The Aspects of Manifestation We Shouldn’t Discount

The first time I heard of “manifestation” was in 2019, as I coasted up California’s Highway 5, listening to a podcast with Lacy Phillips, an actor turned manifestation coach. Manifestation, she explained, is the intentional practice of bringing our desires into existence. According to Phillips, the universe collaborates with us to make good things happen. “There’s a road map to have whatever story I want, and to create whatever story I want,” she said. “I have the autonomy, the power.”

As a United Methodist minister, I immediately heard alarm bells in my head. Phillips promised access to a world where people could make their dreams come true, for just $27 a month. The idea that people could obtain what they wanted most through sheer power of thought cut against both my theology and my own experience. I knew that our lives are rarely so predictable, determined by simple formulas. I also knew that the world is full of schemers eager to make money off people’s hopes and dreams.

But manifestation was clearly popular, and I was eager to understand why it appealed to people—even as I knew all the reasons for skepticism.  

[Read: How to make life more transcendent]

Over the last few years, manifestation experts and programs have flooded Instagram and TikTok. The methods for manifestation are as bountiful as the coaches. Take, for example, the 3-6-9 method.  In one TikTok video, over ethereal background music, a young woman instructs viewers to write what they want three times, why they’re manifesting it six times, and how the desire makes them feel nine times—from the perspective of having already achieved their goal. (The creator’s goal was to reach 30,000 followers on TikTok.) “The results happened in 3 days,” reads the caption beneath her video, which has more than 150,000 likes.

For high-profile coaches such as Lacy Phillips, with seven-figure business revenues and a team of paid staff, the methods are more elaborate: months-long programs training students to recognize what they really want, rewire their subconsciouses, and sharpen their intuition in order to receive what the universe wants to deliver.

Manifestation traces its roots to the 19th century New Thought movement. New Thought isn’t grounded in any particular religious tradition but incorporates threads from Jesus’s teachings, ancient Greek philosophy, and pop psychology, among other sources.  They’re braided together to buttress a central idea that thoughts create reality. Once people realize this, they can wield their mind’s power to fashion their destiny.

And there’s a grain of truth in this belief. Our thoughts do shape our reality to an extent. Astronauts were able to land on the moon only because we first imagined the possibility in our mind. We’re able to design our homes in the style we love because we first envision it. A simple change in perspective can also heal a fractured relationship or set someone on a new career path. I myself recently came across the mindset-shifting work of the spiritual teacher Byron Katie, and my husband can testify to how it’s transformed our marriage. Her process, known as “The Work,” helps dismantle negative thoughts we may have about a person in our life by asking ourselves four questions: 1) Is it true? 2) Can I absolutely know that it’s true? 3) How do I react when I believe the thought? 4) Who would I be without the thought? Then, we reverse the original negative thought and provide three pieces of evidence to support the opposite statement. Going through these questions made me realize my tendency to automatically cast my husband as the wrongdoer and me as the victim in our conflicts.

But during the same month that I immersed myself in “The Work,” a series of earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria, killing more than 40,000 people. Did the victims manifest these outcomes? They were like you and me—people with hopes for long and happy lives.

At first glance, the existence of such catastrophes may seem at odds with the core teachings of the manifestation industry. In fact, one helps produce the other. Living in a chaotic, unpredictable world leads people to seek order or an equation to understand it all.

Google trends reveal that searches for manifestation peaked during the summer of 2020, when the reality of COVID-19 had set in and, consequently, so had fear of the unknown. Vaccines for the disease had yet to be created, financial markets were unpredictable, and schools were at a loss as to how to proceed. Of course people wanted to learn how to manifest a better reality than the one they were living in.

[Meghan O’Rourke: Americans have to accept uncertainty]

But there are dangers to the manifestation worldview. Believing that we are primarily responsible for our own life circumstances leads to two insidious lines of thinking. First, it propels us to judge one another and ourselves instead of extending compassion. He’s poor because he’s lazy; she died young because she was irresponsible—these are sentiments I’ve heard others express. We also judge ourselves, as if we could have prevented bad things from happening to us. But research shows we’re happier when we’re kinder to ourselves and others by recognizing our finitude, that we did our best with the limited knowledge we had at the time.

Second, manifestation has a fragile ethical foundation. Neat formulas collapse when misfortune strikes. A better foundation would be one that doesn’t crumble when events go awry or give a false sense of stability when events unfold exactly according to plan.  

The Bible’s canon of wisdom literature, which includes Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, highlights this human predicament. People spend their life trying to understand why the world unfolds the way it does. We are the only species that asks these questions, because we are the only species that can imagine what we want and create a plan to achieve those desires. Wanting isn’t bad; it’s natural and automatic, like breathing.

At the same time, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote more than 2,000 years ago, trying to exert complete control over your life is like “chasing after the wind.” We can do only what we can do and acknowledge our humble place in the grand scheme of things. This disposition is what sets prayer apart from manifestation. The practice of prayer presupposes that while we can express and pursue our preferences, we ultimately hand them over to someone with a perspective much broader and a love more generous than any of us can fathom.

Back in 2019, I enrolled in Lacy Phillips’s free class after I heard her interview. Just before bed that evening, I completed her first assignment: write down a list of everything I wanted within the next year. For item No. 1, I wrote: “Move back to Claremont to be closer to my family and friends.”

Up until that moment, I hadn’t let myself admit this. I had a plum position a couple of hours away in San Diego. Who would be stupid enough to leave behind the daily barefoot walks on soft sand in exchange for traffic and smog? Phillips’s assignment took me back to myself, beneath the external and internal voices of expectation placed upon me.

Although I wouldn’t recommend paying for a manifestation program, I also don’t dismiss the value of embracing practices that help people home in on what they truly want. Manifestation is helpful to the extent that it gives voice to these desires. However, we mustn’t stop there. Identifying our desires is important insofar as they point to our deeper values. Usually, the values we hold most dear aren’t material; they’re sensations such as joy, safety, beauty, confidence, and love.

For me, moving to Claremont meant embedding my family, especially my son and daughter, in a stronger web of support. I manifested my move that year and now happily reside back in Claremont.

I still do Lacy Phillip’s assignment occasionally to discover something new about myself or figure out what really matters to me. It’s fun to see some items on the list come true. But for the ones that don’t, I’m careful to avoid manifestation’s pitfalls of judgment and fragility. Instead, I remind myself: I’ve done my best; I release the rest.