The Secret of the Secret: Turning Intention into Reality

To manifest: to make evident to the eye; to show plainly, reveal or display.—The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993)

Since The Secret burst upon the scene a year and half ago, the idea of setting an intention and making it a reality is moving into the mainstream. How often do you hear someone saying, “I set an intention to,” or “I put it out to the Universe”? Many of us women hear about “creating the life we love” or some variation on that theme and we wonder just how the concept of “manifesting an intention” works.

Actually, the principles in The Secret are a repackaged version of a concept called the Law of Attraction that has been around for a long time. Wallace Wattles wrote about it in The Science of Getting Rich in 1910 and Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich in 1937. The principles basically say that we get what we believe/think about. Believe you’ll get a million dollars strongly enough and it will come to you. Not everyone is on board with this. Some have called the Law of Attraction in these works “self-help hogwash.”

But, my academic background in critical thinking has given me a good understanding of how a person’s values, attitudes, and beliefs determine the decisions they make and the actions they take. Based on that, I believe the principles of the Law of Attraction remain fundamentally sound despite often being over-simplified and misapplied by self-help gurus who reduce it simply to nothing but an easy path to wealth. The principles can be applied to much more than that.

So how does it work? In a nutshell, the mind sees what it expects to see. Then, we act based on what we see. You see, our minds are hard-wired to make information filters composed of our beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and values about the world. Those elements make a mesh through which raw events and situations pass. Based on what comes out of the filter, we reach a conclusion about what just happened.