MANIFESTATION
How Thoughts Shape Our Experience
When Jim Carrey wrote himself a $10 million check dated ten years in the future, was he Manifesting? Prophetic? Lucky? The day he signed a $10 million contract for "Dumb & Dumber" exactly when he predicted, he had to wonder: did his thoughts create that reality, or merely prepare him for it?
This question sits at the heart of manifestation—the idea that our thoughts can somehow influence or even create reality. It's a concept that often divides rooms: skeptics rolling their eyes while believers nod knowingly. But what if both perspectives hold pieces of the truth?
The Question at the Crossroads
Do your thoughts create reality? If not whole cloth, then do they alter it? If I want to fall in love or make millions of dollars, how much should I focus energy on seeing these things happen in my mind's eye, and how much should I just shut up and get a job?
These aren't just abstract philosophical questions—they have profound implications for how we live our lives. Should we spend our time visualizing wealth falling into our laps, or should we grind away at practical daily tasks? Is the universe responding to our thoughts, or are we simply deluding ourselves?
Beyond Duality: Mind, Matter, and the Space Between
Science offers competing perspectives on thought and reality—Materialists view consciousness as a byproduct of physical processes, while Idealists see consciousness as fundamental. My intuition leans toward a both/and perspective: perhaps consciousness and matter are intertwined, co-creating our experience in ways we're just beginning to understand. The placebo effect, visualization's impact on athletic performance, and quantum nonlocality all hint at a more permeable boundary between mind and matter than we once assumed.
But before we can understand how thoughts might shape reality, we must ask: Where do our thoughts come from? And who—or what—is doing the thinking?
When you pay close attention through meditation, something startling becomes apparent: thoughts arise spontaneously. We rarely decide to think a thought before it appears—it simply emerges, already formed. Every word in your head has been inherited. Language itself is a collective phenomenon, carrying centuries of meaning and cultural context. Ideas and desires are mimetic, almost like life forms of their own we inherit and pass on.
Is there really a separate "you" who thinks, or is thinking happening through you? Buddhist traditions speak of "anatta" or "no-self"—the insight that what we call "self" is not a fixed entity but a process, a flow of experience without a central controller.
This perspective transforms how we understand manifestation. Rather than seeing it as a personal power to impose our will on reality, what if manifesting is about aligning with currents already flowing through the universe? What if our thoughts are not solely our own but arise from a vaster field of consciousness?
This doesn't mean we're merely passive receivers. We have the capacity to direct attention, to choose which thoughts to nurture and which to let pass. This selective attention may be our real creative power. How does manifesting change if you shift from asking "What do I want?" to "What is the universe attempting to manifest through me?”
Could surrender be compatible with ambition? Eastern wisdom traditions and Western manifestation practices might seem contradictory—one emphasizing letting go of desires, the other focusing on fulfilling them. But perhaps they're approaching the same mountain from different sides.
The Middle Path: Love as the Orienting Principle
Manifestation, as a practice, seems to increase self-regard. Based on psychologist Dr. Craig Malkin's spectrum of narcissism, this can be either healing or harmful. For those who fear taking up space or being seen, whose self-regard is too low, manifestation practices can be incredibly healthy—increasing confidence, reducing shame, and encouraging the sharing of gifts.
But for those already high in narcissism, manifesting can become a distorting lens, leading to grandiosity and detachment from reality. For those who resist vulnerability and avoid feedback, it can justify hiding in private thoughts while blocking signs the universe is attempting to show.
How do we know if manifesting is helping or hurting? Focus on LOVE. If your vision is win-win, you're getting in sync with the universe. If you need to diminish others in any way, if you're engaging in win-lose thinking, your ego is likely inflating. Love dissolves boundaries between self and other, between your desires and the greater good; boundaries that prove elusive if you meditate on them.
The answer lies in balancing seemingly contradictory truths: You are both an individual and not an individual. You are both insignificant to the universe and immeasurably precious. Comfort with this paradox is a hallmark of higher development, whether spiritual or intellectual.
Practical Applications: Surfing the Waves of Reality
Let me offer a practical approach from my experience as a coach. When I have clients stuck transitioning careers or looking for love, I may suggest they develop a mantra or incantation—something that encourages them to believe in possibilities before they have evidence.
For hyper-rational folks, this can sound like magical thinking. Here's how I ground it: Imagine going to a bar every night with one of two mindsets:
”Someone here wants to fight me.”
"The love of my life is in this room.”
Consider how each mindset affects your posture, your thoughts, the tone of your voice, even your gaze. If you're looking for enemies, you'll likely lock eyes with others who are similarly suspicious. But if you're assuming your future partner is present, everything changes—your smile, your openness, the way you engage.
Every environment contains latent potentials that we may or may not activate. Our mindset helps determine which potentials we tap into. This doesn't prove your thoughts magically brought someone new into the room, but it clearly demonstrates how thoughts create different experiences of the same environment.
For the skeptical, this explanation is often enough to get started. But I suspect something deeper is happening—not that our thoughts manifest people who wouldn't otherwise be there, but that we have an incredible capacity to sense reality and yes, interact with it, in ways that our limited concepts and language cannot possibly capture.
Synchronicity: Random Chance or Meaningful Pattern?
This brings us to synchronicity—those meaningful coincidences that seem too perfect to be random. Is the world fundamentally random (as many materialists prefer) or filled with meaningful connections?
"Random" implies events happen without intelligence or meaning involved—just dumb particles colliding. Follow this logic far enough, and it's easy to land in nihilism, no gods allowed. I find the word random unscientific. The entire scientific method rests upon finding causal links. How can you then claim it all rests upon randomness? But I digress.
Synchronicity suggests the opposite—that everything happens for a reason, that moments are infused with meaning. This perspective often leads to pondering the existence of a higher consciousness orchestrating it all.
Here's a middle path: What if noticing synchronicities is an elegant way to get in sync with your environment? This is being neither a puppet nor the puppeteer. This is co-creative. You are part of the larger intelligence, not separate from it.
When you want to surf, do you paddle against the waves or with them? Paddle against them, and you struggle; the ocean seems to be working against you. Paddle with them, position yourself in front of the right wave, and you're carried to shore with a force far greater than yourself. From this perspective, it appears the universe is collaborating with you.
This requires alignment between your intentions, actions, beliefs, and senses. My wife and I, when facing ambiguous decisions, often ask: "Is it in the flow?" When both yes and no make rational sense, and when our personal preferences are ambiguous, we allow intuition to guide us by asking if something feels easeful. We look outside ourselves and ask: does the universe want this to happen?
With practice, the answers can be surprisingly clear. Walk into twenty bars assuming your future partner is present, and you might find some locations reject you while others have gravity and draw you in. You might find yourself trading bars for lectures or yoga classes. You might find that your energy and presence draw new people into the room, perhaps even via nonlocal means we can not account for. When we stop resisting reality and start swimming with the currents, better outcomes seem to accumulate.
Embracing Mystery While Taking Action
My advice? Pray. Write incantations and repeat them. Choose the thoughts you want to swim in, and do your best to make them the first thoughts in your head in the morning and the last at night. When I did this, everything changed. I learned to be happy in situations I didn't like, and then I found myself in the situation of my dreams. Learning how to tune into my unconscious thoughts via contemplation and meditation allowed my dreams to surface and then holding them in my mind in the daylight became an important navigating tool and yes, some of my dreams have been demonstrably prophetic. I have no explanation, but I learned to recognize the tone of these particular visions.
Worry less about outcomes or explanations and more about process. When surfing, we don't aim for a single spot on shore—we try to catch a great wave and ride it beautifully. Think of destinations less as places you want to go and more as mandalas that activate the energies you want to embody.
The more I study the philosophy of science and the philosophies of scientists, the more I believe that the most rational, grounded approach to life is to feel oneself deeply immersed in the great Mystery at all times. I don't merely want to achieve my goals, I want to live an adventure.
As physicist Werner Heisenberg said: "Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think."
Perhaps the wisest stance is one of humble curiosity—embracing the paradox that our thoughts might simultaneously be both powerful beyond measure and merely ripples in a vast cosmic sea. How will you surf these waves?