People often frame their manifesting skills as something spiritual, mental, or a combination of the two. Manifesting is often treated as something akin to prayer. Ask the universe for what you desire, and hopefully you’ll receive it.

But what if manifesting is actually a physical skill in disguise?

Other mental skills, including reading, writing, speaking, and solving math problems, are actually physical skills too. Your physical brain implements these skills on your neural hardware. If your brain is damaged in certain ways, you could lose some of your mental skills.

We often overlook the connection between the mental and the physical except when it becomes really obvious, like after consuming alcohol or when feeling sleep deprived. But the connection is strong and clear. The mental and the physical are inseparably linked.

What about so-called spiritual skills, however, such as manifesting or prayer? If you focus on your desires to manifest what you want, clearly that’s a mental activity too. You have to think about it to do it. You’re engaging your mind in a mental activity, which means you’re also engaging your brain in a physical activity.

Are you following this so far? The mental and physical conneciton seems pretty straightforward up to this point, right? Now here’s where it gets a bit weird.

If manifesting is a spiritual skill and a mental skill, then it’s also a physical skill. This suggests that the health of your brain could affect the results of your manifesting experiments, just as the health of your brain can affect your other skills and the results you can generate with them.

Any mental skills you have can be degraded with drug and alcohol abuse, right? And any mental skills can be upgraded with better health habits, right?

Have you considered that this isn’t just true for skills like writing, solving business problems, and computer coding? Have you considered that it’s also true for any and all spiritual skills, including prayer and manifesting?

Yes, I’m actually suggesting that the health of your brain is inextricably linked to the results you’re able to achieve with any of your so-called spiritual skills. Sure you can still use your skills under suboptimal conditions, just as a drunken writer can still write well sometimes. But in general, a cleaner brain will yield better and more consistent results.

How can you tell? One way is to do health experiments that will significantly affect your brain health. When your brain gets physically healthier, do you notice a difference in your manifesting skills?

I absolutely do notice this when I do certain health experiments, as long as I’m making big enough changes. The improvement in “spiritual” results is very pronounced. Whenever I eat 100% raw for a while, my manifesting skills undergo a major upgrade. Positive synchronicities amp up tremendously, and my desires flow into my life with much less effort. It’s almost a magical experience. Every time I change my diet this way, I’m blown away by this change. I expect to experience physical and mental improvements, but it’s weird when spiritual improvements occur as well.

I also experience a huge increase in intuition. This part makes sense to me because I can say that intuition is a mental skill, so when my physical brain runs cleaner, of course my intuitive insights may improve as well. I can explain this by saying that intuition is a function of the subconscious mind, so when the underlying hardware runs better, the software runs better too, and this leads to more accurate neural computations.

But it’s harder to explain why manifesting skills are so much better when eating raw. Sure I can say that my mind works better because my brain works better. And I can see the surge in results that stays high as long as I keep eating raw. I can notice that those results decline again when I return to eating cooked food. But what’s the connection between my brain and the universe? Why does having a cleaner brain make a difference in reality’s responses to my intentions and desires?

That aspect does puzzle me. I don’t doubt that there’s a connection though because it’s so pronounced. To doubt it would be like having six shots of alcohol in a row and pretending that there’s no effect. You’ll notice the difference plain as day, especially when the shift happens so rapidly.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed similar effects. Other raw foodists have written about this too. It’s a common subject of conversation in person. Many explain it differently though – as something spiritual or soulful.

I find the spiritual explanation unsatisfying. I think there really is a link that runs through the physical. I think it’s probably similar to the application of communication skills.

For instance, if you eat a super clean raw vegan diet, your social life will change. People who’ve never eaten raw may assume one’s social life would get worse, but it actually gets better – usually a lot better. This could be explained by a physical chain of events. You’ll soon look healthier, and people will start to notice. People will find you more attractive. Your thinking will become clearer, calmer, and more focused, so you’ll communicate differently in your writing and speaking, and people may pick up on those differences too. Hence it makes sense that changes in your brain functioning will change what you’re communicating, and this will change the social response that you receive.

My experience is that when I eat raw, people are friendlier and more social around me. Interestingly this effect happens not just in person but also online. I wouldn’t have understood this effect if I hadn’t tested this lifestyle enough times, but it’s pretty pronounced and hard to overlook. I don’t have to try to be more social. It just happens.

I suspect that there’s a similar pathway for communicating with reality itself. Or maybe it’s a pathway of communicating with life, like a form of telepathic signals that we collectively broadcast and receive. Perhaps when we eat cleaner, our internal hardware and software for broadcasting and receiving these signals works better than before. And perhaps there’s an aspect of manifesting that uses these communication channels, and this in turn affects our manifesting results.

When I eat raw, I feel like reality is better at reading my mind. Instead of feeling like I’m pushing intentions out into the universe and hoping for some positive echos, it feels like reality reaches into my mind, pulls out my desires, smiles, and gives me a receipt. Then it brings me what I want rather quickly. I don’t really need to ask. It’s like I’m always automatically broadcasting what I want, and reality is hearing me loud and clear.

Opportunities and invitations flow into my life so synchronistically. My thinking and reality’s responses achieve a level of synchronization that I don’t experience when eating cooked food. I can still achieve an okay level of alignment on a cooked vegan diet, but it’s way, way better on 100% raw foods.

Have you ever considered the link between your manifesting skills and your diet? Have you considered that manifesting is a physical skill too, not just a mental and spiritual skill? Do you realize that your spiritual skills are still running on physical hardware? Have you wondered if cleaning up your diet could yield a significant increase in your ability to manifest your desires?

Have you also pondered that eating cooked food could be negatively affecting your communication pathways with reality? Is it possible that your mental transmissions are getting garbled and that reality isn’t actually receiving your intentions accurately and powerfully? Is it possible that most of the time, reality dismisses your requests as the misaligned ravings of some drunken human who eats a very strange and unnatural diet?

Cooked food affects the body and brain very differently than raw food. For instance, when you eat cooked food, your body generates an immune response with a surge in white blood cells. The body doesn’t response this way when you eat raw foods. If your body must expend extra energy on digestion and waste cleanup, maybe it won’t devote as much energy to transmitting your desires.

What if your life is much harder than it needs to be? What if your eating habits are preventing you from experiencing a level of flow that would make abundance easy and natural?

Are you trying to manifest abundance? What if this could be automatic, just by eating a cleaner diet? What if your natural state of being is to be outstanding at manifesting your desires, and you’ve degraded this flow at the physical level?

And what if your mental and spiritual framing of this skill set has been keeping you stuck? What if manifesting was mostly a natural physical ability all along, and you just had to let it out of its cage, so it could run at full speed?

All of this can be personally tested.

This is one of many factors that’s motivating me to test eating raw for all of 2021. This month I’m reloading those skills, practicing making different raw meals to get back into the flow of eating raw while still permitting cooked food when desired for the next few weeks. I want to do a deeper dive into this aspect of life, especially with respect to what I can glean about reality’s responses. I recently reviewed some of my old blog posts that I wrote during the time when I was eating fully or mostly raw (about 11-12 years ago), and I was struck by how easily I manifested various desires back then.

I think 2021 is going to be a very fun, flowing, and social year.