Many believe that your beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create your reality. However, is there any scientific evidence to support this seemingly magical idea? The Law of Attraction was made popular by the 2006 book, The Law of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham by Jerry Hicks and then the film The Secret, but does it have any scientific validity?
From the level of the atom to the level of our bodies to the level of the galaxies, Dawson Church, Ph.D., award-winning author has spent years of painstaking research that reveals that the mind-body link is more profound than we ever imagined.
Church won the Best Science Book of 2018 for Mind to Matter; The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality. Church synthesizes hundreds of scientific studies in the fields of biology, physics, and psychology, and shows that moment by moment, the energy fields of our brains are literally creating our reality. There is an intricate mechanism by which thoughts become things, and this has been scientifically proven. Research shows us that with thought, used deliberately, we can create things beyond what we could ever have imagined.“You’ll discover that you are a potent creator, and that your thoughts lead to things. You’ll learn how to use your mind deliberately, as a creative tool, to think nurturing thoughts. You’ll understand how you can nudge material reality effortlessly toward your desires. You’ll grasp just how powerful you really are and how capable you are of creating change by simply changing your mind.”—Dawson Church, Mind to Matter; The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality
The Science of How Our Minds Create Material Form
New discoveries in epigenetics, neuroscience, electromagnetism, psychology, cymatics, public health, and quantum physics are showing that thoughts can be profoundly powerful. These various branches of scientific study reveal exactly how our minds create material form.
Every time you have a thought you are directing your attention and signaling your brain to create new neural connections. When you direct your thoughts deliberately in a positive way, rather than allowing random thoughts to flow through your mind, you start consciously directing the formation of neural tissue. After weeks, your brain changes substantially. Keep it up for years, and you can build a brain that’s been entrained to focus on the positive and getting beneficial results.
The Heart Has a Brain
Researchers at the Heart Math Institute discovered that the heart contains 40,000 neural (brain) cells and that the heart emits an electromagnetic field 1,000 times stronger in amplitude than that of the brain. Pioneering Neuroradiologist, Andrew Armour, M.D., Ph.D. introduced the term ‘heart brain’.
“The heart possesses a complex and intrinsic nervous system that is a brain… the heart is a state of intelligent consciousness” — J. Andrew Armour, M.D., Ph.D. in “Translational neurocardiology: preclinical models and cardioneural integrative aspects“
A state of heart-brain coherence is when the heart and brain vibrate in the same smooth sine wave rhythms as opposed to jagged patterns, as seen in the electrocardiogram (EKG) image below.
How Our Brains Shape the World - The Five Different Brain Waves
Gamma Brain Waves
There are five basic brain waves that are picked up by a modern EEG (a test that measures the electrical signals emanating from the brain). Gamma is the highest brain wave frequency.
When monks were asked to meditate on compassion, large bursts of gamma waves were found in their brains (Davidson & Lutz, 2008). They were compared to novice meditators who had meditated for an hour a day the week before. The novices had brain activity similar to that of the monks.
However, the dramatic difference between them occurred when the monks were instructed to evoke a feeling of compassion, their brains began to fire in rhythmic coherence. The flares of gamma waves measured in the brains of the monks were the largest ever recorded. The monks reported entering a state of bliss.
Gamma is associated with very high levels of intellectual function, creativity, peak states, and of feeling “in the zone.” It is rare to achieve extremely high gamma waves. These brain waves are considered the brain’s optimal frequency of functioning. Gamma brainwaves are usually very weak in normal people. Mostly Tibetan Buddhists, martial art masters, and highly elevated mystics, can vibrate at this frequency.
Beta Brain Waves
The next fastest wave is beta. Beta is typically divided into two parts: high beta and low beta. High beta is your monkey mind. High beta is the signature brain wave of people experiencing anxiety, frustration, and stress.
The more stressed people become, the higher the amplitude of the beta their brains produce. Negative emotions such as anger, fear, blame, guilt, and shame produce large flares of beta in the EEG readout.
This shuts down the brain regions that handle rational thinking, decision making, memory, and objective evaluation (LeDoux, 2002). Blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the “thinking brain,” is reduced by up to 80%. Starved of oxygen and nutrients, our brains’ ability to think clearly plummets.
Low beta is the good part of Beta. It is the band that synchronizes our bodies’ automatic functions, so it’s also called the sensorimotor rhythm frequency (SMR). Beta is required for processing information and for linear thinking, so normal levels of beta are fine. SMR represents a calm, focused mental state. Conversely, it’s the feeling of stress that produces high beta.
Theta Brain Waves
Theta is the dominant frequency of the brain when daydreaming or asleep. Theta is the dominant frequency of people under hypnosis, healers, people in trances, and people in highly creative states (Kershaw & Wade, 2012). The recollection of emotional experiences, both good and bad, can trigger Theta brain waves.
Delta Brain Waves
The slowest frequency is Delta and is characteristic of deep sleep. Very high amplitudes of Delta are also found in people who are in touch with nonlocal mind, even when they’re wide awake. The brains of meditators, intuitives, and healers have much more Delta brain waves than normal.
Alpha Brain Waves - Linking it All Together
Alpha forms a bridge between the two high frequencies of Gamma and Beta and the two low frequencies of Theta and Delta. Alpha brain waves are an optimal state of relaxed alertness. Alpha brain waves are in the middle range of frequencies. Alpha forms a bridge between the two high frequencies of Gamma and Beta and the two low frequencies of Theta and Delta (C. Maxwell Cade, et al., The Awakened Mind: Biofeedback and the Development of Higher States of Awareness).
Biofeedback and neurofeedback skills focus on teaching people how to get into an Alpha state. The ideal state is to link enough Alpha to the other brain rhythms together. This minimizes High Beta so that there is very little monkey mind and anxiety. Alpha balances Gamma and Theta, and brings in a wide base of Delta.
How Our Emotions Organize Our Environment
You have this magnificent brain and mind, capable of creating wealth, happiness, health, and well-being in your own life and the lives of those around you. Your consciousness is powerful—much more powerful than you realize. Most of us are using just a tiny fraction of our ability, not even realizing that our minds create matter. We do it unconsciously. However, you can harness the power of your mind and do it systematically and deliberately. Information flows out from those that can deliberately create matter into the universal field.
Morning Work: How to Become a Master of Manifestation
As soon as you wake up in the morning, do not check your messages or social media. What you should do is leave space for your consciousness first thing in the morning.
Place your hand over your heart, and breathe deeply and feel love and gratitude. This connects your body and mind into a state of congruence. Solutions to your problems will just float into your consciousness. Tune into your inner sense of guidance. Imagine releasing anything that stands between you and inner peace. When your energy field isn’t flowing properly, you can have intentions but they will be less likely fulfilled.
Practice yoga, meditative walking in nature, walking barefoot on the earth, mantra chanting, or dance. Just make a commitment to what brings you that burst of positive neurochemicals in your brain. Later in the day if something happens that disturbs that state you can tap into the memory of how you felt in the morning.
Energy Fields
Your body’s electromagnetic field extends about five yards or meters from your body. When you’re five meters away from another person, your field begins interacting with their field. The two of you might be saying nothing, yet your energy fields are shaping each other in an invisible dance of communication (“Electromagnetic field interactions with biological systems 1” , Frey, 1993).
Different intentions produce different fields and different material creations. The thoughts and energy fields we cultivate in our minds condition the atoms and molecules around us. Energy fields can affect others at a distance as well. Emotions are as contagious as the flu. In long running studies researchers at the International Society for Bioelectricity (Frey, 1993) found that if people around you are negative, they infect you with those negative emotions and thus you will infect other people around you.
Emotional Contagion
In one massive study in 2015, researchers manipulated the Facebook feed of people to produce ‘emotional contagion’ in 780,000 people. They tweaked their feeds to be emotionally darker or for the other group emotionally lighter. The study authors found that when people were fed negative expressions they produced more negative posts in response; when people were fed positive expressions, they responded with more positive posts.
This demonstrates that “Emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”
It is important to become super-spreaders of emotional infection for positive emotions. Become addicted to that flood of serotonin and dopamine that occurs when you focus on love and gratitude. Remember to entrain yourself to this in the morning. You don’t just affect people around you one layer out. You affect people around you, thus infecting other people with emotional contagion like a pandemic. With the new knowledge from this Facebook study, we are capable of undergoing a shift in consciousness as we learn to spread joyful emotional contagion.
Evidence of Heart Rhythm Synchronization
In 2007, a group of scientists validated for the first time ever, evidence of heart-to-heart bio communications. Eric Leskowitz, M.D., a psychiatrist from Harvard Medical School’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, joined other scientists at The Institute of Heart Math. While Leskowitz was blindfolded and meditating, his heart rate and heart coherence were continuously monitored by the lab technicians.
Heart coherence is associated with increased alpha brain wave activity. It is a state in which the interval between heartbeats is regular and constant. It’s produced by positive emotions such as love and compassion. Negative emotions disrupt heart coherence and create irregular and jagged heart rhythms. At random intervals unknown to Leskowitz, expert meditators standing behind him were given a signal to enter heart coherence themselves. As they did so, Leskowitz’s heart coherence also increased (“Mindfulness, Meditation, and Prayer After Brain Injury“, Leskowitz, 2007). Without touching him, they were able to shift his heart-brain function.
A follow-up study measured the same effect in 25 volunteers in a series of 148 ten-minute trials, and it found the same phenomenon of heart entrainment at a distance (Morris, 2010). The director of this last study, Dr. Stephen Morris stated that “a coherent energy field can be generated and/or enhanced by the intentions of small groups of participants. . . . The evidence of heart rhythm synchronization across participants supports the possibility of heart-to-heart bio-communications.” Our bodies and brains are synchronizing with people around us all the time.
Antennas in Your Brain
For decades, microtubules, with their rigid form, were assumed to be no more than structural elements of the cell. Just as your body has a skeleton that provides a rigid structure to which other structures of the body attach, microtubules are the girders and scaffolding of the cell.
They are long cylinders. This property allows them to resonate, slowly like a drum or fast like an antenna, receiving signals from energy fields (Hameroff & Penrose, 1996). When they vibrate at faster frequencies in elevated states, it causes them to emit more light and coherent energy (Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon). The microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells have a shelf life of just 10 minutes between creation and destruction (Kim & Coulombe, 2010). That’s how quickly our brains are changing.
In this seething mass of activity, selected neural circuits are enhanced. The ones that grow are the ones we use. Pass an information signal repeatedly through a neural bundle and the bundle starts to enlarge. Just as the arms of a bodybuilder get bigger as he practices lifting heavier weights, our neural circuits can grow when we exercise them.
As our thoughts and feelings are carried through our neural network, they trigger the growth of functional genes. This, in turn, triggers the synthesis of proteins in our cells. These cellular events produce electrical and magnetic fields –energy fields that can be measured by sophisticated medical imaging devices such as EEG and MRI.
The closer science looks at matter, the more it looks like pure energy. Our consciousness interacts with the energy of the universe.
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. When we begin to “free ourselves from this prison, then we expand our consciousness to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature.” —Albert Einstein
Entraining Minds Experiment
Dawson Church and Joe Dispenza, author of Becoming Supernatural: How Common People are Doing the Uncommon, conducted an experiment where they put hundreds of people meditating in heart coherence. They placed metronomes completely out of sync and three minutes later all of the metronomes a whole room were in sync.
Directing Your Consciousness
You can direct your consciousness. it can be controlled and pointed in a desired direction. We use invisible energy fields, such as cellular networks, to transmit information every day. Humans also interact with our environment using invisible energy fields. Through your brain, mind, and cells, your consciousness projects signals into the fields around you (Oschman, et al., 2015). Signals traveling through our neural pathways create energy fields, and those fields change depending on the content of consciousness.
When you direct your consciousness, you harness the power of your mind, activate the splendid machinery of your brain, and influence the environment around you (Chiesa, Calati, & Serretti, 2011).
