A Lesson in Manifesting

This manifesting business is... Well, it's big business. I am almost convinced that the best way to manifest is to write a book or create a video on manifesting and sell it. There are a seemingly endless number of books, websites, blogs, podcasts, video blogs and DVDs dedicated to the fine art of manifesting. Everywhere you look, someone is peddling advice on how to make your dreams come true.

Hmmm...

I see this as a good sign. Though not long ago I was incensed by the idea of all these people selling their own "method" for manifesting. My inner capitalist, so very nearly starved to death by my ironically greedy inner socialist, finally gathered enough oomph to smack me upside the head hard enough to make me see a different perspective. Making money is good! Making money is even okay.

But this is not what I want to share today. My ideas and beliefs about money aside, manifesting is taking the world by storm and demanding that people wake up and know that they are, indeed, allowed to prosper.

So, armed with a variety of systems, I recently decided to put one of them to the test. In her book, Your Invisible Power, Genevieve Behrend advocates for visualizing. Her method is quite simple and follows the basic tenets of other manifesting manifestos: think it, see it, feel it, be grateful for it (even before it takes form) and watch it happen. She cites an example of having manifested $20,000.00 simply by visualizing herself counting 20 one thousand dollar bills every morning for several minutes. While she does not give the details of how this money actually made it into her coffers, she insists that it happened and so, suspending disbelief, I decided to visualize something similar for myself.

I set an amount that I wanted to manifest - $5000.00. I closed my eyes and imagined counting the money using one hundred dollar bills (I don't think that Canada has a $1000.00 note, but I intend to confirm that). All was going well. For a while.

I kinda got bored with counting the 50 bills over and over and decided to divide the stack and shuffle them like a deck of cards instead. It seemed to me that I already knew that there was $5000.00 in my hands; playing with them sounded way more fun. In my imagination, shuffling 50 one hundred dollar bills was quite easy. I had equated it to shuffling cards, thus eliminating the floppiness of real notes. My visualization continued satisfactorily. I kept it up for about ten minutes and repeated the exercise twice daily for several days.

Now the thing that all manifesting gurus make sure to state is that there is an undetermined time delay. Some say it will take a few days for things to start happening. You have to give the Universe time to get things rolling.  And then you have to watch for the signs that guide you to the right actions that you must take in order to get what you want. Fair enough. I mean not even I expected $5000.00 to drop out of the sky into my lap. (Though it sure would be nice!)

The days passed and turned into weeks. I didn't seem to be getting any signs from the Universe, but I chose to give it the benefit of any doubt, realizing that the Universe was probably just waiting for me to notice the next "shiny object" of my desires and forget about the five grand. I determined to stay the course, though, and I stuck to visualizing myself shuffling 50 one hundred dollar bills like a deck of cards.

Meanwhile, back in real life, arrangements were made to have my daughter and her boyfriend over for a visit. We decided to play crib. In preparation for their arrival I retrieved the crib board and cards from the closet and set them out. When my guests arrived and we had settled around the table to begin the game, my daughter took the cards out of their case and laid them on the table to be cut for first crib. My daughter won the cut and so the game began.

It wasn't until it was my turn to deal that I noticed that the card backs were printed with the image of one hundred dollar bills!

Pretty much exactly like I had been visualizing for days, I was shuffling one hundred dollar bills.  Just like a deck of cards!

I had to laugh. It seemed that the Universe either has a grand sense of humour, or it is extremely literal. Either way, the notion of clarity that is also carefully included in manifesting instructions is now being given its due attention.

* * * * *

In the process of writing this blog post, I decided to research the Canadian one thousand dollar bill. It seems that "Pinkies," as they are called due to the pinkish-purply colour they are printed in, were withdrawn from circulation in 2000. The reason they were discontinued is because they were primarily used in criminal activity. Criminals preferred the higher denominations because they made moving money around easier. A million dollars in $1000.00 notes weighs only one kilogram as opposed to a million dollars in $100.00 notes, which weighs ten kilograms. There are, however, nearly one million (946,043 to be precise) $1000.00 bills still out there somewhere. It is believed that these notes continue to circulate primarily among the criminal element, being used to pay off debts between those of that ilk with very few ever bleeding out into general circulation. I would suppose, as well, that wear and tear will further deplete the numbers as they are not meant to last forever anyway. You can read more about the Canadian $1000.00 bill here.  

There are still a few of these babies left! The Canadian $1000.00
bill remains the highest denomination of legal tender in the
Western world.