Within the world of manifestation, there are many myths that can misguide us. In this article, we’ll zero in on 11 of the most common and limiting ones. And towards the end, we’ll explore why these misconceptions appear in the first place and I will give some advice on how to avoid it happening.
Misconception 1: Manifesting Is Backed by Science
Manifesting, as of yet, is not supported by any scientific evidence. It’s important to understand that just because there is no scientific proof doesn’t mean it’s not real. It’s rather an indication that science is just not at a place yet where it would be possible to develop any theory of manifestation and the slippery nature of how manifestation works would also make it really hard to develop testable experiments.
Science is about making rigorous and precise claims that can be tested. It requires clear mathematical theories and a way to test them through experiments. As of today, designing a proper scientific experiment for manifesting would simply be too hard, if not impossible. Science has not come far enough to develop a theory of manifestation and probably won’t for a long time. Similarly, scientists from five-hundred years ago wouldn’t be equipped with the knowledge to do experiments, let alone mathematical theories relating to quantum physics.
This is not at all dig of science in any way. Science has to be this rigorous and precise to be as useful as it is.
You will often hear misleading claims stating that quantum physics or energy at specific frequencies prove that manifestation is real. I feel that such statements will, unfortunately, make it all seem like a scam or a lot less credible to the newcomer.
Scientific debates around quantum physics, emergent space-time, and parallel universes are all very interesting, but they don’t offer direct evidence for manifesting. Yes, they may make it more plausible, but they do not prove it in any way. For example, some leading physicists are currently exploring the idea that space-time might be a construct emerging from some deeper structure that is somehow ”beyond” space-time. Again this does not prove manifestation, but a theory such as this does make it slightly more plausible to science.
Also, hypnosis research has shown that our subconscious mind has a lot more influence over our bodies and behavior than we think and that it becomes susceptible to the impression of new beliefs under a trance-like state. Though these findings are fascinating, they demonstrate how the subconscious can control the body but not the external circumstances.
Even further, there is more controversial science within what is called parapsychology, seemingly demonstrating that the mind acts beyond time and space. Even then, none of these offers a clear explanation or a precise theory of how manifestation works, and they do not really show the power of manifestation to its true extent.
So, while there’s currently no concrete scientific proof supporting or refuting manifestation, that doesn’t discount its reality. If science ever formulates a theory of manifestation, it could take centuries. You need to put manifesting into practice and see it working in your own life to know that it is real. The proof is in the pudding. If you’re still skeptical about manifesting, the only way you will ever be convinced is to make it work yourself.
Misconception 2: Positive Thinking
While there are benefits of positive thinking, it’s simply not true that you have to force yourself to think positively all the time. It is not only too exhausting, but it is also ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive.
First of all, it’s important to understand that the subconscious mind is beyond thoughts, so to speak. If the subconscious mind remains unaffected by the positive thinking, it does not matter how many negative thoughts or how many positive thoughts you have.
Also, negative thinking is not all bad. In fact, if you do not have negative thoughts, you are not able to look at things critically. You can never find a problem within yourself if you are not able to look with an honest frame of mind. If you constantly hide away from truths because you only want to think positive thoughts, then that’s a bad thing.
You do not have to ”flip” every negative thought into a positive thought. In fact, this only shows that your fear them. When you fear a thought, that’s when it gains power over you.
Instead of constantly ”flipping” thoughts, change your reaction to them. Think of them as ”just thoughts” within you. The problem with negative thinking comes when you identify with the thoughts. When you stop fearing a particular pattern or series of negative thoughts, you stop feeding the underlying belief or idea from which they appear.
Positive thoughts that only remain on the surface level of your conscious mind and do not reach the depths of your subconscious also won’t produce much of an effect. Unless your positive thinking impacts the subconscious, there will be no change in results.
Positive thinking is often a cover-up for fear. When met with doubt or worry, one might begin to think positive thoughts to escape this doubt. Here are two examples of this:
- You’re manifesting a new job, but deep down, you believe that you’re not qualified enough. No matter how many times you affirm, “I am deserving of the best job,” unless it produces an effect on your subconscious, it will have no impact. Here the positive thinking is overpowered by the underlying belief.
- Suppose you’re manifesting a loving relationship. But, underneath the surface, there’s a fear of being unlovable or rejected. Covering these fears with surface-level positive affirmations without addressing the root belief still does not get rid of the belief. The belief will still show itself in manifestation even though you have ”covered it up” with positive thinking.
This is why the idea of ”constructive” thinking is so important. Constructive thinking involves acknowledging and dealing with your thoughts – positive or negative – without judgment. It is more neutral and doesn’t label things as good or bad.
Remember, the important thing is the ideas in the subconscious mind. All too often, positive thinking ends up being a ”plaster” or method of hiding away from negative beliefs. Instead, stop caring so much about positive or negative thoughts and instead focus on the underlying belief.
Misconception 3: Negative Thoughts or Emotions are Bad When Manifesting
It’s simply not true that you always need to be happy or feel good when manifesting. You can feel down, overwhelmed, or depressed and still manifest good things. Once you begin to get good at manifesting, this misconception will fall away on its own pretty quickly.
As mentioned before, negative thoughts and emotions, in and of themselves, are not detrimental to manifestation. They only become obstacles if we allow them to settle and take root in the deeper subconscious level.
When you’re manifesting something, it isn’t about not avoiding negativity. It’s about how we react to and process these negative experiences. It is true that if we get all locked up in how bad things are, we reinforce and re-manifest those conditions again. But the cure is not to avoid the negativity; rather, it’s to confront it head-on. If we observe them objectively, accept their existence, and process them (rather than suppressing or denying them), we are cutting away the roots. We are detaching from them, gradually taking the power away from them.
Remember, the important thing is what idea or belief is in the subconscious mind. Do you think that a good idea has ever come from negative emotion? If so, then you are correct. Someone met with huge failure or disappointment might end up thinking ”never again,” ending up implanting a good idea in the subconscious mind. Here the person may feel sad and depressed but will ultimately wind up manifesting something of greatness.
You will probably need to encounter a lot of negative or uncomfortable truths about yourself or very limiting beliefs in yourself where you just feel like hiding away from them and covering them up. Instead, you need the resilience to look honestly within, even if it is a little bit painful.
Accepting and being able to confront negativity only makes you stronger and more resilient.
Misconception 4: Manifesting Is Just A Way To Feel Good/Wishful Thinking
A common misconception surrounding manifestation is that it is simply wishful thinking and merely a delusion that makes you feel good. This conception trivializes it as a mere “feel-good” coping mechanism. After all, those who feel the most powerless in life, surely would be especially attracted to the concept of manifestation, right?
Even though manifesting and wishful thinking may seem similar on the surface, it’s important to understand that the purpose of manifesting is to get actual results. If you’re simply living in a fantasy world without making any changes in your circumstances, it is not working.
Wishful thinking is a way for your mind to cope with things by putting you into elaborate feel-good daydreams. Manifesting is different in that you are deliberately implanting an idea in the subconscious for the purpose of making real observable changes. It’s a lot more deliberate. You are, therefore, not meant to be stuck year after year in idle daydreaming.
Wishful thinking is often used as an emotional escape, a way to find temporary relief from an unfulfilling life. For example, if you’re feeling powerless in your life, it might feel good to daydream about a more powerful version of yourself doing the things you wish you could do, being admired and praised by others. While this may provide momentary comfort, it actually keeps you stuck. It gives you enough satisfaction to demotivate you to do anything about your situation.
Manifestation, on the other hand, is a deliberate process. It is done for the purpose of getting new results, not to escape from reality. It involves consciously choosing a goal or an idea, then working to impress this vision upon the subconscious mind. Sure, you may feel good when manifesting, but results are still the determiner of your success. If there are no results, there is no success, and you, therefore, have to keep practicing.
I also have an article on the difference between daydreaming/wishful thinking and manifestation if you’re interested.
Furthermore, manifesting techniques are meant to go deep within the subconscious. Through the use of visualization, affirmations, scripting, self-talking, and meditation, you are trying to make changes in the subconscious parts of you. Wishful thinking or daydreaming happens on the surface level and is most often accompanied by a subtle underlying feeling of longing to be elsewhere.
Manifestation is not about ”wishing” for things to change; it’s about intelligently working with the deeper power inherent within yourself. It’s not about temporary relief; it’s about getting big and lasting changes in your life.
Misconception 5: You HAVE To Be Specific
You’ll often hear that you need to be extremely specific when manifesting. If you want money, it’s not good enough to wish for ”wealth” – you have to know exactly how much money you want down to the penny. In my experience, this is completely untrue. In fact, I have also found that it’s a lot easier to manifest something broad like ”wealth” rather than a specific amount of money.
I go a lot deeper into this in my article on specific vs. general manifestations.
This is not to say that you can’t be specific. If your desire is very specific, then go for it. There’s just no need to be more specific than necessary.
In my experience, general manifestations usually lead to better results. When you go general, you give the deeper, more intelligent part of you the freedom to manifest your intentions in numerous ways that often leads to even greater than anticipated results. The subconscious knows you better than you do, and oftentimes going general leads to manifestations that are way better than you would have ever imagined. For example, if you want something like ”greatness” or “accomplishment” in your life, then you simply impress these ideas on the subconscious, and the subconscious will manifest it in all sorts of ways.
Misconception 6: Everything You Manifest Is ”Meant to Happen”
If you feel that your life is circular and imprisoning, you probably feel that your life is “meant” to be this way and that you’re bound to experience the same results over and over again. You may feel that you are meant to suffer, that you are meant to be broke, or meant to be alone and that your life is stuck on a certain level, destined to go a certain way.
If you’re not careful, you will unintentionally end up believing that it is fate. In actuality, it’s nothing but the manifestation of deeply rooted beliefs that may have been there for a long time. The results you get flow from the beliefs in your subconscious, and if you never make drastic inner changes, your life will be circular and predestined.
It’s important to understand that there is no fate and that nothing is really ”meant” to happen. Everything you experience is projections that align with the ideas or structures in consciousness (which is basically what I mean by ”belief”). You could say that your fate flows from your beliefs. If you have an innate belief that ”I am meant to be broke,” ”that I am always broke,” or similar, this belief MUST manifest. You cannot really escape from it, and this makes you feel like you are bound by fate. To get a new fate, so to speak, you need to work on your beliefs in the subconscious. If your beliefs align with greatness, freedom, power, happiness, etc., then whatever fate you felt impeded by will pass away.
As a bit of a side-note, the idea of fate is not something that only people within manifesting struggle with. Even though the average person does not logically believe in fate, many actually feel that their life is locked in some way. A person saying,”I won’t get this because nothing good has ever happened to me in the past,” is actually revealing that they, perhaps unintentionally, believe in fate. It is, of course, illogical to say that just because something good hasn’t happened in the past, it cannot happen in the future. On the other hand, there are also many people that hold the belief that they are free in life, and this manifests as a corresponding freedom, free from any notion of fate.
So, if your life feels to be ”locked in place” and you feel stuck on a certain path, it’s because you hold ideas that give you a thin rope to walk on. You cannot really deviate from a deeply ingrained subconscious idea. Your job is to go within and work on your subconscious. This will automatically overcome the ”stuck-ness” that makes your life feel predestined.
Misconception 7: There Is Only One Correct Way to Manifest
There really is no correct way to manifest. Your job in manifesting is to cause a change in your subconscious mind (which means it will produce new manifestations), and it doesn’t matter how this change is made.
You have properly encountered a lot of rules. Some say to ”act as if,” and think, feel, and act like the person you want to become. Others say (like I do) to go into meditation, impress an idea, and then to go about life more or less regularly. Some say you have to visualize, while others say that scripting is the way to go.
Another common one I see is the insistence that you have to say ”I am” instead of ”I will.” The argument is that saying ”I will” is an acknowledgment that ”I am not” or ”I don’t have.” But in truth, if the ”I will” statement impresses the right idea in the subconscious, then the desire will manifest. If your subconscious holds the idea that your particular manifestation is going to appear, then the mental affirmation of ”I will” is going to work perfectly fine.
The key takeaway is that all techniques have the potential to work, and each individual will end up with his or her own method that fits their particular mindset.
Misconception 8: Manifesting is About Control
Many people, including myself, have fallen into this misconception – and it’s an easy one to fall into. After all, isn’t manifestation about having control over your reality?
I believe that this over-controlling attitude stems from this: you know that you are in control of reality, and you therefore believe that you need to think through every single knot and bolt when you are manifesting something.
You may want the desire to show up in a certain way, for it to come within a certain time frame, for it to appear precisely in this and that way, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, you can be extremely specific, but being specific is very different from the micro-managing attitude I am talking about here. The best way is to loosen the toils and let things happen on their own without you feeling the need to intervene all the time.
If you have ever manifested something, you have probably noticed that the thing you intended for actually came in a different way and perhaps even that it feels very different from how you imagined it. This is because it’s not your intelligence that is doing the work but the intelligence inherent in the subconscious mind. It doesn’t matter what is happening in your intelligence, the manifestation comes from the infinite intelligence.
This also means that if you successfully manifest something while trying to control every single detail with your own mind, the manifestation will still not fit the details you tried to force in. This is because you tried to control things through your own intelligence.
Instead of trying to control everything, simply just convey your desire to the inner power (by whatever technique you want to use) and let things happen from there. Be specific if you want – imagine or affirm specific details if they are important to you, but understand that the only way for those details to manifest is if they are held by the subconscious intelligence.
Misconception 9: You Must Constantly Think About What You Want to Manifest
You don’t have to constantly think about your desire for it to manifest. In fact, overthinking can actually reinforce your doubt and worry, which will only uproot the desire.
The power is in your subconscious mind, not your surface-level conscious mind. It’s not about consciously thinking about your desires every waking moment but about planting the seeds of your desires deep with yourself.
Once an idea or desire is deeply embedded in your subconscious, it’s set into motion, regardless of whether it remains at the forefront of your mind or not. In fact, the subconscious mind operates outside of our conscious awareness, meaning it continues to work even when you are not consciously thinking about it.
Manifesting is a ”set it and forget it” process. You may have to do the ”set”-part again and again until the idea is firmly planted, but that is really all you can do. It’s not the repetition of a conscious thought but the depth of impression on the subconscious that makes the difference.
Misconception 10: Manifestation Is About Materialism
Most people who get into manifestation want things like big houses, luxury cars, large sums of money, etc. While there’s no harm in desiring and manifesting material wealth, it’s a misinterpretation to view manifestation as solely a tool for getting more ”stuff.”
Manifestation is, at its heart, a process of getting more out of life. Yes, you can definitely manifest material items, but you can also manifest deeper things like happiness, freedom, meaning, and greatness. These are things we are all looking for. You can use the power within you to bring about these things.
Misconception 11: Manifesting Is Only About Changing Your Own Actions
While impressing an idea on the subconscious will change your own behavior, thoughts, feelings, overall mental state, and so on, it also manifests itself directly in your external world in the form of new opportunities, changing circumstances, meeting new people, and so on.
The idea that thoughts can control external reality is the part that draws the most skepticism. But you can, through practice and the desire to believe it, actually prove to yourself by experience that this is true.
Why Do So Many Misconceptions Appear In Regards To Manifestation?
In my view, misconceptions in manifesting arise for the following reasons:
Firstly, the concept of manifesting deals primarily with the mind, which is inherently subjective and often elusive. This makes it difficult to communicate ideas clearly and accurately, leading to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
Secondly, many people may not have a lot of experience with manifesting that give advice. It often comes from people who have a lot of ”knowledge” but do not have results to account for it, or simply just from people who have neither.
In a well-meaning attempt to help others, they might put forth ideas that sound appealing or seem right, even though they may be wrong. In fact, people with experience with manifesting also do this – and I may even do this unintentionally. This is not a dig at anyone at all, it’s just something to keep in mind, as it is a big cause of many of these misconceptions. Sometimes it can feel like we have ”figured it out,” but if the results aren’t there, it doesn’t really matter.
Thirdly, human nature has an innate desire for definitive answers. It can lead to ill-thought-out conclusions that come because of a desire for closure. This can further proliferate misconceptions, despite good intentions.
Next, we will look at how we can avoid locking ourselves into incorrect ideas about manifesting.
How To Best Avoid Misconceptions?
First of all, become comfortable with the fact that you do not have all the answers. This doesn’t only apply to the concept of manifesting but also to most other things in our lives.
And you know what? That’s perfectly fine. It’s better to accept this and say, “I don’t know,” than to fill the gaps with stuff that just isn’t true. You really do not have to know that much to make manifesting work. You simply just have to practice it. It doesn’t matter how much you know on the intellectual level.
Next, use your noggin! Don’t take everything you read or hear at face value. Even if that guru on Instagram said it, it doesn’t mean it’s a fact. You’ve got to think it over, question it, and decide for yourself what makes sense. Think of it as a possibility rather than a definite fact.
Also, remember that manifesting is about you learning to cooperate with your deeper self. The only way to learn is to look within. You can look in a book or look at a video, but you cannot replace this with actually looking within yourself. The results you get when manifesting are far more educational and far more convincing than any advice you get.
And lastly, remain open-minded. Clinging on to a particular idea that you like doesn’t make it true. Truth is truth, and it will always be so, no matter what you think. And again, you do not really have to know the exact ins and outs to reap the practical results of manifesting.
Summary
With a sea of varying beliefs and interpretations in the world of manifestation, it’s simple to fall prey to misbeliefs and misinformation. Yet, it’s crucial to maintain an open mind, not letting these so-called ”rules” and misconceptions limit you.
Manifesting is about learning to cooperate with your subconscious. And this is something you can only really learn by testing it yourself. Knowledge is beneficial, but the important thing is the results. You can get big results without having all the answers. Also, genuine learning comes from putting it into practice for yourself and figuring out what works.
Your own experiences are the best guide. Let your experiences shape your understanding and hone your skills, and stay open to new viewpoints.
I hope you found this article helpful. Thanks for reading!
