[Adam]

Nerkles,

As far as the quantum mechanics of it all...

Most physicists who deal with the quantum level agree that using your mind to manipulate objects from a distance (with no observable connection) is possible, but they all also agree that it is highly unlikely.

In computer programming, it represents a NULL value... it exists, but it also doesn't exist. It is a place holder, but it doesn't hold any place. Once you define it, it stops being null. In other words, you can't disprove a negative.

James Ray's usage of quantum mechanics seems to stem from the presence of 'ghosted quarks.' A quark, one of the building blocks of atomic particles, is a particle/wave that can, under extreme conditions, split into two entities, both seeming to have the same mass as the original. The peculiar properties of these ghosted quarks is that events which affect one ghost also affect the other one, no matter what the distance. Current research into them is along the lines of instant communication; if you can cause one ghost to pass through a circuit, its partner will take the same course, causing a receiver on the other side to register which path was taken, allowing people to infer the state of the circuit on the other side.

It is all theoretical right now, though, because we have not been able to measure individual quarks. Our best resolution so far is on the 7nm scale, the size of an electron's orbit around hydrogen... Quarks are much, much smaller. (For context, if you expanded a yard or meter, which are roughly the same size, so that it equaled one thousand, then on your scale, a meter would be equal to a centimeter... Expand it again by a thousand, and you would be on the micrometer scale... Expand it again, and you are on the nanometer scale... About seven of your subective yards would equal the width of a hydrogen atom's outer shell... and the tiny dust mote floating at that distance would be an electron, safely sitting at the nanometer's micrometer scale... (Micronanometer? Help, I'm an ignorant American who hasn't learned the full range of metric tenths...) Making up that electron are quarks, impossibly small, even at the nano scale.

In other words, controlling ghosting quarks is possible, but highly unlikely.

Then again, why throw out a good tool because it is mislabeled? Would you throw away a chisel because someone called it a saw? Both chisels and saws cut, even though they work in different ways. In fact, fundamentally, they do work the same way. Force is applied to a lever, and when a sharp point at the end of that lever meets another object, it pushes that object, often splitting a piece from the whole. With the Law of Attraction, whether it is explained through physics or psychology, works the same way. The force is your thoughts. The action that you take from those thoughts is the lever, and the results is what happens to the other object.

Also, just because something is improbable doesn't mean that it isn't common. Amino acids forming complex, self programmed chains, attracting different chemicals and giving birth to life as we know it is also impossibly improbable, and yet, it is also common. Bets at tables in Vegas have a limit because, even though it is improbable for a single person to continue doubling their bets and winning until the house is bankrupt, it is also a statistical certainty that it will happen.

Even if the whole of the Law of Attraction is simply self-fulfilling prophecy, (and what isn't?) then it shows just how powerful of a tool it is, and how easily disrespect for it can cause major problems in people's lives.