Much of the New Age or New Thought movement begins with the premise that thought can be a cause. That is, thought can interact with physical entities. This is far from generally accepted science. In contemporary philosophy, medicine and science it is not accepted that thoughts can effect your body, your mind, or anything else.

This is probably one of the biggest gulfs between lay people and professional academics in many fields. There are some philosophers whose ideas remain unproven, who argue that the seeds of conscious must be present in matter. They argue that if this were not the case then consciousness could not arise naturally. Generally speaking though mind/matter interaction is avoided.

This results is that much of contemporary philosophy is far removed from everyday experience and the sciences. Thus, it is difficult to use the work of contemporary philosophy to either support or negate a view about experience. Additionally, much of contemporary science is very technical in nature and also removed from everyday experience. Even the scale at which biological process occur is difficult to fathom.

It is in this environment that some rush to fill the gap with resurrected New Age and New Thought philosophies that are are neither grounded in either contemporary philosophy or science. Intuitively, we want to believe that if we think positively, give to others, make and work toward goals that we can be at cause. However, the evidence of that is small and not generally accepted.

The current accepted view is that thought cannot and does not effect matter. However, that does not seem to be the case. So either our consciousness deceives us, as many philosophers contend, or we are still missing a great deal of knowledge about reality.

While my hunch is that our thoughts can and do effect our choices and our actions effect our brains, possibly through epigenetics, there is little well documented and researched material.

So for the last few months I have been reading and researching. In the months ahead I hope to bring more substantive information.