Manifesting makes sense, when it’s looked at scientifically

Last year I wrote a couple of blog posts about the scientific approach to manifesting: Mind Magic is a science-based book about manifesting what you want, and Manifesting comes in two varieties: scientific and New Age.

I’ve just started reading another scientific book about manifesting. The author is a psychologist, Sabina Brennan, who wrote The Neuroscience of Manifesting. It’ll probably cover much the same ground as Mind Magic, but the Introduction has an interesting perspective on the magical aspect of manifesting.

Recently in a comment I mentioned how our conscious mind is just the tip of the mental iceberg, since the unconscious depths that lie beneath the surface of awareness are much greater, and more important, really, than what we’re consciously aware of. Brennan writes:

Many manifesting advocates place power and trust in the universe, but after decades of studying and researching the brain and human behavior I can confidently say that the power lies within you, not with some external source. More specifically, I know that it is the human brain that holds the power and magic behind manifesting.

It holds something far greater than conscious awareness. Our conscious experience is only the tip of the iceberg. Our conscious experience is the equivalent of what a magician lets their audience see. For an audience member, the parts we don’t see — the work done by the magician that we are unaware of, the illusions they create — this is the stuff that makes the magic.

As we consciously experience the world and our life in it we are blissfully unaware of the non-conscious brain processes, the illusions your brain creates that make the magic. Even our conscious awareness is an illusion created by our brain.

Our inherent tendency to see that which we don’t understand as magic has led to a situation wherein we credit external magical forces with outcomes that are the result of the work carried out by non-conscious processes in our brains.

Magicians sign an oath never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a non-magician unless that person also swears to uphold the magician’s oath. This is critical to the success of the profession for the reason I mentioned earlier: when magic is explained, it becomes science.

Thankfully, neuroscientists take no such oath and I am delighted in this book to explain that the magic behind manifesting is the work of the greatest master of illusion– the human brain. Scientists who research the neuroscience of magic describe what happens inside your brain as the greatest magic show on earth, and I am inclined to agree.

There is simply no need to invoke external or supernatural forces or abstract constructs when the power behind manifesting actually lies within the natural biological organ of the brain. Is that not simply awesome? For me, that is magical. Why abdicate power to an external force such as ‘the universe’ when the power lies within you?

Because Brennan refers so often to “illusions” that the brain creates, I took a look at the chapter titles in the rest of her book to see if there was any explicit mention of illusions. I didn’t find anything, so I’ll have to read the rest of the book to learn what she means by that term. However, in a section called Reality, there are some clues to this which fit with the general neuroscientific understanding of how the brain works.

You might also be surprised to learn that we perceive the world not as it actually is but in a way that best serves our purposes and needs. The brain uses predictions and best guesses to build our experience of an external world, a world that the brain can never directly encounter.

…Continuing the city government analogy, your brain is a city government that’s trying to understand what’s happening in the world outside the city hall. Because it’s stuck in the city hall with no windows, it can’t directly see or interact with the world outside. It relies on messages and reports from its different departments (the sensory inputs) to build a picture of what’s happening outside. In this city government, information doesn’t just flow in one direction, from the outside world to the government. It’s a two-way street.