All this secrecy is necessary, because there is great power in “letting go” of our attention on our intention - in allowing our most passionate desires to fly free from any conscious or unconscious constraints that might hem them in. Even those who live secular lives acknowledge the special significance of making a silent birthday wish, since a wish revealed might not come true. The most important component in wishes is simply letting them go.

If you’ve seen the film, “Mary Poppins”, you’ll recall the touching scene in which two young children, Jane and Michael Banks, sang their list of desired qualities for their new nanny. They presented their hand-written list to their parents, whereupon their father angrily ripped up their list and tossed it into the fireplace. What none of the family expected was that the children’s list of torn and discarded wishes would later mysteriously rise up from the fireplace ashes and fly off into the sky to be found by Mary Poppins! When Mary found the list and decided to float down in response to the children’s advertisement for a new nanny, the family was completely astonished. It seemed counter-intuitive to them that a discarded list of heartfelt wishes could result in the materialization of the children’s ideal nanny on their doorstep... yet there she was, big as life and twice as real!

It might reassure and intrigue you to know that our intuitive understanding about the importance of releasing wishes can be seen in scientifically controlled experiments. Our observation of the universe has an immediate and observable impact... there is no physicist in the world who can observe a quantum physics experiment without that observation affecting the outcome of the experiment. The smallest observable particles behave as both particles and waves, and seem to know where and how we are looking for them to appear. We can’t see what these tiny particles are doing when they move like waves before appearing as particles, in much the same way that we can’t see our wishes and prayers when we release them. This “secrecy” is necessary so they can have the degrees of freedom required to exist unobserved as pure energy waves before our observation collapses the wave functions and one possibility materializes.

There’s a wonderful experiment you can do to prove to yourself how helpful it is for you to release your wishes. Write down your wishes in a journal every day, without peeking at previous days. A few weeks later, go back to read your journal where you started writing down your wishes, and track which wishes have come true. Make a note as you read your wishes which ones you truly managed to forget about, and which ones you kept thinking about. You’ll easily be able to determine what kind of wishing is most effective for you!

Cynthia Sue Larson holds a bachelor's degree in physics from UC Berkeley (1982), earned in conjunction with her pursuit of a more complete understanding of reality. Shortly after receiving her physics degree and working with scientists at the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, she earned an MBA degree from San Francisco State University with the intention that she would be able to help scientists better manage their projects. Following completion of her MBA degree in 1984, she worked as a project manager at Citibank for seven years at the California Data Center.

Cynthia currently writes articles for Magical Blend and Parabola magazines about reality shifts - discussing everything from the physics of prayer to the connection between language and our culture's view of reality. She has taught workshops and classes to dozens of people, and communicated with thousands more on the internet through discussion forums and chats. She has been interviewed by Elliot Stein for his Stein Online talk show.