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“First figure out who you are and then figure out what you want to do.” -my spiritual teacher
This was the spiritual advice my teacher gave me a few years ago.
It wasn’t until about a year ago that I began to grasp greater depths of what she meant by this statement…we’ll come back to this.
This article is probably going to piss a lot of dedicated manifesters off. But it’s my truth, so be it 🤷♂️
If you’ve been doing a manifesting practice and it’s working for you with the consistency and effectiveness that you desire, by all means keep doing it! That’s amazing and I’m genuinely happy for you.
If not, you might find this perspective interesting.
My First Encounter With Manifesting
I first engaged in the concept of manifesting after discovering Joe Dispenza. I’m not sure how I found Joe, but I read his book Becoming Supernatural in the beginning of 2019.
This period of time was the first time I really had any openness to the idea manifesting. I had watched The Secret when I was in college, but immediately dismissed it as total bullshit and never really thought about much after.
I’m sure there are many interpretations of the term manifesting, but my perception after reading Joe’s book was that by setting a clear intention in the field of consciousness, the universe would conspire to bring you the thing you desire into your life in due time.
In 2019, I was very much living mainly in the “life by me” consciousness. So I never thought that this meant you could just sit on your ass and do nothing kind of like a lot of people thought with The Secret. It seemed like the idea was to take the right actions in life AND do the intention setting in stillness.
As I engaged in Joe’s content, I got excited because it seemed like this might be the missing piece to me having everything I’d ever wanted in my life. That’s certainly how they sold it. I was already working my ass off so all I needed to do was add this extra component of manifesting and voila!
I starting listening to Joe’s mediations daily and my meditation practice more or less evolved into a manifestation practice. I would listen to his conscious potential meditation for 40 minutes each morning, setting intentions for a whole bunch of things like professional success, the relationship I wanted, money, and physical health.
I probably did this everyday for over 6 months. Some things ended up materializing and some didn’t.
Cutting The Manifesting Chord
I eventually stopped my manifesting practice due to the influence of my spiritual teacher. When we started working together, I hid from here that I was doing it. Mainly because it felt in opposition to a lot of the concepts that she was suggesting. I felt kind of like a teenager hiding that I was sneaking beers from my parents.
Eventually, I came clean to her that in addition to the Qigong practices she was advising me to do, I had also been secretly doing Joe Dispenza meditations for a big startup exit and perfect girlfriend.
She would ask me things like:
“Well what are you asking for….?”
“Who is it that wants those things?”
At one point I asked her what she thought of Joe Dispenza and she said, “he’s cute.” I thought this was hilarious, but also congruent with my growing realization that her evolution was on much more expansive planes than his or anyone else I had ever met.
This all happened around the same time I was moving into greater depths of witness consciousness and recognizing that many of the things I wanted were actually all just conditioned desires. Simultaneously, it became clear that accumulating things outside myself were not going to get me what I really wanted which was quite simply to feel good all the time. Unconditional joy, contentment and love baby!
So long story short, I stopped engaging with anything manifesting related. Like the prodigal son who had come home with his manifesting tail between his legs, I heeded the advice of my teacher and redirected all my energy towards identifying and transforming all the unhealthy patterns and emotions hidden in my consciousness.
This process is a core focus of the awakening process taught in my wisdom school RenXue and is also a central idea in many traditions. For example, I’ve learned that the Tibetan Buddhists advise the same thing and consider this purifying the chakras. Each one is an energy center which contain the energy of our conscious and unconscious thoughts, emotions, and experiences which then project out reality.
Same thing. Different language.
A Few Years Later, Where I’m At Now
Over the past few years, I’ve had lots of revelation and direct experience that has shaped a new perspective on manifesting.
What has became abundantly clear is that my reality is basically a reflection of my entire consciousness. This includes my stable conscious mind, and the far more expansive unconscious mind that stores every imprinted belief, emotion, and experience from my entire life(s). With this recognition, I began to see that reality was like a giant projector screen of all of my stuff.
At some in my journey, I had set the intention and aligned my behaviors to make my consciousness evolution the most important priority in my life. So the projector screen seemed to be sequencing scenes in the form of life’s events that served as clues for me to remove the impediments blocking greater realization. I call this phenomenon the responsive reality.
Life became my teacher. This was and still is the case.
I explain this phenomenon and a recent example that came up on a project I’ve been working on in the video below.
Eventually some interesting things started to happen that made the whole manifesting thing come back into the fold.
The further I went down this road, I began to notice an increasing amount of synchronicity. Specifically, the events in the outer world seemed to magically match my inner world more frequently. A simple example is that someone would pop into my awareness that I should reconnect with and then later that day they would text me completely out of the blue.
This would happen sporadically, but over time, this started to happen with increased frequency. Maybe something like once a week, to every other day, to now multiple times a day.
It is hard to articulate the impossibility of some of the pleasant coincidences that have happened. It feels like a divine dance of experience that somehow is perfectly choreographed by an unseen force more intelligent than anything I could possibly conceive of.