Manifestation & the Elephant

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The elephant in the room in the craze of manifesting our desires is in the rift between conscious and unconscious mind, between the lunatic and the wannabee, between the rock and a hard place. When we empower our cravings, we also empower our sense of lack. It's a hell loop of greed and poverty.

There is a lower magic about how we create realities. The Californian secret (which is even less subtle than Victoria's Secret) reveals to the unsatisfied multitude that if we imagine we are already rich, already have that partner, or already have that job, then we will manifest that reality in the physical. Consciousness gives form. It's a no-brainer - until we find that the form is a prison of consciousness.

The understanding of The Secret is that through generating the resonance within our thoughts in the present moment, we become co-creators of all future moments. We manifest our visions. This is because the quality of each present moment births the next. The proposition is that the physical dimension will follow and conform to the higher dimension of thought resonance. It's a kind of magic.

Often called the Law of Attraction, this popular ideology around spirituality, manifestation, and success has done much to enforce the notion that our thoughts can master all forms of reality. It’s a curious blend of idealism and materialism and lacks sentient depth. It's a new way to whip life into form, control it, command it, dominate it. In other words, it's a new form of psychological division and split. Because it pits life against itself. That great big gig in the sky of the mind that wants to dictate form on life, is itself an after-effect of life. Life is in a struggle with life. 

The idea of separate manifestation according to the wants and desires of the separate self has left in its wake many frustrated, despairing individuals swathed in the sense of failure - perennial losers that didn't manage to ‘manifest’ the stuff that they want in their lives.

Nevertheless, the notion is half-true, and is still compelling and hypnotic, especially as it plays into the mainstream conditioning of materialism. We’ve been groomed for lower magical thinking by our culture, education, and mainstream beliefs since the industrial revolution. Gratification and fulfilment, we are taught, can only be taken in from the outside. The world should be our oyster and we are the consumers. In a way, we are the donkey, failure is the stick beating our butt, and future reward is the carrot. It's suffused with existential incompletion and insufficiency. It rests on the very ground of not having or being "enough" - a fundamental seizure on a sense of natural esteem.

A new wash for brainwash

We are collectively cast in a spell of limitation. Bullied by a stick whipping our ass with the threat of disease, death, and destitution, we follow the carrot of material attainment, even sacrificing our freedom of thought to the materialistic archetypes.

Because we are our thoughts, and our thoughts are consequential, then we must think the "right" things in order to be happy. Negate our despair in order to feel good. Deny where we are wounded in order to spring into a perfect life - all through force and interference with the mystery of who or what we are.

Under this spell, we believe that fulfillment comes from getting things from the outside. This depends on a belief that our wellbeing can be separated from the wellbeing of others, or the planet. We are intoxicated into believing that our life has to be earned and that this life is in a competition with itself and with other people’s lives. It's immensely auto-immune and stressful.

To get on the winning team of successful manifestation, we need to be shamelessly self-interested, projecting  the resonance of our future gain with real-time fantasy.

But one person’s heaven is another person’s hell. The invocation is all about personal reward, the conscious resonance doesn’t include those areas that are hurt, forgotten or exploited. It doesn’t include the deeper yearnings of the soul and the furious scream of the heart for liberation from the bonds of energetic isolation.

This conditioning isolates the individual, while gunning to become the winner and not the loser, to get success and not failure, pleasure and not pain while being fenced in on an island of separate happiness and private fulfillment.

This isolation of the separate self brings a whole set of limitations. The person themselves becomes a finite ‘thing’, subject to loss, just as all the stuff that has been gained is subject to loss. In trying to be separately more, we find ourselves to be claustrophobically limited to a space that is exceedingly small. The scope of sensitivity and responsiveness gets reduced to the shady borders of me, myself and I. The impact of our manifestation is not a bang, but a whimper.

The popular culture of The Secret has enticed a generation with an ideology of personal gain that generates a sense of being apart from the unified field of all life. The disconnect from the field of unity evokes an inner sense of loss of epic proportions. This can feel unbearable, so we numb it down, boarding up the inner world as a no-go zone.

This inner sense of boredom, blankness or dense nothingness further feeds an addictive dependence on the outer world to compensate the dullness and to distract from any frustration or suffering within the inner world. You wouldn’t expect it, but boredom and dense nothingness are a tremendous suffering. It’s like having a numb pelvis, or not feeling the weight in a leg. It’s bewildering, frustrating and gets us out of balance. This other kind of suffering – the suffering of numbness – again sends us outside in a quest to do something, get something, to break the state. But whatever we get, it’s never really enough.

“Happy thoughts superimposed over existential despair will attract existential despair with a few happy thoughts pinned on top. Because sooner or later, experience will catch us off guard, when our personal agendas have been put to rest for the night.”

Just as The Secret works as a lower magic, it delivers a superficial crust of experience that barely conceals the mists of dread and mortal impermanence from the darkened inner world. This is because when we think of something we desire from the world – a reality that we want to manifest – we are also thinking about the reason for that thought.

Based on resonance, the law of attraction says that like attracts like. Happy thoughts attract happy things. But this has a depth. Happy thoughts superimposed over existential despair will attract existential despair with a few happy thoughts pinned on top. Because sooner or later, experience will catch us off guard, when our personal agendas have been put to rest for the night.

There is a vast difference between looking happy and being happy. The field of resonance goes way beyond the ice-tip of appearances. For example, when we are bringing the bank balance of $30 million plus into the present moment of our felt sense, we are also bringing the methodology of that wish – the dread of poverty, the existential insecurity, the slavery of the sense of value to bank account numbers and not actual worth, and on and on. We are consciously affirming and recreating a whole reality – those same energetic sufferings that caused us to want $30 million in the first place.

When we fantasize about what we want, as if we already have it in real time, in order to manifest it later, we are also investing in fantasy. Each moment of illusion births a moment of illusion. Even that physical Mercedes Benz will have a slightly fake, illusory quality to it. Make-believe breeds make-believe.

Whatever the desire, it is driven by a sense of lack, and when lack is at its essence, the future results of the mental hocus pocus will be equally alive with lack. Only now it will be clear that $30 million can’t buy an exemption. No amount of money can buy out the lack. So, there could be some evolution.

It’s not a crime to want stuff and to seek the attain of certain positions from the outer world. It’s simply where we’re at in our evolution of mind. We’re hard-wired by our conditioning to this materialistic striving based on a background belief in lack. We all do it, as we’re coded by this software of suffering.

We became so addicted to dictating experience, that we are losing our receptivity – our ability to sense and feel the spontaneity of living impressions in the here and now. Not knowing exactly what’s going on around us makes us unsafe and generates an amorphous sense of threat. This sense of threat directs us to avoid the unknown still more, as the unknown could hide horrible outcomes (such as disease, incarceration, death). In this, we lose our way. We get numb to the sense of purpose and our passion often goes offline. At a certain stage, we can begin to feel incredibly lost.

What is it that we truly desire? Do we have the faintest clue of what is really needed for our personal manifestation? If fulfillment is our destiny, do we remember what fulfillment feels like?

In our boredom on the inside and addiction to the outside, we have by degrees forgotten how to feel. Our senses have dulled and our thought are increasingly dumbed down. We don’t expect the earth to speak to us, or the cells of our body to have a genius, so we stopped listening, stopped asking, muting the energetic conversation. After a while, as we don’t experience any aliveness in nature and in our own bodies, we stop believing in it, and because we stop believing in it, we stop experiencing it. We become cynical indeed. But not cynical enough yet to take a sword of truth and slash the curtains of illusion down.

In this, our individual purpose has become scripted as a future based agenda, rather than a Felt Sense of purpose that is alive as a sentient compass in the moment. Our passion has been traded for the ambition to get to get somewhere else in an imagined future life, as opposed to the experiential quickening, heat and uprising of the whole organism in order to clear a way for the soul to express.

Could it be that whatever we dream up as our own fulfilment from our position as a work-in-process could never compare to what the universe has planned for us? That to follow the plan, we first need to open up in receptivity of body, heart and mind to the authenticity of all that is being felt?

Could it be that the deeper secret and the higher magic is right in the heart of those areas where we suffer the most? Those same areas that we have always avoided?

There is an offering of wellbeing beyond belief waiting at the door of every individual, but it is a door that many have forgotten how to open. It is the door through which we receive experience into the infinite inner word, without discrimination.

This offering of wellbeing leaves no part untended. It touches the form, but also the soul of the form. It arouses the suffering but also the creational power within the pain. It welcomes adversity but also the hero within the moment of strife. It takes the horror of death and instantly holds the wonder of birth.

It will not forsake the forsaken or expel the refugee. It will not despise the despicable, nor will it reject that which has been hounded out of form. Rather it will touch each thread of living experience as if it were meeting itself, initiating the alchemy in which suffering becomes passion, passion becomes purpose, and purpose becomes manifestation. All this is suffused with the sense of unconditional reward and fulfillment – a reunion of sorts with life.

This is the deeper secret and the higher magic. Our sense of purpose and our passion is right here, in the instantaneous fulfillment of cracking open the intimate kernel of our suffering to let it be of service to the whole. In this, we shift from the dictation of narrow experience to the reception, offering and sharing of boundless vistas of life.

“Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.” – Rumi