It Is No Secret:
What You Notice Is Not What You Summon
Part 2
by Don Elium MFT
Few ideas have spread faster—or sunk in deeper—than the belief that what you focus on creates reality. The self-help market has been built on this promise: think hard enough, feel deeply enough, and you’ll bring it into being. Love. Money. Healing. It’s not just wishful thinking—it’s the “law of attraction.” It sounds like physics. It feels like truth.
But looking at it from a steadier place, something else comes into view.
Maybe it’s not power you’re being offered, but pressure. Perhaps it’s not freedom but a subtle kind of blame. For people living with chronic pain, irreversible loss, or situations that the culture doesn’t even have a language for—this framing can complicate everything. It doesn't just miss the mark. It can quietly cut.
What if your thoughts don’t control the universe? What if they don’t summon events from the void?
What if what they really do is shape what you notice?
That’s not magic. That’s neurobiology.
When you focus on something—say, red cars—you begin to see them everywhere. Not because you conjured them but because your brain has flagged them as relevant. It’s called the reticular activating system—a built-in attentional filter. It helps determine what stands out and what fades into the background.
There’s also something called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or frequency illusion. Once something is named in your awareness, it seems to multiply. Not because it’s suddenly everywhere but because you are now tuned in. That difference—between noticing and creating—is everything.
Because if you believe your thoughts create reality, then every diagnosis, heartbreak, or failure starts to look like your fault. You didn’t stay “high vibe.” You let fear slip in. Your suffering becomes evidence that you failed to do it right.
That’s the quiet sadness at the core of magical thinking. It tells you healing is possible—but only if you think the right thoughts, feel the right feelings, or vibrate at the right frequency. If things fall apart, well, maybe you blocked your own blessings.
But that’s not how the brain works.
And it’s not how life works.
What you focus on doesn’t shape what exists. It shapes what appears to you.
Focus doesn’t control outcomes. It controls awareness.
It shifts the lens, not the landscape.
And still—something mysterious happens.
There are moments when your internal world seems to meet the outer one in perfect timing.
You think of someone and the phone rings.
A word repeats in your head, then shows up in a song, a headline, a stranger’s mouth.
These moments are real. But they’re not proof of a vending machine universe.
They’re proof that you’re alive and connected.
They aren’t evidence of summoning.
They’re resonance.
These are moments when attention and timing harmonize—not caused. Aligned.
They feel electric because they are—lighting up the circuits of memory and meaning in your nervous system.
Not because you made them happen. But because you were present enough to notice when they did.