76. Decolonizing Manifestation, Part 1: The Roots of Magic

Why am I teaching manifestation as a marketing teacher?

Because effective marketing IS manifesting: changing reality with your intention. Good marketers are master manifestors.

But we need to get to the roots of the idea. Because the idea that your mind shapes reality did NOT come from The Secret, or the New Age movement, or a blonde wealth mindset coach. 

It's actually one of the oldest, most rigorously developed ideas in human history. 

Then the modern Western stripped it of its ethics, lineage and cosmology, and distorted it into a kind of "cosmic vending machine." Put your order in, recite the mantras, wait for same-day delivery. (And if it doesn't come... well, you must have been thinking low-vibration thoughts!)

But we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We're rescuing the real heart of manifestation, and restoring it to its roots.

This is Part 1 in a 3-part series.

Transcript

Hello, everyone. You're listening to Liberatory Business, and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for being here.

Now, I'm thrilled to present to you the first part of a three-part series I'm planning, in which I'm teaching you about manifestation. And you might be wondering, "Wait a minute, Simone, where are we going? You're a marketing teacher. Why are you talking about manifestation?" Well, here's the thing: marketing is manifestation.

Marketing is manifestation

Like, think about what marketing actually does. It's about creating change in people's hearts and behaviors. Marketing done well brings conversations to life that didn't exist before, makes connections happen that weren't happening before. Through marketing, we are directing people's attention. We are shaping movements.

All of that comes from some human being's intention and desire. So all of that is manifestation. So if you've been a student of mine for a while, if you've been doing some of the things I've been teaching and, as a result, creating different results in your life and in your business — guess what? You've already been practicing manifestation, whether you've known to call it that or not.

Now, there's a lot of noise around this concept. A lot of not-so-helpful things being taught — not so helpful or accurate — a lot of popular misunderstanding about it. So it got to a point where I felt like, the older I get and the more work I do with people, the more I feel the need to set the record straight. Because this work of creating things, spreading the word about it, influencing people in a way that grows your business and creates positive change in the world — it's spiritual at its core. It's energetic. And I think it's important that we have the right ideas and terms to talk about it. And that's what I want to accomplish through these three episodes on manifestation: decolonizing manifestation, making it actually work.

You're already manifesting something

So here's the idea I want to open with for part one: you're already manifesting something in the world. Regardless of whether you're aware of it or not. Regardless of whether it's working in a way you like or not. Why? Because desire happens in the mind, and your mind is always shaping reality.

Now, this is a little bit of a metaphysical part, but stay with me. If you're like probably most people in my world, in my community, it's probably not exactly shocking news that your mind shapes reality and influences reality. You're like, "Okay, I get it." But here's what I want to ask you. When I talk about the idea of your mind shaping reality, where do you think that idea comes from? Think back through your life — where did you first encounter it?

You know, a lot of people first heard of it from The Secret. The big thing from, what was it, 20 years ago, 30 years ago? But even if that's where you heard it for the first time, the idea that your mind shapes reality did not come from The Secret. A lot of people first encountered it from the New Age movement. It did not come from the New Age movement either. A lot of people might have heard it from a mindset coach, a success guru, a wealth coach — but even if they're teaching those ideas, it did not originate from any of them, or from any other part of Western self-help culture or coaching culture.

It is actually one of the oldest and most rigorously developed ideas in human spiritual history, and it has deep, serious, ancient roots.

Where this idea actually comes from

Buddhist philosophy — which, in a manner of thinking about it, is like an offshoot of more ancient Hindu philosophy — originated in what is now Nepal and India around the fifth century BCE, and over the years it spread extensively through different parts of Asia, including my motherland, Korea. And the whole point of the origins of Buddhist philosophy is to eliminate suffering. Life is full of suffering, and let's help you suffer less.

What Buddhism teaches is that suffering arises from the mind — from craving and attachment, from the delusion of mistaking what you're perceiving for actual reality. And once again, if you're like, "What are we talking about? I thought we were talking about manifestation," stay with me here, right? Because the interesting thing to note is that Buddhism teaches that everything arises from the mind, but it does not teach that the mind is a tool for getting what you want. It doesn't say, "Oh, use your mind to manifest more riches." That's not what it teaches. What it teaches is that the mind is the training ground for liberation — more specifically, liberation from suffering. Because your mind causes suffering, you're also going to work with the mind to let go of suffering.

I said that in some ways Buddhism is an offshoot of Hindu philosophy. And in Hindu philosophy, there's this concept of Maya, which says that the world as we perceive it is shaped by consciousness, and that ultimate reality is not this material world we can touch, but pure consciousness. Mind and reality are deeply entangled. And I think quantum physicists are beginning to understand what this actually means in scientific terms.

And once again, the point of working with your own mind was never to get more stuff. It was to understand reality so deeply — which you're able to do when you understand your own mind — that you realize you were never separate from the divine in the first place. To, I would say, become one with the divine — but what the tradition really teaches is to let go of the illusion that you were ever separate from it in the first place.

Now, in the late 19th and early 20th century, these ideas began flowing into Western culture as Westerners became more interested in Eastern culture. But the way it traveled to the Western world, on its way, the teachings often got stripped of their ethical context, their roots in community and lineage, and the requirement of years of disciplined practice. So this idea that thought influences reality, that our thoughts create reality, got flattened to a much shallower version — and I might even say a distorted version — that offers, quote-unquote, "positive thinking" as a lifestyle.

You might have heard of, or you may have even read, the very famous book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which was a big mid-20th-century hit, and it hugely influenced the coaching industry, the self-help and self-development industries. And Napoleon Hill is the one who, on a really popular level, made the mind-reality connection very explicit — and he made it about wealth. The book literally talks about how you can change your thoughts, and that's all it really takes to make more money and to have more money in your life.

And then the more contemporary manifestation of that is, you know, The Secret. First it was a book, I believe, and then it got turned into a movie, became a big hit. Oprah endorsed it. So many big people endorsed it. It became a hit in, I think, the 2000s, and it kind of turned into a wildfire that spread alongside the booming of the self-help and coaching industries over the past two decades.

This wisdom belongs to all of us

Now, before we go any further into what the modern Western world did with this, I want to step back just a little bit and make sure you feel how big the thing it flattened actually is. Because the roots I've been pointing you to are Buddhist and Hindu. That's the lineage I believe the modern Western version draws most directly from, and also one of the most important and influential traditions in the world.

However, this wisdom is not even close to being uniquely Asian, or uniquely Buddhist, or uniquely Hindu. The understanding that mind and matter aren't separate — that your wishes and intentions have real consequence in the world, that thought and word and intention directly, and not metaphorically, shape reality — shows up in indigenous wisdom traditions all over the world. And there are going to be so many out there that I can't name, because I don't know enough to speak on their behalf. But just some examples that I do know of: from the time I studied with an elder who was trained in the Yoruba tradition, a West African tradition, there's something called Ashé. And Ashé is the power — again, to my understanding, and I'm so sorry if I get it wrong — the spiritual power that turns your words and intention into reality. You speak reality into being.

And in Hawaiian and Polynesian cultures, where I also had the privilege of being able to learn from indigenous teachers, there's this concept of mana, which is a life force. When you make something, when you say something, you put your mana behind it, and that shapes reality. I've read about Aboriginal Australian traditions that speak of the Dreaming — singing reality into being. And from my research, you can also find similar things in Andean cultures, in Indigenous nations across the Americas, in Jewish mysticism — the creative power of the divine word. And of course, I don't want to forget, there are the folk traditions of Europe, the Indigenous traditions of Europe before they were colonized by their own empires, again and again and again.

So when I talk about decolonizing manifestation, I don't mean just look to this one culture. I mean remembering this thread of ancient wisdom that belongs to all of us. And it's easy to see the real outlier here — the one that's stripped it of this entire communal, ancient, lineage-bound, ethical context. That could only have come from the modern Western world.

And I think this is where the law of attraction, the idea of it, became fully individualistic, transactional, and — dare I say — capitalistic.

What the modern West did with it

And let me be a little more concrete about what I mean by these words — individualistic, capitalistic, transactional — because these can be slippery. What do they mean?

So by individualistic, I mean it became all about you. Your dream life, your dream body, your dream business, your dream income, your dream partner, right? The vision board with the car and the house and the beach, and there's no other people in it — maybe aside from the partner you want or the child you want, all very nuclear-family-coded. And at its worst, it curdles into something a bit more sinister, which is the idea that because you create your own reality, anyone who's suffering must have created their own suffering. The person who's sick, the person who's disabled, the person who's broke, the person who was born into war or genocide — well, I guess they manifested those things. I guess they didn't think enough positive thoughts. Which is actually a very convenient story if you are committed to not looking at the systems that actually put people where they are — the systems over which you have a measure of responsibility. That's what I mean by individualistic.

And by capitalistic, I mean the measure of whether, say, a manifestation practice worked almost always became something about money. Something about a number, right? A certain weight, a certain dollar amount — the six-figure, seven-figure this or that. This is what happens when manifestation gets swallowed by the exact wheel of suffering that it was originally supposed to free us from.

And when I say transactional, I mean we're talking about treating the universe like a vending machine. As if this whole spiritual practice of manifestation is like logging into some kind of cosmic Amazon, right? You put your order in — click, click, click, I want this. You ask, you believe, you recite your mantras, you do your visualization, and then you receive. You run the technique and the scripting, you input this cheat code of manifestation practice, and then you wait for delivery. Hopefully fast delivery. Hopefully same-day delivery or next-day delivery. And when it doesn't work, you beat yourself up. "Oh, I must not have believed hard enough. I must have been too low-vibration." As if you failed to complete the right payment for that Amazon product to arrive.

So this is what I mean. And I do think these kinds of ideas and practices constitute the majority, if not all, of what typically wears the name of manifestation in the mainstream world.

This isn't about shaming you

And hear me. If you've practiced manifestation in some of the ways I just talked about — if you ended up with a vision board that's all about stuff, or you've been trying to do all the practices to manifest seven figures, six figures, whatever, and it just didn't seem to work, or even when it did, it didn't feel the way you thought it would feel — none of this is about telling you that you did it wrong. None of this is about telling you that you made bad choices, or shaming you. Not at all.

I remember — I don't even remember where I first learned about manifestation, but it was for sure from a white person. And despite the fact that I grew up in a Buddhist culture, when someone who seems to have a lot of authority — like a white person with fancy credentials — tells me, "You do this, and you will get money and whatever you want," you're gonna listen. So I did. And this was a lot of my first experiments with manifestation as well.

The thing is, this is the only version many of us ever saw. It's the water we were swimming in. And so of course you reached for this version. When the whole culture around you tells you that your worth is tied to your net worth, and tells you this is how you get that net worth — it's only natural for us to reach for that. It's so human. And so none of this is about going back and feeling bad about how we've done it before, or what we've believed before. It's about realizing that we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Why we don't throw it all out

We don't want to throw out the teachings around manifestation altogether. Because I think the very reason this idea has been so sticky — why it's traveled so far and survived so much and proliferated to the extent that it has, despite the way it's been distorted and flattened, and I might even say bastardized — is that there's a powerful kernel of truth in it that a lot of people recognize.

Even if you think being told "change your thoughts and you can become rich" is too simplistic, too naive, too materialistic — even if you think it's spiritual bypassing — you still have to admit there's something compelling about the idea that your thoughts shape your reality in some way, right? Something in you goes, "You know what? That makes sense at some level."

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to rescue the deeply wise and intelligent and true heart of manifestation from its modern Western capitalist distortion — perversion, even — and restore it to its proper roots. And while you might not be able to join a Buddhist order or be mentored by a yogic elder in India, you can practice these ideas in your daily life in a way that's much truer to what these traditions teach, but that actually works for our modern lives.

So that's what this first episode has been: clearing some of the fog, breaking down where manifestation actually comes from, so you can start to tell the truer versions from the distorted, flattened ones.

A defense of manifestation

And before we go further, I actually want to sing a full-throated defense of manifestation — even celebrate it. Because manifestation has gotten such a bad rap, and a lot of it for good reasons. You know, it can be so cringe. And we've forgotten how powerful and genuinely sacred it actually could be.

So imagine applying the power of our intention, our mind, to a version of this work that isn't about manifesting a yacht, and a third vacation home, and a fancy watch, and a responsibility-free life, or the Instagram-perfect nuclear family. Not because there's anything wrong with wanting any of these things — there really isn't — but because that version is too small for you and for me. It's such a cramped little idea of what this incredible technology is for.

Because here's what's actually possible. You can build a life that's genuinely yours, one that fits you so well that when you're in it, you feel like you can exhale into it — instead of hustling to live up to someone else's standard of beauty or success or abundance, and wondering why some part of it always feels wrong, why you're still exhausted.

You can bring things into the world that have never existed before. Art, businesses, communities, movements — healing that ripples further than you'll ever get to see or imagine. You can provide for the people you love, break cycles that your ancestors weren't allowed to break. And that might be, I think, maybe the most sacred, the most holy version of this work: you being able to do the specific work that you came here, to this planet Earth, to do — to make the contribution that's yours and yours alone.

And I think it's worth stepping back and seeing how, on the larger scale, through manifestation, by doing it right, you can help build a world that doesn't exist yet. We're manifesting a new world into being — one that's more just, more beautiful, more alive, more harmonious. Because think about it: every movement that changed anything ever in history started as a spark of desire in somebody's mind, and they were like, "Hmm, what if I can actually pursue this?"

So that's what we're talking about. Not getting more stuff, but creating. Not accumulating, but building. We're not working to make an effective vending machine in the sky that works on our behalf — we're tapping into a sacred, ancient, world-shaping power that you were born holding as a human being. That's your birthright.

What's coming in part two

And guess what? That technology is worth getting right. That's why I'm devoting three episodes to this.

So next time, in part two, we're going to start talking about where I think any conversation about manifestation actually has to begin — which is with desire. How to become aware of what you want, how to clarify it, and how to point it in the right direction. Because so much of the mainstream conversation about manifestation is about how to get what you want — but almost none of it is about why we want what we want in the first place, and whether that's even good for us.

So that's part two. We're diving into it next time, and I'll talk to you then. Thank you so much for listening.