Today we’re going to talk about manifesting, we’re going to debunk the BS behind it, and we’re going to talk about how to really make your dreams come true.
I kind of cringe when I hear people talking about manifesting, because when they do, I often get the impression they’re either trying to sell me something or get my attention, or they’ve never really achieved anything in their life.
And behind the strange woo-woo pseudoscientific explanations out there, there’s a very real, observable, reliable, repeatable track to success, to being a results maker, to making your dreams a reality.
And I think this is the gem that the manifestation people are trying to desperately explain with things like quantum mechanics. And once we’ve talked about the current manifestation movement a bit, we’re going to look at this exact process for how you become a results maker.
The quantum mechanical explanation, it captures some truth, but it’s quite unscientific and unconvincing. And the QM and the manifestation craze has kind of been exploited and exaggerated because it appeals to our fears and to our fantasies in a certain way. And we’ll get to that.
Manifestation and Quantum Mechanics
So what is manifestation and what is the Quantum Mechanical explanation for it? Well, first of all, Quantum Mechanics is a scientific discipline, a field of physics, that shows, in layman’s terms, that the objective world at the smallest scale is essentially about probability and is essentially made of nothing.
And it also, as an extension of that, proves that the future exists as a probability wave of superimposed events, not as deterministic reality at that scale. Really important to remember, this is at the subatomic scale.
The manifestation people say that by creating mental dreams and visions, we basically are collapsing these quantum waves, these probability waves into our desired future. And this creates our future.
By doing so, we’re tapping into quantum reality. We’re literally creating the future with our thoughts and we’re collapsing the quantum wave. Thought, emotion and action are intertwined and our thoughts become our reality: not through action so much, but actually because we’re collapsing quantum waves and creating future realities.
And the manifestation folk will also say that it’s in our power to collapse whatever quantum waves that we want.
Problems with the QM Explanation
So what are some of the problems with this quantum mechanical explanation? I guess the first obvious one to me is that you don’t just achieve things in life by thinking about them in a quiet room with your eyes closed.
It would be lovely if we could, but sadly, it doesn’t work like that. You need to take action and fail and create and fail and create and keep persisting over months and years. And I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.
The other problem is a scientific one. I’m not a quantum physicist, but I am a maths major. I’ve graduated in a STEM subject and I’ve studied physics to a level that most people haven’t. So the problems that I’ve identified here are based on the study that I’ve done.
And I don’t have time for a full philosophical debate on this going into all the detail, but basically the way I see it, the quantum mechanical explanation is one of scale and one of extrapolation.
Quantum science is done in highly controlled experimental conditions at an unimaginably small scale, scales that we have no real way of comprehending. It’s done observing the behaviour of individual electrons, which are basically unimaginably small, weird, part wave, part particle, subatomic entities.
And the measurements are done with complicated instruments that are capable of measuring the properties of these entities.
It’s not done with a human mind. It’s not done with thoughts.
The problem is that we’re simply over-extrapolating: we’re observing certain things at the quantum level and then we’re extrapolating them up to the human scale, the scale that we’re all familiar with, the size of ordinary objects.
Life at the human scale is extraordinarily different from life at the quantum scale. Life is more Newtonian at this scale, hence why Newton came up with his laws of movement and so on, because that’s what life does at this level.
Another problem is that thoughts aren’t actually made of anything. They’re not objective and tangible like, say, a computer is. If you go to a small enough scale, a computer is made of atoms, which are in part made of electrons. Thoughts are not in that domain.
A thought is not made of anything. That’s like asking what an is emotion made of. Is an emotion made of electrons and atoms? It’s not. It’s not even in the same realm. It’s in the subjective intangible domain.
Even if thoughts were made of atoms and electrons, just because something is composed of subatomic particles doesn’t mean that everything behaves like subatomic particles. Everything in the objective world is made of subatomic particles when you go down to quarks and possibly something else, if you go further.
But that doesn’t mean that everything behaves like subatomic particles. If it did, we’d be living in a very different world, where perhaps this quantum mechanical explanation would apply to goal setting and so on.
In our world, there’s something called an emergent phenomenon.
And again, I don’t want to get too philosophical here. But basically, it’s when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And when you reach a certain level of wholeness, when you put enough things together, it creates a new order.
Like when you have so many atoms together, it creates a molecule. When you have so many molecules together, it creates a substance. And the new thing cannot be reduced to its constituent parts because it’s an emergent phenomena: the thing behaves in a fundamentally new way that its constituent parts don’t.
And the point here is that even if our thoughts were in the objective domain, and they were composed of subatomic particles, they wouldn’t behave as such because there’s such a thing as emergent phenomena. The things that compose an object or a phenomenon eventually create a new level of complexity.
Pseudoscience & Magical Thinking
At best, this quantum mechanical explanation is really pseudoscience, or it’s a metaphor. It’s kind of empowering, but I don’t think it’s convincing or realistic. You’re not going to get much scientific respect by giving these explanations.
Another huge error is that the idea that we can literally think reality into any configuration that we want.
This is the type of thinking that dominates in two to five-year-olds. This is magical thinking, pure and simple.
This is the kind of thinking that is behind Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. We don’t know how Santa Claus comes in through the chimney with all the presents, but he just does it. He can just change the shape of the chimney because he’s magic. That’s magical thinking.
And though our minds have a lot of power, it doesn’t mean we can just dream anything we want into reality, or that we’re collapsing the quantum waves of reality to our favor.
It’s like claiming that if you imagine good weather, really believe it hard enough, really visualize it’s going to be a lovely sunny day, then all of a sudden the sun is going to come out. Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
This craze, as I kind of mentioned earlier, appeals to our desires for omnipotence and for magical control over things, which are really fantasies, but we experience them so strongly as infants that I think it lives on inside us as adults, even though we realize that things don’t work that way in reality.
What Does Manifestation Get Right?
But as I said, there’s something very real that we’re trying to capture with this quantum mechanical explanation. And it’s to do with goal setting and achievement and becoming what I call a results maker. And funnily enough, there is something kind of magical to it.
Let me explain. It’s that something unexplainable happens when you do something for a long time. What you’ll observe is that basically we mould our lives over time according to our desires and actions.
And basically, if you look at your life over time, it really does reflect what’s going on in your mind. In this way, life isn’t set to be a certain way. Our personal lives aren’t set in stone. Really, a lot of the time we make our lives stagnate through our own inner stagnation, our own lack of desire and motivation to do things and to change our lives.
I think another thing they get right is that our imagination is a remarkable tool. So if you think of all the things you’ve achieved in your life, all the things you’ve created, or if you think of all the best works of art in history, all the best architecture, businesses and books that have been written, all of these just start as an idea. Just an idea, a fantasy in someone’s mind.
That’s where it begins. That’s the factory. Then people have put a lot of work into making those things a reality.
They also get right that we have a lot of power to change ourselves by creating a powerful mindset, thinking about what we want and taking concrete action towards it. I think lots of people could do with learning the power of this, that it’s actually possible, and that you’d be remarkably surprised by what’s possible when you do this.
Another thing they get right is that if you set a goal and work diligently towards it for years and years, you’ll be very surprised at your progress. And it has this magical quality to some degree. It’s like you reach a level you never dreamed of. It’s beyond your wildest dreams.
Opportunities open up to you. You’re capable of doing things that you didn’t think were possible. And it’s magical. I think that’s why the QM explanation is tempting, because there is a component of this that’s kind of hard to explain.
Another thing that manifesting trend gets right is that life does seem to help us. Of course we have difficult times in our life, but there are times when things seem to conspire in our favor.
And especially when you’re doing something that you’re passionate about or you stick with something for long enough, things seem to start conspiring in your favor in a strange way.
And this might sound fluffy and a bit weird to say make your dreams a reality, but it’s possible and it’s repeatable, it’s been done, it’s reliable, it’s observable, and it’s quite easy in a way.
It’s a very simple process, but it’s difficult to do it, which is why a lot of our dreams go unrealised and we never live up to our potential and what we feel we are capable of.