Manifestation: Lessons from Prometheus Rising.

 In the first chapter of Robert Anton Wilson's book Prometheus Rising, he covers Dr. Leonard Orr's model of thought about the brain. Dr. Orr says that the brain acts like it is divided into two halves, the Thinker and the Prover. Dr. Orr also states that whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. You see this all the time with psychosomatic illness and the placebo effect, a person is given a pill and is told it will make them feel better and it becomes so; even if the pill was just a vitamin. I remember reading this article somewhere in a health magazine a long time ago and I was astounded, the medical journal report can be viewed here. So basically belief is a powerful thing. It shapes the way we perceive the world around us, and the good thing about belief is that it can be manipulated to our advantage.

 "If the Thinker thinks passionately enough, the Prover will prove the thought so conclusively that you will never be able to talk a person out of such a belief."

So there are a few exercises in the first chapter. These are my favourite exercises, when you're doing them try to have fun, don't get frustrated if you can't make it work the first time. Persistence and determination are the two main things that will help you get past the first roadblock. The roadblock for this chapter is a penny, yes, a penny. As Wilson says in the book "Sad as it is to say, you never understand anything by merely reading a book about it." you have to actually experiment and try things out before you can really get the hang of it. So now onto the exercise...

1. Visualize a penny vividly, and imagine vividly that you're going to find a penny on the street. Then, look for the penny every time you take a walk, meanwhile continuing to visualize it. See how long it takes you to find the penny.
2. There are two ways you can take this next step, but it is recommended that you try both, for comparative reasons. [First Hypothesis]When you find the penny, explain the above experiment by the hypothesis of "selective attention"—that is, believe there are lots of lost pennies everywhere and you are bound to find one by continually looking. [Second Hypothesis] Explain the experiment by the "mystical" hypothesis that "the mind controls everything." Believe that you made the penny manifest in your universe. Choose which hypothesis you want to try first, then go looking for a second penny.
3. Compare the time it takes to find the second penny using the first (selective attention) and second (mind over matter) hypotheses.
4. With your own ingenuity, invent similar experiments and each time compare the two theories—"selective attention" vs "mind over matter"
5. Avoid coming to any strong conclusions prematurely. At the end of the month, re-read this chapter, think over it again, and still postpone coming to any dogmatic conclusions. Believe it possible that you don't know everything yet, and that you might have something still to learn.

Ok, a few notes. I changed the original exercise a bit, I noticed some people have trouble manifesting things that they think are worth more or are bigger, like a dollar or an expensive watch. So I thought that starting out with something so minuscule would be perfect, not only do you have more confidence in being able to manifest the object, but you build even more confidence when you actually find the object.

The full book can be found in PDF format [here]