New York City

New York City is one of the book’s most important concrete settings for illustrating the law of attraction. Rather than appearing only as a named metropolis, it becomes a testing ground where private thoughts are said to acquire public, material consequences: an imagined feather is found at the entrance to a high-rise, a desired meeting occurs through a misdelivered letter, and a talk at Hunter College unexpectedly connects a speaker with a writer for the National Enquirer.

Definition and Setting

New York City is presented as part of a worldwide field governed by one supposedly universal power. The book places it alongside India, Australia, New Zealand, Stockholm, London, Toronto, and Montreal, insisting that people in all these places work with the same natural laws. The comparison gives New York City a double identity: it is a specific urban location, recognizable through streets, buildings, addresses, and institutions, but it is also one node in a universal system that the book calls the law of attraction. The precision associated with the universe’s laws is compared with the ability to build spaceships, send people to the moon, and time a landing to a fraction of a second; within that framework, New York City becomes an ordinary human-scale arena for the same claimed order.

The Feather at the High-Rise Entrance

One of the book’s clearest New York City demonstrations begins with a young man who has watched The Secret and decides to test its teaching with something small. He forms a mental image of a feather and makes the image distinctive by giving the feather particular markings. The markings matter because they are meant to distinguish an intentional result from an ordinary coincidence.

Two days later, as he is about to enter a high-rise building on a street in New York City, he happens to look down. At his feet lies a feather, not merely a feather of the general kind he imagined but the exact feather, including its unique markings. The setting turns a private act of visualization into a visible encounter with an object in public space. His discovery is described as removing doubt: he concludes that the law of attraction has operated through his mind and recognizes, in the book’s terms, an ability to attract something to himself. The small scale of the event is essential to its narrative function. Because the object is modest but precisely specified, New York City supplies a manageable first proof before he moves on to creating larger things.

Addresses, Mail, and an Unexpected Meeting

New York City also provides the setting for Jeannie’s story about meeting Bob Proctor. Jeannie watches a DVD of The Secret at least once a day because she wants to absorb its message completely, and she is especially impressed by Bob Proctor. Her wish is simply that it would be wonderful to meet him.

The meeting is arranged through an apparently accidental delivery. One morning, a mail carrier brings Bob Proctor’s mail to Jeannie’s address. Jeannie does not know that Bob Proctor lives only four blocks away, and the coincidence is intensified by the fact that her house number is the same as his. She takes the mail to the correct address, where the door opens and Bob Proctor is standing before her. The urban details transform the encounter from a vague inspirational anecdote into a chain of linked circumstances: two nearby homes, identical numbers, a mistaken delivery, and a rare moment when a globally traveling teacher happens to be at home. The book interprets these connected circumstances as the law of attraction moving people, events, and conditions into place.

Hunter College and the Expansion of Possibility

A third New York City episode occurs at Hunter College, where a talk before six hundred teachers becomes the turning point in a financial and publishing ambition. The speaker has been thinking about a hundred-thousand-dollar idea based on selling four hundred thousand copies of a book at a quarter each. He does not initially know how those sales could be generated, but an inspired thought directs his attention to the National Enquirer, which suddenly stands out to him at a supermarket after having previously been mere background.

About six weeks later, he gives the talk at Hunter College. Afterward, a woman approaches him, praises the talk, and offers her card because she wants to interview him. She is a freelance writer who sells stories to the National Enquirer. The event therefore links a New York City educational institution to the publication opportunity he had begun imagining. The resulting article appears, and the book’s sales begin to rise. The financial result falls just short of the original figure: the speaker and his wife make $92,327 rather than $100,000. Yet the shortfall is not treated as failure. They regard the result as evidence that the process works, and his wife immediately asks whether the same method could work for a million dollars. The subsequent million-dollar royalty check, marked by the publisher with a smiley face because it was the first million-dollar check he had written, extends the New York City encounter into a larger narrative of expectation, action, and reward.

Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, New York City is less a backdrop than a machine for converting inward attention into outward signs. The high-rise entrance makes an imagined feather visible; the city’s close-set addresses allow a mistaken letter to produce a meeting with Bob Proctor; Hunter College creates the social contact that leads to national publicity. Each scene begins with an intention or desire and ends with an unexpected material confirmation, giving the location a recurring structural role in the book’s argument.

The city also supplies a productive contrast between scale and intimacy. New York City is associated with large buildings, a major college audience, and a national publication, yet the decisive moments are small: looking down, carrying mail to a nearby house, accepting a business card after a lecture. The book’s rhetoric depends on that compression. Universal claims are made credible, within its own narrative design, by being attached to precise urban details and recognizable actions. New York City thus becomes a place where the extraordinary is said to emerge through the routine, and where coincidence is repeatedly recast as the visible operation of the law of attraction.