If you’ve ever dipped your toe, even briefly, into the rapids of New Age spirituality, you’ve probably come across the word ‘manifestation’. Along with ‘love and light’, and calls to ‘raise your vibration’, ‘manifestation’ is one of those words you’ll find on your kooky cousin’s Instagram feed next to a sales pitch for some healing crystals.
It was popularised by Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book The Secret, which holds that the ‘law of attraction’ enables you to ‘manifest’ your desires (i.e., magic things into existence just by believing in them). “See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It works every time, with every person,” she claimed, audaciously.
Later, it caught on as part of the New Age renaissance — the boom of astrology and tarot, crystals and witchcraft, which is gaining ground as traditional religion loses resonance.
Manifesters are told to visualise their desire, as if it’s already within their grasp. Apparently, if they’ve visualised hard enough and raised their vibrations high enough, the dream job or dream partner or lottery win will eventually fall into their lap.
This works, they say, because thoughts create reality. Sometimes quantum physics is invoked to explain why this might be, although a little part of you does suspect that Byrne has never studied the double slit experiment.
At its simplest level, manifestation is a bid for control — an appealing prospect to anyone who’s ever felt skint or loveless, or lived through a still-raging global pandemic. Its cosmology is appealing too. Rather than being a discrete individual in an empty universe, the law of attraction holds that you’re fully enmeshed with cosmic forces — and that through wanting something hard enough, you can make those forces do your bidding.
Despite the many flaws in this idea, I decided to manifest something big — a publishing deal for my work in progress (also called The Reluctant Hippie). Would visualising my book on the shelves of Waterstones make it so? Would a lifetime of scepticism be overturned, as I tuned into the power of positive thinking? There was only one way to find out.
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Now, not to spoil the suspense or anything, but the answer to both those questions is no. As yet I have completely failed to manifest a publishing deal, which you could either interpret as a boo-boo on my part (I wasn’t manifesting hard enough! I entertained too much doubt and negativity!), or as evidence that manifestation might be bullshit.
Personally, I’m leaning towards a little of column A and a whole stinking heap of column B. Sure, a seasoned manifester might look at me and say “you are a jittery mass of self-doubt who didn’t even do proper visualisation and scripting exercises — what were you expecting?” But the more I think about it, the more repellent the concept becomes to me, and the harder it is to square with my own spirituality.
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The flaws in the idea are obvious. First up, the law of attraction entails a big ol’ dose of victim blaming. Let’s say you’re still skint, still loveless, still in the grips of a pandemic, even though you performed a bunch of ‘scripting’ exercises. Was that your own fault somehow? Are wealthy bell-ends like Ivanka Trump (who recently manifested a private island) somehow more spiritually aligned than a poor Indian mystic?
This line of thinking bleeds into the ‘just world hypothesis’ — the childish belief that life is fair — not to mention the pseudo-Buddhist idea that shitty circumstances are justified karma. When you espouse these kinds of ideas, all you are doing is kicking someone when they’re down, forcing them to grapple with self-reproach on top of whatever else has happened.
To look at the issue from another angle, what about if you’re anxious or depressed, or prone to intrusive thoughts? According to the law of attraction, anyone with a mental health condition is doomed to create the circumstances they’re afraid of.
For example: failing to love yourself means creating a reality in which nobody else can love you. Being terrified of jellyfish attacks means somehow manifesting a jellyfish attack. Doubting that you can blag a publishing deal (because, you know, it’s really bloody hard and you’re not a total narcissist) means no publishing deal for you.
Perhaps I can accept a weakened version of this principle, insofar as if really hate yourself, you probably won’t make the kind of decisions conducive to a healthy relationship. Similarly, if you think you’re a crappy writer, you won’t put your stuff out there for appraisal. Confidence is a useful tool, and perhaps some people benefit from manifestation insofar as they find it motivating.
But the gurus of our age are making a stronger claim than that. They’re not just saying ‘you need to believe in yourself to make your dreams a reality’. They’re saying that even once the book is written and publishers are appraising it, it’s your thinking around the issue that determines the final outcome. There’s a strange denial here of external forces, including an overriding of other people’s agency.
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I have another issue with the law of attraction, which is that it runs completely counter to everything I’ve ever learned about spirituality. As far as I’ve understood it, the spiritual path is about surrendering control rather than gaining it. It’s about letting things go. Learning how to centre yourself amid changeable circumstances — finding the still middle in the Wheel of Fortune as the spokes whir round indefinitely.
It definitely isn’t about getting rich or gaining status or getting whatever you want whenever you want it. That’s the kind of toxic growth mentality that leads to planetary crisis.
I firmly endorse the right to be negative, the right to be angry, the right to feel the full spectrum of human emotions instead of clinging desperately to the ‘good’ ones. I want to welcome my shadow side rather than running away from it. I want to feel whatever I bloody well feel, without having to worry that my negative thoughts are somehow going to manifest negative circumstances. Surely it would do far more damage if the thoughts are repressed, the feelings bolted down, the disappointment clogging my gut rather than being properly metabolised.
I do believe that each situation has something to teach me, and that the tough situations are usually the best teachers. At a push, I can believe in some kind of unfolding cosmic process, which has its own mysterious teleology. What simply doesn’t ring true is that the cosmic process would kowtow to the demands of my personal ego, or that it would be better for me if it did.
My book didn’t work out because it didn’t fit the marketplace, and no amount of moodboarding could have made a difference.
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Abi Millar
Freelance writer
This is a Write Off 
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