Creative Process

Creative Process is the central three-step rule in The Secret for creating a desired result: ask, believe, and receive. Drawn from the New Testament in the Bible, it presents desire not as a vague hope but as a disciplined sequence in which clarity begins the request, faith establishes its presumed reality, and feeling places the person in what the book calls the frequency of receiving.

Definition and Operating Principle

Creative Process is introduced as an easy guideline for creating what a person wants in three simple steps. Its underlying image is the story of Aladdin and the Genie: the law of attraction functions as a Genie that answers every command, while the person occupies the position of the Master of the Universe. The Genie does not distinguish between a deliberate wish and an accidental one. It treats what is thought about, spoken about, and acted upon as wanted, then begins to leverage the Universe through people, circumstances, and events to fulfill it.

This image makes the rule both empowering and demanding. Desire is not limited to formally stated requests; attention, language, and conduct all become instructions. The law of attraction is described as always present and always listening, so the Creative Process operates continuously even when a person is not consciously using it. The framework therefore shifts responsibility from an external power that selects outcomes to the individual whose repeated mental and emotional patterns are understood as commands.

Step One: Ask

The first step is to ask by making a command to the Universe and letting it know what is wanted. The Universe is said to respond to thoughts, but asking requires more than an indistinct wish. The person must become clear about the desired outcome. Bob Proctor advises sitting down and writing the desire on a piece of paper in the present tense, turning an internal preference into a definite formulation.

The book compares this act with placing an order. A person orders something only once; repeatedly placing the same order because of fear that it was not received would signal doubt rather than improve delivery. The same logic governs the Creative Process. Once the mind has become clear, the request has been made. Asking is therefore presented as an act of clarification, not as repeated pleading or an attempt to force the Universe through anxiety.

Step Two: Believe

The second step is to believe that the desired result is already possessed. Lisa Nichols describes this as unwavering faith and as believing in the unseen. The required conviction is not merely that the result might arrive later; the person must know that it is theirs at the moment of asking and must behave inwardly as someone whose order has been accepted.

The catalogue-order comparison continues into this stage. After placing an order, a person relaxes, expects delivery, and gets on with life. In the same way, belief requires release from doubt. When doubt appears, the book instructs the reader to recognize the feeling and replace it with unwavering faith, expressed in the thought, “I know that it’s on its way.” Belief thus changes the emotional posture surrounding desire from surveillance and hesitation to expectation.

The rule also defines belief through behavior, speech, and thought. The later summary explains that acting, speaking, and thinking as though the request has already been received emits the frequency of having received it. According to the book’s model, the law of attraction then moves people, events, and circumstances into position so that the desired result can be received. Belief is consequently treated as an active state rather than a private opinion: it organizes the entire pattern by which the person relates to the anticipated outcome.

Step Three: Receive

The third and final step is to receive. This does not mean waiting passively for an external delivery; it means beginning to feel wonderful about the result and feeling now what will be felt once it arrives. The person is asked to inhabit the emotional condition associated with fulfillment before the visible manifestation occurs.

Marci Shimoff connects this emotional state to the book’s idea of frequency. Feeling good is said to place a person in the frequency of what is wanted. Michael Bernard Beckwith reinforces the point by describing the Universe as a feeling Universe: intellectual belief without a corresponding underlying feeling does not provide enough power to manifest the desired result. In this account, emotion is not an aftereffect of success but a necessary component of the mechanism that supposedly produces it.

The summary of the rule condenses receiving into a causal formula: feeling good now places a person on the frequency of what is wanted. The suggested affirmation is, “I am receiving now. I am receiving all the good in my life, now. I am receiving [fill in your desire] now.” Its purpose is not simply verbal repetition. The instruction is to say it and feel it as though the desire has already been received, joining language to the emotional condition the process requires.

A friend named Marcy is offered as an example of this practice. She is described as one of the greatest manifestors the speaker has seen because she feels what it would feel like to have what she asks for. She does not become caught up in how, when, or where the result will appear; instead, she feels it into existence, and the book says that it then manifests. The example gives the third step its strongest emphasis: receiving begins when attention leaves the mechanics of delivery and settles into the felt experience of possession.

Applications and Thematic Significance

The Creative Process gives The Secret a compact grammar for its broader teaching. Asking supplies direction, believing supplies certainty, and receiving supplies the emotional frequency through which the result is presumed to arrive. Each step corrects a different obstacle: confusion is answered by clarity, doubt by faith, and emotional distance by the felt experience of fulfillment.

The framework also explains why the book treats attention as consequential. Because the law of attraction is said to interpret thoughts, words, and actions as wishes, a person can unintentionally reinforce an unwanted condition by continually focusing on it. The practical guidance is therefore to state the positive condition desired rather than organize attention around its absence. The book gives weight loss as an example: instead of focusing on “losing weight,” the reader is told to focus on a perfect weight and feel the feelings associated with it, thereby summoning that condition.

At its deepest level, the rule turns a metaphysical claim into a daily discipline of selection. The person is asked to choose the object of attention, maintain the conviction that it has been received, and cultivate the happiness associated with its arrival. Its decisive promise is that inner alignment precedes outer fulfillment: once the request is clear, faith is unwavering, and the feeling of receiving is present, the law of attraction is said to arrange the intervening people, circumstances, and events.