I'm not a huge fan of the whole woo-woo manifesting thing in general, but this article has actually made me more sympathetic to it. A lot of the magic numbers a

I'm not a huge fan of the whole woo-woo manifesting thing in general, but this article has actually made me more sympathetic to it. A lot of the magic numbers and frequency stuff is obvious noise, but there do seem to be useful subsets. For example: > Similarly, there’s “awake” versus “asleep”: Asleep people are “doing the nine to five, the white picket fence. They think that their surroundings dictate them. They’re always the victim. They don’t take responsibility. If you strip out the spiritual context, trying to get to a state where you stop playing the victim, take responsibility, and actually evaluate why you're doing what you're doing sounds... obviously good? > While it doesn’t have feelings, it is something that your future self that already has the car who’s done the inner work to get there has. If you embody the version of you that has that car, eventually, you’re going to be in a situation where you have the money or the opportunity to meet your future self in that car. Ignore the frequencies and matching vibrations bit, and it does seem like there is good advice buried in this. The version of you that is successful enough to reach your goals probably would have different traits that you could try to emulate. If you're getting "on the same wavelength" as a romantically-successful future self in an attempt to "manifest" love, "embodying that version of yourself" would probably involve being more outgoing, more willing to take some social risks, and more willing to chase after what you want. Ignoring any universal vibrations or whatever, the core advice seems good. It seems like the two main problems are 1) the low signal:noise ratio (though this is a problem of seemingly all schools of self-help...), and the 2) pseudoscientific wrappings, but it's not clear to me that the core strategy is obviously false. Though I may be biased; I'm a pretty stone-cold atheist, but Dancing With the Gods has left a lasting impression on me (in the direction of giving more credit to woo): http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html EDIT: After looking up more about the book The Secret, it is much more obviously stupid and harmful. Consider the quote: > Imperfect thoughts are the cause of all humanity’s ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness. I feel like I don't need to spell out how incredibly dumb that is as an idea. It seems like the Vox article (ironically) gave manifesting an incredibly positive spin, much better than is in the original text.