deconstructing manifestation tok

A manifesto against the fear-mongering and fake promises of Manifestation Tok.

Abha’s note: I am sending this out on Friday. This issue of girl online should have hit your inboxes on Wednesday. I had been sleeping most of this week as I am getting used to my new dose of sleep medication and antidepressants. I am also back to full-time freelance reporting and just filed the copy for my first assignment — a 4000-word deep-dive into the human impact of mass layoffs. I will try my best to resume the usual Wednesday posting schedule next week. As always, feel free to support my work by buying me a coffee here.

I was 17 when I first came across the idea of manifestation. I spent most of my teenage years in a boarding school, and my bunk neighbour at the time had a copy of Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret” that she always kept by her pillow and read religiously. Once during a winter break when we both couldn’t go home, she explained to me the law of attraction.

She told me, as Byrne wrote:

“Your life is in your hands. No matter where you are now, no matter what has happened in your life,you can begin to consciously choose your thoughts, and you can change your life.There is no such thing as a hopeless situation.Every single circumstance of your life can change!”

The year was 2018. My grandfather, the biggest cheerleader of my then-amateur writing career, had suddenly passed away. I was preparing for medical entrance examinations. My heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to go to Delhi. I wanted to study History or Literature in India’s best liberal arts college — a dream I had been secretly nurturing for about two years then. But I didn’t know how to convince my parents to let me waste my potential on a liberal arts degree. My friend’s retelling of “The Secret” gave me hope that I wasn’t doomed to a life of white coats and cadavers. That I could walk the red corridors of St. Stephen’s College if I wanted it badly enough.

The first thing I successfully manifested was my parents’ permission for me to go to Delhi to study history and literature. The second thing I successfully manifested was an admission letter to my dream college. By manifestation, I don’t mean scripting “I got into my dream college” a thousand times or making a vision board with pictures of the classrooms I wanted to be in. I just wished really really hard. I went to bed crying for it. I woke up somehow knowing I would make it. And when I did, I was grateful.

Everything I have ever achieved in my life, I have always credited the Universe and my manifestation skills for it. Everything that went wrong, I made peace with, believing that the Universe had better plans for me.

When I got my first-ever professional byline in BuzzFeed, I credited the Universe for it. When I got fired from my job at BuzzFeed, I made peace with it; the Universe had better plans for me. When the boy I had been crushing on from the freshman year of college kissed me a few months before graduation, I credited the Universe. When he broke my heart a year later, I called that divine redirection.

Even after being a huge proponent of spiritual practices to better your daily life, lately, I have been disillusioned with the idea of manifestation. There are two reasons for it:

• One, the sheer ludricity of how the internet explains the concept of manifestation.

• Two, the lack of collective responsibility within the framework of the concept itself.

The second is a much larger conversation about the state of the world. In simpler terms, a teen girl in Afghanistan can’t just manifest her way to being a doctor or an astronaut when the system is deliberately designed to stop her from accessing education. We can’t manifest away the patriarchy. We can’t manifest away the oligarchy. We can’t manifest away racial and other structural biases. I don’t have an answer to the state of the world, and for that reason we aren’t gonna discuss the second reason for my disillusionment in this essay.

To break down the first, I need to first explain what I understand as manifestation.

The theory of manifestation is based on the12 Universal laws (mainly, the law of attraction) and often claims to be rooted in quantum mechanics. I don’t know enough physics to validate that theory, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that it is probably a bastardisation of some actual scientific theory. What I can share is how I understand it.

So the idea is that we live in a Universe with infinite planes of realities that exist at the same time. In many of those universes, I exist, living different realities. The vibrational frequencies of those selves differ from each other. If you want something bad enough, it is because you are already living that life somewhere. So all you need to do is match your current frequency with that of your ideal self, and things in this plane will align perfectly to help you become the self you are envisioning to be. And that’s how you manifest your desires.

I know this all sounds a bit confusing. I will illustrate with an example. Let’s say I want to girl online to be my full-time job. The idea is that in one of these infinite planes of reality, I am already doing that. Currently, I am not making a full-time living off girl online. Which means that the vibrational frequency of myself in the plane where I am already living my dream life and the life I am currently living are different. To manifest the life I want, I need to resonate with the former’s frequency, often referred to in the literature as “the higher self.”

The person who got into St. Stephen’s College needed to have near-perfect grades, essays, and demonstrated interest in the subject she wanted to pursue. Even without knowing the law of attraction and the law of assumption, I knew what I needed to do to achieve my goals. By putting in the effort to build the best profile possible, I was probably resonating with my higher self, who had already gotten into my dream college.

I know what I need to do to build the media outlet I dream of — keep refining my craft, fish out unique subcultures to tell you about, show up consistently, and so on. The person who does this all probably has a routine, reads widely, consumes web content critically, and has an original point of view. That is, to be the person you WANT to be, you have to BE the person you want to be. Which is, you know, basic common sense. That is manifestation. It is basic common sense.

Truth be told, BEING the person you WANT to be is no easy task. It requires discipline, patience, consistency, and above all, blind faith. It requires an eyes-on-the-prize mentality and a delulu-is-the-solulu mindset. You also need to cultivate an unwavering sense of self. Because if you are constantly second-guessing yourself and keep changing your goals, it can be difficult to be that person.

In the process of resonating with your higher self, you are also going to do a lot of unlearning. Unlearning your patterns, beliefs, and habits. You will have to be ruthless, cutting off anything that doesn’t serve you. Manifestation is the process of embodying who you want to be to the dot, so that the mathematical probability of you not achieving your goal is almost zero.

Now that I have explained my personal philosophy regarding manifestation, let me address the main part of this essay — how the internet has commercialised manifestation as a get-rich-quick scheme.

A quick scroll down Manifestation Tok gets me this:

“The SIP method to emergency manifest your dream life overnight”

“I robotically affirmed for 6 hours straight, and it changed my life”

“Listen to this 3x before sleeping and watch what happens tomorrow”

…the list goes on.

Let me hold your delicate hands while saying this: listening to an audio thrice isn’t going to get you your dream life. It is only going to boost the creator’s engagement and perhaps manifest their dream life from the money the views generate. For you to work to achieve your dream, you are going to have to put in a little more effort than compulsively writing down affirmations and meditating on an AI-generated sound claiming to resonate with your higher self’s frequency.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let me come to the even more insidious part of Manifestation Tok. I am talking about the gurus and coaches belonging to Neville Goddard’s school of thought. A 20th-century new-age mystic, Goddard theorised the Law of Assumption: “Imagination creates reality.”

According to Goddard, the external world is nothing more than a mirror reflecting your internal state. Goddard believed that if you assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled with absolute conviction, the material world has no choice but to rearrange itself to match your assumption. In this framework, there are no external conditions, no independent wills, and no objective limitations; there is only your consciousness.

On Manifestation Tok, however, this philosophical solipsism has mutated into an aggressive form of fear-mongering. Here, manifestation coaches take Goddard’s idea that "you create your reality" and turn it into a hyper-vigilant psychological prison sentence. The message plastered across the timeline is terrifyingly uncompromising: the Universe is a cosmic panopticon, keeping tabs on your consciousness, waiting to penalise you the exact second your vibration drops. We are told that harbouring a single negative emotion or acknowledging a bad day will instantly sabotage our futures and manifest disaster.

Once they establish this, they sell you a masterclass to being a “master manifestor” or “quantum leap” for $999. After all, a thousand bucks is nothing when it promises a future where you get everything you want, where you don’t feel a single negative emotion. As with all internet content, if there is a price tag at the end of the product, I am going to second, third, fourth-guess your motivation in creating a certain narrative. In this case, I am happy to break it to you that thinking negative thoughts isn’t going to magically hamper you from manifesting your dream life.

Let me illustrate with the earlier example. Let’s say I achieved my dream of creating a best-selling newsletter on women and the internet and a thriving community around it. Would that mean my higher self doesn’t have any negative thoughts ever? Will she have magically transcended the realities of life to achieve a trance-like state of pure bliss? Of course, not. I am probably going to have stressful moments and days where I like my job a little less than the day before. And that’s okay.

The purpose of manifestation isn’t to create a perfect life outside of reality and every single negative emotion. It is to create a life you enjoy living. One where you are equipped mentally and physically to deal with the uncertainties of life. One filled with experiences that enrich your soul. One where you feel safe, loved, and at peace with your inner world. One that you feel proud of.