The Law of Attraction: What the Books Actually Say

Most people have heard of the law of attraction, and most of them know the same version. Think about what you want and it comes to you. Pin a picture of a new car to the fridge, and wait.

That's the version that got famous. The books that teach the law say something quite different, and a lot more useful.

Abraham-Hicks, the best-known teachers of it today, put the whole law into eight words: "That which is like unto itself is drawn." Like attracts like. Wishing has little to do with it. What counts, in their telling, is what you give your attention to and how that feels.

This essay follows the idea from its beginnings to what it claims, then looks at how you'd tell what you're attracting, the three steps Abraham-Hicks describe, and three ways to put it to work. Griff, the griffin who carries the video's examples, has a tight month at his workshop and tries all three.

Older than you'd think

In 2006 a film called The Secret made the phrase famous. The idea itself goes back well over a century.

In the 1880s a writer named Prentice Mulford published a set of essays called Thoughts Are Things. He described our thought as an unseen magnet, always pulling in its match among the things we can see and touch. A cheerful mood, he said, plugs you into a current of success, and a gloomy one plugs you into a current of failure.

In 1897 Ralph Waldo Trine wrote it down in In Tune with the Infinite in five words: "Like builds like and like attracts like." He added something the later teachers would repeat. This law, he said, "is continually operating whether we are conscious of it or not."

Then in 1906 William Walker Atkinson put the phrase on a cover. His book was called Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World. He was writing just as wireless radio arrived, so he pictured the brain as a transmitter and a receiver. A thought goes out like a radio wave, and only minds tuned to the same note pick it up.

Each generation dressed the idea in the science of its day: radio waves then, quantum physics now. The science kept changing, and the claim underneath stayed the same. What you hold in mind tends to show up in your life. Abraham-Hicks gave that claim its best-known modern form, with a lot more detail on how to use it.

What the law says

Abraham-Hicks describe every thought as vibrating. It sends out a signal and attracts a matching signal back. You draw to you the essence of whatever you're mostly thinking about. If that's the things you want, your life reflects them. If it's the things you don't want, your life reflects those instead.

Two details in that description catch most people out.

The first is that the law isn't listening to your words. It responds to where your attention is and how that feels. So saying no to something doesn't push it away. When you look at something you don't want and say "go away," you're still looking at it. Abraham-Hicks call this an inclusion-based universe: your attention includes whatever it lands on.

The second is that it runs whether you know about it or not. You don't need to practise it, they say. It's already working, all the time.

Here's Griff. Money has been tight at his workshop this month, and he checks his bank app every hour or so. Every thought he has about money is about the money that isn't there, and he can feel it too: tight shoulders, a knot in his stomach. By the law, all that attention on the empty account is the signal he's sending.

James Allen put it bluntly in As a Man Thinketh in 1903: "Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are." Griff wants money. Right now, what he is, is worried.

Your feelings are the gauge

If the law ignores your words, how do you know what you're attracting?

The answer Abraham-Hicks give is simple: you feel it. They call your emotions a guidance system. When you feel good, your attention is lined up with what you want. When you feel bad, it's pointed at what you don't want. The feeling is the reading on the gauge.

They lay the emotions out as a scale with twenty-two steps. Joy, appreciation, freedom and love sit at the top, with passion, enthusiasm, optimism and hope just below. Around the middle come contentment, boredom and pessimism, then frustration, disappointment, doubt and worry. Further down are blame, anger and jealousy, and at the bottom, fear, grief and despair.

You don't need to memorise it. The point is that feelings come in an order, and you can usually tell whether a thought moves you up the scale or down.

The neuroscience writer Joe Dispenza describes the same loop in terms of the body. A thought makes a feeling, and the feeling makes more thoughts to match it, round and round, until a mood becomes a habit. Abraham-Hicks would call that your point of attraction. Dispenza calls it your state of being. The words differ; the loop is the same. By now, Griff's worry has become his setting.

The three steps

Abraham-Hicks say every creation happens in three steps. You ask. It is given. You allow it in.

The first step happens on its own. Every time life shows you something you don't want, you get clearer on what you do want. They call this contrast and sum it up in a little chain: variety causes contemplation, contemplation produces preference, preference is asking, and asking is always answered. A tight month is how Griff found out how much he wants to feel easy about money.

The second step isn't your job at all. In their telling, the universe answers every asking the moment it's made, and they even have a name for where the answer waits: vibrational escrow.

That leaves step three, which is where nearly everyone gets stuck. Allowing means letting your attention and your feelings match what you asked for. The trouble is that when you want something badly, you keep noticing it isn't here yet. Abraham-Hicks say the absence of a thing and the presence of it are two different signals, and you can't focus mostly on the absence and expect to receive the presence. Every time Griff checks his balance, he's asking for money and pointing at its absence in the same breath.

In Ask and It Is Given, Abraham-Hicks give twenty-two processes for this third step. Three of them follow.

Climb the scale

The first is the simplest. Don't try to jump.

When Griff first hears about the law, he tries to leap straight to the top. He stands at the mirror and tells himself he's rich. It sounds hollow, and part of him knows it isn't true. Now he feels worse than before, a bit silly on top of worried.

Abraham-Hicks say you can't get from worry to joy in a single move. The gap is too wide, and your mind argues back. Instead, reach for a thought that feels a little better than the one you've got. Only a little. Relief is the sign you're moving up. They even put anger above despair on the scale. It sounds odd, but going from powerless to angry is a step up.

So Griff tries again. Worried becomes frustrated: at least this month is nearly over. Frustrated becomes content: he likes his work, and his last customer loved her chair. Content becomes hopeful: he's had slow months before, and they passed.

None of these thoughts is about being rich. Each one is a step up, though, and he believes every one of them.

The focus wheel

The second process happens on paper. Abraham-Hicks call it the focus wheel.

Draw a big circle with a small circle in the middle, and in the middle write the feeling you want. For Griff, that's "I want to feel easy about money." Around the edge, like the numbers on a clock, you write twelve statements. Each one has to be something you already believe, and each should feel a little better than where you are now.

At twelve o'clock Griff writes, "I don't have to fix all of this today." At one: "I've got through slow months before." At two: "People like what I make."

When a line makes him wince, like "I'll be rich by Friday," it comes off the wheel. Abraham-Hicks say that thought has gone off in the bushes. It's too specific, and too far from what he believes. General thoughts work better because they don't start an argument.

They suggest staying with each statement for about seventeen seconds. They don't offer evidence for the number, so take it as their suggestion. When Griff reaches eleven o'clock, he circles the middle of the wheel: I want to feel easy about money. An hour ago that felt out of reach. Now it feels close.

Let go of the oars

The third idea is less a process than a way of carrying yourself.

Abraham-Hicks picture life as a river. Imagine putting your boat in the water, turning it upstream and paddling with all your strength. That's how most of us spend our days, straining and forcing and checking. In their picture, though, nothing you want is upstream. The current is already moving toward everything you want. Their advice fits in five words: let go of the oars.

So Griff puts the phone in a drawer and stops checking. He goes back to his bench and makes something just because he enjoys it. He isn't waiting for money any more. He's having a good afternoon.

Letting go isn't the same as doing nothing. In The Science of Getting Rich (1910), Wallace Wattles wrote: "Thought brings the thing to you; action allows you to receive it." He also warned that "whenever a man hurries, he ceases to be a creator and becomes a competitor." Abraham-Hicks call the good kind inspired action, the kind that comes from feeling good rather than from panic.

A few days later, Olive stops by the workshop. A friend of hers saw the chair Griff made, and she'd like six more just like it. Griff doesn't need to work out why it happened. He's just glad he was at his bench and not staring at his phone.

What the law asks of you

Here is the law of attraction as the books describe it. Like attracts like, and it responds to your attention and your feelings, not your words. Your emotions show you where you're pointed. The real work is allowing: climb the scale, build a wheel, and let go of the oars.

Nobody has measured a thought pulling money across town. The law is also built so that it can't really fail: if something doesn't arrive, the answer is always that it wasn't allowed. Keep that in mind, especially when life hands someone something they never asked for. Nobody should be told they attracted an illness or an accident.

You don't need the physics to use the practice, though. James Allen described it with no vibration at all: thought becomes habit, and habit becomes circumstance. A calmer mind notices more, and it's easier to be around. Whichever way you read it, the practice is the same.

Mulford, Trine, Atkinson, Allen, Wattles and Abraham-Hicks, across more than a hundred years, each say it in their own way. What you give your attention to, and how it feels, shapes what you meet.

So this week, try one step up the scale: one thought that feels a little better than the last. That's where it starts.