boards, collages of images of what one wants, are a late-twentieth-century form of the older New Thought 'treasure map', given mass circulation after The Secret in 2006.
- Scripting, writing out the desired reality in detail as though it had already happened, is a direct application of Goddard's method.
- Intention setting generalises the same act into a deliberate, often ritualised, statement of what one means to bring about.
- The 369 method, writing a desire three times in the morning, six at midday, nine at night, is a specifically internet-era coinage, spreading on social media around 2020 and loosely and baselessly attached to Nikola Tesla's supposed regard for those numbers.
None of this is ancient, and honest treatment says so: it is a documented lineage running from nineteenth-century New Thought through Goddard to a twenty-first-century online industry. The serious objection is the same one recorded against the Law of Attraction generally, that a doctrine crediting the mind with sole causal power over circumstances implies, by its own logic, that those who suffer misfortune or illness produced it by wrong thinking, a corollary its gentler promoters tend not to state but cannot easily escape.