Was Manifestation always about Getting what you Want?

What happens when a practice that once existed within a larger cosmology and worldview is extracted and turned into a technology for personal attainment?

The technology I am referring to is the practice of manifestation. Within popular culture, manifestation rituals appear to serve one primary purpose: getting what you want.

But is personal attainment what manifestation has always been about?

Is the Law of Attraction—first coined by Theosophist Helena Blavatsky—really a “law”? Or is it better understood as a concept that exists within a particular cultural paradigm?

Certainly, the very term “Law of Attraction” gives the impression of being centred around human desires. If universal laws really are centred around human desires, what else does this assume? 

Language can be deceptive, not through malicious intent, but simply because it emerges from particular cultural assumptions. Where there is belief in God - at least from the abrahamic traditions - there tends to be a belief in human centrality or importance. For we were made in the image of God, or so it is told this way...

This observation is worth earmarking in your mind, as it helps to bring perspective to our modern approaches to manifestation. 

Before you continuing to read, I invite you to consider your existing beliefs:

Do you believe in a larger Divine Order?

Or do you believe the universe is impartial to your personal preferences?

How does your answer shape the way you approach manifestation?

By the end of this essay, notice what has shifted.

Who Manifests? God, the Universe, or Me?

From a theological lens, spiritual traditions have generally acknowledged human beings to be situated within a larger system of Divine Order. The design of art and architecture in Gothic cathedrals, for example, had the effect of making humans feel small, anonymous, and subservient to the will of God.

Let’s compare this structure with the structure that social media encourages today. Everyone is front and centre in their hyper-personalized echo chamber. The algorithm is designed so that you get to be at the centre of your universe.

While having personal desires and ambitions is hardly a new phenomenon, during pre-modern times, abrahamic religions encouraged people to approach their desires in consultation with God; a Priest or a Rabbi. Fate and duty were often understood as more important than individual wants. Personal wishes were legitimate on the condition that they were understood as a part of God’s plan.

During this period, questions may have sounded like:

• Is this desire compatible with virtue, duty, and God’s Higher Plan for me?

• What am I being asked [spiritually] to move toward?

• How can I become more receptive and obedient to God’s Will?

  
  

Let’s compare this with secular questions we might ask today:

• How can I align reality with my desire?

• What is my highest potential or vibration?

• How can I create my desired reality?

  
  

Here we can see how the philosophical posture of the pre-modern era begins with receptivity, while the modern era begins with preference. In the earlier period, the self is placed in the background while modernity brought the self to the foreground.

In the late 20th century, classical modernity shifted gears into what we now know as the post-modern era. While classical modernism championed universal truth, absolute objective science, and reliance on “grand narratives” that could explain the whole world, post-modernism introduced concepts of relativity, paradox, and pluralism into our understanding.

In a time where true and false were organized into tidy binary boxes, skepticism and critical thinking became valuable virtues. It is from this post-modern mindset that I have come to question some of the claims made by popular spokespeople of manifestation rituals and Law of Attraction principles.

Changes in Meaning: The Changing Rhetoric of Manifestation 

In biblical texts, manifestation is said to concern something being made evident, revealed, or expressed—a revelation rather than a teaching about wielding your psychology for personal advantage. 

From a Hermetic perspective, the operative idea of manifestation was to understand one’s relationship within the cosmos and to act in accordance with Divine Order. Knowledge, ritual, correspondence, virtue, celestial order, and human action belonged together in a cohesive system. 

Through this lens, human beings were thought to be participating in a cosmos rather than governing the cosmos. Personal revelations would therefore suggest how one’s actions might be in service to the greater whole, and such revelations are what provided a sense of personal meaning and higher purpose.

Manifestation today continues to be inspired by this teleological framing. Frameworks like the Hero’s Journey interpret human experience as a progression towards final victory or return. Manifestation became the part of the journey where life turns around for the better - a reward for having passed through difficult trials and tribulations. 

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of manifestation became increasingly more human-centric. Rather than treating humans as passive subjects of a Divine Order, the faculties of human beings—reason, emotion, and lived experience—were placed at the centre of meaning-making.

Instead of manifestation revealing the presence of God, it came to reveal the capacity of the human mind to create one’s own reality.

As greater emphasis was placed on the power of the individual, and on the authority of one’s own feelings as an “internal guidance system,” the function of manifestation became about raising one’s vibration. 

Obtaining personal desires underwent a form of spiritual materialism. If you were religious, your manifestations became a symbol of your relationship with God. If you were not religious, the “Universe” replaced God while the same underlying structure remained. 

Although the secularization of manifestation caused the term God to be replaced with “Universe” or “Source,” it is worth questioning to what extent these changes were merely linguistic alterations within an otherwise theological system.

Instead of manifestation being about “God’s plan,” it became about “my purpose.”

The mirror shifted from God to self. Having a purpose was the individual responding to the idea of a Divine Plan - What do my desires mean about me? What do they tell me about what the universe has in store for me?

In these examples, phenomena are understood within the frame of a larger narrative that one is moving towards. If the mind stops feeding off concepts surrounding one’s purpose and meaning in the larger cosmic narrative, the mind is left with bare reality that refuses to explain why something is happening and is left to observe what is happening. When the mind stops interpreting reality, it is given room to observe the conditions of reality. 

And this is a step closer to true realization.

Manifestation and the Hedonic Treadmill

The hamster wheel always has us moving, yet the circular-rotating function of the wheel disables any true sense of progress. The idea of "moving forward" can therefore be seen as a product of a linear teleological framework that seeks an end goal or purpose.  Immanuel Kant and later philosophers argued that while humans naturally look for purpose, we cannot prove that the universe itself has an objective goal.

The idea that the universe has a goal is one thing, but to think that this goal is specifically related to helping humans manifest their desires is another thing entirely. Within this view, people tend to relate to the universe as if it were a Super Human Operating System in the same way God is imbued with human-like qualities.  

Within this framework, manifestation is simplified into a linear sequence of outcomes originating from the intentions or mental powers of the individual.

me → my mind → my reality.

Wherever there is simplification of complex cosmology, people mis-label their  interpretations as observations. I may interpret that I caused something to manifest, but I have no way of proving this is true. There are innumerable conditons that can contribute to the formation of circumstance - the individual mind is not the cause, but a cause.

Contemporary manifestation teaches that because your beliefs determine your vibration, and your vibration attracts your circumstances, if your circumstances are not changing, something inside you must be misaligned.

Reality can then be traced back to the individual’s mental state:

Success = “My manifestation worked!

”Failure = “I had limiting beliefs.

”Delay = “I wasn’t in alignment.

”Unexpected outcome = “The Universe has something better.

”Misfortune = “I attracted this experience for a reason.”

The model becomes increasingly difficult to falsify because almost every possible outcome can be incorporated into a theory that places the individual as the primary agent who is responsible for the conditions of their reality.

And while this idea isn’t entirely false, it isn’t entirely true either.

There are two main issues that I see with modern manifestation models.

The first is that it places unreasonable weight on the individual’s capacity to manifest their desired reality. Failure can therefore be labelled as misalignment, low vibration, or inadequate visualization.

Understanding why something did not work out becomes reduced to a singular cause:

• Can widespread systemic poverty really be attributed to limiting beliefs?

• Is career stagnation really a matter of insufficient abundance consciousness?

  
  

All things considered, these explanations are gross interpretations of complex concepts.

The very abstract nature of concepts means that any statement can be falsifiable when given a different meaning. Take the concepts of success and failure. Failure according to whom? Success according to what criterion? These concepts make sense not because they are rational but because they are vague. The view of something “not working out” is also a matter of perspective. The event that didn’t work out through one lens, is the same event that ‘worked out’ in a wider lens. 

The second issue with modern manifesting has to do with ethics, or the lack thereof. When manifestation practices are approached purely through the lens of personal desire, questions that help contextualize the value of our desires within larger ethical frameworks can easily be overlooked.

One might argue that, for our desires to be truly worthy, they must spring from a deeper spiritual current or virtue that older spiritual traditions so clearly emphasized.The fact that something is desired does not automatically mean it is worth pursuing. 

Where personal preference and individual power dominate, altruistic considerations can be forgotten. Without attention to our motivations, “prosperity consciousness” can stop being in service to generosity and become a function of greed.

The Myth of Mis-Alignment

When explanations for why we are not manifesting our desires are placed within vague concepts such as “misalignment,” more accurate truths about reality can become obscured through linear justifications. This becomes especially apparent when compared with multi-causal frameworks that are described within a Buddhist worldview. 

Through a Buddhist lens, current circumstances form part of a causal chain that includes past lives and residual karma which adds flavour and variation to the types of experiences we encounter.

Within the ethical framework of Buddhism, there is a distinction between taṇhā (craving), which is considered unwholesome or problematic, and wholesome forms of desire that contribute to the development of one’s character and spiritual aspirations.

Before asking, “How do I manifest this?” a Buddhist practitioner is invited to investigate the conditions of mind that give rise to wanting the object in the first place. This exercise would be analogous to a hamster asking, "I wonder what is causing this wheel to keep spinning?" Are all my desires worth the chase? Through obtaining this desire, am I truly moving “forward?” 

Instead of assuming that strong feelings correlate with truth, the Buddhist view exercises greater caution around this assumption. Buddhist practitioners give instruction not to follow feelings, but to investigate their causes. Investigation is what allows the metaphorical hamster wheel to stop spinning so that one can notice the surrounding conditions that are otherwise blind sighted in the pursuit of wanting. 

Modern manifestation tends to reverse this:

“If I strongly desire it, perhaps the desire is telling me something about what I am meant to have.”

Notice the way feelings are rationalized on account of their assumed authority.

“My feelings know best.”

Where older theosophy may have been seen to undermine individual authority, perceiving God as an external agent, modern manifestation tends to amplify individual authority as feelings themselves are the expressions of one's God Nature within.  

Humility and the Power of Mind

There is no doubt that individual psychology is a powerful agent in the orchestration of our lives. Even so, we can benefit from the humble reminder that our own mind exists within a sea of several billion other minds—and that is only counting the beings we know of!

While it is a nice idea to think the conscious mind is calling the shots on what we manifest, the reality is the subconscious has already pre-programmed installations, only some of which can be uninstalled or adjusted in the course of one's lifetime. Although the deeper grooves within the psyche are not permanent, they can take lifetimes to undergo noticeable alterations. In the same way some people have a tendency to furrow their brow (that’s me!), there are similar patterns of tension that exist in the psychic dimensions of our experience.

 

Consider, for example, the desire to have children. Some people do not have this desire, while others experience strong parental instincts. Phenomena of this nature is not necessarily about training the subconscious to want children. It may be about recognizing and honouring one’s instinctual inclinations.

This is important to keep in mind when manifesting.

Have you been unable to manifest your desires because you're "not-aligned" in the sense of being low-vibe, or because this desire is not congruent with your deeper biological needs right now?

 

While instincts can change over time, these sorts of changes do not necessarily arise from visualization practices nor is it helpful to even try to overide deeper programming that has its own wisdom. 

In other cases where we have developed bad habits, it is appropriate to employ the conscious mind and form an intention toward new habits. Over time, repeated conscious intentions change subconscious tendencies.

In the case of deciding whether to have children, one might ask: to what extent does the conscious mind need to get involved?

Reality will do what reality does. Sometimes the decision is not ours to make. 

This isn’t to discourage participation in the act of creation. We are constantly creating in every moment with or without our awareness. We simply tend to recognize the forms of creation that feel significant while ignoring those that we have not assigned meaning towards. 

What holds meaning is deeply shaped by our cultural values. Consider how your desires might change without capitalism or consumerist ideals?

What if collective aspirations were shaped towards more connection and generosity? How would our current desires shift in tone and quality? 

Within this broader philosophical outlook, we might approach manifestation with a longer pause creating room for greater reflection and self-inquiry.

Final Thoughts 

Although conventional manifestation models can be novel and fun, any desire-based technology is at risk of promoting ideological delusions and consumerist mentalities. By placing a high level of responsibility on the individual’s mental state, we tend to collapse larger social structures and karmic conditions into objective statements that simplify concepts like success and failure.

Anytime we attempt to explain something, we are forced to reach for information that has no basis in reality. The concept of manifestation is best served when it helps us to observe our relationship with reality -not as another means of control and dominion. To do this, the posture of participation is said to be more helpful and honest than the posture of the protagonist that so many manifestation practices endorse. Reflection Questions

• What happens when liberation from external authority becomes unlimited confidence in internal authority?

• Does each individual have equal manifesting potential available to them?

• Even if manifestation is simply a matter of shifting your thoughts, what other conditions make mental shifts more or less easy?