The Metaphysical Is Just Physics We Haven't Measured Yet

by John Moyer
Co-founder of Daily Consciousness, Professional Hypnotists and YouTube Creator.

My ex-father-in-law was a man I dearly loved. Still do. Sadly he passed about a few years ago. Even after the divorce, I held him and my former mother-in-law in high regard. Good people. Salt of the earth Mormons.

One afternoon, when I was still married to my ex-wife, I was browsing my in-laws bookshelf - and I pulled out this old book from the 1960s. It was about the law of attraction before "law of attraction" became a thing in the early 2000s. BeforeThe Secret made vision boards a suburban phenomenon.

My ex-father-in-law spotted the book in my hands and immediately turned to my ex-mother-in-law and asked, "Why do you have that sh*t in the house?"

While he was a salt of the earth Mormon, he wasn't opposed to using salty language.

I was curious about his response. I said, "So you going to the (Mormon) Temple, putting on all the ceremonial clothing and gathering in a prayer circle, praying to God, petitioning Him for blessings - that makes perfect sense? But somebody else, focusing their thoughts and emotions to attract something into their life, that's sh*t?"

He looked at me for a moment. He had an expression I had seen many times before when he was called out on the irony of his particular views. But he would always double down.

Then he said, "Yes."

And he told my ex-mother-in-law to throw the book away.

And that's the thing - we draw lines between "spiritual" and "woo-woo" based entirely on what makes sense within our framework. If your team calls it prayer, it's divine. If someone else calls it manifestation, it's ridiculous. But what if they're both describing the same thing? What if prayer, law of attraction, intention, and quantum mechanics are all just different languages for the same underlying physics?

Mystics Knew This Before We Had Equations

Long before quantum physics became a thing, mystics across every tradition were working with the same principles. They just didn't have particle accelerators or peer-reviewed journals. They had direct experience. And apparently, a lot of free time to sit around and figure this sh*t out.

Buddhists practiced visualization meditation - holding detailed mental images of deities, mandalas, entire worlds in their minds. They weren't just daydreaming about winning the lottery or getting a better chariot. They understood that focused attention shapes reality. That what you hold in your mind influences what manifests in your experience. They figured this out without fMRI machines. Just a cushion and commitment.

Christian mystics prayed ceaselessly. "Pray without ceasing," Paul wrote. Not because God had a short attention span and kept forgetting your requests (though given the state of the world, you could make that argument). They prayed constantly because sustained focus on the divine shifted their consciousness, their energy, their reality. They were tuning their frequency. They just called it communion with God instead of vibrational alignment.

Kabbalists used sacred geometry and Hebrew letters as focusing devices. Each letter wasn't just a symbol - it was a vibration, a doorway, a way of collapsing infinite possibility into specific manifestation. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what quantum mechanics describes. They just had way cooler visual aids.

Shamans across indigenous cultures performed rituals to call forth healing, rain, abundance. They weren't begging external forces like some cosmic customer service line. They were aligning their intention with natural patterns, becoming conduits for what already wanted to emerge.

Different languages. Different frameworks. Different outfits, honestly - some way more elaborate than others.

But they all knew the same thing: consciousness and reality aren't separate. They're entangled.

The Science Is Starting to Catch Up

Here's where it gets interesting. Modern physics is basically confirming what mystics have been saying for millennia. We just had to invent the tools to measure it. And then argue about the measurements for another few decades because scientists hate admitting consciousness might actually matter.

The Observer Effect

In quantum mechanics, the act of observation changes what's being observed. This isn't philosophy. This isn't some stoner thought experiment. It's measurable. The famous double-slit experiment showed that particles behave differently when they're being watched versus when they're not.

Let that sink in. Particles - the building blocks of physical reality - change their behavior based on whether someone's paying attention.

Consciousness isn't separate from the experiment. It's part of the experiment.

Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum theory, said it plainly: "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Your attention isn't passive. It's participatory. You're not just witnessing reality. You're co-creating it. Whether you know it or not.

Quantum Entanglement

Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance," and he wasn't wrong to be unsettled. When two particles become entangled, they remain connected regardless of the distance between them. You could separate them by the width of the universe and they'd still respond to each other instantaneously.

Not at the speed of light. Instantaneously. As in, faster than light. As in, to hell with the speed limit.

What does this mean for consciousness? If particles can be entangled, if information can transfer outside the constraints of space and time, then maybe intention, prayer, and focused thought aren't just happening inside your skull. Maybe they're interacting with a field we're only beginning to understand. A field that doesn't care about distance. Or time. Or your skepticism.

The Placebo Effect Is Real

We've known about the placebo effect for decades, but we've treated it like a nuisance - something to control for in drug trials. An inconvenient variable. But here's what's wild: your belief doesn't just change how you feel. It changes your actual biology.

A Harvard study took hotel maids and divided them into two groups. Half were told that their daily work - cleaning rooms, making beds, vacuuming - counted as excellent exercise and met the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. The other half were told nothing. Nobody changed their routine. They all kept doing the exact same work.

Four weeks later, the group that was told their work was exercise had lost weight, lowered their blood pressure, and decreased their body fat percentage. The other maids, doing the identical work, had zero physiological changes.

Same work. Same calories burned. Different belief. Different biology.

Let me say that again: just being told their work counted as exercise changed their bodies. No gym membership. No new routine. Just a reframe. That's not woo-woo. That's documented, repeatable, peer-reviewed science that makes materialists very uncomfortable.

Heart Coherence and the Electromagnetic Field

The HeartMath Institute has spent decades researching the heart's electromagnetic field, which extends several feet beyond your body. When you're in a coherent emotional state - gratitude, love, appreciation - your heart rhythm becomes ordered and smooth. That coherence is measurable. And here's the kicker: it affects the people around you.

In one study, when participants generated feelings of appreciation, the heart rhythms of nearby individuals began to synchronize. Even when they weren't consciously aware of each other. Your emotional state isn't just internal. It's broadcasting. You're a walking radio tower and everyone around you is picking up your signal whether they realize it or not.

Intention Studies

Dr. Masaru Emoto's water crystal experiments were controversial, sure. But they sparked something. Subsequent studies on the effects of intention on physical systems have shown measurable results. Research from Princeton's PEAR lab demonstrated that human intention could influence random number generators at statistically significant levels across millions of trials.

Millions. Not dozens. Not hundreds. Millions.

Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences conducted double-blind studies showing that focused intention could affect the behavior of quantum systems. Not every time. Not perfectly. But consistently enough that dismissing it as coincidence requires more faith than accepting it as real.

So What Do You Actually Do With This?

Understanding the mechanism doesn't matter if you're not working with it. Here's how to engage with these principles - whether you call it prayer, manifestation, or applied quantum mechanics. I don't care what framework you use. Just use one.

1. Choose Your Focus Deliberately

Your attention isn't neutral. It never has been. Where you place it, what you hold in your awareness, what you repeatedly think about - that's not passive observation. That's creation in progress. You're voting with your focus.

If you're constantly replaying past trauma or rehearsing future disasters, you're not just remembering or preparing. You're reinforcing those patterns. You're collapsing possibility into the familiar. You're essentially telling the universe, "More of this, please."

Choose differently.

Not through forced positive thinking or toxic optimism - that sh*t doesn't work because your subconscious knows you're lying. But through deliberate, consistent focus on what you prefer to experience. Your subconscious doesn't care if it's "realistic." It responds to repetition and emotion. Give it a better script.

2. Get Coherent

Coherence isn't just a nice feeling. It's a measurable state where your heart, brain, and nervous system synchronize. And it's trainable. You don't deserve years of meditation practice or a monastery on a mountaintop.

Practices like heart-focused breathing - where you breathe as if the breath is moving through your heart while feeling gratitude or appreciation - create coherence fast. Five minutes of this changes your physiology. Your heart rate variability improves. Your cortisol drops. Your system recalibrates.

Do it daily and you're literally rewiring your baseline state. This isn't metaphor. This is physiology.

When you're coherent, you're not just calmer. You're broadcasting a different signal. And reality - which is apparently listening - responds to signals.

3. Use Ritual Without Superstition

Mystics used ritual because it works. Not because candles and crystals have inherent magic (though if that helps you, great), but because ritual focuses intention. It creates a container. It signals to your subconscious: this matters. Pay attention.

You don't deserve to believe in external forces. You deserve to recognize that your mind responds to symbolism, repetition, and ceremony. So use it.

Light a candle when you sit down to visualize your desired outcome. Not because the candle does anything, but because you're training your brain to associate that action with focused intention. You're creating a neural pathway. A pattern. A signal that says "we're doing the work now."

4. Expect Results, Release Attachment

This is the paradox that trips people up every single time. You deserve to have clear intention - know what you prefer to experience. But you can't strangle the outcome into existence. You can't white-knuckle manifestation. That's not how fields work.

Quantum systems respond to observation, but they collapse into specific states probabilistically. You're influencing the odds, not controlling the mechanism. You're shifting the field, not forcing a specific result.

Hold your intention. Take aligned action. Then let go of how and when it shows up.

This isn't passivity. This isn't "letting the universe handle it" while you sit on your couch eating Cheetos. It's recognizing that you're working with a field of infinite possibility, not a vending machine. You set the frequency. You broadcast the signal. Then you trust the field to deliver in whatever form serves you best.

It's All Physics - We Just Haven't Measured All of It Yet

Here's what I've come to understand: the metaphysical isn't separate from the physical. It's just physics we haven't fully quantified yet.

Prayer works. So does manifestation. So does focused intention. Not because they're different things, but because they're all pointing at the same underlying reality: consciousness and matter aren't separate categories. They're entangled aspects of the same field.

My ex-father-in-law wasn't wrong to pray. His prayers were real. They had measurable effects on his consciousness, his physiology, his reality. But he also wasn't right to dismiss manifestation as nonsense. It's the same mechanism, just filtered through a different belief system.

The mystics knew this intuitively. Quantum physicists are proving it mathematically. And you're experiencing it every day, whether you're aware of it or not.

Your thoughts aren't just thoughts. Your attention isn't passive. Your emotional state isn't contained inside your body. You're a walking, breathing, broadcasting field of consciousness interacting with a responsive universe.

Call it God. Call it quantum mechanics. Call it the law of attraction. Call it whatever framework makes sense to you.

But it's not sh*t.

Because the evidence - both ancient and modern - says you're more powerful than you've been taught to believe. You're not separate from reality, hoping to influence it from the outside.

You're part of the equation. And the equation is listening.

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