The 10 Billion Dollar Blind Spot
A Manifestation Manifesto
A man walks into a bookstore and asks the saleswoman,
“Where’s the self-help section?”
She says, “If I told you, it would defeat the purpose.”
I have been writing my first book. I am almost done.
It is about consciousness. Developmental psychology to be precise. A well established body of science that describes how we grow, both individually and collectively.
Yet I gave it a fiction spin. So you get to feel it more than just think about it.
It contains no secrets. Just peer reviewed science available to all.
There are no charlatan tricks. No hacks.
Just awareness of something we should learn in school.
In any book shop it would end up in the self-help section and that bothers me.
It bothers me because it would defeat the purpose.
The Lineage
The self-help industry publishes 15,000 books a year in the US alone.
85,000 titles currently in print.
Self-help is a $10 billion market.
A book on the self-help shelf is like a needle in a haystack.
Invisible.
It did not start yesterday.
The New Thought Movement from the mid-1800s to early 1900s.
Mind shapes reality.
Then Napoleon Hill “Think and Grow Rich” in 1937.
Stripped the spiritual. Definite purpose, autosuggestion, mastermind. 100 million copies sold, although written by someone with doubtful credentials whose life was far from proof of concept
A couple of decades later Norman Vincent Peale sold 5 million copies of “The Power of Positive Thinking” with a flavor of Protestant Christianity.
And of course, 2006, Rhonda Byrne, “The Secret”.
30 million copies. Repackaged New Thought flavored with quantum vocabulary, probably inspired by “What The Bleep Do We Know”.
There are no secrets.
Spare yourself the waste of time.
I can give you the essence in half a line:Definite intention + mental focus + belief = results.
Same teaching. Different packages.
The American Addiction
15,000 self-help books a year. $10 billion industry.
And the vast majority of it is about one thing: getting more.
Mostly getting more money.
This isn’t an accident. The genre is American.
Born here, scaled here, exported from here. It reflects something: a culture that equates wealth with worth, accumulation with success, more with better.
Hill wrote for Depression-era businessmen who wanted to believe they could think their way to riches. Peale wrote for Cold War Americans who needed God and capitalism to be on the same team. Byrne wrote for a generation drowning in debt, promising that the universe was a catalog and your thoughts were the order form.
The soil matters. Calvinist theology. The Protestant work ethic. Salvation measured by worldly success. A nation built by religious dissidents trying to prove they belonged, that they had worth, that they were chosen.
At the root: a wound. I must earn love, safety, and belonging.
More on this subject here:
From God to Greed: The Christian-Capitalist Soul of US Spirituality
Chögyam Trungpa warned us in 1973: even the pursuit of enlightenment could become an ego project. He called it spiritual materialism. But something worse happened. We didn’t just use spirituality to look spiritual. We started using spirituality to justify materialism.
Money is energy. Wealth is alignment. Abundance is your birthright.
We didn’t wake up from the dream. We gave it a spiritual polish.
The books sell because the hunger is real. But the hunger isn’t for money.
It’s for freedom, for security, for enough.
Money just became the symbol.
And so we get 15,000 books every year teaching people to chase the symbol instead of the thing itself.
The Grain of Truth
Underneath all the fluff, there is something real.
The universe is holographic. The small reflects the large.
“As above, so below”, this isn’t a New Age invention, it’s an ancient observation. Fractals everywhere, patterns repeating at every scale.
The universe is also abundant, overwhelmingly, incomprehensibly abundant.
And it’s mechanical, not moral. It doesn’t judge. It doesn’t reward. It resonates.
So if you can host within yourself the felt reality of what you seek, not the thought of it, not the wish for it, but the actual vibrational signature of it, the mechanism responds. That’s how resonance works.
This is the grain of truth the books are selling. And it’s real.
What we do with it is questionable.
Three Things They All Miss
1. The somatic piece.
These books treat manifestation as cognitive. Think it, visualize it, believe it. But it’s not the thought that does the work. It’s the experience.
The body has to be living in the reality before it arrives.
Byrne talks about feeling. But there’s a difference between “feel good about what you want” and “your nervous system already lives in that reality.”
One is mood management. The other is embodied transformation.
And there’s a further distinction the books never make: the difference between longing and worry.
Longing is open. Felt in the chest. Alive. It recognizes “this is not here right now” without collapsing time, without predicting the future, without denying the present. Longing carries vitality, heat, creative force.
Worry is contraction. A tightening around the absence. A story that says “it won’t come.” The nervous system freezes. Possibility closes.
Worry is not realism. It’s a physiological response that blocks the very resonance you’re trying to create.
The books tell you to feel good. They don’t teach you to stay open in the presence of what’s missing.
2. The intention piece.
The universe is mechanical. Rain doesn’t care who you are. Gravity doesn’t keep score.
But intention still matters.
Karma works the same way. Not cosmic morality. Just physics. Every action has an outcome. The intention within the action shapes what follows. Act from the larger intelligence: no residue. Act from ego: the grip stays. We carry it.
Not because the universe punishes selfishness. Because grasping keeps you in the loop. We get what we wanted and now we need to protect it, grow it, defend it.
Ruthless people manifest all the time. They vibrate "I get what I want" and the mechanism delivers. But they're still on the treadmill.
They got the stuff. They didn't get free. The thing they manifested owns them.
3. The freedom-now piece.
Me and a coaching client:
What do you really want? I want to make enough money.
How would you feel when that money comes? Free.
So you’re trading freedom today for freedom tomorrow? Silence.
(You know, the old joke about a Mexican fisherman and the American businessman?)
And if the money never comes, you’d never be free? Silence.
How about being free now? How would that feel? Great.
Then be free now. Do whatever you’re doing. Maybe money comes. Maybe it doesn’t. But you get what you actually want.
Being free now may require inner work. Figuring out what's in the way. But that's inner work, not more years as a slave to a job.
Byrne’s version is a technique. It grasps. Being free now is a state you inhabit regardless of outcome.
But a one-line book that says “Be free now” doesn’t sell. No sequel, no course, no certification. The industry depends on you staying in the loop, almost there, one more secret, one more book.
What I’m Actually Offering
Consciousness grows with us, until we decide to stop.
Find out where you are on the journey.
Decide if you want to keep growing or not.
That’s it.
Not denying we may want more of something. Yet not being slave of it.
Desire, not demand. One invites. The other repels.
Living in the fire of both wanting and not having a clue if it will come.
Letting that fire do the work. Like Rumi. Like Rilke. Like Cohen.
There is a thin line between longing and grasping.
The books can’t teach you where that line is. But your body already knows.
If it ends up in the self-help section, fine.
At least it won't be just another empty promise.
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PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
A lot of hard-won wisdom in these words. Wading through all the tangents of the self-help world (what I sometimes call the self-help trap) to find the pearls of truth. Fantastic article.
I found this through email — I don’t really see the feed.
What stayed with me wasn’t the critique, but the tone.
Especially the way you talk about freedom not being something we postpone until later.
This felt calm, honest, and grounded — not selling hope, not scolding either.
Just naming something many people feel but rarely say out loud.
Thank you for writing it this way.