What is manifestation?

I didn't know.

It kept coming up in conversations about finances with my girlfriend.

I would say, "Let's save for a house."

And she would say, "I'm already a billionaire."

We were like two boats passing in the night. Me, approaching finances from a logical, mathematical perspective. And her, approaching finances from a perspective of abundance and manifestation.

She recommended that I read a book called Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks.

I'm only on page 26, but here are some quotes that have helped me to understand what manifestation is and how you actually do it ...

"Every thought vibrates, every thought radiates a signal, and every thought attracts a matching signal back. We call that process the Law of Attraction" (25).

"As your experience causes you to launch vibrational rockets of desires, you must then find ways of holding yourself consistently in vibrational harmony with those desires in order to receive their manifestation" (25).

"Whatever you are giving your attention to causes you to emit a vibration, and the vibrations that you offer equal your asking, which equals your point of attraction" (26).

"The key to bringing something into your experience that you desire is to achieve vibrational harmony with what you desire. And the easiest way for you to achieve vibrational harmony with it is to imagine having it, pretend that it is already in your experience, flow your thoughts toward the enjoyment of the experience" (26).

The part about holding yourself in vibrational harmony makes sense to me. Everything is vibration. Material reality is made up of atoms and all atoms are in a constant state of motion. Even thoughts can have a vibrational frequency.

So I'm open to the possibility that matching the vibrational frequency of your thoughts to the vibrational frequency of what you desire could somehow create a magnetic force of attraction between your thoughts and what you desire.

One question I have: how do you make decisions in real-time if you're pretending something is already in your experience?

For example, let's say you want to buy a sandwich and you're pretending that you have $15 in your wallet. So you walk up to the counter, order the sandwich, and then they ask you to pay. You open your wallet, but there's no money.

Then you have to look up at the cashier and say, "Just give me a minute. I'm manifesting $15."

The book will probably answer this question later on. It's a 300-page book and I'm only on page 26.

I'm curious about what this book can teach me because I've always been taught that hard work is the way to get things. If you want something that you don't have, you make a plan and then work hard to execute the plan until you get what you want.

But this book is saying that you can get what you want just by imagining that you have it and pretending that it's already in your experience.

It feels like there's a middle piece that's missing. I’m imagining the middle piece would be some kind of action.

You desire something, you think up a plan to get it, and then you take action in accordance with the plan.

But the Law of Attraction seems to suggest that there's no action necessary. You just imagine or pretend and then whatever you desire comes to you somehow.

Perhaps I'm jumping the gun. The book may explain how action fits into manifestation as I keep reading. I'll write another post after I read some more.