Pendulums: How Group Beliefs Capture Your Attention and Energy

A pendulum, in Vadim Zeland’s Reality Transurfing books, is the structure that forms when many people think and act alike. He argues that a company, a political party, a fashion or an online crowd takes on a life of its own, feeds on the attention and emotion of the people involved, and pulls them toward aims that serve it rather than them. The name comes from his image of a swing: the more people push it, the harder it swings, and when they stop, it stops.

You don’t need to believe in energy beings to find the idea useful. Most people can name a group that changed what they wanted, a feud they got pulled into, or a news cycle that ate an evening. This page covers what Zeland claims, how the idea connects to the rest of his system, what research supports, and where the source material needs handling with care.

What is a pendulum in Reality Transurfing?

Zeland starts with a claim about thought. When people share the same thoughts, he says, their combined “thought energy” builds a structure that outlives any one of them and starts to set its own rules. Its followers then serve it. His examples run from states, churches and companies to clubs, fashions and fan movements, and reach as far as schools of fish, flocks of birds and ant colonies.

He is candid about the limits of his own model. He says he can’t tell whether a pendulum counts as alive or is a lifeless form of energy, and that the answer doesn’t change what you do about it. In a later volume he compares a pendulum’s “mind” to an algorithm with no conscious intention of its own. In his afterword he goes further and calls the whole system a model, a scaffold for the mind that another model could replace.

The older word for something similar is egregore, an occult term for the collective thought-form of a group. Zeland mentions it and argues that his pendulum covers more, because any shared way of thinking qualifies, not only groups built around ritual.

The concept sits at the centre of his larger system, which the Reality Transurfing explained page covers in full. It connects most closely to importance, his name for the extra weight you load onto an outcome, because in his account pendulums pull you in through whatever you’ve made too important.

Is the idea of a pendulum new?

The name is Zeland’s. The observation behind it is old, and several thinkers reached versions of it without any talk of energy.

Thinker	Idea	How it compares
Occult tradition	The egregore, a thought-form a group creates and then serves	Closest in spirit; Zeland cites it and widens it
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (1895)	A crowd develops a mind of its own that lowers individual judgement	Matches his claim that people in crowds act on autopilot
Émile Durkheim (1912)	Collective representations: shared ideas that exist outside any one person and shape each member	A sociological version of a structure that outlives its founders
Irving Janis (1972)	Groupthink: cohesive groups suppress doubt to protect agreement	Matches his second law, a structure protecting its own stability
Richard Dawkins (1976)	Memes: ideas that spread by copying, whether or not they help their carriers	Close to his claim that a pendulum serves itself rather than its followers

What Zeland adds is a practical angle. The others describe crowds and ideas from outside. He asks the individual reader a question in the moment: is this reaction mine, or am I being swung?

How do you recognise a pendulum?

Zeland describes pendulums as destructive by default, and gives them five marks:

• It feeds on the energy of its followers.
• It tries to recruit as many followers as it can.
• It sets its followers against everyone else, “us” against “them”.
• It turns on anyone who refuses to join.
• It hides its own interests behind lofty aims.

He includes charities in the list, which is meant to provoke. His point is that a good cause and a structure that uses the people serving it can exist at the same time, and that the useful question is whether you serve the cause or a self-image the group has handed you. He applies the same test to his own system and warns that it would become a pendulum too if people turned it into a movement.

He also says pendulums compete with each other for followers, and reads wars, elections, advertising and ideological campaigns as versions of that one struggle. Leaders rise, in his telling, because they fit the structure well, not mainly because of personal merit.

How do pendulums hook people?

Zeland calls the hooks strings. Fear comes first, then anxiety, guilt and a sense of duty, then personal complexes: feeling inferior, needing to be right, wanting to fight. Beneath those sit justice, pride, love, hate and curiosity. A pendulum pulls on whichever string you offer it.

The most useful observation in the chapter is that opposition feeds a pendulum as much as loyalty does. The person who spends every evening furious at a politician is pushing the same swing as the politician’s fans. On his account, news programmes serve bigger pendulums and lean on bad news because it holds attention best. Habit keeps you attached: you react to the same provocation the same way without ever deciding to.

This idea holds up well against what researchers have since measured about outrage online, covered in the research section below. It also explains why the site treats energy vampires, Zeland’s term for people who drain you through guilt or provocation, as a relative of the pendulum rather than a separate phenomenon.

What are the laws of the pendulum?

In a later volume Zeland sets out two laws and a rule.

The first law says a pendulum inflames any conflict it can feed on. Once two sides collide, events move toward escalation, and any truce tends to be temporary. He uses a small everyday example: the pedestrian ahead who keeps stepping into your path as you try to pass. And he uses a large one: wars that flare again after every ceasefire.

The second law says a pendulum works to keep its structure stable. Inside a structure, he argues, people act on autopilot to a large degree and absorb its standards as their own. His examples are a summer camp where teenagers copy the loudest kids to borrow their confidence, and an office where people rise by fitting the system rather than by doing the best work. He says the structure teaches people what to want.

The pendulum rule is his name for the unwritten law behind all of it: “do as I do”. People make the rule, and the pendulum grows out of it. Stadium waves and flash mobs are harmless versions. Media standards of success, beauty and intimacy are harmful ones, because people measure themselves against a picture few of them fit. His alternative is the rule he builds his whole system around: be yourself, and let other people be themselves. He adds a warning most summaries skip. Once you see the rule, looking down on the people still following it creates a new comparison, and you become the outcast. The pendulum rule has its own page.

Why do you get what you don’t want?

This is Zeland’s strongest claim and the one that needs the most care. He says that hating or fearing something intensely ties your attention to it and moves you toward a version of life where it’s abundant. Love and hate both bind you to the object. His radio image: if you don’t like the programme, change the station rather than phoning in to complain.

He separates ignoring from avoiding. Avoiding something, he says, still admits it into your life and then pushes against it. Ignoring lets it pass. Building armour doesn’t help either, because defending yourself is still a way of engaging. In a later volume he applies the same logic to Murphy’s law and to irritating neighbours: the more you resent them, the more they seem to bother you, while they barely think about you at all.

The attention half of this stands up. The claim that feelings pull events toward you does not, and the care section below explains why the site won’t repeat it as fact. The law of bad luck page covers the neighbours and Murphy’s law in more detail.

How does Zeland say you get free of a pendulum?

He describes two routes and a stance.

Defeating a pendulum means declining the conflict. You accept that it exists, the way you might walk past paintings in a gallery you don’t like, and you don’t fight it. He describes letting a demanding person’s first surge run out before steering the detail, which he compares to redirecting force in aikido.

Stopping a pendulum means breaking its script: responding with something the scenario doesn’t expect, often humour or play, so the swing has nothing to push against.

The stance is awareness. Zeland describes ordinary life as something close to a waking dream, in which most people react on autopilot, and he says pendulums have power only over that sleeping part. His remedy is to stay in the scene but watch it, like an actor who is also sitting in the audience. He also warns against running away. Cutting yourself off from every group doesn’t make you free, and escaping pendulums entirely is neither possible nor desirable. What he recommends is leaving a norm you don’t choose without a fight, and choosing the norms you keep.

This page describes those ideas. It doesn’t teach them. Putting them into practice means working with the specific groups, conflicts and habits in your own life, which is the work we do in coaching.

Can a pendulum work in your favour?

Zeland says yes, with conditions. After someone drops the pendulums that were draining them, he describes a flat stretch he calls the suspended state: fewer fights, but less happening. His answer is to find your own goals, which he calls finding your own pendulums, and he connects this to his idea of goals and doors.

He also argues that pendulums “light up” people who go their own way. Anyone who refuses to march in line and makes something of their own either becomes an outcast or a new model the line turns to follow. He tells the story of two famous bands whose success came in sudden waves after long quiet periods, and draws the conclusion that popularity is a collective event rather than a verdict on quality. His dates for those stories are wrong, but a well-known experiment, described below, supports the underlying point.

Several of his other concepts grow out of this one. The induced transition is his account of how a pendulum can drag a person into a downward spiral, and his treatment of health talk and advertising appears on the illness pendulums page.

What the research says

No research supports thought energy, resonance, or a structure that feeds on emotion. Zeland’s pendulum isn’t a physical thing. The behaviour he describes, however, matches some of the best-replicated findings in social psychology.

Zeland’s claim	What research shows
Groups set people against outsiders	Supported. Henri Tajfel’s minimal group studies (1970) found people favour their own group even when groups are assigned by a coin toss. Social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) grew from that work.
“Do as I do” steers behaviour	Supported. Solomon Asch’s conformity studies (1951) and Robert Cialdini, Raymond Reno and Carl Kallgren’s work on descriptive norms (1990) show people copy what they believe others do.
People follow rules they privately doubt	Supported. Deborah Prentice and Dale Miller (1993) found students overestimated their peers’ comfort with campus drinking norms, a pattern called pluralistic ignorance.
Opponents feed a pendulum as much as fans	Supported as an attention effect. William Brady and colleagues (2017, PNAS) found each moral-emotional word raised a post’s spread on social media by about 20% in their sample. Outrage from either side increases reach.
News leans on bad news to hold attention	Supported. Stuart Soroka, Patrick Fournier and Lilach Nir (2019, PNAS) found stronger physiological responses to negative news across 17 countries.
Conflicts escalate toward more conflict	Supported as a pattern. Research on conflict spirals and on hostile attribution bias (Orobio de Castro and colleagues, 2002) shows how tit-for-tat and reading bad intent into others escalate disputes without anyone planning it.
Popularity comes in collective waves	Supported. Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts (2006, Science) found that when listeners could see what others downloaded, hits became more unequal and less predictable, and quality explained only part of success.
Fish schools and ant colonies need an outside organiser	Contradicted. Iain Couzin and colleagues (2002) and Michele Ballerini and colleagues (2008) showed that simple local rules, such as tracking a few neighbours, produce coordinated movement. Ant colonies organise through pheromone trails and interaction rates with no central control.
Hating something attracts it into your life	Not supported. Daniel Wegner’s work (1994) shows that suppressing a thought makes it return more often, and rumination research links dwelling on distress to depression. That is attention, not attraction.

The honest reading: Zeland gave a vivid single name to conformity, in-group bias, outrage and escalation, and his practical advice about not feeding conflicts has real parallels in psychology, such as self-distancing research (Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk, 2017) and acceptance-based therapy. His explanation of why those patterns exist doesn’t hold.

Who should take care with this idea

Nobody attracts harm by thinking about it. Zeland suggests that dwelling on disaster news makes you likelier to become a victim, and that an aversion can bring misfortune. This site rejects that. People don’t cause accidents, crime, illness, floods or fires by their feelings about them, and anyone who has been harmed did nothing to invite it.

Ignoring is not a response to abuse. “Stop engaging and they’ll lose interest” may help with an irritating colleague. It’s the wrong advice for harassment, stalking, threats or coercive control, which need documentation, safety planning and professional or legal help. The same applies to his advice about not fighting a situation: some situations need fighting.

Guilt is not always a string. Zeland’s point about manipulators working on guilt is useful. Guilt after you’ve harmed someone calls for repair, and guilt or shame that won’t lift is worth taking to a licensed professional.

Groups aren’t the enemy. A 2010 meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues linked strong social ties to a 50% higher likelihood of survival over the study periods, and charities, faith communities and teams do real good. His argument concerns how a structure uses you, not whether you should belong to anything.

Some of the source material is excluded here. His chapters include violent confrontation stories, a corporate patent conspiracy, and a passage labelling a generation of children with attention difficulties as spiritually special. None of it appears on this site as advice or fact. Parents with concerns about attention should talk to a paediatrician or licensed child psychologist.

So what is the idea worth?

Zeland took something everyone has felt, the pull of a crowd, and gave it a name you can use in the moment. “Is this mine, or is this a pendulum?” is a better question than most self-help offers, and research on norms, outrage and escalation backs the pattern even where his energy language fails.

Where the site parts company with him is on explanation, and on anything that makes people responsible for harm done to them. Where we build on him is the step after noticing. A pendulum can only use the parts of you that agreed to its rule: what success looks like, who you’re allowed to be, which limits count as real. Ideas about false beliefs and identity come at the same ground from the side of the self, and the manifestation hub covers how the teachings say inner states shape outer events.

Seeing the rule is the start. Deciding which borrowed beliefs to keep, and building a self that doesn’t need the crowd’s permission, depends on your own groups and your own history, which is why we do that part in coaching.

Frequently asked questions

What is a pendulum in Reality Transurfing?

A pendulum is Vadim Zeland's term for a structure that forms when many people think and act alike: a company, a party, a fandom, a movement, a crowd online. He argues that it takes on a life of its own, feeds on the attention and emotion of its followers and opponents alike, and pulls people toward goals that serve it rather than them.

Are pendulums real?

As energy beings, there is no evidence for them, and Zeland himself says he can't tell whether they are alive or how they act on people. The patterns he groups under the word are real and well studied: conformity to group norms, us-versus-them bias, outrage spreading online, and conflicts that escalate without anyone planning it.

Is a pendulum the same as an egregore?

They overlap. Egregore is an older occult term for a collective thought-form created by a group. Zeland mentions it and argues that his pendulum covers more ground, because it includes any structure of shared thinking, from a nation to a fashion, and not only groups formed around ritual.

What is the pendulum rule?

Zeland's name for the unwritten rule every group runs on, which he sums up as "do as I do". People make the rule and the pendulum grows out of it. He sets it against what he calls the Transurfing rule: be yourself and let other people be themselves.

How do you get free of a pendulum?

Zeland's answer is to stop feeding it rather than fight it, because opposition feeds a pendulum as well as support. He describes declining the conflict without a fight, breaking the expected script, and staying aware inside a group rather than fleeing it. He says escaping pendulums entirely is neither possible nor desirable.

Why do I keep getting what I don't want?

Zeland says intense hatred or fear of something ties your attention to it and brings more of it into your life. There is no evidence that feelings attract events. Research does support the attention half: suppressing a thought makes it return more often, and dwelling on what you dislike keeps it in front of you.

This article is educational and is not medical, psychological or financial advice. Talk to a qualified professional before making major changes, especially if you live with a mental health condition. Read the full disclaimer.