Is Law of Assumption Real?

Here's What Neuroscience Says

Understanding Law of Assumption principles is so much easier when you connect it to what science has taught us about how our brain works. Below, I explain how what we have thought of as woo woo is actually just teachings that were ahead of science's time.

Wait what..? I get it if that is your first thought - I have actually questioned myself on this many times. But I kept returning it and finding more proof this is the secret so many are missing when they want to change their lives - meaning, wanting to experience more and better than what they do today.

There is so much information, ways of thinking, and beliefs coming at us every single day. Between our upbringing, personal religious and spiritual beliefs (or lack of), and past exerpeiences our brain is making a lot of choices about what we will believe on any given day.

Take me, I was raised Catholic, but had a ton of questions, and always felt a connection to something larger than myself but also didn't quite buy some of what we were being sold in church.

In church I felt like I was told my only connection to forgiveness from God, which I desperately needed if I didn't want to spend an eternity burning, was to tell a man what wrongs I had committed. I felt that I needed to feel bad for everything I did that was considered wrong - I personally carried fear of my wrongdoings that would condemn me that weren't thing I had done but instead things done to me.

About a decade ago I stumbled onto Law of Attraction, Law of Assumption, and my now favorite mystic, Neville Goddard online. And for all too long, this created a confusion all of its own. The teachings in the spiritual space felt to be pushing we should feel nothing but positivity all the time - no matter what we were facing or how we actually felt. Yet, the more I tried to do this the more it felt like I was creating a battle field in my own mind.

What Our Emotional Reactions Really Are

They are a wonderful gift, even when it doesn't feel like it. Your reactions give you a great insight into the state you are currently in and give you the opportunity to learn how to decide what you do with a thought or an emotion.

We don't choose our thoughts, we don't even choose the feelings that come up with them and while it is very true that our emotional reactions can give us insight to our current state I also have found that even when I am feeling my absolute best, I can still have unwanted and misaligned thoughts (and the feelings that come with them) pop up into my mind.

And since you don't choose them, you shouldn't feel guilty about them. Instead get curious and have some compassion for where they came from.

We get to decide what we do with them. We have the power of choice over where we dwell, for how long, and what we do with the energy. You control your actions and your reactions - that is it. Trying to control anything else will only make you frustrated.

Your Brain Is a Prediction Machine

"The basic idea is that the brain is a very constructive organ. It generates predictions, hypotheses, fantasies, explanations that best explain the sensory impressions on our eyes and our ears and our bodies" Karl Friston, neuroscientist and theoretician.

You assign the meaning of everything in your life - your brain makes a prediction using the data it is getting from your senses and matching it to past experiences and feelings you assumed as truth.

Reticular Activating System and Manifestation

Your brain is taking in roughly 11 million bits of sensory information every single second. You are consciously processing somewhere between 40 and 50 of them. Your brain quite literally takes 11 million bits of info and chooses to process between 40 and 50...it is wild.

And it is what I like to call your little brain bouncer that decides what gets through. It is this system in your brainstem called the reticular activating system - the RAS. And the short version is this: it prioritizes whatever you've already decided is important. And you tell it what is important thrrough what you entertain, what you focus on, and the state you are in.

When a manifestation teacher tells you to "focus on what you want" - there is actual science underneath that. It's that your brain, which was already filtering out most of reality, starts letting through the things that match what you've decided to believe is possible.

Now, of course, I also believe that God, AKA Source, will also provide what you seek - your sustained attention and faith is prayer.

Mark 11:24 anyone...?

The assumption you're living in shapes what your brain decides is worth your attention. Change the assumption, change the filter. Change the filter, change what you see. Change what you see, and watch what becomes possible.

Law of Assumption vs Toxic Positivity

Now, this is not toxic positivity with a neuroscience bow on it.

I spent years in the spiritual space watching people weaponize "good vibes only" against their own very real, very valid human experience. Grief, anger, having any hurt feelings got ignored and attempted to be suspressed in order to make room for only feeling positive. This teaching is what hurt a lot of people.

You can't consciously control which thoughts or feelings arise. What you can do is choose what you give your attention to, what you rehearse, what you practice dwelling in. Over time, that practice literally reshapes the neural architecture of what feels default to you. And it is not by fighting what comes up but instead is by consistently returning to where you've decided to live.

This isn't a denial or attempt to force unfeel what you feel, or a denial of the reality of the world - which, everything changes, that is one truth about life no doubt but you are more than able to work with yourself to design the life you want to experience.

Because we are always predicting and choosing what to accept as fact - what is real is actually subjective.

Here is what I do:: I decide what I want and what that looks like for me. I ask myself how I want to feel when I go to bed tonight and then ask myself during the day if my current behavior is aligned to how I want to feel.

When I have feelings come up - feel like I am an imposter, things aren't going my way, or just have some random not so helpful thought pop into my head - I get real curious about if I believe it, do I want to believe it, is it just past experience driving it...questions and curiosity are key.

It isn't about denying what I don't want but instead calming myself and making a choice of where to direct my thoughts.

Neville said assume the state of the wish fulfilled. Science says the brain builds reality from assumptions, filters experience through primed attention, and rewires itself around repeated mental states.