The Loominal Take - Manifestation

The word “manifestation” has infiltrated everyday language by 2025. People who have never cracked open a New Age book are using it. YouTube and TikTok are saturated with it. There are thousands of manifestation coaches, each with their own spin. It feels like a new thing, like we all just discovered this idea at once and decided to run with it.

But it’s not new.

Although I can’t say how far back this really goes it is commonly framed as “ancient knowledge”. What I can say for sure is that this version of things started at least during the spiritualist movements of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when questions about consciousness, death, and the unseen were pressing into the cultural imagination. Books like The Kybalion (1908) laid out metaphysical laws of mind and reality. The New Thought movement gave us Neville Goddard, whose Bible-based teachings framed scripture as instruction for creation. Florence Scovel Shinn followed with affirmations rooted in a Christian context. Louise Hay popularized the idea that thoughts and emotions shape health, launching not just a bestselling book but an entire publishing house that carried these ideas forward through people like Wayne Dyer.

Then came The Secret. A book, then a movie, that exploded into the mainstream and sold millions of copies. It gave the language of “law of attraction” to everyday households. Abraham Hicks had already been channeling their collective consciousness for decades, teaching manifestation as vibrational alignment. Vadim Zeland’s Reality Transurfing in 2006 added a Russian philosophical angle. And this is just the famous short list. There are far more. Manifestation has always been present in some form, but now it’s gone global, and everyone has access.

I think that’s amazing.

Anytime a philosophy about how we live and perceive reality reaches collective consciousness, it creates openings. But like anything in a dualistic world, it carries both light and shadow. The explosion of manifestation has brought inspiration, creativity, and possibility. It has also carried risks.

One danger is solipsism — the belief that only you exist, and everyone else is just a character in your movie. Some manifestation teachings lean toward that. I’ve even followed teachers who insisted that other people’s behaviors, thoughts, and feelings were my manifestations. That I was controlling them. I now believe that’s a dangerous road. It erases the sovereignty of others and turns life into a kind of delusion where empathy and responsibility can vanish.

Another danger is self-blame. If you’re taught you create everything, then every illness, failure, or heartbreak can become “your fault.” I lived through that mindset. I believed that if my health faltered, I had failed. And I watched others go through the same. When Jerry Hicks, husband of Esther Hicks (Abraham), got cancer, their community was told it would be healed through alignment. But he died. The fallout left people confused and devastated. Even those who seem to control their reality do not escape sickness or death, because mortality is not optional.

So let me be clear, I am not dismissing manifestation. Quite the opposite. I don’t have to “believe” in it. I know it. I’ve experienced it so consistently that it’s simply part of my reality. But the Loominal take rests on some core assumptions. One is “Unfinished Knowing”, basically that no one knows everything. That includes me. I am always willing to revise my understanding as I encounter new information, new experience, new evidence. Another is that “No-thing is one-thing.” There is no such thing as nothing and there is no such thing as one thing. Everything is connected. Which means our consciousness, and even the unconscious processes beneath it, are always interacting with the world in ways we can’t fully perceive.

This is where I draw from biocentrism and the work of physicist Robert Lanza, who argues that consciousness is not a byproduct of matter but the foundation of reality itself. That what we see, hear, and touch is not fundamental reality but our translation of something deeper.Manifestation, to me, lives inside this framework. Consciousness is central. Reality is participatory.

Of course, critics call manifestation confirmation bias. They say we only notice the wins and forget the misses. And as a logical, educated person, I’ve tested myself on that. I’ve asked: is this just selective memory? But the sheer volume and specificity of my experiences tells me something more is happening.

It isn’t always the “big things” that convince me. It’s the small ones. Because manifestation has a way of slipping into the cracks of everyday life so seamlessly that it feels organic. One of the principles is that it will happen in the most natural way possible — so natural you could miss it if you weren’t paying attention.

Years ago, I set out to manifest flowers. I started by buying myself bouquets, flooding myself with joy and gratitude for them. Within weeks, I randomly took a different walking route with my dogs. Around the corner stood a man on his porch surrounded by dozens of flowers of all kinds left over from a photo shoot. He asked if I wanted some. I walked home with eight dozen flowers, filled my house with vases, and delivered arrangements all over town. I had asked for flowers. And flowers came.

Another time, during COVID lockdown, broke and stressed, I wanted wine. I had none and didn’t want to go to the store. I half-jokingly tried to manifest some. Nothing arrived immediately. So I decided instead to quit drinking and focus on health. And then, two days later, a friend gave me wine for Mother’s Day, and my LDS cousins, who don’t drink, passed along a stack of expensive bottles their company had gifted them. The irony? I didn’t even drink it. But the manifestation was undeniable. And it illustrated a principle: when you release your grip, when you let go, things flow in. Clinging to desire pushes it away. Trust opens the channel.

One of Neville Goddard’s famous experiments involves visualizing yourself climbing a ladder. I tried it, skeptical but willing. A few days later my fire alarm malfunctioned, and maintenance arrived with the exact ladder I had pictured. I climbed it in my living room. For someone as action-oriented as I am, who usually makes things happen by force, this was a shock. I hadn’t done anything. The ladder came to me.

But manifestation is not magic vending. It is entangled with what we truly want — and what we think we want isn’t always the same. Humans are notoriously bad at knowing their own desires. We chase money, partners, status, things that might even be harmful to us. Somewhere inside, we know. And that hidden knowing can block us.

I’ve seen it in myself. When I’ve tried to manifest something that wasn’t aligned with my deeper truth, it didn’t come. It looked like failure. But it wasn’t. It was that my conscious desire hadn’t matched my unconscious want. Until you name the root, the surface can sputter. If I say I want ten thousand dollars, what I may actually want is stability, or to feel cared for, or to trust that my world supports me. If the desire is driven by panic or scarcity, the ten thousand stays elusive. But when the root want is aligned, the rest can unfold.

And sometimes, you manifest what you used to want, even after you no longer want it. That wine story showed me that. We don’t always change the order just because we’ve changed our mind.

There’s another layer: we’re all manifesting all the time. It’s not something you turn on or off. And we’re not doing it in isolation. We are interconnected, constantly influencing one another in ways we can’t measure. Remember the moments when you think of someone and then they call? Or when something you’ve needed appears through another person without you ever saying a word. My mom and I call it “T-mail” — telepathic mail. These exchanges happen beneath conscious awareness, but they happen.

Do I have a neat scientific explanation? No. But the Loominal framework doesn’t require certainty. It only requires honesty and curiosity. Everything is connected. We are all part of one field. And what we call “physical reality” is not the fundamental bedrock, but a navigational interface. A way to touch, to learn, to move.

The Loominal take on manifestation is not about denying death, or blaming yourself for every setback, or pretending you can control other people. It’s not about bypassing grief or forcing outcomes. It’s about recognizing that consciousness is active, connected, and creative. It’s about living with curiosity for how the small and the large weave together. It’s about releasing enough control to let the field move.

And even if you strip away every metaphysical claim, these practices still matter. Because when you engage them — whether through affirmations, rituals, visualizations, or imaginal work — they change you. They shift how you see, how open you are, how creative you feel, how gracefully you move through your days. That change alone reshapes your experience. It places you in the kind of state where opportunities arrive more easily, where you can meet them with excitement and possibility.

Manifestation is real. It is not a trick or a hack. It is an ongoing entanglement between what you believe, what you want, what you fear, and what you don’t even know about yourself. It moves in organic ways. It respects the limits of being human. And it reminds us, again and again, that we are not separate.