Personal Development and Intention Manifestation
This one goes out to all my homiez down at the forumz. Special mad propz to Stevie P. and Erin.
Alright, so that introductory sentence just reminded me of Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy.” (That song can be played through the link, for those unfamiliar with it.) Yeah, I’m no “gansta”… And I do know JavaScript and a couple of words in Klingon.
Hey, I’m starting out off topic. I guess this means that this is going to be another long, hopefully insightful post. I have had a couple of people comment, either directly or indirectly, in the past couple of days, so my motivation has gone through the roof. This weekend, {edit at time of posting, last weekend} I have started not just one, but three different topics. What are they? Well, if you look up at the title of this one, you’ll see one third of the answer… The other two, though, will have to wait until they’re ready, just in case I change the title around to fit what I’ve written.
As of finishing this post, the expected wait on the other two is a week for each.
PD & IM: How they fit together
Just a quick note, before I’m fully on-topic. PD is short for Personal Development, and IM is short for Intention Manifestation. Personal Development is all about getting your life in shape so that you are happy with it. Intention Manifestation is about using phrases and imagery (Intentions) to cause events to happen (Manifestation).
So, why am I writing this? Well, it seems that a lot of people who are involved in PD are also heavily involved in IM, and to an outside observer, it can almost seem like a cult. In fact, there have been a few certain individuals who have attacked Steve Pavlina’s character based on their religious beliefs… A cult needs to be persecuted, right? 
I’m mainly writing this to set a few things straight. IM is not required in PD, and IM has its legitimate uses, even among the genuinely skeptical. People who believe in Subjective Reality (one model which attempts to explain how IM works) are not members of a cult, rather, they are extremely individualistic, and to an extent, somewhat egotistic.
Views from the Far Side
Intention Manifestation, also known as the Law of Attraction, is, in its most simple terms, the belief that your beliefs affect reality. If you believe that you will get money in the near future, you will get money. If you believe that you will be hit by a car, then you will be hit by a car. The psychological world calls this Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, and it really does work. Why it works, though, is up for some serious debate.
One side holds that, since we can not know the exact nature of reality, since we are creatures that observe through our senses, rather than having a perfect knowledge of how things really are, that there is plenty of room for some more, well, bizarre explanations. One explanation is that our thoughts have a measure of control over what happens in reality, besides our thoughts simply controlling our bodies. This is one of the basic arguments supporting the Subjective Reality model of reality. The Subjective Reality model can neither be proven nor disproven… it is entirely in the realm of philosophy.
Of course, there are people who whole-heartedly believe in it. To these people, it is their replacement for a more traditional religion. There are also people out there who believe in the spiteful, vengeful version of their deity, and try to spread that hate by attacking anyone who professes to entertain the notion of Subjective Reality. Most people are simply skeptical about it all, or are largely indifferent. The most popular argument used against people who profess skepticism is that their skepticism is forming a world where IM does not work, so of course there is no way for a skeptic to test it.
Scientific Stance
Science has been aware of IM for quite a while now, but under a different name, and with a much more simple explanation. Even so, the scientific explanation isn’t nearly as popular, mainly because it doesn’t seem exotic, but I find it more empowering than any of the extremes. Science (specifically psychology) calls IM a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, whatever you believe is stored in your subconscious, and your subconscious will make it come true. The mind is a great and terrible thing… It is an amazing parallel processor, surpassing the greatest serial processors that we have been able to create in our computers.
Tangent: Parallel processors and serial processors are just terms that describe how much information is moving at once. Serial processors handle a small amount of information at a time, but handle that information extremely quickly… An example is doing a math calculation: A serial processor will work on one pair of numbers at a time, and handle each resulting number very quickly. A parallel processor will work on several pairs of numbers at a time, but handle the resulting number very slowly. The easy way to picture this is to think of a fire hose and a hundred garden hoses… The serial processor, the fire hose, can handle a lot of water at once at high pressure, so it can shoot a stream very far. The parallel processor, the hundred garden hoses, can’t handle nearly as much pressure, so all of the streams are very short, but instead of being limited to shooting that stream at only one point at a time, the garden hoses can deal with several different problems at once.
Our consciousness is a lot like a serial connection to the great parallel processing of our minds… A well trained person can concentrate on about eight things at once (I maxed out at six when I had tried practicing splitting my concentration). Our sub-conscious handles all sorts of things that we are never aware of, probably thousands of different details at once, including being able to do complex trigonometry to calculate the trajectory of a ball tossed at us, while filtering out sounds, sights, smells, and the feel of our clothes on our skin. (I bet that, until now, you hadn’t been conscious of your clothes for quite some time… Your subconscious still knew about it, though.) One set of subconscious processing could be easily working on how to bring about the things that you are trying to manifest through your intentions. It notices patterns, such as the distracted store clerk who is more likely to hand you extra change back… It notices traffic, with all of the power of your conscious reasoning, but none of the limitations of being able to concentrate on a few things at a time, and can tell your consciousness to change lanes, and you unknowingly avoid an accident or get into clearer traffic. If you learn how to read your subconscious cues, you can have the intuition that matches the brain power of hundreds of people in a think tank consciously figuring out the patterns unfolding around you.
Instead of the entire universe waiting around for intentions to be thought very ‘loudly,’ it is just your subconscious mind, which has the vast resources of everything that you have ever experienced, even if you didn’t know that you experienced it. The human brain is exceptionally good at pattern matching… We hear patterns and call it music. We see patterns and call them objects. We feel patterns and calls them textures. We smell and taste patterns and call them scents and flavors. Each thing that we experience gets classified into a pattern and is assigned a name. Right now, you are looking at a pattern of bright and dark pixels, and you call it text, give it meaning, and can recognize the words that those patterns make up without noticing the individual letters.
Hree’s a qicuk exmpirenet to try: ecah of the wrdos taht are lngoer tahn trehe ltertes lnog are mxied up wtih the frist and lsat ltertes in the crorcet pacles. Snice you can raed tihs, it is porof taht yuor mnid is vrey good at ptaetrn mtacnhig.
A computer would have no way to make sense of the above paragraph (as my spell checker can firmly attest to). It simply does not have enough processors working on all of the different aspects of those sentences to figure it out. When you’re reading it, the pattern of how the word should be is in your mind almost before you realize how the words are misspelled. My apologies to non-native English speakers. I realize that you will probably have trouble with the above paragraph unless you have been fluent for a few years. I’ll post the correct spelling down at the bottom of this post for you.
Intentions sans Manifestation
First, sans means without. A sans serif font means that the font is without serifs (the stylized cross bars that make long text easier to read, but short text harder to pick out). An example of a sans serif font is Arial, which is what the main font on this blog is. Anyways, this post isn’t about typographical conventions, so I’ll just skip on down to the topic of this section.
As I said, our subconscious mind is very good at recognizing patterns, but it usually just files the patterns away and forgets about them. That is, it files them away unless we are paying attention to something that has to do with that pattern. When we’re paying attention to something consciously, the subconscious kicks in and starts showing us aspects of those patterns, so that to our conscious mind, we start noticing coincidences more, and things seem to be going extremely well in regards to that topic. This is called the Reticular Articulating System, or RAS for short. What the heck is reticular, and why is it articulating? Well, looking over at my handy dictionary, I find that Reticular means either like a net, or complex. In this context, it makes no sense, but I do notice that “rete” is the Latin root, (meaning “net”), and rete is also the root for retina, or the back of our eyes that transform light into pulses used by our brains. My guess is that the people who coined the term didn’t know their Latin, and used a word that was closely associated with vision… Also, to articulate is to clarify something by showing the parts and how they fit into the whole. (That’s how I hope these posts come across as, as very articulate. )
So, the Reticular Articulating System (RAS) is nothing more than our subconscious calling attention to parts of our vision so that we will notice it consciously. It’s also bad Latin, but it seems too late to change the term, since it has already caught on. RAS works without us doing anything consciously, so it seems magical or improbably coincidental. One example of the RAS is when certain people notice the numbers 11:11 all over the place. Since people have given meaning to that sequence of numbers, when we notice it subconsciously, our minds figure that we might as well notice it consciously as well, after all, we made such a big deal about it in the past.
Our subconscious mind also loves rituals, since rituals are, at their most simple, a combination of different patterns. Anything that we ritualize gets noticed by our subconscious minds. Similarly, anything that we feel strongly about also gets noticed. Rituals are very powerful tools. I won’t say whether they are powerful because they are spiritual in nature, or if they are powerful because of their subconscious nature, because honestly, I don’t know. I will say, however, that with proper use, rituals become one of the most powerful tools that a person has. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but ritual is mightier than an atomic bomb.
Intentions are rituals. They are very simple rituals, lacking in the usual symbolism found in religious rituals, but they are still powerful on their own. The usual way to state intentions is to do them at specific times and places, and most people preface or close them with specific phrases. The subconscious mind notices the ritual and begins working on figuring out the patterns that it has stored up to see if anything matches. Within a couple of days, hours, minutes, or even seconds the subconscious mind has part of a plan figured out, so gives you a hint intuitively on how to reach this goal. During this time, the RAS is in full force, since much of your subconscious mind is working on that very topic… These are the “alpha reflections” that Steve Pavlina talks about, where you’ll notice very peculiar coincidences about your intention, such as finding money on the street, or a co-working urging you to try for a raise. Eventually, the subconscious mind works out the details and begins pushing you towards ways for you to bring your intention to a reality, such as giving you confidence when talking to your boss or giving you ideas on side jobs that you can do. Usually within a month, you are well on your way to manifesting your intention.
Personal Development and Intention Manifestation
So, where does IM fit into PD? Well, generally, wherever you want to put it. PD is your own personal development, so you are the only one who can say what is right or wrong. If you choose to take an extreme stance on IM, then go ahead. If you are extreme in that you believe that IM is the process of the universe bending to your will, then it really doesn’t hurt you, except in cases where you attempt to fly without the aid of machinery. If you are extremely against IM in all of its forms, then at least you won’t be in danger of violating your morals if you continue to leave IM alone. If you’re middle of the road, then a mature view of IM will benefit you greatly, and it can be as magical or psychological as you want it to be.
The Conclusion (finally)
To conclude (isn’t it odd how conclusions tend to start with those two words?), Intention Manifestation can be a very powerful tool in your Personal Development. IM is not new, but it is new as a fad. Science has known about IM under different names for a long time. Personally, I find that the scientific explanation of IM is more empowering than any other model, but I also believe very strongly that everybody should find the belief that is the most empowering for themselves.
The messed up paragraph: Hree’s a qicuk exmpirenet to try: ecah of the wrdos taht are lngoer tahn trehe ltertes lnog are mxied up wtih the frist and lsat ltertes in the crorcet pacles. Snice you can raed tihs, it is porof taht yuor mnid is vrey good at ptaetrn mtacnhig.
Correct Spelling: Here’s a quick experiment to try: each of the words that are longer than three letters long are mixed up with the first and last letters in the correct places. Since you can read this, it is proof that your mind is very good at pattern matching.
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