Mind Magic is a science-based book about manifesting what you want

If I hadn't read a review in New Scientist of James Doty's new book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, the title and subtitle would have turned me off, since "manifestation" sounds New Age'y, and "how it changes everything" sounds over-the-top.

But the review stressed the neuroscience part, which I liked. And after the book arrived via Amazon a few days ago, I really liked the first sentence of the introduction, along with the entire first few paragraphs.

THE UNIVERSE DOESN'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

It may not sound like it, but this is good news. The universe doesn't give a fuck about you, not because you are not worthy or are out of alignment with the cosmos or have been put under a curse for ten generations. No, the universe doesn't give a fuck about you because it has no fucks to give.

Many of us are taught to spend our lives hoping for something outside of ourselves to fix our problems and make us whole: a winning lottery ticket, a wise guide who knows all the answers, a guru, a guardian angel, or some magical being, force, energy, or genie sitting out there in the universe who will make everything work out for us. For years I longed to believe this, too.

I thought there was a stern cosmic parent tracking all our actions and deciding if we were worthy to receive our dream house or to meet our soulmate or to be cured of cancer. As a neuroscientist and physician, I know today that we have no proof of such a force or being but we have a great deal of scientific evidence of the power of our own minds to produce changes in our lives that may at first appear impossible. This is the practice of manifestation. 

There is much confusion about manifestation in popular culture, so before I go any further, here is what I mean by the term: manifesting is defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness. By doing so, we activate brain networks associated with goal orientation that make an intention important, salient, or noteworthy.

In practice, this means that regardless of whether or not that intention is present on a conscious level, brain mechanisms that remain focused on the goal are activated around the clock. Our inner intention now guides our life. By using our inner power to tap the vast resources of our own brain, we gradually decrease the impact of our external environment and begin living from our deepest intentions.

In fact, the first step in successfully manifesting is to separate yourself from the belief that there is an external source for solving your problems and that this external source is what is manifesting in your life. If you want to live a rich, meaningful, and prosperous life, you do not have to appease any power beyond yourself.

You simply must believe that the source of your well-being and success is nothing other than the power of your own mind. The reality is that the same mind that creates the obstacles in the life you want is also the source of the intention that will make the life you want real. This is the real secret.

The fuck you give must be your own. This is the real magic.

I say this to you as a neurosurgeon who has studied and operated on the brain and as a neuroscientist who has spent decades investigating the human mind and brain, as a practitioner of spiritual techniques who has collaborated with the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders to teach compassion to thousands of people, and as a human being who has learned it all the hard way.

I'm looking forward to reading Mind Magic. I've only read the first two chapters and am liking the book so far. Doty has various exercises that he invites the reader to do. I'm usually not big on doing exercises, but Doty says that if someone already is meditating, like me, some of the exercises can be integrated into their meditation.

I suspect that Mind Magic refashions fairly familiar neuroscientific findings into a different sort of package. That's fine, though I'll admit that browsing Doty's web site, I found it a bit, well, over-the-top, like the subtitle of his book. But since this isn't a scholarly book, but a popular self-improvement book, I guess that's to be expected. 

What's said on the home page of his web site resonates with me. I'll write more about Doty's book as I get deeper into it.

For decades the practice of manifestation has been widely dismissed as self-involved, materialistic pseudoscience. But as neuroscientist and recognized compassion leader Dr. James Doty reveals, manifestation introduces us to different possibilities, and it lays the groundwork for a kinder, better world.

Doty grounds us in the practices that change our brain structures: attention, meditation, visualization, and compassion. This mind magic allows us to move through the world in ways that help us see clearly—reclaiming our agency, realizing our dreams, and reaching out to help others along the path.

Where previous works about manifestation have focused narrowly on outward success and individual benefit, Mind Magic delivers an openhearted call to make manifestation part of a deeper contribution to healing the problems we face today.

Comments

[Chiro]

My problem with science is that it by its very exact principles of determining and proving quantification it denies any horizon beyond it. Science does not and cannot extend beyond the mind. Science does not and by its own dogma cannot conceptualise or postulate, without being subject to derision, the existence of the soul, or spirit and by extension the possibility of God.

Back in 1972 I first started smoking pot. At that point two possibilities opened before me. One was to say WOW! to the creation, and the second was to realize the impermanence, the shamness if not the shoddiness of its imperfection and of the lack of any destination beyond old age and death. Science it appeared to me was no less a constriction, no less a set of empty chains, than organised religion. But the books I was reading were left-brained, were every one limited to the region of science which is the mind. I would take myself into the wilds and by a little waterfall and a little stream smoke a joint and contemplate on books like Basho's exquisitely beautiful 'Narrow Journey To The Deep North' 'The Way Of Zen' 'The Gateless Gate' 'Zen Flesh Zen Bones.' Yet like many people who read poems like

A frog jumped into the water
A deep resonance

I would get a rush of satori, my mind would empty of all thought and preconception and experience a lone sense of cosmic freedom from everything.

But as someone raised in what was in those days the post Vatican II fast dying old world of Catholic love and devotion, Zen for me was as cold as science. Zen was not a path of love, and I wonder if however much a scientist loves his wife he might find it hard to fit the concept of love into his ability to measure scientific phenomena. Most significantly I cannot recall one line in any of those books that personally gave me a means or a clue to achieve my own realisation, the very clever stories all amounted to imagining myself enjoying the liberation of others as one identifies oneself with characters in a movie. It only delineated a border for me that I wanted to cross to escape from the mind itself.

Later when I discovered the Indian saints and realized the error of the early Roman church in not realizing that Yahweh, the God of the Torah and the Old Testament, despite their inclusion of prophets they actually executed, was a God of righteousness, hate and vengeance as we observe today in Gaza, while the God of Jesus (who never used the term Yahweh) like the God of the Indian saints, was a God of love, and a preacher of Shabd. Furthermore I understood the appeal of the atheist Buddah to the most hardened atheist, who reviled the notion of God but would throw himself at the feet of Siddhartha Gautama any day of the week.

As a young Catholic I was attracted to the idea of transcendence. Little appealed to me in the church beyond the art and the culture of the monastic and the possibility that one could through mystic assent reach higher realms of soul consciousness. Of course, unlie the eastern mystics who were welcome to be astronauts as it were and describe inner stages of transport, Christians, almost from the beginning were constrained by priestly forces to venture any information about their inner experiences.

One remembers the line in Fellini's eight and a half when the hero is wakened at midnight to be summoned to his sought for appointment with the cardinal to tell him the ultimate truth he is seeking. The cardinal is seen for less than one minute, but solemnly intones to him "Sine ecclesia nulla salus, sine ecclesia nulla salus!" "Without the church there is no salvation, there is no salvation outside the church!" In other words you will only reach heaven by obeying the orders of the church, salvation comes after death and never before! So the Christian mystics were constrained, and St. John of The cross merely gave one a headache in that respect, because like his colleague St. Teresa of Avila he had the Spanish inquisition literally breathing down his neck, checking everything both of them wrote to make sure there were no giveaways.

Reading the cosmology of the sants one can detect why Brahm is the highest God-like deity mentioned in Buddhism, and why the Buddah was an atheist. Gautama rightly realised that Brahm was not the answer, and after realizing Brahm he then crossed into Par Braham, above Braham, and gained self-realisation. This he took to be the final stage.

If one was to travel from Miami to Sacrimento one would observe every facet on the way that millions of others have observed, the same buildings, intersections and road signs. In that way inner cosmology if you belive a long line of indain mystics, can tell us how far any mystic has journeyed either in through his description or in his realisation. One sage who journeyed extensively in their meditation within this stage described that Gautama took a sharp right turn off the spiritual highway to the final stages above, and entered a dark void below Maha Sunn in which there was no God but a great emptiness filled only with his own Nirvanah, his own self-realisation. The meditator described a wonderful region in which the souls of Boddhisattvas sit exactly as described by Buddhist artists, appearing as a sky filled with millions of crystal-like shining stars, and each lit by the refulgence of their own inner light.

Prof. David Christopher Lane, a former commentator on Sant Mat and the RSSB, postulated the theory that not only is the microcosm of the macrocosm, the universe in miniature, located within the brain, but that when one dies all these inner stages, the soul, and god Himself and the mind dies along with the brain. That there is no individual eternity. Meanwhile science itself scratches its head at the whole concept of eternity itself.

My two cents is, that if you are born without the God gene you will never believe in God. Millions of atheists might disagree.

石は石です
私たちは私たちです
The stone is the stone
we are who we are

[Ron E.]

James Doty: - “Here is what I mean by the term: manifesting is defining an intention such that it gets embedded into our subconscious, which functions below the level of consciousness. By doing so, we activate brain networks associated with goal orientation that make an intention important, salient, or noteworthy.”

A general description of the unconscious mind is that the subconscious mind contains all of the stored information of everything you have ever experienced. And from Psychology Today: - “It’s impossible to scientifically test. As a general rule, scientists consider something true only when it can be meaningfully observed or measured. The unconscious mind, by definition, can’t be. After all, its central feature is that it’s completely inaccessible.”

Strange as it may sound, I am not a keen fan of the ‘subconscious mind’ term. Maybe it’s because of the traditional way of talking about the mind as though it has nothing to do with the brain – but at least Doty does talk about ‘activating brain networks.’

All a bit pedantic of me perhaps but I’m much happier with the theory that the brain is predictive and that it constructs reality from its own past experiences. This is not to say that it is fixed and that we are unable to change how we respond in the future, but where we see the necessity or the desire of change, it has always been possible to take on new (and perhaps better) information that can give ourselves and consequently the world about us a more intelligent way of engaging with ourselves and the world.

All this entails conscious choices, choices we are aware of and make on the basis of need, logic and perhaps compassion (so definitely not free will!). As far as I can see, none of it needs to be addressed as the unconscious mind.

[Brian Hines]

Ron, good points. I was sort of thinking along the same lines today, as I thought about Doty's book. It does seem to me, as you said, that the brain learns from experience, which includes the experience of our conscious thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such. I'll be interested to see Doty's arguments for why it's necessary to "hack" the brain by inserting conscious intentions into the brain's mix. I'm kind of doubtful about this, but I'm open to what he has to say in the rest of the book that I haven't read.

[Appreciative Reader]

Looks interesting!

At first glance, looks like Rhonda Byrne level gobbledegook. ...But clearly not that, as you spell out in your post.

So far it looks like a how-to to bring about induced monomania. Which might make for "success", of a kind, in some specific areas, sure. Not sure that's necessarily a good idea, generally, though.

But I mustn't rush to forming opinions before actually seeing what it's about. It'll be interesting to see, in your further posts, what he's actually talking about.