Manifestation is all the rage on TikTok, so it seems newfangled and gimmicky. Yet the idea that you can summon what you desire—through visualisation and affirmations—has a long history in human philosophy. Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret (2006) and The Power (2010), in which she chronicles thinkers and details properties of the universal law of attraction, contends that ‘whatever you can imagine exists’, suggesting the human capacity to conceive of a possibility makes that possibility a reality.

Byrne links religious and scientific principles in posing this theory of pre-existing potentiality. She cites the 9th century Hindu text, the Srimad Bhagavatam, which claims that ‘creation is only the projection into form of that which already exists.’ This statement is at first a mind-boggling proposition that dreams are real because we dream them, but it suggests that what is reified (made real) must be preconceived (thought of first). Byrne recalls the Book of Genesis which recounts, of the world at the beginning of time, that ‘the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was complete,’ suggesting all eventual possibilities were contained within that initial whole. Quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) reinforces this notion, offering that ‘atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities rather than one of things or facts.’ Heisenberg’s theory of potentia proposes that ‘the state of a physical object is a collection of potentialities’ (Shimony), meaning that any given thing is what it had the potential to be.

Author J.K. Rowling famously recounts, of how she came up with Harry Potter, that ‘Harry just sort of strolled into my head, on a train journey. He arrived very fully formed. It was as though I was meeting him for the first time.’ The extent to which the character and world of Harry Potter was embraced and inculcated in culture, suggests that Harry always had a place in the world—he was just waiting to be created, to fill it. Other major cultural phenomena—Disney, Star Wars, The Beatles—represent similar creative feats in being so intrinsic to the world, it seems they were always meant to be. So meant to be, it seems, that they always were.

Such is the creative power of the imagination. The imagination literally is potential.