"It would seem, Adeimantus, that the direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future life. Does not like always attract like?"
—Plato from The Republic
What is The Secret? That is the first question we need to discuss before we can dive deeper into the arguments for or against its scientific validity. In essence, The Secret is considered to be the so-called Law of Attraction. I say "so-called" here because it isn't really a law at all following the definitions of science.
From a scientific standpoint, a law is something that we have hypothesized and theorized, and more importantly, experimented and tested diligently, and then argued and debated through peer review, often over generations. An example would be Sir Isaac Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation:
Every mass attracts every other mass by a force pointing along the line intersecting both points. The force is directly proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the point masses
Newton also posited the Laws of Motion, of which there are three:
These laws have been tested through scientific experiments over and over and verified to the point that the global scientific community considers them "laws of nature."
The Law of Attraction, on the other hand, is not such an "empirical" law. It is more of an adage, along the lines of the so-called Murphy's Law, which states that "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."
Murphy's Law is actually a philosophical maxim that is likely intended to lead you along the path of the Boy Scout motto of "be prepared," because "anything that can go wrong . . . will." Obviously, this is not a law in the scientific sense, because there is plenty of evidence every day of moments when there is potential for things to go wrong and they didn't, don't, and will not. Hence, it has been proven not to be an empirical law of nature.
Now, the Law of Attraction states that "like attracts like." That is it. That is the basis of The Secret. Like attracts like.
Like attracts like? Really? When I first heard this, high school science jumped in the way, and I thought about magnets and how "opposites attract." It is a scientific fact that opposite poles of magnets, as well as electric dipoles, attract each other. Not like attracts like.
On the other hand, there are plenty of other situations in science and modern physics where like does indeed attract like. Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation states that every mass attracts every other mass. One chunk of mass is not unlike any other chunk of mass when it really comes down to it. Atoms are just electrons, protons, and neutrons in various arrangements. There is interferometry, chaos theory, fractal mathematics, quantum physics, and many others. But we'll get to that later.
The point here is that The Secret is simply the idea that within our universe like attracts like. I say this isn't a scientific law because it hasn't had a general analysis through the scientific method to rigorously prove it like Newton's various laws. However, it is at the least a maxim, or law in the general philosophical sense, like that of Murphy. Whether it is true all the time is inconsequential; what matters is that we explore this adage: What is this maxim of like attracts like? What does it mean?
We'll start with the quote from Plato's The Republic at the beginning of this chapter. I find it quite humorous and unsurprising that both true believers of The Secret and true skeptics of The Secret use this very quote to argue that Plato was either teaching the Law of Attraction or that he was doing no such thing. How can one sentence be so controversial? Either he was or he wasn't, right?
Let's review the quote once more and have some fun with it.
"It would seem, Adeimantus, that the direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life. Does not like always attract like?"
The skeptic would likely argue that all Plato is saying to Adeimantus here is that educated people tend to travel in the same circles and that those educated in a certain field tend to travel in the same circles as others educated in that. Simply put, plastic surgeons go to plastic-surgery conventions, science-fiction writers go to science-fiction conventions, cops hang out with each other, and so on. And if one starts out studying a particular vocation, the students he is likely to meet are studying the same.
When I was working toward my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, I mostly saw only other electrical engineering students, and quite often, through camaraderie, we would make fun of the other "less difficult" engineering fields. You see, we electrical engineers knew that our field was the most difficult of all. Nonsense, of course, but one has to be a team player. The other students in the other majors, likewise, made fun of us in the same vein. Their jokes usually involved thick glasses and pocket protectors, neither of which have I ever owned.
But then I went to graduate school in physics, then optics, then aerospace engineering, then astronomy, each time associating with a new "team." Does this not shoot a hole in this interpretation of Plato's statement?
Not really. But it certainly doesn't prove the skeptic right, though he'll cling to this interpretation of Plato's statement to Adeimantus.
The philosopher and life coach and teacher of The Secret will tell us that this is clear evidence that Plato was inferring something more than birds of a feather flocking together, and that indeed he was telling us the heart of the Law of Attraction—some three hundred eighty years BCE!
And the fact of the matter is Plato is one of the most renowned deep thinkers in history. His words are the tools with which he taught his ideas, and no matter how you parse it, Plato is plainly stating the Law of Attraction.
Now, my interpretation of the statement Plato makes here is just that: my interpretation. Your interpretation is yours. Who is to say which interpretation is the correct one without actually being able to ask Plato himself? After all, why does he put it in such a way as to say, "Does not like always attract like," as if it were an accepted maxim of the universe meaning something that everybody understands?
Situations like this remind me of a Benjamin Franklin adage my dad used to always tell me that goes something like, "A man convinced against his will is at another opinion still."
But still, this is the beauty of The Secret. The idea behind it is deeper than just "birds of a feather" or "like attracts like." The idea is that you create your own reality. You create your universe around you by how you perceive it, interpret it, and feel it. And if you don't believe me, or Plato, just wait until we get to the science.
"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship."
—Yoda from Star Wars: A New Hope
Now we should dig a little deeper into what The Secret is supposed to be. The Law of Attraction is the basis for it, but as I mentioned, there is more to it than just that. The true essence of The Secret is that everything in the universe is made of energy. You, your house, this book, the light bulb above your head illuminating the pages, the light itself that is illuminating the pages, grass, trees, dogs, cats, televisions, cars, dirt, and everything else in between, above, below, around, behind, and elsewhere all are made of energy.
In fact, even the very fabric of the universe—the actual space between interstellar bodies—isn't empty. Space itself is made of energetic oscillations known as quantum vacuum energy fluctuations (often referred to in science-fiction as zero point energy, or ZPE).
Energy at its basic level of description can be described as a vibration, an oscillation, or a wave. So if everything in the universe is energy, and energy, is a vibration, then, as Spock would say, it is logical to deduce that you are a vibration or wave, as is anything else within the universe. If you have a thought, then there is some energy required in setting that thought up, and that thought energy is a vibration that ripples through the spacetime continuum (everywhere) across the universe.
And, as we'll discuss in detail a little later, these oscillations are quantum-physics phenomena, and quantum physics happens instantaneously across the entire universe. Wow!
I know that might have hurt your head a little. It hurt Einstein's, too, so don't feel bad about it.
Following the basic understanding of waves—and the physics and mathematics describing how they interact with each other—we find that waves that are most like each other "positively interfere" with each other, or "cohere," and amplify each other into something bigger, whereas waves unlike each other "negatively interfere," or "decohere," with each other. The decoherence is also sometimes referred to as "destructive interference," meaning that the two waves destroy each other. We see this in water waves, sound waves, ripples on the strings of a guitar, and in all things in nature when observed at the level where the wave nature of things becomes apparent.
"Whatever you think you can or can't do, you're right."
—Henry Ford
The Secret suggests that if you focus your thoughts on a particular thing, say an attractive spouse and a million dollars, then the energy wave of that thought is set up and vibrated across the universe. The energy waves in the universe most like you having a hot spouse and a million bucksare the ones that will positively interfere with those thoughts and lead you down the right path to attain such a goal.
Now, there are esoteric aspects of how you are supposed to think of the things that you want most, and the experts in The Secret, or the Law of Attraction gurus (such as Louise Hay)' can explain how to do this far better than I.
My rough interpretation is that if you "wish" you had a hot spouse and a boatload of money, then the universe will respond to your "wishing" and will happily cohere to your continuing to "wish" for this thing rather than actually allowing you to have the object of your wishing. So you need to be very careful how you wish—no, how you think—about these things.
In fact, you are supposed to visualize the things you want as if you already have them and "feel" the way you would feel if you did. As Yoda would tell Luke Skywalker, "You must unlearn." The way we have been raised to think of things is quite in contradiction with the way we should think of them.
"Size is nothing to the universe (unlimited abundance if that's what you wish). We make the rules on size and time"
—The Secret
"Every great teacher who has ever walked the planet has told you that life was meant to be abundant."
—James Ray a teacher featured in The Secret
There is another aspect to The Secret that needs to be mentioned here, and that is another so-called law or maxim known as the Law of Abundance. The Law of Abundance states two things. The most important of these to me as a scientist is that the universe is big. You say, "Duh! Of course the universe is big. What idiot doesn't understand that?" Well, yeah, but . . .
The point of this first part of the Law of Abundance is that the universe is so very, very, very, very big that there is an extremely abundant amount of energy within it.
From a physics standpoint I really like this. The universe, at least the observable universe, is estimated to have some 9 x 1021 stars in it. That is a whopping nine billion trillion stars (or written out would be 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars). Here in the South we'd use a highly technical term and call that a "buttload." Actually, there's a slightly more "eloquent" term, but there might be children present, so I'll refrain.
When we use the mass of an average-size star to guesstimate the mass of the observable universe, we come up with some 3 x 1052 kilograms. That's a three with fifty-two zeros after it.
Think of it this way. A gallon of milk has a mass of about 3.785 kilograms. So, if you divide the mass of the observable universe by the mass of a gallon of milk, you end up with: 7,900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or a 79 with fifty zeros after it! That's roughly how many gallons of milk it would take to fill the universe. A "buttload" of milk, for certain (not to mention a buttload of cows). The universe is big. Got it.
I absolutely believe the first axiom of the Law of Abundance.
"You can have, do, or be anything you want."
—Dr. Joe Vitale a teacher featured in The Secret
The second axiom of the Law of Abundance is that life is supposed to be lived in abundance. In other words, there is a buttload of energy in the universe, everything in the universe is energy (see previous discussion on the Law of Attraction), and therefore there is no reason for us to not have whatever we want, because there is plenty of it to go around! Why not? Makes sense to me.
* * *
Clearly, this is not one of those empirical laws like Newton's, but at the same time the logic is quite impeccable. The skeptic, on the other hand, would say that just because there is an abundance of energy in the universe doesn't mean you know how to tap into it.
As Qui-Gon Jinn told Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, "A solution will present itself." I think The Secret experts would agree. Again, this comes down to you and how you want to perceive and interpret this.
If you choose to be the skeptic, then that will be your reality. If you choose to perceive that matter and energy and space and time are nothing more than the same entity oscillating in slightly different fashions, then a solution will likely present itself. You create your own reality.
I realize that I keep repeating this, but it is a very important point. Stay tuned and I'll explain it as we go along, and I'll explain the physics behind it to boot. We truly do create our own reality around us.
"From the Non-physical, you created you, and now from the physical, you continue to create, and we are nothing if we are not Flow-ers of Energy. We must have objects of attention, that are ringing ourbells, in order to feel the fullness of who we are, flowing through us, for the continuation of All-That-Is. That is what puts the eternalness in eternity."
—Esther Hicks