History
Where these ideas came from: the New Thought movement and the people who shaped it.
None of this started with social media. The core claim behind manifestation, that belief and expectation shape experience, has a real, traceable history, mostly running through a 19th-century American movement called New Thought, and through individual writers who each put their own spin on the idea over the following century.
Understanding where an idea came from doesn't prove or disprove it, but it does make it easier to tell the difference between a specific person's teaching and a much older, broader tradition.
History articles
History
History of Manifestation
The roughly 150-year arc from Phineas Quimby's mental healing experiments through the New Thought movement to today's Law of Attraction wave.
August 9, 2026 · 8 min read
History
The New Thought Movement
What New Thought actually teaches, the churches and publications it produced, and the long list of writers, from Wattles to Goddard, associated with it.
August 9, 2026 · 7 min read
The people
Teachers who shaped these ideas
Teacher
Joseph Murphy
1898–1981
An Irish-American New Thought minister whose 1963 book The Power of Your Subconscious Mind sold millions of copies on a simple premise: the subconscious accepts whatever it's repeatedly told, true or not, and acts on it.
Teacher
Neville Goddard
1905–1972
A Barbadian-American writer and lecturer whose teaching on imagination and assumption underlies most of today's visualization-based manifestation practice.
Teacher
Rhonda Byrne
b. 1951
An Australian television producer whose 2006 film and book The Secret popularized the modern Law of Attraction more widely than any single work before it, largely by synthesizing much older New Thought ideas.
Teacher
Wayne Dyer
1940–2015
An American psychologist and counselor educator turned bestselling author, whose books moved over four decades from practical psychology toward intention, spirituality and higher consciousness.