How to Meditate for Manifestation
‘Manifestation’ is one of our culture’s top spirituality buzzwords. Teachers, courses, and books promise to teach you the best methods to manifest what you want quickly and effectively. Gurus emphasize the importance of where you place your attention and share exactly how to rearrange your reality by manifesting your ideas.
Some sources claim you can do this from thin air, while some sources assert that manifestation is the product of hard work and intentionality. In many cases, the process of manifesting is said to come from some sort of manifesting meditation which you can practice regularly to change your life, attract opportunities, or get what you want in your life.
In this post, we’ll talk about the Vedic Worldview on manifestation, why our culture seems obsessed with the idea of manifesting, and how Vedic Meditation specifically works with manifestation.
The Manifestation Craze
First, let’s talk about why manifestation is so popular as an idea.
Our Western culture has normalized convenience. Especially where I live in the United States, we’re promised anything we could possibly want at the click of a button – even if we don’t actually have the funds. We’re so used to this idea of getting what we want and building the dream life that we naturally want to apply it to our spirituality.
The idea that we can create a life we love is clearly true, and we see people doing just that all the time. We even see people meet great strokes of ‘luck’ or find incredible opportunities out of nowhere. When we see good fortune, it’s easy to think that the person magically manifested everything they wanted. We usually don’t see the years of overcoming challenges, focusing on a goal, risk, or discomfort the person went through… we only see the result.
As humans, we all naturally want to control our lives and surroundings. When the idea comes up that we can somehow control how our lives go and the material things we can have, there is inevitably a huge cultural focus. Much of spirituality has been about releasing control and accepting, surrendering, or following a doctrine instead of doing and getting things you want.
Combine the desire for convenience with the desire for control, and you get a whole culture that jumps on the idea of magically manifesting things you want out of thin air.
The Vedic View on Manifestation
According to the Vedic Worldview, desire is a mechanism that Cosmic Intelligence uses to guide our individual and collective evolution. That is to say, our impulse to desire something that we believe will make us happy comes originally from Cosmic Intelligence, not the other way around.
The Universe is not a Sears catalog, a sugar daddy, or a vending machine. We don’t individually come up with desires and put them in as a request to the waiting Universe. Rather, that universal intelligence prompts us to desire things.
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ATTEND A FREE INTRO TALKStress, Desire, and Manifestation
Vedic Meditators sit for twenty minutes twice each day to meditate. Each meditation is an effortless experience, where the meditator repeats a specially assigned Bija mantra that is a meaningless sound.
This sound slowly charms the mind into less and less excited states of consciousness, or into greater quiet. Eventually, the mind stops having thoughts altogether and passes into the thoughtless transcendent state where it can encounter pure Being.
Each encounter with pure Being or Universal Consciousness provides the meditator with more connection to the same intelligence that guides the evolution of the whole universe. Rather than experiencing themselves as only an individual, the meditator begins to experience the perspective of Universality more and more. They become a clearer channel through which the cosmic self can inform our desires toward things or ideas that will forward evolution.
Without experiencing this greater Intelligence or Cosmic Self, we’re left with our individual sense of desire, which is often controlled by stress.
Stress accumulates in our bodies and affects everything we think and do. It creates a series of responses to try to protect us from stressful situations and is largely fear-based. Stress is what causes us to react poorly, overreact, feel anxious or depressed, and experience any number of low-consciousness experiences.
When our consciousness and body are overcome with the natural stressors of life, our desires are colored by that same stress. We may want to find a loving partnership that would forward our evolution, but through the lens of our stress, we feel drawn to people who are not good for us.
Attracting vs. Printing
So this idea that there is a law of attraction by which you can attract all the things you want in your life is an incomplete picture. Everyone instinctively knows that you can have a positive outlook and you’ll experience life in a more positive way. We don’t need a spiritual system based on that, it’s common sense.
In the Vedic Worldview, a more accurate picture of manifestation comes from one fact: you are a printout of your state of consciousness. So whatever level of stress or consciousness is present, you’ll see it directly manifest in your body, your actions, your situation, and so on.
Someone who has a lot of embedded stress and a low-level consciousness could receive a wonderful opportunity or get exactly the things they want, but they’ll still feel unhappy. They are not attracting the things per se so much as they are printing out or creating an experience from their state of consciousness. Those who win the lottery but have a poverty consciousness will return to poverty quickly. It’s a law of nature.
When unexpected challenging things happen (and they inevitably happen to every person, no matter their level of consciousness), it doesn’t matter if the person ‘attracted’ the challenge or not. What matters is their response to it.
A person with an expansive consciousness will learn and will not suffer. They’ll move through the challenge effortlessly. A person with a low level of consciousness will resist, suffer, and react poorly.
Meditation for Manifestation
Now that we understand attraction and manifestation a bit more, we can talk about meditations for manifesting.
If you search on the internet or on a meditation app, you’ll likely find all sorts of highly focused meditations that require visualization and manipulating your feelings to force a certain outcome. In the Vedic Worldview, you’ll find a much different approach to how to meditate for manifestation.
The Vedic Worldview holds that all of reality is in a process of going from the unmanifest to the manifest, and vice versa. It’s a cyclical, natural evolution. As our consciousness expands through our brief experiences with Universal Intelligence in meditation, we begin to perceive more of the unmanifest and to perceive its movement toward becoming manifest.
It’s not so much that we arbitrarily pick what we want to become manifest as it is a perception of what Universal Intelligence is already up to. We can sense through charm when we as physical individuals are ready to bring the unmanifest into manifestation. Then, we become like a conduit or a vessel for this Universal Intelligence to cause evolution.
Charm and Manifestation
It is true that whatever we place our attention on will grow– both in the sense of desiring consistently and resisting or avoiding consistently. What we focus on takes up our awareness.
The way Cosmic Intelligence signals to us what we desire and what to pay attention to for our evolution is through charm. Charm, in the Vedic sense, is an inner sense of pull toward a choice or idea. We find something charming, and we move toward it. We find we feel averse to something else and we move away from it.
The more we come in contact with Cosmic Intelligence by transcending thought during our meditations, the more we will be able to sense charm at finer and finer levels of feeling. Then, we get to participate in this adventurous process of sensing charm and moving into the unknown to see where the charm leads and what evolution it causes. We can follow this sense of charm to bring the unmanifest into manifestation at the cue of Cosmic Intelligence.
Manifesting What We Want
Following charm toward our highest evolution is a very different experience than seeking to forcibly manifest what we think we want on an individual level. In the first case, we’re participating in a story that is as big as all of reality, and we’re informed by a consciousness that is much larger than our own individual consciousness.
Rather than having to choose from endless possibilities what we guess would make us the happiest, we can participate with a greater intelligence that encompasses many more versions of reality than we can perceive.
We may feel very certain that only one thing or outcome would make us happy, but we’d be severely limiting ourselves. How much more interesting is it to allow our lives to evolve into our highest potential and highest contribution through means we could never have imagined ourselves?
Individuality vs Universality
To understand individuality from the perspective of the Vedic Worldview, you can imagine a funnel. There is a narrow part of the consciousness field that is productive in the physical, relative world. That’s our small ‘s’ self, our individuality.
Then there is the wide end of the funnel, which represents Universal Intelligence or Cosmic Consciousness. This is also the big ‘s’ Self. Most people aren’t aware that both parts of the funnel are inside them. There is an individual self and a Cosmic self in each of us at all times.
It isn’t very useful then to think in terms of getting the material objects or the perfect situation we want to come about in our lives. That would only serve the small ‘s’ self– our individuality. We are totality. The sooner we can understand and embody ‘I am totality,’ the more interested we will be in what our cosmic Self is up to, and the more we’ll want to follow charm into the unknown to forward evolution.
Meditation Practices for Manifestation
This means that each time we sit for our twenty-minute meditation sessions, we are participating in the process of manifesting our own evolution and the evolution of the collective. The best time to meditate for manifestation then is every day, twice a day, in the morning and in the afternoon for twenty minutes.
To learn Vedic Meditation and receive your own Bija mantra, you can sign up for an intro talk or register for the next Learn to Meditate course here. That way, you can start the lifelong journey of continually manifesting your highest evolution, and stop worrying about forcing a personal wish list on reality. You can meditate for manifestation every day, twice a day, and experience transcending thought and pure Being for yourself.
