For millennia, scientific visions have been shaped by religion, and religion has been changed by science. Today, neuroscience continues to transform our concepts of life, the universe, and God.

Researchers from the Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania offer a neurological explana­tion of the Law of Attraction.

Science and religion are great bedfellows, spawning inspirational theologies throughout history, especially in Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Religious Science. Take, for example, Galileo. He violated Church edict, resurrecting Copernicus and displacing Earth as the center of the universe. Did God diminish? No. God got larger, and the universe became a greater mystery to ponder.

Another example: Georges Lemaître, a Roman Catholic priest, who, in the 1930s, developed a theory of a “Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of creation.” We call it the Big Bang. Skeptics rejoiced, proclaiming the end of God, but instead of fading away, God became the hottest topic of the twentieth century. Enter the quantum physicists—in particular David Bohm, Neils Bohr, Roger Penrose, Karl Pribram, and Henry Stapp. They knew that, at the subatomic level, the universe was weird, and so was human consciousness. Could they be related? Brilliant hypotheses emerged: holonomic minds, holographic universes, quantum brain dynamics, and their potential applications to prayer. But the connections between quantum dynamics, consciousness, and the brain have failed to find support in the scientific community. So far, no direct scientific evidence has been found to correlate quantum physics with God, consciousness, and the human potential to heal. Perhaps one day—but until then, scientists must build their models on the evidence that currently exists. And neuroscience does offer new, exciting validation that our thoughts and feelings change the structure and functioning of our brain, our consciousness, and our deepest concepts about God.

Indeed, the newest research shows that we can influence the minds of others in meaningful and measurable ways—but only if we have visual and auditory contact with each other. There’s a word for this—neural resonance—and it supports, at least conceptually, one of Ernest Holmes’s biggest ideas: The Law of Attraction.

The concept has its roots in the spiritual and metaphysical dialogues of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as exemplified in the title of William Atkinson’s 1906 book, Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World. Holmes expanded on these ideas, in his 1938 book, The Science of Mind:

Every person is surrounded by a thought atmosphere. This mental atmosphere is the direct result of his conscious and unconscious thought, which in its turn, becomes the direct reason for, and cause of, that which comes into his life. Through this power, we are either attracting or repelling.

Andy and I would put it this way: Every person’s brain is imbued with a thought-and-feeling atmosphere. It shapes our behavior and influences every living organism we encounter in life, either attracting or repelling. It does this through our perceptions of each other. As we speak, listen, and move, we generate— in the other person’s brain—a state of neural resonance, or attraction, but only if we are expressing positive thoughts and feelings. Negative thoughts and feelings, when perceived, repel us.

Ernest Holmes wrote, “The most destructive force you and I have is our own unconscious emotional and thinking and feeling state.” Again, neuroscience agrees: Negative emotions easily undermine our positive intentions and goals. Our advice: Don’t give in to them. Acknowledge them, understand them, and then ask yourself two simple questions: How do they make you feel? And how do they affect the people with whom you engage?

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