Thought Vibration

People in Atkinson's circle liked to say “Thoughts are Things,” and he complained that most of them said it the way you repeat a proverb: without hearing it.

He meant it literally. When you think, he writes, you send out vibrations of a fine ethereal substance, as real as light or heat, only at a far higher rate. You cannot see, hear, weigh or taste them, and he does not think that settles anything.

His favorite comparison is the magnet. A strong one will draw a hundred pounds of steel to itself, and not one of your five senses registers the force doing it. For Atkinson, invisible has never meant absent.

Throw a stone into a pond and the ripples spread across the surface. Atkinson starts there, then corrects the picture: thought-waves do not travel along a flat plane but in all directions from a center, the way rays leave the sun.

What they travel through is his second image. Just as we live inside a sea of air, he says, we live inside a great sea of Mind, and every thought moves out through it. The waves weaken as they go, worn down by friction against the Mind around them, so distance matters.

Hold on to that ocean. The rest of the book assumes you are swimming in it, and so is everyone around you, all the time.

Here the wave image turns into something stranger. Ripples on water just spread and fade. Thought-waves, Atkinson says, behave more like sound: they reproduce themselves in whatever is tuned to them.

His example is a violin note that sets a thin glass vibrating until it sings. Nobody struck the glass. It simply shares the note. In the same way, a strong thought will “tend to awaken similar vibrations in minds attuned to receive it.”

That is where he places many of the stray thoughts that drift into your head from nowhere in particular. Some are answering vibrations, echoes of a strong thought someone else sent out. But the condition matters as much as the echo: a mind not attuned to the note barely hears it.

In the violin-and-glass image, what decides whether someone else's strong thought affects you?

• Whether you consciously agree with what it says
• Whether your mind is already attuned to that note✓Correct answer
• Whether the sender concentrated hard enough on it
• Whether the sender aimed the thought directly at you

The glass sings because it shares the note, not because the violinist aimed at it or played harder. Atkinson says a thought out of harmony with your mental attitude awakens no response in you, however strongly it was sent.

People now call this the radio metaphor, which is close but not quite. In 1906 nobody had a radio in the parlor. Atkinson's machine is the Marconi wireless telegraph, the new invention that sent telegrams through the air without any cable.

What struck him about it was not the sending. It was that a receiving instrument picks up only the transmitter attuned to the same key, while other telegrams pass through the air nearby and leave it untouched.

He applies the rule to the mind without softening it: “We receive only that which corresponds to our mental attunement.” The air around you is full of traffic. Your set takes in one kind.

This is where most first readers take a wrong turn. They hear “thought vibration” and picture a transmitter: think harder, send farther, and the world will pick up your signal.

Atkinson does say strong thoughts travel. But look at where he puts the weight. Your general mental attitude decides the character of the thoughts you receive from others, as well as the ones you send. A person steady in confidence and determination is unlikely to be touched by the discouragement drifting from other minds; the same drift, reaching someone already low, deepens the low.

So the first question the book asks is not how powerful your signal is. It is what you are tuned to, and what you have been picking up all along.