The Metaphysics of Manifesting Your Future

The science of woo-woo

Ok, we’re going to go on a little journey, down to quantum mechanics and back up to goals & intentions. Strap up.

For most of the history of science we had to use our senses to observe phenomena, propose hypothesis, and develop rules and laws the universe abides by. As we developed better tools to break things up into smaller pieces and measure forces something very strange happened.

Turns out the building blocks of our reality don’t behave like reality at all. They turn into probabilities and potentials. It’s honestly really hard to grasp - we can measure everything in our observable universe and it all behaves like observable things but the small things don’t. We can’t predict exactly what they’ll do and where they’ll be. We can only wave our hands at a general behavior set.

The best demonstration of this is the famous double-slit experiment. They threw electrons at an impenetrable wall with 2 slits in it they could pass through and something on the other side that showed where they landed after passing through the slits. Our rules of reality say we should be able to predict where they land by knowing the starting parameters - only electrons that arrive at the wall at the slits will pass and they’ll form a predictable pattern on the other side. And if we watch the experiment, that’s true. But if we run the experiment without determining which slit the electron goes through, the rules change. They exhibit wave-like interference patterns, behaving as if they passed through both slits simultaneously. Each electron behaving as if it’s multiple, the probability cloud remains in-tact.

It’s been proven over and over and birthed all kinds of theories including the multiverse. If you accept it as is, it makes sense. But to accept that you have to suspend everything we’ve been taught about solid objects. The wildest part is the act of measurement itself. To ‘see’ an electron we have to interact with it- bounce a photon off it or detect it’s charge. This interaction destroys the delicate wave pattern, collapsing it back into a particle.

A baseball isn’t a set of probabilities, we believe; it goes where you throw it. But the tiny ‘things’ that make up the baseball are a set of probabilities. The baseball doesn’t disappear when we blink and in physics this is called decoherence. A baseball is constantly being ‘observed’ by the environment. Air molecules hit it, light bounces off it. These billions of tiny interactions keep its quantum wave function collapsed, locking it into the reality we see. It’s too big and noisy to act like a wave.

Imagine, for a moment, that everything solid in this world is just a group of vibrations, vibrating so coherently that the vibrations get so tight together that it no longer looks like a vibration.

What the double-slit experiment tells us, however, is that if there weren’t observations happening, the baseball is in the first state…well, maybe second. Only when we look at it, or the sun does, or bird songs, do the quantum particles behave the way we expect and a baseball emerges. WTF?!

I’ll admit it can be very hard to imagine the baseball is not a baseball when we look away cause when we look back, it’s the same baseball. But at a quantum level it’s not. Nothing is ever actually the same. Time, itself, changes things and all those probabilities are interacting and changing each other, too, always towards disorganization. That’s called entropy and is a fundamental guiding principle of the universe that even quantum mechanics obey.

Back to the baseball and double-slit, this tells us reality is participatory. At the quantum level, the state of a system depends on the measurement. It is not a huge leap to extrapolate that how we think and focus also changes what our reality is. Our brain is a constantly firing electrical system. While neural signals are biological, the fundamental particles driving them operate on quantum rules, not solid object rules.

Now, if you’re still with me, let’s observe what happens when look at our future. There are so many possibilities for that future. Some are very hazy and we cannot truly see how we get there. Some are very clear and we know they’re coming. If we say “I want to be an astronaut” but then turn our focus to our daily tasks we only hold that path in our mind for a moment, the wave collapsed into an idea then it returns to a cloud of probabilities.

This is extremely intuitive, but what I’m exploring here is that maybe we’re not just affecting our own thoughts and behaviors. We very much could be interacting with the quantum field to bring about the things we think about. Perhaps if we don’t just say “I need to study to make good grades” but expand the thought to “the right things for the best grade will emerge for me to study and I will learn them in the right way” we not only narrow our focus, but perhaps, just perhaps, influence the book to fall open to the right page that happens to be most important for the upcoming test. I mean, why not???

And, to be sure, if you don’t believe that - it 100% will never happen to you. I, for one, have had layers of coincidences….coincide in ways that absolutely have astounded me. How could it possibly be true that so many things happen exactly perfect to bring out the thing I truly believed would happen?!? Further, I feel this way sometimes when learning about the universe and how improbable we all are. For SO many things to come together to create our world, our reality, right now, is so ridiculously mind-boggling that imagining I can help effect the world I want as I move through it seems simple in comparison.

Intention identifies sets of probabilities and our focus tries to turn them into reality. Of course we’re often up against forces far stronger than ourselves. It’s less manifestation and more about levels of influence. If we see the world as waves of probabilities that we try to surf we can better understand we don’t always catch the wave we want. Watching the surf is the best way to find the right wave.

Which brings me to our final parallel with quantum mechanics let’s think about observing the future, not the present. Not planning, not dreaming, but observing. Our brains are hard-wired for pattern recognition and probability calculations. Observing the baseball turns it into a baseball. Sensing where waves of probabilities are going and observing the outcome is not a huge stretch, for me. You '“know” a baseball will hit the ground before you drop it, but you’re already calculating how low the odds are a dog will run by and catch it before it hits the ground. We don’t call that quantum mechanics, but it’s a similar process of predicted outcomes from a set of variables.

If observing physical particle collapses it from a wave of possibilities into a single point of reality, perhaps our conscious attention does something similar with the future. We are observing the ‘quantum cloud’ of our future life and, by measuring and focusing, helping to crash that wave function into the reality we want. Somewhere between looking away from a baseball and dreaming of being in the world series, right?