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10,000 Thoughts has made a new addition to the “The Best Free Sites for Learning the Secret Law of Attraction” list.
 
A Best of the Best award is going to The Manifest Station. I am making this special announcement because I was frankly so impressed with their content that I wanted the members of 10,000 Thoughts to be aware of it.
 
The Manifest Station is a free online web TV channel that focuses 100% on personal development, the law of attraction and the power of thought. 
 
What impressed me about the website is the number of heavy hitters that are on board.

• Neale Donald Walsch
• Mike Dooley
• Dr. Joe Vitale
• James Redfield
• James Arthur Ray
• Bob Doyle
• and many more

 
All are providing video clips of seminars, interviews, and workshops to The Manifest Station so they can broadcast these to you for free. In the short time, I have been watching, I have seen things I haven’t found anywhere else on the web. Definitely a valuable resource and worth checking out.

10,000 Thoughts is built on the power of thought. But just how powerful are they? What exactly are thoughts capable of doing?

Can our thoughts heal us?
Can our thoughts affect the physical world around us?
Can our thoughts affect other living things?
Can thoughts transcend time and space?
Do our thoughts connect us?
Can our thoughts affect other human beings?

Many of us have our own answers to these questions based on our own personal experiences, intuitive knowledge, and common sense. The bookstores are full of the new age pioneer’s answers to these questions, but what does the scientific community have to say?

It turns out quite a lot. And fortunately, there are a few books that have compiled a great deal of this information (a list of a few of these books is provided at the bottom of this article). Below is a brief synopsis of how some of the scientific community is answering or attempting to answer the questions above.

Can our thoughts heal us?

The placebo effect is one of the most well documented and most widely accepted medical findings. A placebo effect occurs when a treatment or medication with no therapeutic value (a placebo) is administered to a patient and the patient's symptoms improve. In other words, the patient thinks they have been given something to heal their condition, and simply because they believe they should get better, they do.

The placebo effect is so widely accepted that most drug studies take the placebo effect into account when they design their testing procedures. In fact, many drugs are considered effective if they can show any statistical improvement over the placebo effect at all. The placebo effect is so powerful it has become a barometer by which treatment effectiveness is now judged!

“…over 30% of all medical healings, including those attributable to surgery, are the result of the placebo effect and the role of the mind.” Bruce Lipton Ph.D. (The New Mind-Body Science Goes International)

Multiple personality disorder (MSD) is a highly controversial disorder that is characterized by the presence of two or more distinct and complex identities or personality states, each of which becomes dominant and controls behavior from time to time to the exclusion of the others.

Scientists are beginning to accept the physical bodies of people with multiple personalities actually change depending on what personality is present. Studies have shown while one personality may have allergies, another may not. One personality may have poor vision while another personality in the same body may have perfect vision. One personality may test positive for diabetes while the others do not test positive for the disease. The thoughts of the personality that is present has an almost immediate physical impact on the body.

''A given state of consciousness has its biological reality,'' Frank W. Putnam MD (Dissociation in Children and Adolescents: A Developmental Perspective)

Can our thoughts affect the physical world around us?

Scientists have been studying whether our thoughts can affect the physical world for centuries. The simplest experiments include people trying to influence the outcomes of coin tosses or rolls of dice simply by focusing their thoughts on a preferred outcome. Over a sufficient number of tosses of a coin, one would expect the number of heads and the number of tails to be about equal. If a person’s thoughts can affect the physical world, then a person should be able to influence the outcome of the coin toss so that Heads are predominant or vice versa.

These thought experiments are still being conducted today at places like the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, except scientists today are replacing the coin toss with much more sophisticated random event generators (or REGs). REGs are mechanical systems that create random or nearly random outcomes. Instead of focusing on coin tosses coming up heads, persons are now using their thoughts to influence these REGs.

Many of these REG thought experiments show results that are significantly different from the expected outcome and therefore create an argument that our thoughts do affect the physical world around us. A compilation study of 73 separate but similar thought experiments using REGs calculated the odds that the effects witnessed in these experiments were just chance to be 1 in 10^76 (1 followed by 76 zeros). Entangled Minds Dean Radin (New York: Pocket Paraview, 2006)

That is an awful lot of zeroes! It is roughly equivalent to winning the lottery 10 times in a row.

Can our thoughts affect other living things?

Clove Backster is famous for his experiments with plants. Years ago he began monitoring plants for changes in their biology. In the same way scientists use polygraph machines to measure changes in human stress levels, Backster used machines to measure the stress levels in plants.

Backster found that plants record spikes in their stress levels during times of danger. If a person attempted to burn a plant with a match, the plant registered a spike on the stress machine. But what intrigued Backster most was that the plant registered a spike on the stress machine even if the person only thought about burning the plant with a match. No action needed to be taken and the person didn’t even need to be in the same room. Just the visualization of burning the plant was enough to create a physical change in the plant's stress level.

Many scientists have conducted studies that show our intentions have an impact (good and bad) on bacteria, plants, animals and even human cells.

Lynn McTaggart has organized a similar experiment to be carried out this week. She has organized the readers of her book, The Intention Experiment, to focus their thoughts on a plant and to attempt to change it physically.

End of Part I
Link to The Science of Thought (Part II)

I will be participating in the Lynn McTaggart experiment and you can too if you like. http://www.theintentionexperiment.com

Part II will include a detailed discussion of the McTaggart experiment, as well as a continued synopsis of the questions above.

Books
By Lynne McTaggart
The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World

The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe

By Dean Radin
Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality

By Bruce Lipton
The Biology Of Belief: Unleashing The Power Of Consciousness, Matter And Miracles

By Michael Talbot
The Holographic Universe

Papers on affecting physical things
“Correlations of random binary sequences with pre-stated operator intention: a review of a 12-year program" R.G. Jahn (Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11)
“Evidence for consciousness-related anomalies in random physical systems” Radin D., Nelson R. (Foundation of Physics, 1989; 19)
“FieldREG anomalies in group situations” Nelson, R.D., Bradish, G.J., Dobyns, Y.H., Dunne, B.J., Jahn, R.G. (J. Sci. Exploration, 1996; 10)
“Anomalous organization of random events by group consciousness: Two exploratory experiments” Radin, D.I., Rebman, J.M., Cross, M.P. (J. Sci. Exploration,
1996; 10)

Papers on affecting other living things
“Psychokinetic control of bacterial growth” Nash, C.B. (J. Am. Soc. Psychical
Research, 1982; 51)
“Some biological effects of the ‘Laying on of hands’: A review of experiments with animals and plants” Grad, B. (J. Am. Soc. Psychical Research, 1965; 59)
“The influence of an unorthodox method of treatment on wound healing in mice” Grad, B., Cadoret, R.J., Paul, G.I. (Int. J. Parapsychology, 1961; 3)
“Distant mental influence on rate of hemolysis of human red blood cells” Braud, W.G. (J. Am. Soc. Psychical Research, 1990; 84)

The law of attraction states that you will attract into your life what you project out into the world via your thoughts, your feelings and your actions.  The sum of all 3 is what determines what you bring into your life.

The law of attraction and the power of thought are hot topics these days.  With Oprah doing not one but two shows on the movie, The Secret, these topics are as mainstream as they can get right now. 

Unfortunately, many are only learning what I call the Hollywood version of the law of attraction.  The Hollywood version is primarily concerned with your thoughts matching your desires.  It downplays the need for your emotions and actions to be in sync as well. 

If you are not getting the results you want in life, then you most likely are out of step in one of these 3 areas.  Your thoughts, your feelings, your actions or a combination of the three are not in alignment with what you want. And sometimes, in order to get back in harmony, you need to take a step backward to move forward again. 

An Example.

About 3 years ago, my wife had our first child.  Up until this point, neither my wife nor I had any life insurance.  We didn’t need any.  But now, if I died, Stephanie would be left to raise our child without my income to support them.  This was not a pleasant scenario and according to the Hollywood law of attraction I should completely avoid thinking about it. But I couldn’t do it.  At odd moments, my conscience would whisper, “What if something happens to you? What shape will your family be in?”  And along with those thoughts, feelings of doubt, worry, and guilt would wash over me.

Life is pretty busy with a new baby, so it was fairly easy to turn my thoughts away from my untimely demise and toward something else.  But those feelings of worry remained.  And because emotions are as important as thoughts when it comes to the real law of attraction, I eventually realized this was not an acceptable situation.  I came to the conclusion that I needed to take a step backward.

So I focused my thoughts fully on what I didn’t want – dying young and leaving my family in dire straits.  Dale Carnegie in his book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living calls this the worst case scenario.  By visualizing the worst case scenario and accepting it fully, the doubt, worry, and fears that often cloud ones ability to think and act are lifted.  Once you can think clearly, it is fairly easy to think of ways you can improve on the worst-case results.

In this example, once I fully faced the possibility of my dying young, it was fairly easy to decide to get a medical check up and to buy adequate life insurance.  And because now my thinking wasn’t clouded by doubt and worry, I realized that seeing the doctor and buying life insurance were actually in harmony with what I wanted in life.  I wanted to be a good provider for my family, and these actions were in-sync with that desire, not opposed to it as the Hollywood version of the Law of Attraction might suggest. 

I also realized that by taking a step backward and focusing fully on the problem in the short term, I was able to find a proper solution.  And with solution in hand, I was able to direct my thoughts, emotions, and actions toward the life of my dreams in a way I wasn’t capable of before.