You’re driving a car in traffic, 30 minutes away and running late for an important event that you really need to be on time for. Based on GPS and current traffic, if you find a parking spot outside of the building you’ll make it just in time. However, it’s the city in the middle of the day at one of the most busy districts. Chances are very slim you’ll get a spot and most likely you’ll have to park in a garage a couple blocks away which will make you too late. With all your thoughts and intention for every second, every minute of the rest of your drive you hope for “getting a parking spot just outside of the building when you get there”.
The allure of an abundant, infinite world that we can have all that we ask for sounds great. Want to be a rich millionaire, want a perfect spouse, a perfect job and to be the best at whatever you endeavor on? Simple, proponents say just ‘manifest’ it into existence. Manifesting means that we set our intentions and everything will fall into place. Skeptics of course will say manifesting is just hippie mumbo-jumbo; and if you want anything you need to plan ahead and work for it day in and day out. What if they are both right?
Goals & Planning
Regardless of whether we’re manifesting or deliberately taking action, one thing is consistent across the board, we need a target goal. The details surrounding the target goal is crucial. Using our initial traffic example, let’s say we get to our destination and lo-and-behold the parking spot is coming available right as we pull up. We put our blinkers on and wait for the car to pull out; we’ve done it! Or have we? Unfortunately, the person isn’t the best driver and can’t seem to get out of the spot, the parallel parking is so tight they need to inch forward and backwards and the driver is very slow at doing it. Ten minutes go by (the same amount of time it would have taken to park in the garage), and we finally get to pull up; what we asked for initially was getting a parking spot … when we get there. Any other situation it would be fine, but because we’re late we needed to be able to park immediately without being delayed in any way so that we’d make our event on time.
It of course should go without saying that was our intent. But, let’s imagine for a second we’re in line at a manifesting store, when we get to the cashier we tell them we want to “get a parking spot just outside of the building when we arrive”. How do they know what we actually want if we haven’t fully articulated what it is? In reality we want to be able to make our event on time, not simply find a parking spot.
Instead of manifesting the situation, let’s look at ‘planning’ to get a parking spot right out front of the building. Let’s ignore the fact that if we are properly planning we should also account for traffic and being late in the first place… First we’d have to determine what are the ways to get a parking spot right in front of the building? We’d want to ask various questions: Is there any parking restrictions at that location? What time is the parking known to have available spots? What time seems to have the most changes in parked cars? Do we know anyone nearby that can do us a favor? Each of these questions will help us determine when we can expect with reasonable probability to be able to get a front spot. Assuming we were in the ‘exact’ same situation except instead of manifesting, we had to magically ‘make’ something happen, we could still figure something out. How about hiring an on call personal assistant in the area and giving them extra to wait for parking and save the spot. Task rabbit, Go Errand, even Door Dash could be a way to get your way with a little extra planning and critical thinking, no manifesting required.
Broken Manifesting
Assuming manifesting is actually true, there is one extremely important fact that no one on the manifest team seems to acknowledge. Let’s use a different manifesting example and this time say we want to be the greatest player of all time for whatever sport we love the most. But we learned after being late to our event last year that if we want to manifest we need to be very specific. We don’t want to be the greatest of all time in some wacky way, like being the greatest NBA player to our 5 year old nephew. No, we want to be the greatest of all time to the majority of sports newscasters and the majority of fans. And we want to be considered the greatest of all time for as long as the sport exists.
That may sound insane to most people, but for someone already in the profession at least we would have met the minimum requirements and skip the details there. Now we just have to manifest our destiny, there’s only one problem (well maybe a few, but let’s keep it simple). There are other players that want the exact same thing. Despite the idea that the world is infinitely abundant, it is simply not the case for our goal, only one person can fill the role.
Wanting to be the greatest of all time in a specific area means that our manifesting needs to somehow compete with other player’s manifesting. This is a problem, because to all but one of the players, manifesting this particular goal simply won’t work. What then is the logical conclusion? And if we are manifesting in a way that is ultimately ‘competing’ with others, then what’s the difference between manifesting and simply competing?
Trying Harder
Let’s imagine we’re working on becoming the greatest and to walk this path our ‘intentions’ led us to a massive ton of practice and research, no life outside of our sport whatsoever. No parties, no social life, no spouse, just living and breathing our sport. Yet there’s another player that you heard of who’s really good who is doing the same thing; they are also all in, and we know they also want to be the greatest.
How would we overcome our competitor? Whether manifesting or simply working hard, overcoming the competitor is the same. Extreme focus, finding ways to learn more, adapt and grow faster and perform consistently better; all while at the same time understanding our own limitations and weaknesses so we can improve them and prevent others from exploiting them.
Yet, what is the difference in a manifesting ‘intent’ and our naturally competitive ‘desire’ to overcome? Ideally they are pretty much the same, and it is all just a matter of “who wants it more”? If we dissect what that ultimately means, it infers that we are willing to ‘sacrifice’ aspects of our being to achieve our intended goal or purpose. And whoever ‘sacrifices’ more will end up winning.
Manifesting the Skeptic
The extreme manifesting where we are sacrificing our every being doesn’t seem to be a loving, kind, ‘abundant’ manifestation that proponents seem to advocate and what we may fail to realize is that if manifesting is real, then at any point depending on the scale to which we are trying to manifest, we are competing with other’s in our intentions. Simply manifesting a job ultimately is going to be competing with someone else who also wants that job. This is why, in my opinion if manifesting is real, it simply can’t always work. Even worse if manifesting does somehow “always” work, then we are potentially taking from others because we ‘want to’ irrespective of what others need or want and irrespective of who did or didn’t put in more work. If we do so knowingly, is that what a good person would do?
The other issue that I’ve alluded to is that in my opinion manifesting is no different than setting goals. Starting a business for example is about finding the right ‘niche’ that you can be the best at. If you go forth guns blazing trying to be what other’s have already established a place in, it’s going to be that much harder. Why would it be any different with manifesting?
Increasing the odds of manifesting anything, then would be a matter of choosing the ‘right goals’, and those goals should be ones that are in touch with our own nature, our skills and abilities and do not unnecessarily conflict with others. Focusing on things that are abundant, more internally focused and cooperative competition versus scarce, externally focused and adversarial competition could make all the difference in the world. It may also tell us something about our character and what it is that really drives us.
Down to Competition
Notice we are talking about competition no matter what. We cannot live in this world without competing in some form, but the key is doing so in a ‘cooperative’ nature vs a ‘adversarial’ nature. Focusing ‘internally’ doesn’t mean to be selfish, it means that when we compete we are ultimately working on ourselves, not to restrict or negatively impact others.
Despite what many may say, playing against each other in sports is a cooperative competition. Cooperative because everyone agrees to the rules and what defines the sport. Without that agreement, we’d have a more adversarial type of competition and thus where we have ‘cheaters’ and ‘bad guys’ who don’t follow agreed upon conventions.
If manifesting is real, we should have similar agreements or rules that acknowledges the dilemma of competition in an abundant world. A rule that underscores the fact that if we are asking for something specific that others also want, we need to do so in a way that is cooperative in competition to every extent feasible. For example, if we want to manifest being the president, then we should also have put in all the work necessary, have the charisma and have all the knowledge that we’d expect the best president to have. And if we do not do so, we are no longer manifesting cooperatively but ‘adversarially’. If in either case manifesting works, the question is what type of person do we really want to be, because chances are how we manifest is going to provide that answer for us.
