Yes, Manifestation Is Magical: And That’s Why It Works
How to actually get what you want using manifestation practices
Right now, millions of articles, videos, and podcasts trawl the internet, defending manifestation from a scientific perspective.
By manifestation, I’m talking about using processes like visualization, imaginal scenes, and affirmations to create the reality you want.
Invariably, the articles and videos proclaiming the scientific basis of manifestation say, “It’s not magic: it’s something we can understand scientifically.”
They’re not wrong. But if we overlook the magical roots of manifestation, we’re also likely to limit its potency, becoming demoralized and convinced we’re powerless to change our circumstances.
How to Argue for Your Own Limitations (Using Science)
When people speak about the science behind manifestation, they usually mention the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS is a bundle of nerves charged with pattern recognition and salience detection.
It processes huge amounts of information, distinguishing the meaningful information — data points that confirm your existing beliefs and perceptions — from the less relevant.
One example of the RAS in action: When you buy yellow overalls, suddenly you can’t walk down the street without seeing a stranger wearing them.
How does this relate to manifestation? As Wayne Dyer put it, what you focus on expands.
When you focus on the signs what you want is on its way, you’ll see more evidence of that perception.
Conversely, when you focus on your tension-riddled relationships, your dying cacti, and other not-so-pleasant aspects of your reality, reasons to suffer multiply.
But here’s the thing. The people who are saying manifestation isn’t magic are overlooking the ancient alchemical formula that manifestation comes from: Solve et Coagula, which means “to dissolve and recreate.”
As Carolyn Lovewell describes in her brilliant book, Existential Kink, the #1 reason manifestations fail is that we focus too heavily on one side of the solve et coagula formula.
Mainstream manifestation processes represent the coagula side of the equation. This is where we recite affirmations in front of the mirror, visualize our goals, or create vision boards.
The less well-known part of the process, solve, (pronounced “solve-ayy”), is where we confront and dissolve the patterns that gave rise to our less-than-ideal circumstances in the first place.
This is the tension: The people who pat themselves on the back for understanding manifestation scientifically never mention the solve part of the process. As a result, they’re setting people up to fail.
The Cost of One-Dimensional Optimism
When we solely focus on Coagula processes (i.e. visualization, affirmations, or vision boarding), we see only superficial or transient changes.
You visualize a thriving business, and transformation happens (for a little while).
But a few weeks later, you’re bored, resentful, and hunting for a new business model. Or you manifest a relationship with a specific person, and that person turns out to be clingy or ice cold.
Thinking of manifestation not as magic but as something we can prove scientifically, it’s like we’re trying to squeeze it within our depressingly secular materialist culture.
When you do this, you’re quite likely to end up feeling like manifestation truly is woo-woo or that it works for others, but not you.
Yet as psychoanalyst and mystic Carl Jung wrote:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate.”
Said differently: until you illuminate and release the assumptions and beliefs that initially made you want to manifest changes, those patterns will repeat, and you’ll feel like a victim, throwing your fists at the “woo-woo” freaks who promised that all you had to do was affirm success.
The Science (Err, the Magic) of Making Your Own Fate
When people rush to say manifestation isn’t magic, it’s usually because they don’t understand what magic is. They picture pointy hats, the crescent moon, and other spooky lunar imagery.
But according to the infamous occultist and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley, magic is the process of creating change in accordance with one’s will.
And as mentioned in Existential Kink, the Basque word for witch, sorginak, means “one who makes her own fate.”
When people say, “manifestation isn’t woo-woo magic,” it’s as if they’ve forgotten what we’re talking about.
And I get it: though I think the term “woo-woo” is condescending and basic (I’m proudly woo-woo), I understand that people mean to imply that manifestation can be systematized. Engineered through repeatable processes.
And it can be. But it works much better when you remember to dissolve the painful belief systems that gave rise to your sucky life before you attempt to create a new one.
To increase our likelihood of successfully manifesting what we want, we need to create what Carolyn calls a “unified will.” We can do this by confronting and releasing the assumptions, curiosities, and beliefs that led to the current versions of our lives.
So, in addition to your imaginal scenes or vision board, try the following solve practices.
Replacing Your Disillusionment with Enduring Transformation
The Sedona Method
“But ordinarily we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we don’t let them complete their work.
We try to suppress them or discharge them in premature action, not realizing that they are a process of creation, which, like birth, begins with pain and turns into a child.” — Alan Watts
We suffer, not because we feel pain, but because we don’t trust ourselves to process it. We don’t realize that our emotions arise and pass away within predictable patterns.
We either run from pain, suppress it with drugs, social media, or other forms of stimulation. Or we clumsily express it in ways that ultimately amplify it.
The Sedona Method is an easy-to-learn process that helps you tap into your always-present capacity to surrender and release painful emotions. It’s a solve practice because it involves confronting difficult emotions directly.
Instead of papering over your pain with affirmations or visualizations, you liberate the energy that might otherwise go to fighting or denying your emotional experience.
The Sedona Method is elegant and simple: it’s something you can do in less than 15 seconds, and it doesn’t require you to learn an intricate process or adopt any belief systems. It simply brings you into conversation with the ease and joy always lying dormant within you.
There are several ways to do it, but this is the process I like. It helps me work with everything from regret, self-doubt, to the urge to procrastinate.
This releasing process comes from the book The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin.
- Ask yourself, could I welcome this feeling?
- Would I?
- If yes, when? If no, would I rather have this feeling or would I rather be free?
- Visualize a pot. Imagine lifting its top off and watching steam flow upwards.
The change you’ll feel is experiential: you probably won’t be able to intellectualize the shift, yet you’re likely to feel a shift in your orientation toward your emotions.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) Tapping
“Any uncomfortable high sensation is an indication that you are at an edge. Approaching it with awareness and consciousness instead of reactivity is where magic is created. Feel into the high sensation before reacting to it.” — Carolyn Elliott
Tapping is an energy psychology process that allows you to work through emotional and physical pain.
It’s acupuncture without the needles: it invites you to tap on acupressure points on throughout your body while repeating the anchoring phrase,
Even though I [feel anxious, have a stomachache, feel angry, want to procrastinate], I deeply and completely accept myself.
EFT functions as a form of exposure therapy: by directly acknowledging how you feel, you’re discharging it.
It’s the same principle at work with the Sedona Method. It’s a tool for speeding up emotional alchemy. Tapping gives you an experiential glimpse at the way all emotion naturally shifts when given space to do so.
It’s an alternative to the way most of us were conditioned to relate to our painful or scary emotions: that is, by running away or doing whatever we can to banish them.
Yet of course, when we run from or suppress our emotions, we paradoxically extend their effects on our psyches and bodies.
But when we look them directly in the face, we get them out of the unconscious (where they hold generative power to shape our circumstances). Once we see and feel them, we dissipate their power.
When I first read about EFT, it seemed tedious or complex, but it’s extremely simple.
You can learn and memorize the points in less than 10 minutes. There’s a tiny bit of upfront effort, but once you learn it, EFT is a tool you can forever use to work through charged emotions.
Shadow Journaling: Illuminating the Thrill Hidden in your Darkest Tensions
The fundamental purpose of shadow work is to cultivate a remembering that our lives feel tedious and painful, not because the world sucks or we’re powerless, but because there are quieter parts of us who genuinely enjoy the darkness.
Shadow work journaling is a tool that helps us unearth the desires and curiousites that the quieter, shadowy parts of us are keeping in motion.
By simply shining the light of awareness on your unconscious shadowy desires, you subtract from their power to compulsively run the show.
Journal about your answers to the following questions.
Why is [whatever you want] unsafe for you?
What assumptions would you need to release if your desires materialized?
What’s a not-so-wholesome benefit of you creating a wildly good life?
What do I get out of being in pain? Where’s the strange pleasure in it? Where do I feel that in my body?
What’s the most controversial thing that would happen if your intentions became reality?
Who would you piss off if you got everything you’ve ever wanted?
Consider this: Most people have messy, gloomy lives because they believe their egos are truly running the show.
They believe that the absence of their deep desires is a product of the moral bankruptcy of the world or their lack of talent or resourcefulness.
And most of these people will NEVER do anything to make their unconscious fears and desires conscious.
When you unearth your unconscious curiosities, you’re taking 20 minutes to unravel complexes that keep people in the same miserable circumstances for 75+ years.
Good for you.
If you take nothing else from this article, please take this: manifestation IS a magical process; that is, it’s the act of intervening in our fates.
Just because we can think about it from a scientific perspective, doesn’t mean we should overlook its magical roots.
Here’s an irony I find frustrating — A lot of people pat themselves on the back for having a scientific worldview.
Yet this can seriously hold them back. When we think of manifestation divorced from its history, we risk missing a fundamental part of making it work: The process of confronting and letting go of the assumptions, patterns, and paradigms that made us flock to manifest new circumstances to begin with.
Again, it’s not that it’s impossible to manifest without solve practices. But it’s a lot harder to create long-term, deep-rooted changes without them.
Wishing you liberation from compulsive patterns and the experiential proof that you truly are the author of your own fate,
Caty
If You Want to Trap Yourself in Scarcity Consciousness, Program This Belief Deep into Your Psyche
Release these trances for greater freedom with money.
Our beliefs and our actions are two sides of the same coin.
We don’t take action when we have the right information. We take action when we trust our actions will yield fruit.
Whether you have that trust or you’re riddled with self-doubt depends on your conditioned beliefs about money, power, and the value of your time and attention.
Has Society Conditioned You to Push Away Abundance?
My subconscious beliefs have repeatedly interfered with my creative and financial momentum.
I’ve invested in degrees, courses, and teachers only to procrastinate, feel guilty about not acting, but then cringe at my attempts to move forward with the information I’m learning.
From these experiences, I know transformation doesn’t come from having the right information.
Transformation happens when you identify and re-write the subconscious beliefs conditioning how you think about yourself, the world, and your chances of success within it.
But unless your parents carefully curated your reality & were conscious reality creators in their own right, you were exposed to many noxious money beliefs.
Even if money isn’t a problem for you, there’s a high likelihood you could be making more — or experience more ease and flow while stewarding the money you already have — if you examined your unconscious perceptions about money.
The Subconscious Mind Learns Through Repetition
Our money programs come from what we absorb repeatedly.
Our repeated conversations, interactions, and messages from our caregivers influence us through osmosis.
In my case, my parents had jobs they only tolerated. The message I received was something like, “Work is inherently sucky and draining, but that’s just reality.”
That subliminal message has led to my discounting my authentic interests, and expecting money to come from stressful work alone.
Similarly, there are so many repetitive money messages in mainstream films and music.
One common trope is that wealthy people are evil, dull, or selfish. Remember Titanic?
But here’s the good news.
As long as you remember repetition is key, you can erase 95% of your dysfunctional money beliefs by being radically selective about the information you consume.
Then, you can also use hypnosis, subconscious mind reprogramming techniques (such as affirmations or subliminals), and listen to podcasts or read books that inspire forward-moving thoughts around your finances.
Along with those habits, make a habit out of writing down the stories you’re telling about money.
When you make those stories conscious, you defuse their power to control you.
Beware of the Childhood Message that Makes You a Stranger to Money
After lots of introspection, I’ve realized a phrase I heard in childhood may have been the mother of all my scarcity-driven thinking.
It was the dreaded slogan that“Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
In my experience, I subconsciously interpreted this to mean money isn’t readily flowing. It’s hard to make.
This can also show up as the belief money comes from struggle, suffering, and sacrifice (rather than trust in your natural instincts & preferences).
Hello, contraction.
These ideas gave rise to a giant wall between my younger self and the natural flow of money.
This belief can manifest in so many different ways:
- Believing the only stable, feasible way to make money is by doing something you hate or only tolerate.
- Seeing work as a perpetual, inconvenient, taxing struggle, and as a result, pushing away the possibility that what you’re genuinely interested in could ever bring you financial freedom
- Over-committing to projects. When stress feels more familiar to your nervous system than ease, you’ll compulsively take on more work than you can handle.
The most insidious result of the belief “money doesn’t grow on trees” is this:
It diminishes your awareness of the core foundation of positive momentum.
The reality that the small seeds you plant today will soon compound, and you’ll be free to devote the same amount of time & energy to your work (while reaping deeper benefits).
As explained in Atomic Habits, most people delude themselves into believing they have to take massive action to see big transformations in their lives.
But the truth is big transformations come from the accumulation of small, yet consistent daily actions.
If you believe money doesn’t grow on trees — or it doesn’t spring from tiny seeds you water gradually over time — chances are, you’ll believe writing a book, growing a podcast, or starting from ground zero as a course creator will be futile.
You’ll give up before you try.
Or you’ll overwhelm yourself with 10+ hour days, burn out, and quit before you see any momentum.
A Perspective to Help You Burn Through Overwhelm, Fear, or Futility While You Work
Reduce the responsibility until it’s tolerable. You don’t have to fix everything at once. You can just start by fixing the things you want to fix. — Jordan Peterson
This statement is potent medicine against imposter syndrome, fear, and overwhelm because it allows you to start with the low-hanging fruit.
On the days when you feel completely unmotivated, take the smallest possible step.
For example, if you’re interested in creating a course, set a timer for 20 minutes, and brain dump ideas for it.
If you want to write a song, pick 2–3 chords, spend 10 minutes noodling, and note whether anything stands out to you.
And here’s the key: Every time you take those small steps, celebrate them. Reward yourself.
The more you celebrate the actions you feel willing to take, the more naturally and bountifully your motivation will flow.
And remember: Our capacities are different every day.
Sometimes, you’ll only feel the capacity to show up for 20 minutes.
On other days, choosing to devote 20 minutes will be a bridge to a better state: You’ll find that by simply getting into action, your next steps will unfold naturally.
Small steps, learning and returning to the fundamentals of your craft, and consistency create positive, sustainable momentum.
It’s how you go from seeing money generation as a gated garden accessible only by a lucky few…
to knowing it emerges naturally through a potent combination of patience, trust, and consistency.
And if you want to make this process even more concrete, buy a Money Tree, and shower it with love, water, and attention.
See its growth as a devotional to your growing relationship with Money herself.
For more perspectives on reality creation, mindset reprogramming, and honoring your unconscious money kinks, join the Fate Hacking Academy, my free newsletter about using occult philosophy to author your own fate & break free of the limiting societal beliefs keeping you stuck.
