What Is Manifestation?
To put it in simple terms, it’s a process by which you can create your reality by using the power of your mind.
That means that instead of taking what the world offers you, accepting what you’re given, succumbing to concepts like fate and luck, you take a conscious and deliberate role in creating the world around you, by manifesting what you want in your relationships, your life, your wealth – in fact, in every aspect of your life.
Manifestation is a metaphysical process, which means it’s based on mental processes that go beyond the ones we use in everyday life.
That’s not to say it’s a complicated process, or that the techniques of manifestation are difficult to understand or use. Far from it! They’re actually very simple.
You see, those “in the know” have been producing, or co-creating, their reality for centuries. (Co-creating just means we recognize the Universe’s role in creating reality. You’re never doing this alone!)
If you look back throughout human history you’ll find people were writing about how the world around us can be changed with the power of the mind at least as far back as the ancient Egyptians.
And most of you will know that the Bible refers to a process of getting what you want – you might recall the famous quotation “Ask and it shall be given unto you, seek and you shall find.”
The thing is, though, most of us are not accustomed to taking control of our lives, or even really making a serious effort to manifest what we want.
Sure, in matters of romance, we might exert ourselves to get a particular partner into relationship with us. Or we might put a lot of effort into getting a particular job. Or we might train hard for a particular sport.
Those are things we do because we all have some deep interests or pastimes that are really important to us.
But the truth is, for most of us, for most of the time, life is a pretty random thing: we get what we are given. We allow fate and chance and luck to rule our lives. We are not masters of manifestation, nor even apprentices.
But accepting this means somebody else controls your life.
If you don’t know where you’re going, and if you don’t have clear objectives, and if you’re not trying to get what you want, then you can guarantee that you’ll be part of somebody else’s life plan!
Creating Reality Is Easy!
Although the 2006 film and book by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, was immensely popular, it didn’t contain much in the way of manifestation techniques. In fact, it was mostly “experts” telling us about their successes or how they (and we) could use the process to get what they want.
For most people, at least when they’re starting to discover the process of creating a new life for themselves by creating what they want, these techniques are almost magical, hard to understand, and sometimes downright mysterious.
So let’s start at the very beginning. It is, after all, a very good place to start!
My guess is that you’re reading this because you already believe, at some level, that manifestation – creating the reality around you – is something you really can do.
And if that’s true, then you’re probably looking for a set of instructions on how to do it rather than a theory about how it works.
Well, there are plenty of instructions for how to create your reality and get what you want on this website. But let’s also consider how it all works.
How Reality Creation Works
Manifestation is creating reality.
And the key to creating reality using the power of your mind is your subconscious mind.
And your subconscious is more powerful than you can possibly imagine. In fact, your subconscious is a gateway to the infinite intelligence of the universe.
There are plenty of ideas floating around about what “infinite intelligence” might actually mean: words that you might recognize include Cosmic Consciousness, Universal Intelligence, The Great Mystery, The Oneness, The “I am”, The Divine Force, The Divine Intelligence, and so on.
The fact that there are so many names for this power or energy suggest we all have an awareness of it, regardless of what we call it.
I like the idea expressed by the psychotherapist Carl Jung, who believed that our subconscious minds create a collective unconscious or cosmic consciousness.
And this collective energy represents the entire history, present reality, and future potential of the human race. Some people think it represents the entire potential of the universe.
Imagine it as an energetic place where there is no time and space, but simply energetic possibility. From there, in response to the actions of the human race, physical manifestation can take place on our planet.
Because really, when you think about it, every set of circumstances, every event, every entity, every being, every building, everything on our planet, in fact – it all started with a thought in somebody’s mind.
This is another definition of manifestation, in fact: thoughts create things.
And of course that’s one way in which creation of reality can take place: you think of something, you realize you want it, you have enough energy and desire for an outcome to get it, and you set out a plan of action in the world to do so.
But what we call manifestation goes beyond this physical process of cause and effect.
This process is driven by the unconscious or subconscious mind (it’s the same thing, just different words).
How do you contact or instruct your subconscious? By entering into an inward-looking mental attitude, in a relaxed way, and visualizing or focusing your attention on what you want, and supplying a lot of emotional energy to that image or desire, you can send an instruction to the universe to produce that image in your physical reality.
That sounds really simple, doesn’t it? And it is really simple.
However, as you know, there has to be a catch, because if all we had to do was sit down and think about something to make it appear in our world, we’d all be rich, we’d all have what we want, and the world would be a very different place.
So what is it that stands between the simple act of setting an intention, or a goal if you prefer, and having it appear in the way that so many people have described and talked about over the years (not least the tens of millions of people who bought the book The Secret!)
Video: Manifesting Reality by Michael Mackintosh
Blocks To Reality Creation
If you think about what I’ve said above, it’s obvious that the process of creating reality is in principle quite a simple one. You start by setting an intention (you can call it a goal, a desired outcome, or an objective if you prefer). You relax, and in this relaxed state you visualize your desired outcome appearing in your world.
Most “experts” in this area advise you to see or imagine the desired outcome exactly as if it was in your world right now. They tell you to feel the emotions associated with getting your desired outcome. Usually that’s going to be intense joy, delight, happiness. They tell you to send that energy out along with your intention, and to act as if it’s already appeared in your life.
And of course what most people find is – nothing happens.
And then they blame the people who call themselves “experts” on co-creation or manifesting reality.
And then the experts and authors on co-creation say, “Well, it’s your fault… Perhaps you didn’t put enough energy into it, or perhaps you didn’t have a clear enough goal. Or perhaps you didn’t meditate often enough…..” Or whatever.
But in fact the reason that most people fail at the process is because they don’t actually believe that they’re going to get what they want.
Take the example of somebody “programming” (in other words, setting an objective for the manifestation of) financial security or abundant wealth. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about aiming for the manifestation of a million dollars. Not many succeed!
Why? It’s obvious: at some level everyone has a belief about what they can manifest in monetary terms, and that belief is usually a lot less than a million dollars!
If you try this out for yourself, there’s an easy way to find out what you are capable of believing possible around monetary goals, and we’ll have a look at that in a moment.
Of course we’d all like abundance. But the reason we haven’t got it is because we are all operating an individual set of beliefs about our earning capacity, how much we are worth, whether or not we “deserve” wealth, whether or not it is our destiny to live with wealth consciousness or poverty consciousness, and indeed hundreds of other things around money.
Money is an incredibly powerful symbol of all sorts of things (status, power, worth, morality, and so on, to name but a few). No wonder so many people are interested in its manifestation.
Your entire relationship with money is governed by the beliefs that you hold about money as an entity, about money in relation to you, and in particular all of the beliefs you hold about how much you are worth.
It follows that if any of these beliefs are in conflict with your objective to generate or create wealth of a million dollars (or any other amount) you’re not going to succeed.
That’s because no matter how successful you are during meditation and visualization at communicating your goals to the universe, the minute you come back to “normal” reality and start thinking negative or limiting thoughts about how much money you can generate or have in your life, you send a much more dominant message to the universe about your expectations around financial abundance (or lack of it!)
Discover What You Really Believe About Abundance
Let’s say that you set a goal to have $1 million in liquid assets a year from now in your bank account.
So you start to use the process of co-creation, using the Law of Attraction principles to make this manifestation happen. But somehow, no matter what you do, it doesn’t work.
If you go internal, in other words if you close your eyes and look inside yourself, and imagine or think about your objective, you will always know, simply by attending to how you feel, whether or not you believe your goal is achievable.
And if you think about decreasing amounts of wealth, there will be a point where you find that setting that goal becomes completely believable. And that amount might be very different to $1 million!
And if what you can believe in is much lower than a million, that’s why manifestation of a million dollars isn’t working.
You see, everything you do around money is governed by how your relationship with it. And if you believe you can only have a certain amount of money in your life, then that’s what you will have.
Think of lottery winners, who are mostly accustomed to living in average financial circumstances. Why do you think that 70% of them manage to get rid of their winnings within 12 months, and restore themselves to the financial status quo?
In simple terms, it’s because our belief systems are what drives our behavior. In the case of lottery winners, as soon as anything disrupts the status quo, i.e. they win the lottery, their subconscious mind – which holds these beliefs about their relationship to money – sets about putting matters “right”, i.e when they seem to have “too much” money, their subconscious quickly and effectively makes them dispose of it.
Now, you may say this is ridiculous, because you don’t have any such beliefs about money.
But you do, just as you have powerful beliefs about every single aspect of your life in the world.
And the reason that you may not know about these beliefs is because they are held in the subconscious. And, by definition, subconscious thoughts, feelings and beliefs are out of awareness.
Yet if you look around you, every single thing that has manifested in your world today, without exception, is the product of the beliefs that you hold about yourself, whether they are consciously held or unconsciously held.
If you’re “failing”, and you’re in poverty, that’s because you have some belief about poverty consciousness that has caused the manifestation of your financial situation.
If you’re in a poor relationship, that manifestation is a reflection of some belief you hold about you and relationships.
If you are working at a job you completely enjoy, that manifestation has been given to you because you have some deep-seated belief about the kind of fulfilling job you deserve.
And so it goes on: every single thing manifested in your world is the product of your beliefs about yourself and about the world.
Like I said above, if you’re trying to create something in your world, and you hold beliefs that are contradictory to the goals you are setting, those beliefs exert a much more powerful influence over the universe than your conscious desire to get something different.
Look at it this way: if you’re thinking about manifesting abundance, then you’re probably (right now, I mean) in a state of lack, if not poverty.
Which means that most of the time you’ll be sending out fear about not having enough (and most likely something terrible happening), or you’ll be worrying about where the next rent check is coming from, or how you’re going to pay the bills… or something.
The key is to change your attitude, and your feelings.
That way you can think positively about the likelihood of money coming to you. But you can only do that when you change your beliefs.
Good news! There are plenty of articles on this site which will show you how you can change, eliminate or destroy limiting beliefs so that you’re not constrained by limitation, lack, limited thinking or out of date beliefs.