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Good follow-on question from Amitabh:
Any [manifesting] commands to include time factor? Like “Make X happen with y days/weeks/months” sort of?
It turns out, time specifications work the opposite of how you’d expect.
When I was new to manifesting, I’d often specify for something to happen within a week. I figured it was like giving a project to an assistant: If I say, “Do it within a week,” I’ll get it sooner, right?
Nope. Or, at least, not in my experience, which is confirmed by the instructions I’ve gotten from spirits and the manifesting software itself.
The short answer is, manifesting can only do so much. By saying, “Within a week,” you’re not saying, “Work extra hard to get it done sooner.” Nope, you’re saying, “Do this within a week if you can, but if not, don’t bother doing it at all.” Rather different.
Why? Well, manifesting seems to work by selecting sequences of events that are likely to produce your requested outcome. So, request to find a better job, and it will influence your decisions (and possibly the decisions of others) to make you more successful.
(There’s some discussion around whether manifesting also influences inanimate objects, like lottery balls. Let’s skip that for this post.)
When you request a better job, the software finds sequences of events that result in a better job within a reasonable amount of time. But if you request, “Better job within a week,” it selects paths with a chance of that specific outcome, even if that chance is low. And it simply ignores paths that result in a job in two weeks. The request hamstrings the manifesting software, preventing it from finding paths with an actually high probability of the thing you want (a better job).
There’s another complication I didn’t think of until recently: Adding a timeframe will guide you to apply for jobs that start soon, rather than jobs better suited to you. And, depending on the safeguards on your particular manifesting software, it could even lead you to fight with lover, because being single makes it easier to search other cities for better jobs.
So, you can see, the short answer was a bit simplified, and the full answer is (potentially) quite a bit worse.
That’s why non-basic manifesting involves asking a lot more questions, like “What will happen if I make this request.” But doing that successfully requires two-way communication, where the software sends you back information, which requires more skill than simply sending a request. So, we’ll leave that for later.
(And thanks for the question, this is something I really should cover in my book.)
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This is my experience as well. The probability shift that a magical technique can produce is limited, so whenever you’re casting into a chaotic, interrelated system the more time you give the greater the final effect can be.
The cliche, overused example is the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory, in which an influence as small as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can produce a huge shift in the weather on the other side of the world – but only if the initially tiny influence has enough time to propagate. Magick also works like water flowing downhill, finding the point of least resistance that fulfills the exact content of your charge. So if you need a job in one week, jobs you can get that fast are the only ones that will be open to you, just as you explain here.
You should also never use open-ended timeframes because those can have the opposite problem – given an infinite amount of time, some probability exists somewhere that would get you an arbitrarily better outcome. But you don’t usually want your ritual aiming for a job that will take years of probability shifting to accomplish if you’re unemployed. Instead, you want the best outcome possible within the longest timeframe that you realistically have.
So in the job example – if you’re laid off and know that you can live off unemployment for four months without your finances collapsing, (1) perform your job spell right away, and (2) use those four months as your timeframe to give the ritual as much time as possible to work. Keeping both of those principles in mind will produce the best results.