is manifesting real?
I've been living in Grand Teton National Park for four months now, but this week, one of my best friends, Jarrin, came to visit me. As we were driving north through Yellowstone, we started talking about how we have chosen to view the world, and whether that choice was even a choice at all.
I've circled this question for years. I wrote my final paper for my communications degree on the intrapersonal relationship and how the relationship to the self connects to everything else — and somehow, the mystery only kept deepening.
And question after question kept dropping me off at this one premise:
What makes up your reality might be far more psychological than we were ever taught to understand.
Jarrin sees the world as fundamentally good, with terrible things happening within it.
I think I tend to see it almost completely backwards: existence feels fundamentally tragic to me, with beautiful things happening within it.
Neither of us really chose these positions. Or at least, neither of us could remember choosing them.
And yet they seemed to change everything.
The same world.
The same mountains outside the window. The same people. The same death. The same uncertainty. The same ridiculousness of being alive.
But somehow, two different worlds.
And then I started wondering whether the way we see reality is not simply a description of reality.
Maybe it is part of the machinery that creates the reality we actually experience.
Not in the sense that you can think yourself into having whatever you want. That's too easy. Life is happening to you, at least partly.
But there is something more sublime here:
We are participating in this thing. We are co-creators.
I have a friend who believes that creation holds the energetic imprint of its creator— that God is somehow inside all of us, creating through us.
Maybe that's it.
Or maybe it can be understood psychologically.
The assumptions you carry about yourself, other people, and existence itself might determine what you notice, what you fear, what you pursue, what you reject, what you call beautiful, what you call meaningless—and eventually, what kind of life you end up living.
Before we ever experience the world, we are already meeting it through a story about what kind of world it is.
And perhaps even stranger—
a story about what kind of person we are within it.
What kind of being am I in this world?
Am I a victim?
A player?
A stranger?
An explorer?
A failure?
A temporary animal?
A soul?
A consciousness?
A body?
A mistake?
A miracle?
A participant?
A spectator?
A person who needs to protect himself?
A person who can afford to be open?
These aren't just philosophical labels.
They change what you notice. What risks you take. Who you approach. What you interpret as threatening. What you interpret as beautiful. What you think you're allowed to want. What you think you're capable of becoming.
And eventually, what kind of life you construct.
The circular nature of it is quite poetic:
You create a picture of yourself.
The picture determines how you meet the world.
The world responds to how you meet it.
You take that response as confirmation of who you are.
And then you create the picture again.
So is that manifesting?
I genuinely don't know.
I've spent years thinking about this and somehow ended up with more questions than I started with.
Maybe we don't create reality.
But we have severely underestimated our participation in it.
And that might be as close to an answer as I'm going to get.
Because the more I think about this, the more ridiculous the question becomes.
Are we discovering reality? Interpreting it? Creating it?
Or are we just highly sophisticated animals sitting inside a skull, trying to reverse-engineer existence from the inside?
I have no idea.
But somewhere between the mountains of Yellowstone, my friend, and a conversation that somehow escalated into the nature of reality itself, I realized that maybe I really don't need to know.
I just need to pay attention to the lens I'm looking through.
And recognize that I get to decide, at least to some degree, how I meet this strange thing.
Because whatever this is—
we're in it.
And we're apparently making it up as we go.