How powerful can one be with just their thoughts?

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It’s a weird question, I know because I’ve spent a long time contemplating it. I’ve evaluated an entire spectrum of techniques to affect the world using just thoughts. Some of them worked but weren’t practical, like telekinesis and telepathy. Others were practical, but largely automatic, like Intention/Manifestation.

The conclusion I came to is, affecting the world using only thought is not remotely difficult. The world reflects our intentions and desires. Understanding those intentions and desires, however, is far far harder. There aren’t any magic shortcuts to that understanding. This, fundamentally, is what limits human agency, whether you believe in magic or not. Someone with a clear understanding of what they want out of life and how to motivate themselves will quickly orient their will around achieving it.

One of the jobs I had when I was younger was selling cars. My first and only job, the sales manager told me that in order to succeed at this job, you have to be “motivated by money.” I didn’t understand what he meant just then but slowly came to understand as I went about my days there.

The fact is, in sales, there’s nothing ordering your day. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Something’s gotta get you out there and hustling. If that something isn’t money, you just won’t ever be a very good salesman. You have to push yourself to do all the learning you need to do in order to succeed, to constantly and consistently close deals. Your manager can’t push you, your fellow salesmen don’t care. If money doesn’t push you, nothing will and you’ll wash out of the job fast, as I did.

If money motivated you, then you’d get sad and angry whenever you have a down month, you’d look at your less-than-perfect commission check and feel like a failure. That feeling would push you in order to succeed. It’s this boom-bust cycle that eventually produces battle-hardened salesmen, like Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross.

When I was starting out with spirituality, I made a number of very early discoveries that supercharged my progress. I learned how to breathe, I learned to not try to do it all myself, but to go my own way when I had to. I also learned how to remember. Remember who I am and what I’m about. All the time. To never turn off, forget that I’m a person with agency and in this moment, right now, I can choose to keep doing what I’m doing or to do something else. It took a solid month of practice before I mastered the technique of keeping self-realization constantly in mind.

This unlocks everything else. Being able to keep one’s spiritual identity in mind with consistency means you never truly lose progress. With this technique I was able to discern a very useful truth. That spiritual ‘ability’ is constantly being deployed on your behalf by your subconscious mind. And a person is constantly evolving. Meaning at any given moment, you are more powerful than you ever have been. Not noticeably so, the conscious mind doesn’t notice tiny changes. And the conscious mind may see the products of evolution as positive or negative. Animals got a lot smaller after the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, but those animals were smarter and hardier. But the naive mind might see the smaller animals as inferior.

In short, self-development only occasionally involves the direct use of abilities in order to achieve goals. Those who pursue power relentlessly usually only find small success. Those who seek wholeness and understanding are better off in the long run.