Everyone teaching you how to manifest, how to get onto a higher vibe, to bring things into the world is practising a lightweight form of witchcraft.
The problem is, they don’t know that they are.
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At its heart, witchcraft is about studying natural ways to shape your reality in ways that you want it to be shaped.
Both the Manifesty People and the Witchy people are doing similar practice:
- Designing an intention
- Creating relaxed, deep focus
- Praying with feeling.
The difference is that the Witchy people also know how to engage the help of other entities in order to assist them. They know the risks in doing it, how to keep themselves and people around them safe, and why ritual is often helpful in maintaining specific boundaries.
Where the Manifesty People will laugh at the idea that you can talk to and meditate with trees (or rivers); and while the Manifesty People will laugh at the idea that you can charge objects to help you achieve specific outcomes; Witchy people will just shrug and say, ‘yeah so what?’
It’s fascinating to me, as someone who is a Witchy person, and who studied many modalities of that work as a teenager and young adult, that there are so many Manifesty People in the world now.
It’s amusing to me that the Manifesty People will talk about energy, intention, and manifestation… but they will shy away from the idea that there are other entities.
Effectively, if the Manifesty People realised that they are praying the only way that prayer actually works they’d do more than toy with the money spirit, or get skinny. They like to talk about physics and meditation, as if ‘science’ validates what they’re doing.
And even Lynne McTaggart, whose work I personally love to bits, began as a skeptic and bangs the science drum on the fact that you can program (Witchy people call it ‘charging’, not ‘programming’) water to carry messages.
Many Witchy people study the same things, because they have a desire to understand why what they do works for them.
The Manifesty People seem to do it because they want to be taken seriously.
And one other key difference is that Manifesty People believe that they can just control and shape the world that’s there for them. But Witchy people respect the spirits of other things. They won’t just ‘program’ or ‘charge’ an object; they’ll ask it if it wants to work with them first… just like the Crystal People do.
If you are manifesting the world, why do you care if people take you seriously?
If you are manifesting your world the way you want it to be, why do you have to have the validation of other people all the time?
Can’t you just live your life without making YouTube videos about it?
More to the point, if you are skilled enough to make what you want happen, why are you not running a Merkabah meditation daily and getting guidance from other realms to learn how to really use the power that you have?
Perhaps the reason is the terminology.
The word ‘witch’ is most often used in negative ways. And, let’s be honest, there are so many perversions of the term anyway (and so many different traditions, actions, and ways of thinking about Being Witchy), that using it is probably unhelpful. For example, if you’re a Trad practitioner and your friend is a Wiccan, there are a whole lot of ways in which you guys will disagree and not get along. One of those is around ritual; another is around gods; another is the Christian symbolism that pervades Wicca; not to mention a whole lot of unhelpful ribbons of white/black/good/bad/chaos narrative that run through both.
Even though fundamentally you’re doing the same thing.
It’s not often I talk about this stuff.
But earlier this year, while travelling, I stayed in an AirBnB in Melbourne, and one of the hosts was an empath. We had some long and fascinating discussions until late in the evening about a whole lot of the foregoing.
He said something to me I’ve not forgotten, but which struck a chord:
‘Many women go to Bali and engage in rituals, and Bali is a powerful and spiritual place. But many also don’t realise that they’re bringing demonic entities into the world without realising, because they don’t have the training to understand what they’re playing with.’
It is critical that you understand what you’re playing with. That you know how to protect yourself during ritual and during sleep. That you know that psychic attack is real and dangerous. That not all entities are helpful (even if they appear to be that way). That you also understand the principles of working with chaos–because that’s what you’re doing!
So if you are a Manifesty Person, and your personal action in the world is strong and helpful to you, study the other side of what you’re doing.
It’s not going to make you a weirdo.
By knowing what you’re doing, it’ll make you more effective.
Not just to yourself, but to everyone else too.
I personally am excited that there are more and more people discovering their ability to influence their realities.
Here’s why:
Because at some point the idea of Witch will be irrelevant, and humans will just be who they have always been. I studied the Witchy things because I’ve always been this way; I knew that beings watched me while I slept, even when I was six years old. I knew that there had to be more to the world than the material realm. The difference between you and me (if you were not like that) is that I never forgot. I worked to understand it instead.
If you are a Manifesty Person and you’re looking for something beyond what you’re doing, I recommend Laurie Cabot’s book Power of the Witch. Go find it, and read it. It’s heavily Wiccan, but hey – as far as books go, it’s a great entry point.
And if you disagree with everything I’ve said, that’s awesome too. Send me and email and tell me why.
Need help?
Some people have contacted me asking for guidance after reading the above, because they’ve gotten themselves in trouble by not understanding what they’re doing. While it’s unlikely that I can solve your problem, I may be able to guide you. Contact me to discover more about that.
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