“I don’t think you need to believe the universe has your back to create a different reality. But I do believe there is far more going on than we understand”
— Guinevere Ellis
I have been thinking a lot about manifestation recently.
Although I’m increasingly reluctant to call it that.
The word has acquired rather a lot of baggage.
For some people, manifestation means deliberately creating a result before there is any obvious evidence that the result is going to happen.
For others, it means asking the universe for a Range Rover, seeing 11:11 on the microwave and assuming delivery is imminent.
I am much more interested in the first version.
I call it reality creation.
And the strange thing is, when I look back over my life, I realise I have been doing it since I was very young.
Long before I had heard of manifestation.
Long before I knew anything about the subconscious mind.
And certainly long before I had developed any particular beliefs about consciousness, the universe or why some things seem to happen in ways we cannot quite explain.
I remember wanting to be in a school play when I was young.
There was a problem.
I had been told, quite categorically, that it wasn’t going to happen.
As far as the adults involved were concerned, the matter was settled.
Unfortunately for them, I had reached a different conclusion.
I was going to be in that play.
I didn’t conduct a SWOT analysis. I certainly didn’t ask myself whether I was worthy of the role.
I simply refused to accept the existing version of events.
And somehow, circumstances changed.
I was in the play.
Years later, the same pattern appeared again.
There were jobs I wanted that I was told I would never get.
Not unlikely.
Not difficult.
Never.
I have always found the word never strangely motivating.
Tell me something will be challenging and I may procrastinate for three weeks.
Tell me it is impossible and apparently I become extremely efficient.
And then there were the professional exams I decided I would pass in three months, through a route I had been told would take more than a decade.
I passed them.
Three months.
Obviously, I studied.
Reality creation is considerably less effective if you decide you’re going to pass an exam and then decline to open the textbook.
But I had been given a perfectly rational explanation for why what I wanted was unrealistic.
I simply didn’t accept it as the final answer.
And some of the things I have created are harder to explain through sheer bloody-mindedness.
My partner.
My children.
I had a very clear picture of the personal life I wanted.
Not a cosmic shopping list specifying height, eye colour and preferred Sunday lunch.
But the life.
The relationship. The family. The feeling of it.
And that life arrived too.
Exactly as I planned. The partner, my daughter, my son.
This is where reality creation becomes fascinating to me.
Because I can explain some of it.
Something changes when a human being makes an irrevocable decision about what they are going to create.
Their attention changes.
Their behaviour changes.
Their tolerance for discomfort changes.
They notice opportunities they might previously have ignored. They become more persistent. They take actions that would have seemed unreasonable when they were still undecided.
We know the mind filters enormous amounts of information. We know expectations influence perception. We know self-image affects behaviour.
Change what you believe is possible and you change what you are prepared to do.
Change what you repeatedly do and, unsurprisingly, you begin to change your results.
But then there is the other bit.
The bit I can’t neatly explain.
The chance meeting.
The person who suddenly appears.
The email arriving at exactly the right moment.
The opportunity you couldn’t possibly have engineered because you didn’t even know it existed.
The sequence of events that, retrospectively, looks almost suspiciously well organised.
I have experienced enough of those moments to believe there is more going on than we currently understand.
Perhaps there is an intelligence to life.
Perhaps what we call intuition, synchronicity and coincidence aren’t quite as coincidental as we think.
I have my own beliefs about that.
And that’s the point.
None of us really knows.
Humanity has established an extraordinary amount about how our world works. Beyond what we can currently observe and demonstrate, however, we enter the territory of belief.
But I don’t think we have to choose between being logical and believing there is more to life than we can currently see.
I certainly don’t.
I can believe deeply in the power of the mind and believe there may be something beyond it.
I can understand the behavioural mechanisms behind reality creation and wonder why certain things appear at precisely the moment they are needed.
I can have a method without needing to explain every mystery.
And perhaps that is the point.
Because we can spend an enormous amount of time debating why this works.
I’m much more interested in:
How do I use it?
For me, there is a process.
Decide what you want.
Make an irrevocable decision that you are going to create it.
Learn to recognise the thinking that continually pulls you back towards your existing reality.
Change the way you see yourself in relation to the thing you want.
Take the bold actions that move you towards it.
Continue when the immediate evidence tells you it isn’t working.
And remain open to the possibility that you don’t yet know exactly how it will happen.
That last part matters.
Some of the best things that have happened in my life did not happen in the way I expected them to.
I knew the destination.
I was often completely wrong about the route.
Perhaps that is where the mysterious part comes in.
Perhaps it is probability meeting persistence.
Perhaps it is consciousness.
Perhaps the universe has been helping all along and is mildly offended that I haven’t given it sufficient credit.
I remain very open to that possibility.
What I am certain about is how much human potential gets abandoned because people mistake current evidence for future inevitability.
They look at what exists today and use it to calculate what they are allowed to expect tomorrow.
I didn’t do that with the school play.
I didn’t do it with those jobs.
I didn’t do it when I was told something would take more than a decade.
And when I look at many of the most improbable things I have created in my life, I see the same pattern.
First, there was a decision.
Then there was a period in which reality had not yet caught up with it.
And somewhere in that gap, I had to choose which one I was going to believe more:
What existed.
Or what I had decided to create.
Maybe that is manifestation.
Maybe it is the mind.
Maybe it is consciousness.
Maybe it is all three.
I don’t think we need to know exactly how it works before we start experimenting with it.
After all, you don’t need to understand electricity to turn on a light.
And I still have absolutely no idea how Wi-Fi works, yet I use it with remarkable confidence every day.
So perhaps the more interesting question isn’t:
“Do you believe in manifestation?”
Perhaps it’s:
“What would you attempt to create if you stopped treating your current reality as the final word on what is possible for you?”
That is the basis of my life’s work.
Until next Saturday…
Expect Extraordinary.
Guinevere Ellis
The Mind Director™