The Law of Attraction

New Thought roots (19th c.). The phrase grew out of the American New Thought movement. It was given its lasting name by William Walker Atkinson in Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World (1906), which framed the mind as a magnet drawing conditions that mirror one’s habitual thought-patterns.

(Prentice Mulford and others had used “thoughts are things” language a little earlier; Atkinson fixed the brand.)

• Abraham-Hicks (1980s–2000s). Esther and Jerry Hicks built the modern teaching around material Esther describes as channeled from a non-physical collective called “Abraham.” Their book Ask and It Is Given (2004) introduced the Emotional Guidance Scale — emotions ranked from despair up to joy as a read-out of one’s vibrational alignment.
• The Secret (2006). Rhonda Byrne released The Secret first as a film (March 2006) and then as a book later that year. It compressed LoA into the “ask – believe – receive” formula and featured teachers such as Bob Proctor, Joe Vitale, Mike Dooley, and (briefly) Wayne Dyer. The book sold tens of millions of copies and made “Law of Attraction” a household phrase.

A note on the evidence (important). This is the field’s most-criticized claim, and the criticism is fair. “Like attracts like” as a literal cosmic law has no scientific basis: LoA borrows the vocabulary of “vibration,” “frequency,” and “energy” from physics without the physics — these are metaphors, not measured quantities. The Secret‘s appeals to quantum mechanics were rejected by physicists, and the wider ideology was sharply critiqued by Barbara Ehrenreich in Bright-Sided (2009). The gravest distortion is victim-blaming: if circumstances “match your vibration,” then illness, poverty, and even disaster get read as attracted by the sufferer (Byrne notoriously suggested tsunami victims were “on the same frequency as the event”). The Atlas rejects this flatly via its fault-vs-mechanism split — see §5. What survives the critique is a real psychological core: attention, expectancy, and motivated action genuinely shape outcomes. The metaphysics is the part that doesn’t hold; the practice still points somewhere true.

Like attracts like. Thoughts and feelings of a given “vibration” draw matching experiences. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer outer mirrors inner.)

• Feeling is the signal, not thought alone. What you emit is emotional tone; the Hicks scale treats emotion as the real broadcast frequency. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer, The Inner Creates the Outer.)
• What you focus on expands. Attention is the dial — dwelling on lack brings more lack; dwelling on the wanted thing tunes you toward it. (→ All Is One/The Inner Creates the Outer.)
• Ask, believe, receive. The Secret‘s three steps: name the desire, assume belief that it is coming, and stay open to receive it. (→ The Inner Creates the Outer belief shapes outcome.)
• Gratitude and alignment as method. Raising your felt state (gratitude, appreciation, joy) is the operative practice, because the better-feeling state is the higher “vibration.” (→ The Inner Creates the Outer, The Inner Creates the Outer.)

William Walker Atkinson — Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World (1906) — named the law and supplied the “thought as magnet” frame.

• Esther & Jerry Hicks (“Abraham”) — Ask and It Is Given (2004) — the Emotional Guidance Scale and the vibrational-alignment model.
• Rhonda Byrne — The Secret (film + book, 2006) — the mass-market crystallization.
• Bob Proctor, Wayne Dyer, Mike Dooley, Joe Vitale — Secret-era teachers who carried LoA to large audiences.,

LoA is a loud, simplified statement of several Atlas truths: The Inner Creates the Outer the outer mirrors the inner, All Is One/The Inner Creates the Outer attention is creative, The Inner Creates the Outer feeling is the operative force, The Inner Creates the Outer vibration as the language of states, and The Inner Creates the Outer belief shapes outcome.

Its value is that it states these so plainly anyone can grasp them; its danger is that it flattens mechanism into fault. The Atlas keeps the two apart: your inner state may genuinely be shaping your circumstance (mechanism — worth working with), but your circumstance is not your fault (blame — rejected). The causal pattern is almost always unconscious — built by childhood, trauma, culture, repetition — never freely chosen. Harsh about the mechanism, gentle about the person.

Grew from: the New Thought movement (Quimby, the Fillmores, Atkinson) and, behind it, Hermetic mentalism and “vibration” language carried into modern self-help via the Kybalion., Seeded / sits alongside: the entire 21st-century manifestation culture, and a pointed internal reaction — the Law of Assumption revival, which positions itself as distinct from LoA (consciousness as the sole cause, rather than attracting an external “universe”).