Law of Attraction and Manifestation: Here's Why It Works

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.

Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here .

What is the Law of Attraction and manifestation? Can it help you succeed in life, both professionally and personally?

In Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, manifestation is how good and bad things come to us. Through the power of our thoughts, we can achieve great things or find ourselves the victims of misfortune. Keep reading to find out how and why the Law of Attraction and manifestation work.

Law of Attraction and Manifestation: What It Is and How It Works

At the heart of The Secret is the concept of the Law of Attraction—use your thoughts to attract the things you want. Every person alive is a creator within the universe. What you create in your life traces back to what you think about. If you focus on thoughts about who you want to be or what you want in life, you will attract those ideas and things back as your life experience.

Understanding this relationship is the key to changing your life, one thought at a time. To see the result of this relationship, trace the current state of your life back to your previous thoughts. Every action, every event started with a thought.

For example, you might be in a job you hate and have no prospects for change. If you think about the thoughts you’ve had since starting that job, you can see how they’ve helped create your current predicament. Likely, you often sat at your desk thinking how boring your job is. You may have thought the job was a dead end. You may have thought about how stuck you feel or how you don’t have the skills needed for a better job.
Those thoughts, based on the Law of Attraction, created a reality where your job was boring. Because you thought you were never going to find anything better, you didn’t.

So, why is this the case? You wanted a new job, so why does it matter what you think about the current job? The answer is that thoughts have the power to become reality. What you give your attention to the most is what you will receive.

It’s like planting a seed in a garden. If you plant a seed that represents being stuck in your job, the only thing that can grow is a representation of you being stuck in your job. To change your life, change your thoughts. Law of Attraction and manifestation can help you do it.

You Are Full of Magnetic Energy

Your thoughts have an energetic frequency that beckons other sources with the same energetic frequency. When you focus on a thought, you send a frequency into the universe that attracts that same frequency back. You are a magnet pulling the things you think about to you. This is how Law of Attraction and manifestation work- and it happens for both positive and negative thoughts and outcomes.

Think of yourself as a human transmission tower. You understand the concept of transmission as signals sent from your television to a satellite. You turn on a station, and an image appears on the screen. This image is delivered through the frequency slated for that particular channel. If you don’t like the program on one channel, you change it. A new frequency is sent for the new channel, and a new picture appears.

Through The Secret manifestation, you have the power to operate similarly through your thoughts. Your dominant thought sends the frequency signal to the universe, which sends that frequency back as a picture. In this case, the picture is your experience. Because energy returns to the source, the universe must return whatever frequency you send out, no matter how outlandish.

All the things you want vibrate with energy. When you focus on something, you are causing the energy particles to shift toward your vibration frequency. That new energy composition now matches yours, and that energy will return to the source, being you.
For example, if you want a new job, hold a picture of that job in your mind. You may feel the energy, or vibrations, that job emits. If you then think of yourself in that job, you have changed the vibration of that job to one meshed with your vibration. That new vibration creates a new frequency that sends the new picture to your life. That new picture is you in that job.

Like television, if you don’t like the picture of your life, change your thoughts like you would change a channel.

When Your Thoughts Can Hurt You

If you allow your thoughts to be dominated by negative thinking, you are creating a negative frequency. The Law of Attraction and manifestation don’t distinguish between good thoughts or bad thoughts. The universe can only transmit the pictures you send out with your thoughts. If you focus on what you don’t want, you will attract what you don’t want back to you.

Remember the job example above? Focusing on feeling stuck in a dead-end job creates a frequency with that energy. Since like attracts like, the energy vibration of your negative thought (stuck in job) can only create and receive a picture of you stuck. You will continue to be stuck until you change the frequency to what you want.
Instead of focusing on what you don’t want, let thoughts of what you do want dominate your mind.
If you have a pest problem in your home, and you consistently think “I don’t want pests in my home,” the signal you’re sending into the universe surrounds the idea of pests in your home. According to the Law of Attraction, you are attracting more pests into your home.
- If instead you say, “I want a clean and sanitary home,” the universe will understand, pick up that signal, and conspire to keep your home pest-free.

Don’t worry about being perfect with positive thoughts. We all think negative thoughts from time to time. Nothing can come into your existence unless you summon it with persistent thoughts. Therefore, a negative thought once in a while is nothing to worry about. With Law of Attraction and manifestation, bad things only come into your life when you think about them persistently.

You may have experienced negative circumstances in your past and felt you were simply unlucky. Those circumstances were likely a result of being unaware of the power of your thoughts. There’s no reason to blame yourself. Now you know to change the frequency of your thoughts to a positive one to create a positive picture of your life.

If you previously believed you had no control over outside circumstances, the underlying message you created was one of fear, separation, and powerlessness. That frequency had no choice but to bring people, events, or situations that perpetuate those feelings in your life.
- For example, if you believe you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you are attracting the wrong circumstances to you.
Instead, if you believe that the outside world is yours to design, you will have the power to design it. Think “I am always safe and immune to external dangers,” and the universe will make it so.

Your negative thoughts about others create the same outcome. You cannot hurt another with your thoughts, just yourself. If you focus on what you don’t like about someone, you will attract more people with that trait. Likewise, if you focus on wanting something bad to happen to someone, all the universe picks up is the bad thing. Guess who that bad thing gets brought to? It’s important to remember this when you practice Law of Attraction and manifestation.

For example, if you think, “I hope Melissa fails her drivers test,” you’ve signaled the vibrations of failing. That vibration mixes with yours, as the owner of the thought, and you are now attracting failure to your life.
Through the Law of Attraction, negative thoughts about another person draw harm into existence. By calling harm into existence through your thoughts, you are placing yourself on that frequency. You are attracting the harm back to you as the pictures you emit.
If you don’t want to be harmed, avoiding that negative frequency is a good way to ensure you aren’t.

There is no trick to subverting negative thoughts. Set your intention to only think good things. Declare that your negative thoughts have no power. Declare that your positive thoughts are the most powerful. Proclaim and believe the universe is a good place. Law of Attraction and manifestation will reflect pictures back that allow you to experience it as such.

Law of Attraction and manifestation can be difficult to understand and even more difficult to master. Remember, there are no shortcuts, and you have control over the energy you put out into the universe. Start using The Secret manifestation and see what good things come to you.

Law of Attraction and Manifestation: Here’s Why It Works