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From: Ken Homer
Date: Sun, Mar 10, 2024
Subject: [OGM] Opinion | ‘Manifesting’ Is a Modern Version of a Centuries-Old Idea - The New York Times
“Oh I do believe, I do!” ~The Cowardly Lion
"Today, as in the 19th century, the belief that we can will things into reality comes with a dark side, too. In an era when outlandish lies can and do influence elections, manifesting has become as much about exerting influence over others as it is about improving one’s finances, or healing from illness, or self-actualization, or vibes.
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."
By Tara Isabella Burton, March 9, 2024
Dr. Burton is the author of “Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From da Vinci to the Kardashians” and the novel “Here in Avalon.”
Reality is what you make it — at least according to those who believe in manifesting, the art and quasi-spiritual science of willing things into existence through the power of desire, attention and focus.
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.
In some ways, this is a new trend. The idea of manifesting as it is understood today rose to popularity as part of a boom in online spiritualism and self-help philosophy that emerged during the pandemic. According to Google data, online searches for “manifesting” rose more than 600 percent during the first few months of the pandemic.
But while the idea of manifesting may seem modern, the instinct to conflate spiritual forces, political and economic outcomes and our own personal desires is part of a longstanding American tradition that dates back much, much farther than the pandemic.
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.
Quimby’s theory — which was embraced early on by his followers, including Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement — soon proliferated wildly. By the turn of the century, it was ubiquitous.
Dozens of self-help books, including William Walker Atkinson’s “Thought-Force in Business and Everyday Life” and James Allen’s “As a Man Thinketh,” emerged, arguing that the universe’s mysterious energies could be mastered by the human will. The idea of the “mind cure” began to merge in popular consciousness with other then-novel discoveries like electricity and Darwinian evolution, all of which seemed to support the theory of the human mind’s dominance over nature. For what was survival of the fittest if not proof that will triumphs all?
By the late 19th century — in that era of staggering inequality known as the Gilded Age — the influence of New Thought had begun to seep into economic theory and became a popular frame through which to make sense not only of sickness but also of poverty. Nobody who truly wanted to be rich, a new wave of books claimed, would ever end up poor.
As one New Thought advocate, Charles Benjamin Newcomb, wrote in his tellingly titled 1897 book “All’s Right With the World,” “none is really shut out of the feast [of life] except the self-exiled.” Those who wanted in on “the banquet” had only to repeat to themselves the following mantra, which frankly sounds a lot like something you might find on TikTok today: “I am well. I am opulent. I have everything. I do right. I know.”
In this way, the capitalist pursuit of profit was swiftly recast as a religion whose only tenet was desire.
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.
Unsurprisingly, throughout the 20th century, New Thought ideology was frequently invoked to justify the denial of social services to the poor — on the ground that it would interfere with the purposeful workings of the energies of the universe, which wished to reward only those at the top of the proverbial heap.
“If we lack anything,” wrote another New Thought writer, Charles Fillmore, “it is because we have not used our mind in making the right contact with the supermind.” God (or nature or the universe, or whatever higher power you chose) wanted people to be rich. And in turn, people could become rich — or healthy or famous — simply by wanting it.
New Thought offered a convenient economic theodicy: a way of explaining and justifying wealth inequality as a kind of spiritual hierarchy, with the wealthy at the top and the suffering at the bottom. And it’s notable that manifesting, New Thought’s modern descendant, should rise to prominence at a moment when economic inequality is once again at an all-time high.
While New Thought may not be alive in the same form today, its legacy is clearly visible in American life. In evangelical circles, it has alchemized into the Prosperity Gospel: the idea that prayer (and tithing) will be rewarded by material success in this life. According to one study, three-fourths of American Christians say they agree with the statement “God wants us to prosper financially.” Its effect can be traced to maxims found in the philosophies of wellness brands like Goop and gurus like Oprah Winfrey and Tony Robbins, and in self-help best sellers like Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking” and Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret.”
Echoes of New Thought are visible in our politics, too — where self-invention, and the idea that reality can and should bend to belief, has never been more in vogue. The most notorious recent example is the former New York congressman George Santos, whose preposterous fabrications got him elected to public office. (He later defended them, claiming to be a “self-made man,” which, in a sense, he certainly was.) And of course there’s the former president and current Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, whose legendary delusions of grandeur helped lead him to the highest office in the country.
Today, as in the 19th century, the belief that we can will things into reality comes with a dark side, too. In an era when outlandish lies can and do influence elections, manifesting has become as much about exerting influence over others as it is about improving one’s finances, or healing from illness, or self-actualization, or vibes.
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.
A version of this article appears in print on March 10, 2024, Section SR, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: The Strange History of ‘Manifesting’. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/manifesting-spirituality-america-reality.html