On Manifestation and The Divine

Since I was in high school, and probably even before that, I’ve been interested in alternative belief systems. Christianity was never right for my skeptical mind; it was too rigid for my questions and too conclusive in its cherry-picked doctrine for my questioning mind. My doubts piled up through my life, eventually leading to a final breakdown of my childhood faith–what little there ever was of it–when I was nineteen years old. 

My obsession with fantasy worlds and the possibility that there is more divine energy in the universe than a single, autocratic God led me to first secretly reading books on witchcraft at a corner table in the library (never checked out lest my mother should find them in my room). Later, in college, I started reading tarot cards, and I found a connection to a communicative power beyond my understanding. I realized I had a talent for the cards, and connecting to whatever forces allowed me to see beyond my immediate situation and make sense of the past gave me a sense of comfort in the possibility that I was not alone, despite my rejection of traditional systems of belief. 

My practice has been sporadic at best, though. I partially blame my ADHD, jumping from one hyperfixation to another, never in one place long enough to truly become an expert. But it’s mostly a lack of commitment to one belief. I’m not comfortable in a gray area–few of us are. I ask questions because I want them to be answered, even if just theoretically. I followed a few blogs that worshiped old gods from Greece and Rome and Egypt and New Age theology but I never connected with any of those. Part of me believed that none of it existed, that we are truly a random miracle of the universe, and part of me believed that all of it existed and everyone was right in some fashion. 

Recently I’ve been returning to my practice. My downtime in between jobs has given me the time to find my center again, and I’m trying to use that time fully while I have it. I’ve been trying to reconnect with the moon cycles and the astrological occurrences that I used to follow closely as well as utilize the placements of my own birth chart to fulfill my life rather than just expecting those placements to passively affect me. And I’ve been seeking out a manifestation practice.

In my research on finding what your true desire is, I found that a large part of being able to discern your own true desire is being able to define your belief system around what the universe and the gods and the powers that be really are. Many of us cannot do that at the drop of a hat because we have not spent any time with ourselves defining what we believe. Many of us have predetermined notions of belief systems due to the way we were raised and have never sat down to question those beliefs. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron insists you believe in the divine force that is a loving, creative God. She says that you can define its further attributes however you’d like, but as a creative you must recognize the impact that a supernatural force has on inspiration and creativity. To do this, though, you must first understand what you believe about God.

When I first sat down to figure out what I believed, I came up with a system not unlike the Catholics. There was an overlord God, capital G, and a bunch of little helpers that worked in their various areas of the world. There were what the Greeks called daemons and the Romans called geniuses that came to you and gave you the divine inspiration to create (I first discovered this idea through Elizabeth Gilbert’s TEDTalk). There were other little creatures that would grant prayers or cause mischief or tend to nature or move through the world fully unnoticed. These little gods had power, but not as much as the creator of the universe. But while the creator was literally love and creativity incarnate, the little gods could only access a portion of this energy and were far less powerful. Due to their nature, however, they were far more intimate and involved with individual humans and communities than the big-G God.

I finished this piece and realized it was a lovely story but not actually what I believed. I still held onto the belief of my Christian childhood, with a massive exception. In my beliefs at the time, I believed that either:

1. The Christian God was exactly what he said he was, and was a horrendous God who would allow human evil to hurt other humans because he had a dumb moral code. A God who had all the power in the universe to wipe out those who cause real harm, and had done so many times before if his stories were to be believed, but chose not to was not a God worth worshiping.

2. The Christian God was a liar, and had convinced millions of people over thousands of years that he was all-powerful when in fact he was merely one of many. He was an egomaniac insistent that he be given all of the attention of every living human, but was in fact incapable of the things he said he could do. Such a god is not one worth worshiping, either.

This belief I carried with me for years, not challenging it or trying to define what God might be otherwise or considering that perhaps it was humans who had lied about God and what they wanted him to be, and that he had little control over what humans said about him. 

This week, I introduced a new book to my spiritual practice. I first found it in library audiobook form, but I quickly fell in love with it and bought a physical copy to practice with and return to as often as I needed. It’s called Manifesting: The Practical, Simple Guide to Creating the Life You Want, by Kris Ferraro. It’s simple, straightforward, and does not contain any shame. It’s a guide to your own practice, guide being the operative word. It does not prescribe any definites or insist any way is right, but the book does contain encouragement that anything is possible as long as you ask and take action to show the higher powers that you’re earnest about your desire.

But there it is: the higher powers. Yesterday on my walk I listened to the section of the book where she asks you to define your God, but remember that whatever it is, it is first and foremost love. So I came up with a new system that I think is far closer to what I actually believe, and is actually something I can try to practice with.

For me, there is an energy in the universe that is pure creation energy. It is constantly moving and creating, and sometimes creation energy results in destruction because matter can only go so far. Creation energy moves through everything and drives everyone, from the smallest microbe to the most successful human to the cosmos itself. It is undefinable and it is the reason for our existence. How it came to be I do not know; perhaps it simply is.

This creation energy created God, which is equal parts love and creativity and planning. This creation energy also created humans–God is not our creator. Rather, we were born of the same source. This source imbued us with free will, God and animal alike, so that we can be guided by God’s energy but cannot be forced by it. God is in fact all-seeing, all-knowing, and omnipresent, also a barely-understandable force, but one that is constrained. This God is an eternal planner. It had an original plan for our world, but we did not all follow it at all times. Every human makes choices that are not in our best interest, choices that drive us from the path that will lead us to what we truly want. It is this God that plants in us this desire and tries to guide us to what happens. God exists within time as much as we do, and can force our hand through circumstances beyond our control, but always has our best interest at heart. He cannot stop the evil in the world, but he can try to guide the world into stopping the evil ourselves.

I used the word “evil” a lot here. I don’t know what else to call self-interest at the expense of another, no matter how big or small the slight. Corporations use slave labor to produce at a rate beyond consumption, climate change caused by oil and coal industries destroys entire countries, and individual humans harm one another emotionally and physically beyond repair. War is waged and soldiers return to a world that does not support their recovery from the horrors they were ordered to see and inflict, companies steal wages from their employees, marketing experts drive us to hate ourselves in order to sell yet another useless product. All of these things are evil, and all of these things cannot be stopped by God, in part because they all utilize the creation energy that drives us all. They are as much a part of the flow of the universe as anything else. God can try to guide the people involved into moving away from that evil, but humans would have to tune into a God made of pure love before that could happen. And the most popular God at the moment is one of pure hate.

This is the system I can subscribe to. This is a God I can pray to and request reasonable intervention from. This is a God I can thank for minor conveniences, and for major breakthroughs. This is a God I can derive love from to send out to others when I do not feel the love myself. This is a God that could speak through my tarot cards to show me my past and my potential future. This is a God I can manifest with.

At the end of the day I don’t know if this God is real. I can never know truly if this God is real. I can only hope that something like this exists when I reach out. Anne Lamott’s book Help, Thanks, Wow outlines the three types of prayers that everything boils down to: a request for assistance, an acknowledgement of gratitude, or a recognition of awe. For me, this is a God that I can send all three prayers to with ease. This is a God I can hope for. And that means there is a life I can hope for, as well.