What Is Manifesting?

At the least, it is intriguing. The New York Times excerpted Tara Isabella Burton’s book, Self-Made. 

Burton is doing cultural history, and she is doing it well. She is assessing certain religious movements that promoted what is called “manifesting,”-- which she describes as:

… the art and quasi-spiritual science of willing things into existence through the power of desire, attention and focus.

For my part I had not been familiar with manifesting, but the practice and its theoretical underpinnings sound an awful lot like therapy. Doesn’t therapy promise that changing your mind can change the world? It can even change reality, as in, it can help you to change your sex.

I suspect that Burton discussed therapy at other points in her book, but, for now, we only have the Times excerpts.

She describes a moment in intellectual history:

Want to improve your health or make more money or get more Instagram followers? Believe hard enough, a host of TikTok “manifesting” influencers insist, and the vibes of the universe will bring what you desire into existence.

Burton maintains an objective posture, but clearly, the notion that you are who you think you are and that you can change who you are by changing how you think is absurd. It ignores the simple fact that if it is merely a question of your self-definition, what happens when you inevitably find yourself surrounded with people who are not in on the joke. They will not treat you as you think you are, unless you try to force them all to think it.

Such is the case with today’s transmania. It is not enough for a trans person to change his mind and to pretend to have changed his sex. Everyone around him must accept his new identity. Which makes clear the fact that there is more to it than self-creation. It is mental tyranny.

To understand today’s manifesting culture and what it means, we need to look deeper into history — beyond the 21st century and back to the 19th, to a little-known but once extraordinarily popular American religious tradition known as New Thought, or the “mind cure.”

New Thought can be traced back to the 1800s and a New England faith healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Quimby wondered why, when given the same treatment, some of his patients got better and others didn’t. The answer, he concluded, had to do not with a fault in his methods but rather with a discrepancy in his patients’ mind-sets. Some people simply wanted to get better more than others did. Those who wanted it badly enough were able to essentially get in touch with and harness the energy of the universe to will themselves to heal. Those who didn’t, well, simply died.

Again, this bears a striking resemblance to certain aspects of therapy. If the only issue is: how badly do you want it, the formula might well be applied to cure, however dubious the notion, but does it apply to all aspects of life? 

If you want to pass a test or to sell a product does it suffice to want to do so? Is the sole question how badly you want to succeed? 

Obviously, to anyone who has given the matter a modicum of thought, if you sit in the corner of your room mooning about how badly you want something, you are less likely to get it-- because you will have done nothing to gain any advantage. And this does not even consider what will happen if you are burning up with desire to play professional football, but simply do not have the talent.

But then, Burton continues, the logical consequence of this reasoning is the notion that people who are impoverished simply do not want to be rich. But does that mean that they want to be poor? You are responsible for your condition and you can change it by taking the right dose of optimism. 

Burton wrote:

But this Gilded Age optimism about human potential had a dark side. After all, if anyone could achieve health, wealth and success simply by wanting it badly enough, logic held that the converse was also true: The poor, the sick and the vulnerable had brought their conditions upon themselves by failing to possess the requisite will to change.

She seems most concerned with the political application of the concept.

It is only by understanding the religious and occult tradition from which the concept of manifesting descends that we can see it for what it truly is: a spiritualized gloss on the same deluded logic that suggests that poverty is a choice, and that underpins so much political disinformation. After all, if reality is only ever what we make it, then those who possess the fewest scruples about conforming to the truth are the ones who will have the most power to shape the future.

Perhaps she mentioned it in the rest of the book, but this is an adjunct to the analysis offered by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 

Weber was analyzing a civilizational shift. He was asking how a civilization that chose to work only to subsist chose to work to accumulate wealth. In the past people had not wanted to accumulate earthly goods, because they thought that life was a waystation on the road to Heaven. 

Good Calvinist that he was, Weber argued that people who succeeded in life had been blessed by God; their material success was a sign that they were predestined for an eternity in Heaven. 

Obviously, this allows God to decide, point that seems slightly more cogent than to tell people that they could, by an act of will or by indulging a burning desire, change who they are and even change the world.

Weber surmised that those who accumulated excessive wealth were showing their neighbors that God had already consigned them to Heaven. They were not showing off their desire to get rich but showing off their being chosen or elected by God. 

It is obviously not the same as manifesting, but clearly it has some resonance.

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