By Jed McKenna
(This article may be freely reposted, reprinted, translated.)
Few people have the imagination for reality.
Goethe
The last time I looked — probably in 2004 when What the Bleep Do We Know? came out — there was a lot of interest in manifestation by a variety of names; law of attraction, power of prayer, creative visualization, positive thinking, mind over matter, affirmations, wishcraft, and so on.
I don’t know if manifestation is still a hot topic, but why shouldn’t it be? It’s a power that you actually possess, magic that you can actually do. How cool is that? The same way you can physically grow and heal without really knowing or doing anything, you can shape events and participate in the creation of your reality without really knowing or doing anything. You do have a role to play in the process, but it’s mostly just getting out of the way and not screwing it up.
Your mileage may vary, but in my experience of adult-level manifestation, there’s really no doing involved. When you authentically need or desire something, the process of manifestation is natural and organic; no effort or procedure or technique is required. You don’t have to know or learn or perform anything, you just have to bring a desire into focus and let it go.
I suspect that human children like to use manifestation to conjure inauthentic desires which, though it kinda-sorta-maybe works, requires a bit more finagling and jumping through hoops. In other words, adult and juvenile manifestation are two related but dissimilar processes. I’m sure some people are very good at manifesting and that it can work very well even in the juvenile state, I’m just sharing my experience of the adult version which is closely related to…
Effortless Doing
I know about manifestation because I do it. All the time. Without even trying. As a well-developed human adult well-established in the integrated state, effortless-doing is my normal mode of operation. As the name implies, I don’t make any effort in this regard, I simply live in alignment with the subtle energetic currents of my being and all this manifestation stuff just takes care of itself. I don’t have to perform any techniques or plead my case or tape messages to my bathroom mirror, I just maintain my state of energetic alignment and my cocreative dreamstate does the rest.
Of course, if I go out of alignment with my authentic nature and try to manifest something inauthentic like a Jet-Ski or a giraffe, I will be disappointed, but why on earth would I go out of alignment with my authentic nature? Once one comes into alignment, misalignment becomes, literally, unthinkable.
I don’t really have wants, per se. That might be an important thing to mention. The few examples I provide below are sort of environmental and mechanical in a way that certainly pleases me, but it’s not like I want to go to prom or close the big deal or go to Aspen for a week or tamper with the natural order of things. All I really want is to perform my function, and for that to happen I can’t get bogged down in all the minutiae of a somewhat challenging living environment. This world, this body and this character are not me or the point of me, they’re just a platform on which my function can be performed. Things in my environment have to do their job or be replaced, and I don’t want to get bogged down in a lot of getting and spending busywork. Cocreative manifestation spares me that. If I find that I can’t live without the latest squeegee or the hot new color of M&M, then I just go downhill, hand over some money and manifest the old fashioned way.
A casual aside…
Any even moderately aware person must see this cocreative dynamic at work in their own life in a way that doesn’t lend itself to clinical, testable, reproducible results, but which is nevertheless as undeniably real as anything else in the dreamstate. What this means to those who acknowledge it is that the objective mechanical worldview is falsified and replaced by the subjective idealistic worldview. Just that easily, you can defrock all scientific pretenders and reclaim authority over your own dreamstate experience. Let the science children keep playing in their sandbox, but don’t let them convince you they have any answers. Not a single one.
Poor Ol’ Truck
Just as one recent and visible example of manifestation, a tree fell on my good old pickup truck and killed it, so I had to claim the insurance and get a better, more appropriate, even older truck. I was aware that I had to make a change regarding my truck soon; the need was kind of closing in on me and I was kind of ignoring it. It was getting close to becoming a real issue when my better half — the cocreative universe — took care of things with a bang and a crunch. Events were set in motion and two weeks later I had a much better truck just in time to meet a pressing need.
Another example involves that same truck. A year earlier, a woman backed into the truck causing minor frame and cosmetic damage to the right rear. It was her fault and she was very sorry, but I wasn’t upset; I know how these things work. The check from her insurance company came within twenty bucks of the exact amount I needed to have a new woodstove delivered and installed. This was a stove I had already picked out after hours of pleasant research. Winter was getting close but I had forgotten about the stove and my attention was elsewhere. Now, as if by magic, presto!, there it sits, a few feet away from me, keeping me toasty and snug.
I would have been happy to pay cash for both stove and truck, but the universe doesn’t seem to care who pays, it’s more results-oriented. It does seem to have a thing against insurance companies, so that’s nice. On the other hand, it didn’t cover replacement of my Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Grateful Dead CDs, so nothing’s perfect.
These are hi-vis, several-a-year examples, but they come in all sizes from the mega few-in-a-lifetime size to the easily overlooked many-times-a-day ones and everything in between, plus all the subtle stuff we fail to notice. Then there are the navigational ones that don’t really manifest anything more than a sense of where things are going. This is how I knew in Warfare, while in the first split-second of a 70 mph motorcycle accident, that it wouldn’t be fun but it wouldn’t be serious. This is how I always know where things are going and, often more importantly, where they’re not going.
I’m not some big wishcraft expert, I’m just describing my own experience of the integrated state. The above examples of getting money for new stuff in a timely manner are fairly vanilla compared to the fancy stuff. The point is not that these truck examples are so special but that they’re not. They were practically routine, like growth and healing, like the autonomic system that never lets your heart skip a beat or like the mechanism of balance. This is how my life does work and how everyone’s life can work, most notably, yours.
Set It and Forget It
Once a mentally clear and emotionally empowered idea has been formed, my part is done and I let it go. A virtual request has been made and I trust that the best will occur. I spent a pleasant hour every day for a few weeks coming up with the right woodstove solution, brought the matter into clear focus, then forgot all about it. This isn’t like a new dishwasher or garbage disposal for me (I don’t have either), a woodstove is the heart of my cabin and closely tied to my own comfort and happiness. Once rightness regarding a woodstove came into focus for me, I was done with it. I don’t have to carry photos of trucks and woodstoves in my wallet or post them on my fridge. Once I set the desire and set it free, my part in the process is done.
Manifestation is going on all the time, just like physical healing and growth are going on all the time. Integrated adults, being more harmoniously aligned with their environment than segregated juveniles, tend to manifest more smoothly and effortlessly, especially where it involves the exploration and expression of their unique spiritual DNA, but this stuff works for everyone to whatever degree they don’t tie it up in an emotional web of egoic entanglement.
Manifestation is not something you have to perform like a magical incantation, it’s your essential nature as a creative being in a cocreative dreamstate. You can shape reality and alter events and make stuff appear because that’s getting to the heart of who, what and where you really are.
A Prayer for the Living
We think of prayer as an inferior entity asking a superior entity for special dispensation. We plead, make promises, strike bargains, wheedle and cajole like children nagging Big Daddy for some toy or prize or reprieve, but there is no child/parent dynamic in manifestation. We may also think that prayer has something to do with worthiness or merit, but this too is part of the eyes-closed, fear-based, child/parent mindset. It’s your dreamstate, you can have whatever you can want, the trick is right-wanting in alignment with your unique energetic pattern which, for anyone established in the integrated state, is no trick at all.
This process of manifestation scales up and down to all levels. Sometimes it results in wondrous life changes or acts of creative intelligence, sometimes it’s as mundane as finding your keys or getting a good parking spot. Once you enter into this energetic flow, it becomes integrated into your life experience and is only conspicuous by its occasional absence, like when all the stoplights are against you. Yeah, shit happens. Wah.
Be Careful What You Wish For
By waking up and coming into alignment with the underlying structural pattern of your dreamstate reality — your spiritual DNA, rather than the DNA of the herdbeast organism — thought, desire and manifestation merge into a single, organic, effortless process so that, without knowing the first thing about Taoism, you become a living master of it, i.e., a well-developed human adult well-established in the integrated state. Herd-shuffling is over and we learn to stand and walk and run — and maybe more — on our own. Right-knowing, right-action and effortless-doing become the new normal once the artificial barrier of the juvenile shell has been dissolved and one has developed into a functional adulthood.
It’s through mind and heart working together like film and light source that your authentic desires are projected onto the screen of your dreamstate reality. There’s a bit more to it, of course. For instance, you shouldn’t wish for a negative. If you pray that it’s not cancer, you’re empowering the cancer part, not the not part. Similarly, though I haven’t tested this, I suspect that if you wish ill toward another, you’re effectively summoning it into your own environment. Also, you have to walk the talk; if you pray for perfect health and keep subjecting yourself to hyper-toxicity, you’re just uttering fearful words outweighed by opposing actions.
A word to the wise, don’t get locked into a specific outcome. Trust your cocreative counterpart to come up with the best result. That’s what the release part looks like.
Surrender vs Abdication
The point of a caterpillar is to dissolve into the chrysalis stage, and the point of the chrysalis is the birth of the butterfly. The caterpillar is a birth stage and the chrysalis is a transition stage, but the butterfly is what it’s all about. The caterpillar doesn’t need to learn to fly, it just needs to follow its natural course, undergo its natural transition, and flight comes naturally. Similarly, children don’t need to act like adults, they just need to follow their natural course, undergo their natural transition, and emerge into the adulthood for which they were born. The key, as always, is surrender. You can release the steering wheel and press the gas and trust in something larger than yourself — it doesn’t matter what — or you can cling to the illusion of control and keep reading about the life you could be living.
Behind the appearance of the timespace energymatter universe is the truth of infinite consciousness and perfect intelligence. Brahman is mind, dreamstate is mind and you are mind. There is only mind, and that thou art.
Emotional detachment from ego is the key to everything, and that entails a death-rebirth process which, if I were you, I would be praying, manifesting, attracting and affirming my ass off to achieve. In my opinion, the only worthwhile purpose of manifestation in the juvenile state is transition to the adult state. To manifest your authentic desires you must first transition to your authentic self. All else follows from that.
Jed McKenna is the author of the Enlightenment, Dreamstate, and Jed Talks trilogies.
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