[John Freestone]

That's a very good point ALG has made, and when I re-read my own contribution to this thread I saw a glaring omission - or rather, I was just plain wrong, I think. I said that our beliefs just affect our beliefs, not objective reality, and of course, that's quite wrong. I suppose I must have taken it as read that our thoughts affect reality. ALG's kind of experiment is clearly a valid test of objective changes, as long as thoughts don't change beliefs so much that we actually misinterpret results, unwittingly get our original record of reality out of its envelope and alter it, pretending to ourselves we didn't do that! These sorts of cheats would seem silly even to mention, but it's worth noting the philosophical possibility, and, in more complex situations, for instance once someone believes they are psychic and starts trying to prove it to themselves or other people, those kinds of mental splits are, apparently, quite common, explaining why an endless queue of hopefuls try to prove to science some psi ability and don't believe the mathematical proof that they were imagining it.

It seems clear, then, that when we change reality by our thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, as you are learning to do, pokilty, it is through natural means, rather than supernatural. However, another part of what's missing from my earlier post is how powerful our unconscious mental processes are, and I think this explains a lot of the power of LoA. You describe this change very powerfully when you say you're using your intuition instead of logic. Our conscious minds are a bit like the monitors of our computers - there are words appearing slowly in front of my now, but somewhere further below, calculations are happening at an incredible speed. Our unconscious mental processes as also incredibly fast and complex, and only a certain number of observations or results get popped up into awareness. Meanwhile, we type, or walk, and breathe, etc., etc., without thinking about all the mass of information that needs processing to do those things.

It's important not to take the analogy too far. In humans, one common problem seems to be when we try to control objective reality too deliberately, too minutely, with too much analysis: the problem you describe as using logic instead of intuition. Somehow, it seems, we inhibit and sabotage the subconscious process that could have provided a useful solution intuitively - just popped it into our heads from 'nowhere'. This self-sabotage is commonly related to states of anxiety, particularly that low-ish level of chronic anxiety (chronic meaning extended in time), in which a person thinks too much that they might make mistakes, wrong decisions, etc., and so spends a lot of time analysing, worrying about problems. As you are discovering, if you force yourself through this and in some way learn to trust the intuitively popped answers, things begin to run more smoothly. I've been there. It's incredibly liberating. I used to be a dreadful worrier.

The bits of LoA that I dislike are the suggestions that there's something supernatural about any of these effects. Objective experiments will, I'm fairly confident, demonstrate just as effectively that we can't bend spoons with our minds or any of that woo nonsense. If wolfgang was referring to our unconscious brain power, then I'm in agreement, but this passage could be taken the other, mystical, way: "The "effort" of sitting and imagining something is really us picking up on something that is to be - something that is already in the works.". I don't believe in clairvoyance, but we may be subconsciously aware of patterns in the past and present that naturally predict the likelihood of a certain event taking place (say, a stock market crash), while our logical, conscious minds may be thinking "Nah, that seems a bit far fetched".

So while I have some confidence that sitting meditating on changing your body weight, for instance, may well translate into objectively measured results, and that meditating on the idea might translate into actual physical changes, the meditating and beliefs are only triggers to those physiological changes that normally change people's weight. Others may believe that such effects happen on some supernatural plane of super-reality, or that they are warping objective reality with their great mental powers, or that the whole idea of objective reality it brought into question. I believe that weight change would be due to the usual physical causes - a balance between energy intake and expenditure. LoA doesn't bend the LoP (Laws of Physics).

People, however, do get sucked into mystical superstitions by the propagating of such myths, for which there is no scientific evidence. In that way, the Secret, or LoA or whatever, can be sold as a quasi-religious philosophy by its gurus, and people can gradually lose the use of their logic altogether. We need that too sometimes. Intuition can be very wrong. People are 'victims' of irrational belief systems like the LoA. There are a lot of them posting here. It seems that once they open their minds, they don't quite know when to stop.

ALG, I'm not sure why you posted a link to something about a study into NDE. Does it have any relevance to the LoA? It strikes me as an example of over-inclusiveness on these matters - once we're supernatural beings, we can just say yes to any old woo - and then one supernatural idea can be quoted as backing up any other. Besides, I'll make a prediction. When the study is finished, it won't demonstrate that people having NDEs can see pictures up at a height no-one can from floor level. Furthermore, it clearly cannnot demonstrate that scientifically according to strict protocols, unless I'm unaware of some very clever details of security. The experimental conditions leave a lot of room for people cheating. I haven't studied it in detail, but I'm sure one of the objections will be that it is in no way a double-blind controlled trial, on which our reasonably confident knowledge of the world rests.