Essay
Belief
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13 min read

There’s more to manifesting, here’s its philosophical backstory

Beyond the so-called sensible, a hidden strand of Western spiritual thought reemerges.

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

Against a purple glittery background, a orange notelet reads: 'what you seek is seeking you.'
Maia I on Unsplash.

I’m slightly late to the party, but you may have heard that the Cambridge 2024 Word of the Year was ‘Manifest’. Essentially, ‘To Manifest’,  according to our friends at Cambridge, is  ‘to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen’. For many people, ‘manifesting’ belongs in the eye-browraising intellectual funfair of New Age spirituality and self-help gurus and charlatans whose books belong in the second-hand boxes outside shops on the high street of dilapidated coastal towns selling crystals.

If you’re a Gen Xer and elder Millennial, you’ll probably have heard of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a 2006 self-help hit. She claimed to teach readers the secret to prosperity, self-realisation, and fulfilling your heart’s desires. Visualise the object of your desire in your mind, use the innate concentrative energy of your cognition, and, through the scientific Law of Attraction, the Universe (yes, the capital ‘U’, Universe)  will deliver unto you those things which you have brought into your mind because ‘like attracts like’. It shares a very similar perspective to a book written a hundred years prior in 1910 called The Science of Getting Rich by William Wattles which, again, claimed that through ‘creative thought’ you could achieve financial success. By ‘creative thought’ Wattle didn’t mean coming up with a growth strategy for your personal finances - he meant, like Bryne, that there was a psychical force in the Universe that you could tap into with your mind which could manifest, in reality, your thoughts and desires.

Again, if you’re a child of sensible society, you probably would have dismissed all of this as pseudoscientific New Age wishful thinking intended to make bad authors rich. Or, if you were more generous, you might have said that these were helpful psychological practices like ‘focusing on your goals’ encoded in woo-hoo New Age language. It belongs in the weird corner of society. And so, you might be somewhat baffled to find it breaking through into mainstream society - so much so that a sensible institution, like Cambridge University, would highlight it as a groundswell trend in the twenty-first century. 

But is this really a surprise? What has sensible society given us? For many, it’s been the managed and catastrophic decline into societal disillusionment, a generation of broken promises, and the feeling of being feudal serfs under the dominion of national banks and billionaires while we medicate ourselves to death with algorithmically-driven AI slop in the spiritual vacuum of a fragmented and polarised society. The fact that the Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year was ‘brainrot' makes this all the more ironic and sad. And so is it any wonder that people are looking beyond the sensible towards the magical, the mystical, and the Esoteric? And I’m using the word ‘sensible’ in both ways. People are looking beyond the status quo of what is acceptable and accepted knowledge, but they are also looking to things that are beyond their senses.

Human consciousness can manifest thoughts into reality through metaphysical practices like concentration and visualisation. For New Thought thinkers, this was connected with loftier aims than getting rich or manifesting a pay-rise at work.

I’m definitely not alone in this diagnosis. It’s the thesis behind Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder and Justin Brierley’s The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God tracks prominent thought-leaders turning to God and mysticism. Even Wunderman Thompson, a leading advertising agency, highlighted the $3.7 trillion dollar neo-spirituality and wellness industry in their ever quotable report on the ‘Age of Re-Enchantment’. To be honest, even this recent trend of authors proclaiming the ‘spiritual turn’ is a bit late to the game. Back in 1999, the sociologist Peter Berger argued forcefully that the latter decades of the twentieth century saw the radical ‘desecularization of the world’. 

Clearly, cultural trends don’t happen in a matter of years, but take place over decades, even centuries and it seems that we’re finally seeing the mainlining of a previously hidden strand of Western spiritual thought into wider society. So much so that your children and neighbours are searching for ‘manifesting’ on Google and YouTube as a genuine intellectual query. 

Where does this all come from? Ideas don’t spring up from nowhere. They have a history, and the philosophical ideas underneath manifesting weren’t just made-up in the last minute of human history. They in fact go back to an incredibly rich and developed, and once respected, tradition of thought that we’re only getting to grips with again  in recent decades. 

Historical roots of manifesting

The modern concept of ‘manifesting’ finds its root in the New Thought movement of the nineteenth century that shared many themes with the earlier American Transcendentalists. While Transcendentalism emphasised the unity of nature, humanity, and God, New Thought took this further, focusing on the mind’s power to shape reality.

Both movements emerged as a response to the perceived spiritual emptiness of Enlightenment-era materialism, seeking to reignite our connection to the metaphysical. 

Central to New Thought was the belief that the human mind is not merely a passive observer but an active force in the universe - capable of influencing both spiritual and material realms through concentration and intention. Human consciousness shapes reality in the fullest sense. In other words, Human consciousness can manifest thoughts into reality through metaphysical practices like concentration and visualisation. For New Thought thinkers, this was connected with loftier aims than getting rich or manifesting a pay-rise at work. It was about sparking a spiritual revival, attaining a unified theory of everything, and ultimately, salvation. 

“Consciousness shapes reality.” On one level, this is obviously true. You need consciousness to design buildings and cathedrals and strategic operation models to run companies. Even the placebo effect - something that continues to baffle medical professionals - shows that mental states can have tangible effects on the physical world.

For those who pray, this idea feels almost intuitive. Your silent thoughts reach into the metaphysical realm. How else does God hear your prayers? But where prayer is directed towards a personal God, manifesting envisions tapping into a universal force, drawing power through sheer concentration. It’s less about thanksgiving and more about metaphysical technique - what you might call a kind of ‘science of prayer’. (For what it’s worth, if you’ve ever seen a ‘Christian Science’ bookshop, this is what they’re getting at.) 

The New Thought movement is what the scholar Catherine Albanese calls a metaphysical religion of nineteenth century America. It went against the major Protestant revivalist movements at the time, as well as the mainstream scientific community. They rejected Christian notions about God as a sovereign being who gives salvation to the individual through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, but rather saw Him as the metaphysical font of life and universal forces. And they rejected the scientific community for ignoring the spiritual and intuitive aspects of nature. It fell somewhere in-between. Much like other disciplines that we might call ‘pseudo-scientific’ or ‘pseudo-religious’ like Astrology, Alchemy, and Magic. 

Behind the New Thought movement 

The rabbit hole goes deeper. The New Thought and Transcendental movements didn’t just spring up from nowhere either. It is a child of what recent scholars and intellectual historians have begun to call the ‘Western Esoteric Tradition’. In this bucket, you have the familiar traditions of Astrology, Alchemy, and Magic (what some people call the ‘occult sciences’) as well as lesser known ideas like Theosophy, Theurgy, Anthroposophy, Mesmerism, Animal Magnetism and Hermeticism. Western Esotericism is a philosophical and spiritual strand that draws on ideas that go as far back as early Antiquity from certain interpretations of the ideas of Plato and a mysterious Egyptian magical figure, ‘Hermes Trismegistus’, who is said to have written a book called the Corpus Hermetica which lays down many of those philosophical assumptions held by the Transcendentalists - The unity of the world, the Law of Correspondence, and the centrality of the Human Mind as a unique mediator.  The ‘‘Law of Correspondence,’ is particularly interesting. It suggests that everything in existence—from the human mind to the stars—operates in a symphony of interconnected harmony - there is a resonance, a ‘sympathy’ up and down the universe. This idea continues to underpin contemporary practices like visualization, meditation, and even astrology.

An engraving of  shows a standing mesmerist pointing to a sitting patient, with lines drawn between the,
A practitioner of mesmerism using animal magnetism on a woman who responds with convulsions. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

We might think that all these ideas of Western Esotericism have always been fringe. Again - for non-sensible people. The reality is that these ideas have played a profoundly influential role in the history of Western thought. Isaac Newton was not only a scientist and a Christian, but he was an obsessive Alchemist. Friedrich Hegel, probably the most influential philosopher of the nineteenth century, was a keen reader of the Heterodox Christian Mystic, Jakob Boehme - a monumental figure in Western Esotericism - even calling him the First German Philosopher. His ideas about the progress of history and the self-realisation of the World Soul find their origins not in Enlightenment philosophy but in Western Esotericism mediated through the Romantics. In fact, many of the Romantic Movements that ebbed and flowed since the 1790s to the contemporary world drew deep inspiration from the Western Esoteric tradition. They represented intellectual movements that rejected Enlightenment and Orthodox Christian thought and sought to retrieve spiritual and metaphysical insights from other ancient sources. 

Esotericism has also deeply influenced modern art, shaping the work of some of the most celebrated artists in the last two centuries. Claude Debussy was deeply influenced by the late nineteenth-century Parisian esoteric revival and spent many Wednesday evenings in salons discussing sacred geometry and the Tarot, while W.B. Yeats, the famous Irish poet, was an initiate of the Theosophical society. Perhaps most notably, Kandinsky, was deeply impressed by esoteric spiritualism. His book Concerning the Spiritual in Art argues that colors and shapes are not merely aesthetic tools but bear profound metaphysical significance. For Kandinsky, abstract art was a rejection of materialism and a reawakening of humanity’s spiritual potential.

In fact, the idea that the artist plays a central role in spiritual awakening was common to some esoteric movements. Josephin Péladan, a prominent figure in the French Occult Revival, wrote: 

“Artist, thou art priest: Art is the great mystery; and if your attempt turns out to be a masterwork, a divine ray descends as on an altar. Oh real presence of the divinity resplendent under these supreme names: Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Beethoven, and Wagner. Artist, thou art king; art is the real kingdom.” 

The artist is the beating spiritual heart of the human community. Again, does this sound familiar? 

You could say that Western Esotericism, particularly in the last 200 years, represents a powerful counter-movement that sincerely and powerfully raged against spiritual death, meaninglessness, and the phenomena of disenchantment. 

We often like to tell the story of Western philosophical and religious thought in the last 250 years as two sides locked in mortal combat. On one hand, you have the traditional Christian worldview. God is real, miracles exist, and the universe is alive with prayer and worship and open to the supernatural. Meanwhile, you have the new bulwark of Enlightenment secular atheism laying siege to the Christian world, stitching up the world into a closed system of pure science and evacuating society of the miraculous, the sacred, and the supernatural. 

In response, Christians developed their own response to modernity and presented a way through the meaninglessness brought about by the Nietzschian death of God - theologians demonstrated how Christianity could meet the existential hunger felt by every individual heart. Meanwhile, the Evangelicals sent out missionaries to the ends of the earth with storming success such that today, China is set to become the most populous Christian nation in the world, and the Pentecostals spread like wildfire infusing almost every Christian denomination in the world with a sense of personal miraculous encounter with the Holy Spirit of God in a mundane world. At the same time, the atheist and New Atheist philosophers continued to mock and polemicise religion as the source of all violence and dangerous superstitions. But their arguments are fading into obscurity and persuasiveness as some of the key advocates of that early twenty-first century movement are changing their minds. 

This two-strand narrative—of Secular Disenchanted Nature governed by science versus Christian Enchanted Creation under a Trinitarian God—has shaped much of Western thought. Yet this framework is now undergoing a significant renovation. A third strand has always existed, though it has often been overlooked: the strand of Enchanted Nature. This perspective holds that humans have access to the supernatural and an open-ended universe outside of any religious and Christian frame, and this access is governed by ancient philosophies and ideas that are becoming more and more plausible in contemporary society - ergo MANIFEST. 

So what? 

If you’re a child of sceptical modernity and raised on the New Atheists, contemporary society must feel like a whiplash. It’s becoming more and more implausible to maintain a materialistic and rational worldview and the closed universe. Respectable thought-leaders are turning to faith and your friends, children, and colleagues are looking at you as if you're the weird one who lives in a little Reddit-atheist lock-in universe. It is becoming socially more and more difficult to maintain this without either being wilfully blind or being accused of imposing an quasi-imperialist vision of Western Scientism against the reality that most people in the world actually believe and live in. 

Christian thinkers and leaders ignore this at their peril. To dismiss the Esoteric based on books like The Secret would be like dismissing Christianity based on Instagram memes. When you walk past one of those crystal shops, or overhear a colleague comparing star charts, you’re in-fact encountering a millenia old intellectual tradition which taps into perennial human longings for cosmic connections. Sneering at this misses the point entirely. After all, Christians believe in a divine-human Messiah who reigns above angels and archangels who conquered demons and turns his ear to the whispered prayers of broken hearts on dark cold nights. What do you mean that ‘manifesting’ is ‘unscientific’? If you want to critique manifesting or astrology, you’ll need arguments rooted in your own rich tradition—not borrowed Enlightenment dismissals, the same ones once aimed at Christianity itself.

Christians should also recognise that Western Esotericism shares more-or-less common aims. Both seek to renew society, spread wisdom, and heal souls. But this doesn’t mean the two can coexist uncritically. Christianity no longer exists in a vacuum. It is in a marketplace of ideas and Christians need to discern what makes Christianity uniquely special and ensure that it doesn’t adopt ideas that can dilute its integrity. 

The word manifest reveals more than a passing trend—it taps into a deep human longing.

History reminds us that Christianity and esotericism have long had a complex and entangled history. Renaissance Catholic Christians first re-introduced Hermetic ideas and Kabbalah back into the Western mind, and it was nineteenth century Protestant Christians who tried to encode Christianity into the wider frameworks of Esoteric thought and injected society with the panoply of sects and secret societies. Would it surprise you that some of the leading Occultists back then, like Eliphas Levi, were motivated to promote Jesus Christ? Maybe you’re a Christian artist and that quote above from Péladan was disconcerting precisely because of how closely it matches your intuitions. This history is both a caution and invitation: to understand the spiritual landscape more deeply and engage more thoughtfully. 

The real challenge isn’t opening minds to the supernatural - that’s already happening. The task now is to show why the longing for cosmic connection finds its true answer in the person of Jesus Christ. And in a world captivated by openness, that’s no easy task. And it's far more attractive to tell people to be more ‘open-minded’ than to be ‘close-minded’. 

The word manifest reveals more than a passing trend—it taps into a deep human longing. Beneath the vision boards and affirmations, beyond the social media buzzwords, lies a shared ache for transcendence—a yearning to live in a world that feels alive, meaningful, and connected. It’s the search for something more.

We’re not just bystanders to this cultural moment; we’re participants in a profound shift. This is an invitation to move beyond easy skepticism or condescension. What we’re witnessing isn’t a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon but a continuation of a timeless quest to find order, purpose, and connection in a universe that so often feels fragmented. 

But let’s be honest: this is a competitive and crowded marketplace of ideas. Ancient philosophies, mystical practices, and modern interpretations are converging in a swirl of cosmic vibrations, personal empowerment, and spiritual techniques. And while that diversity is exciting, it’s also disorienting. The challenge for all of us, no matter our background or beliefs, is to discern what’s authentic, what’s helpful, and what’s merely noise.

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Article
Belief
Community
Creed
Football
Sport
7 min read

Liverpool's title win shows us that we’re built for community

Answering the question of who do we belong to.
Amid celebrating football fans, one stands on top of a kiosk with outstretched arms.
Liverpool fans celebrate outside their stadium.
Jonathan Rowlands.

“A Liverbird upon my chest 

We are men of Shankly’s best 

A team that plays the Liverpool way 

And wins the Championship in May” 

This is the song that has thundered around Anfield this season. A prophecy willed into existence amidst the departure of Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s Shankly for the twenty-first century. Surely not? 

But then.  

Arsenal drop points and Manchester City drop points and Liverpool don’t drop points. Again and again and again, until Liverpool needs just one more point to make the song a reality. The next game? Spurs at Anfield. At Anfield. As fate would have it, my wife and I had front-row tickets, thanks to my father- and mother-in-law booking a fortunately timed (for us, anyway) holiday and not being able to use their season ticket. (Thanks, Jeff and Janet). 

As we got to the stadium the place thrummed with anticipation. Liverpool is a city that loves to sing, and to dance, and to cuddle; a city built for joy and for love. And here is Liverpool in all its splendour, drenched in glorious, league-winning sunshine, as people sing and dance and cuddle. Most people here won’t have a ticket; Anfield only holds 60,000. People are here just to be here, to be present; around for when it happens. 

The game kicks off and the noise is deafening. Liverpool only needs to avoid defeat in the next ninety minutes and the league is theirs. Spurs, inconsistent all season, surely haven’t got the mettle to get anything from the game. Have they? 

But then.  

Spurs score. An unmarked header from a corner. As simple as it gets. Former Liverpool player Dom Solanke, no less. It was never going to be easy. 2025 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Miracle of Istanbul; if any club knows how to make a game of football difficult for themselves, it’s Liverpool. The ground turns from jubilant to tense. 

But then.  

Salah passes to Szoboszlai who passes to Diaz who scores. Three short passes and Spurs are carved open and all our wildest dreams have come true. 

But then.  

Flag’s up. Offside. No goal. Doesn’t count. Was it Szoboszlai or Diaz offside? Was it close? Doesn’t matter. The ground turns from jubilant to tense. 

But then.  

VAR – which I’ve always said was really good, actually, I promise – overturns the flag. Goal. Liverpool are level. The ground erupts. But there’s still work to do. While a draw would see Liverpool over the line, there’s a lot of football left to go before the ninety minutes is up  

And so Liverpool press and press and press and press. They hound Spurs, hassle them, harass them. Ryan Gravenberch has the ball on the edge of their box and is almost certainly fouled. The ref – who, to his credit, did his utmost to try and ensure a game of football didn’t break out because we wouldn’t possibly want that – decides otherwise. Nothing to see here. Play on.  

But then. 

Alexis Mac Allister picks up the loose ball, takes a touch, and thumps it – properly wallops it – right into the top corner. Anfield shakes and I’m being hugged by someone from somewhere unseen. Now is the time when it happens, when we win the thing we’ve waited so long to win. Being a football fan doesn’t get better than this. 

But then.  

It does. Liverpool have a corner. The ball comes in, Cody Gakpo collects, wriggles, turns, shoots, scores. No coming back for Spurs now. Bedlam. Pandemonium. Carnage. He runs to the corner nearest us, top off, a message on his vest underneath. Daylight.  

“What does his shirt say?” my wife asks. I strain, trying to see, but I can barely remember my own name at this point so I can hardly be expected to read now, can I? 

But then. 

There he is, just meters from us, walking back with his top still off, the message clear: 

I belong to Jesus 

There are two more goals in the second half and the game finishes 5-1 and Liverpool are champions. But honestly, it was all over bar the singing at half-time. And there was a lot of singing still to do. Each player worthy of their own song, the club’s past eulogised over in verse and chorus. And Liverpool’s past means they are no stranger to success. This league title means they are now indisputably, by any metric going, England’s most successful football club. (Hiya, Sir Alex, if you’re reading this). 

But the Premier League has remained oddly elusive: this is only the second time the club has won the competition since it formed in 1992 (although they had won eighteen top-flight titles prior to this; there was, I’m told, still football before the early 90s). And the last league win came at the start of lockdown.  

What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you?

Look: I celebrated that Covid League title; of course I did. But it felt odd, and the oddness has only increased as normality has gradually returned to life since the pandemic. My wife has a picture of me opening a bottle of champagne in our otherwise empty living room. The players life the trophy in an otherwise empty stadium. With hindsight, there’s an unavoidably melancholy tinge to the whole thing. You spend your life imagining what it’ll be like to win the Big Shiny Thing and then it happens when it’s illegal to leave your house (or something; lockdown is just a big blur to me at this point). 

But then.  

2025 rolls around and we get to do it again. Together. Even the ones who don’t have tickets are there. Everyone is there. Together. And all the while I can’t stop thinking about Cody Gakpo with his top off. I Belong to Jesus.  

Gakpo’s a weird footballer, truth be told. He’s unbelievably technically gifted, rapid, and yet somehow enormous, too. He’s scored hugely significant goals for Liverpool. And yet, he’s unlikely to be anyone’s favourite player. He lacks the unflappable brilliance of Rolls-Royce Centre Back Virgil Van Dijk, the sheer inevitability and perfection of Mo Salah, or even the outright gets-you-on-your-feet electricity of Luis Diaz. He's unlikely to be named Player of the Year or to have a statue outside Anfield when he retires. But there he is: 60,000 feral scousers wrapped around his finger, the eyes of the footballing world on him. And what’s his message to them? I belong to Jesus

I don’t know much about economics, but I’m told often that things are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. This is certainly true of footballers, anyway: one player might be worth significantly more to one club over another. But, in Christ, His infinitely valuable perfect Son, God declares that you and I are of infinite value. The One who’s judgement is perfect and faultless has decided you are worth the incalculable cost of His perfect and faultless Son. And so you are. It’s just a matter of simple economics.  

I forget this so often, that I am Jesus’ gift to Himself. I find it so hard to imagine myself as a gift. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. I didn’t know what to expect when we turned up to Anfield, but it certainly wasn’t a reminder of the worth Christ has placed on my very existence. But there I am. I belong to Jesus. And so does Cody Gakpo.  

The reason the Covid title feels so melancholy is that we couldn’t celebrate together. What’s the point of winning if I can’t be there to hug you and you and you and you? Liverpool’s League win, the euphoria that came with being able to share that win together with other people, gives us some slight sliver of a glimpse into the value Jesus Himself places in sharing His life with us. I reckon Cody Gakpo knows this, too. Because he knows he belongs to Jesus. He knows that he is the prize Jesus has won for himself. He is Jesus’ Premier League winning win at Anfield. Jesus wants to spend eternity with Cody Gakpo more than 60,000 feral scousers want to win the League. He wants to spend eternity with me and with you and with that person you find deeply annoying.  

It’s really easy for this all to sound saccharine and trite. “Ooh I went to a football match and it was like a big party in heaven, isn’t that nice?” But there is some truth to the glibness here. Football is better together because humans are made for togetherness. And this is seen no clearer than in Jesus’ desire to win togetherness with us, through his faithful and obedient life of sacrifice. 

As Cody Gakpo would say: I belong to Jesus. Or, as the Kop sang on repeat: Liverpool! Hallelujah, Hallelujah! 

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