These, my peeps, are excellent questions. It hints at the first big misunderstanding that many have about manifesting. The Manifestation Principle (see my previous blogpost) posits that you can manifest your desires by focusing all your intentions, thoughts, feelings, and actions on precisely what you want. However, there are different levels of manifesting: there is manifesting from your ego and there is Manifesting from your Soul.
Manifesting from ego desires works. If you really want something, and go after it, it definitely can happen, although it may happen at great cost to your soul/others/the earth. And it’s often the case that as soon as what your ego wants does appear in your life, you start wishing it had never happened!
However, the real magic happens when you Manifest from your Soul. In my experience, this happens to the extent that your desires match up with what Source/Spirit/The Higher Self wants and not with what the ego/the limited self wants. Martha Beck writes that this level of Manifesting seems to be about discovering and feeling into what “already wants to happen,” and falling in love with it. Thus, Manifestation with a capital M works when what you are intending to Manifest is for the greater good of all (not just for yourself/family/country and not from greed/lack/limitation/fear/harm to the planet).
Trying to manifest mansions, luxury cars, and million dollar bank accounts usually makes no sense from the perspective of Spirit. The Higher Self probably doesn’t need these things in order to fulfill its purpose on this earth. It might—I’m not ruling it out. But really, most people do not need these things to bring more love, joy and peace to the planet, and as Westerners who overconsume most of the world’s resources, we must be mindful of how harmful these big ticket items can be to the earth and to our sisters and brothers in human and animal form around the globe. As someone who has lived and travelled in developing countries, I can tell you that many people living in bare-bones subsistence are far richer spiritually than many people in the western world with a bank account (no matter how much or little is in that bank account). They count their blessings in joy, love, sharing, good work with families, and celebrations with their villages.
But there is another level of manifesting entirely—one that answers those first questions about global poverty and starvation and gets at the second big misunderstanding about the Manifestation Principle, i.e., that this all about individual manifestation—a typically American/Western blindspot. We, all of us, are individually manifesting, and also at the same time, collectively manifesting our thoughts, feelings, intentions, and actions. Whatever groups we belong to, be they families, nations, political parties, religions, spiritual, educational, or work communities, the exclusive Giga Society, the local PTA, the purple poodle club, whatever—and don’t forget that by virtue of our species, we’re all sailing along on the ship homo sapiens sapiens, (the H.S.S. Humanity)—all of these groups have a group mind, a collective consciousness, or quite literally an esprit de corp. The H.S.S. Humanity is manifesting collectively All. The. Dang. Time.
When we look at out at the planet to see what exactly the H.S.S. Humanity is manifesting, we see examples of extreme greed and extreme poverty. Over the ages humanity has manifested extreme greed due to fears, lack of love and self-value, and limiting beliefs. This extreme greed has also must manifested its counterbalance, extreme poverty. This greed/poverty manifestation is hundreds of years in the making. It is not anything one person is reaping all by their lonesome with their little penny-clutching worries. Individuals who are starving are not keeping themselves in poverty by thinking poor thoughts. Humanity as a species is keeping people in poverty and starvation by hoarding and wanting to hoard more than is necessary for the Embodied Soul Purpose.
However, we can individually either play into that large greed/poverty thought form (elemental) with our own limiting thoughts, feelings, actions, intentions, or the good news is we can work on healing that elemental by healing ourselves within. By focusing on the love, joy peace, abundance within, we start to recreate human consciousness around the planet. This greed/poverty elemental can be dissolved when each of us shifts into alignment with Source/Spirit/Higher Self and intends to Manifest not from greed and lack, but from love, joy, peace, generosity, and the knowing that no matter what, we are safe, infinitely cared for, and always abundant. This is not because “bad things” never happen in this world, but because we are no longer identifying with circumstances and the small, limited human self. We are identifying with our souls, with each other as souls, with each other as Divine Manifestations who are eternal and infinite beings at our core. Then, we don’t have to worry about money, food, clothing, and housing and can therefore, share more with those who are lacking these basic needs of survival.
Now here’s where things really take off. When groups of people intentionally Manifest from Source together then we get to an entirely new level: MANIFESTING. However, this blogpost is getting rather looooong, so I’ll leave MANIFESTING for next month’s blogpost.
But bottom line—don’t think that by aligning with Source and Manifesting from there is not taking care of the extreme poverty around the world. It is in the sense that it is dissolving the greed/poverty elemental and energizing a new paradigm of Manifesting from the abundance that always and already is. Feed the eternal paradigm not the temporary paradigm. This is happening now in many big and small ways through our intentions, feelings, thoughts, and actions, as we live to create a world where no one goes hungry. Let us learn to live with what we need in order to do what we are here to do: live every moment from the Love, Joy, Peace, and Abundance that we already really are at our common Core.
And it was Mother Theresa who said, "Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. The rest will be given.