In 2008 I turned some kind of corner in magic / intention manifestation (whatever you want to call it), and got markedly better at it. The technique I developed then is not suitable for manifesting thousands of dollars or a house (in my experience, that takes sustained meditation paired with sustained action), but I’ve had some successes that blew me away nevertheless. Gather ’round, and I’ll let you in on the secret…
How to Do It
It’s a three-step process.
1. Make sure you really want it. You don’t actually have to be specific about every detail, you don’t have to have a clear picture in your mind, or any of that; what you need is a very clear, simple, positive desire uncluttered by any doubts. This can be tricky, because sometimes you have hidden doubts. I’ll give some examples below.
2. Believe it can realistically happen. This can be kind of hard, depending on what it is you’re trying to manifest, and what your level of faith is. But if you don’t believe it’s possible… well, it won’t be. It is easier to practice on more believable stuff first.
3. Get yourself to believe that what you want is, in fact, about to happen and wrap yourself in the gratitude and happiness that you’re about to receive it. I found it’s very helpful to say to myself, “I’m so grateful that X is about to happen!” I repeat this a few times and imagine the feeling… And then I really am feeling it.
Now, watch it happen!
Below are four examples of this technique in action.
Making a Little Fast Cash
This happened in the summer of 2007. It was the first time I feel like I was definitely successful with intention manifestation, and I’ve been using it as a sort of touchstone for my efforts ever since.
I was leaving a parking garage, and I knew I was going to have to pay on the way out, but I didn’t know how much I owed. I guessed it would be somewhere in the $15 to $50 range, but other than that, I had no idea. I also didn’t know how much money was in my wallet, though I figured I probably had at least $20. I desperately hoped I had enough money to pay the fee.
This probably gives you a good general idea of my practical skill with finances at the time…
I decided to try to manifest the money I needed. Going through the three steps:
1. I really, really wanted to get out of the parking garage. Definitely no internal conflict there.
2. I believed that it was realistically possible that I had enough money to pay the fee.
3. I said to myself, “I am so glad I have enough money to get out of this garage!” I repeated it as I drove up to the window. I felt that gratitude.
I drove up. The nice man at the window told me the fee was $33. I looked in my wallet, and that’s exactly what I had. No kidding.
The fact that I’d hit the $33 precisely convinced me that this was magic, not coincidence. I was ecstatic. Over the next year, I kept practicing, but it was difficult to generate both the belief and the gratitude before I saw anything happen. Nevertheless, I persevered, and I got better at it, as you’ll see.
Repelling Insects
In the summer of 2008 we took a family trip up to New Hampshire. You probably know that New England is famous for its three seasons — Winter, Mud, and Bugs — and most of the family stocked up on bug spray and various other insect repelling chemicals and lotions and oils. I decided I didn’t want to bother with all that.
1. I didn’t want to get bitten. Again, no question about what I wanted.
2. I believed it was realistically possible that, simply by chance, I wouldn’t get bitten during the week. A slim chance maybe, but a chance.
3. I spent a little time on the drive up working up appropriate gratitude in anticipation of making it through the week unscathed.
Not one bite. Not one.
Nearly everyone else on the trip was eaten alive, despite their chemical precautions.
Several months afterwards, I took a one-week hike by myself on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts. I could literally see the clouds of mosquitoes around me, and hear them zipping in and out of my ears as I hiked. If I remember correctly, I ended up with exactly one bite on my ankle.
Winning At Pool
Our cabin in New Hampshire had a pool table downstairs, and since it rained like gangbusters during most of the trip, we spent a fair bit of time playing. My brother-in-law was, I think, the best player in the house, and beat the rest of us pretty consistently. But during one game near the end of the trip, he was having a devil of a time getting any balls into the pockets…
As he missed shot after shot, I suddenly realized that I was subconsciously using intention manifestation to mess him up. Every time he lined up his cue, I’d find myself feeling excited and happy that he was about to miss. And he did.
When I saw what I was doing, I started to feel bad about it — it was so easy, it really felt like cheating. (I mean, I’m sure there’s nothing in the Official Rules of Billiards that disallows magic, but…) With a little effort, I turned off the intention manifestation. Immediately — I kid you not — his shots started sinking, again and again. Just to make sure, I tried pushing aside a few more of his shots, and I was able to do it. Then I left him alone. At that point his confidence soared, and his own subconscious magic must have kicked in. He totally destroyed me…
But I was ecstatic. I’d gotten intention manifestation to work again — in fact, it was becoming second-nature. And I was getting fast enough at it to “cast a spell” in time to affect a pool shot.
Finding Lost Items
Shortly afterwards, my beard trimmer’s battery ran out. The trimmer has a cord, so it can recharge, but I’d lost the cord months ago and I had no idea where it was. As a result, my trimmer was dead, and my beard had been growing for weeks and was starting to get pretty shaggy. So I tried to use intention manifestation to find it.
1. Did I really want it? Here I found a little unexpected resistence. Part of me would love to have a big thick long beard, like a classic wizard or something. I’ll probably grow one like that someday. But I know from experience that between the Usual Jeff Length and the Wizard Length is the Awkward Length, in which the beard somehow makes my face look unusually and unpleasantly wide. I had to remind myself of this and make sure my desire for a short, neat beard was quite pure.
2. I certainly believed I could find the power cord. It had to be in the house somewhere.
3. Gratitude was also challenging to create, because what I was mainly feeling at the time was annoyance that the cord had been lost for so long, embarrassment at looking like a refugee from the Lost Island of Druids, and anxiety because I was headed off to work and didn’t have much time for this exercise. I had to push all that out of the way and think only about how wonderful it was that I was about to find the cord.
And…
Well, the cord didn’t just pop into view. I still felt like I needed to know where to look. (Maybe if I had a stronger belief in #2, that wouldn’t have been necessary?) So I took out a book (bibliomancy!) and placed my finger randomly on a letter. Before looking at the letter, I mentally assigned different floors in the house to different letters of the alphabet (eg vowels are upstairs, b-m are the main floor, n-z are the basement…). I did another round of intention manifestation steps 1-3 to make sure the divination would work, and looked at the letter. I was instructed to look upstairs.
I went up. Here there were five places to look: the master bedroom, the office, the bathroom, the hall closet, and the kids’ room. I did another letter divination, and I was instructed to look in the kids’ room.
I was confused. Why would the cord be there? But I went and looked anyway. And I looked and I looked… And it wasn’t there. What went wrong?
Aha! I thought. I hadn’t done another round of intention manifestation before I did the second letter divination! I stood in the center of the upstairs hallway, closed my eyes, and did the whole thing again, making sure to generate gratitude that the letter divination was about to work. This time I was told to look in the hall closet.
Now, you have to understand, weeks ago I had already turned that closet inside out looking for that stupid power cord. I was 99% sure it wasn’t in there. But I set that aside, built up my belief and gratitude, opened the door to the closet, and…
My eyes fell directly on it.
From Small Fry to Big Time
My success with larger projects has been a lot more limited. #2 (belief) is harder to create and maintain over long periods, especially for things like making a million dollars; and the same goes for #3 (gratitude). Plus, larger projects frequently have a lot of possible ramifications in your life, some of which might not be pleasant (are you really ready for all the responsibility and worry that a million dollars might bring?), which creates problems with #1 (desire). The mental discipline involved is just harder.
Over time I have definitely improved. One of the neatest tricks is using intention manifestation to improve your own skill and knowledge: believing that you can get better, wanting to get better, having gratitude in your own improvement, together will serve to build your abilities. It will also improve your own self-knowledge and spiritual growth, since you are continually challenging your own beliefs (Do I really believe in this?) and your own desires (Do I really want this? Why?). It takes intention manifestation away from the self-centeredness of simply getting what you want when you want it, and more toward the mystical union of the self and the larger, more-than-human world.
Druid Journal 
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