'Manifesting' in a Financial Emergency

On this sea a storm might blow up at any moment and destroy us. And yet I was unafraid. I was without confidence in the future, extremely doubtful, and yet I felt no underlying fear. It must come right, it must come right, I repeated to myself over and over again.—Jack London, The Sea-Wolf, 1904

Do New Thought methods of manifesting or Law of Attraction serve us in a financial emergency or urgency? When there is no time for pondering, chin-stroking, or prevaricating?

I have an uneasy relationship with manifesting—or what I term selecting, as explored below.

I abide—and interrogate—such practices. I do so both to probe their efficacy—and their limits, which occur amid the complexity of laws, forces, and experiences under which we live.

I hesitate to espouse miracles. I define a miracle as a fortuitous departure from all reasonable expectancy. But nor will I rule out miracles. Because: they occur. Are such events sheer randomness? The “law of large numbers”?

Or is the exceptional cultivable?

Social scientists and pseudo-rationalists who prate of “confirmation bias” and “magical thinking” have no meaningful response to my questions—because they do not understand the search. Narrowly experienced, they fail to see the pragmatism of survival faced by the seeker, who is often more exacting and self-aware than benevolently deceived clinical subjects replying to forced-choice questions.

Let me return to Jack London’s novel The Sea-Wolf.

“Do you know Dr. Jordan’s final test of truth?” Maud asked.

I shook my head and paused in the act of dislodging the shavings which had drifted down my neck.

“‘Can we make it work? Can we trust our lives to it?’ is the test.”

She references David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), a problematic but brilliant pragmatist who, in London’s telling, challenged colleagues as I do seekers, with the interrogative: does it work?

I am going to share a personal story that is sufficiently detailed to leave you little doubt of my transparency.

I make my disclosures not only to provide workable, vivid, and relatable guidance from the perspective of the search, but also because: I abhor works of practical spirituality or self-help that evade difficult realities with familiar truisms, juiced-up stories, exaggerated data, concealed identities, or sweet anecdotes.

You deserve better. Here it is.