The Intention Economy: Can you Vibe Code Reality?

A.I. is a mirror for manifestation

Is Manifestation the Main Quest?

“There’s a certain sound the scalp makes when it’s being ripped off of a skull—like a large piece of Velcro tearing away from its source. The sound is loud and angry and just a little bit sad.”

Thus begins the dramatic opening chapter of Into the Magic Shop by Dr. James Doty. A recommendation from a fellow member of Leading Edge, I recently read the book on vacation in less than three hours. It was so engrossing that I didn’t even shift position and gave myself incredibly painful and oddly-shaped sunburn in the process.

Doty, who died last year, was a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. He was raised in abject poverty by a violent, alcoholic father and a severely depressed mother. When he was twelve, he wandered into a local store selling stage magic props. The woman behind the counter, Ruth, offered to train him in real magic. Over the following weeks she taught him a process of first relaxing his body, quieting his thoughts, opening his heart and finally visualising his goals. The book provides specific, itemised guides on how to do each. He trained diligently for hours a day for the rest of his life. He claims to have used these practices to fulfill his life’s goal of becoming a doctor, and eventually a successful neurosurgeon, despite not having anything close to the necessary grades or money.

Over and over again Ruth warns Jim that if you visualise with your heart closed you risk creating chaos and suffering. So you don’t need to be clairvoyant to imagine what happened next. Jim’s childhood trauma eventually drove him to visualise from a place of scarcity. He was superficially successful; during the dot-com boom he amassed a net worth of over $75m. But it came at the cost of his relationship with his family and connection to his heart. Eventually he lost it all. In the rebuilding process he was taught the importance of authenticity, via a Near-Death Experience, multiple synchronicities and an encounter with the recently deceased.

Not only have I come to suspect that “manifestation” is real, but that mastering it might be one of the central goals of our lifetimes. We already know that human consciousness has a scientifically measurable impact on reality, but that it’s incredibly subtle. And that’s probably a good thing, given the chaos that would ensue if humanity were given full manifestation powers at this stage of our collective consciousness. Many mystical traditions speak of our lifetimes preparing us for a subsequent stage of collective evolution where we can manifest our desires more directly on demand. As Jim discovered, the key is to learn if you’re manifesting from head and heart or from just your head alone.

This is a warning that emerging technology is beginning to make visible in new ways Jim and Ruth could have never imagined.

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What do you want to be?

“Be careful what you wish for, not because you’ll get it but because you’ll be turned into the thing that can get it. It’s not a process where you just ask for something and it magically appears, it’s a process that breaks you down and rebuilds you into the right tool for the job.”
― Jed McKenna

More than any other, that quote has influenced how I now think about manifestation. Jim Doty got the millions he wanted, but that safety came at the price of his integrity and aliveness. My suspicion that manifestation is real is strengthened by the fact that this dynamic has been repeatedly described over thousands of years in two of humanity’s most popular myths. The culturally ubiquitous hero’s journey describes the process of coming into alignment with the creative flow of reality. In contrast, “be careful what you wish for” myths warn us about manifesting from ego alone. King Midas and Aladdin get turned into people that can get what they think they want, but at the price of integrity and authenticity.

I also suspect that manifestation is real because I might have made that precise mistake, several times, in my own life. With predictably catastrophic results. One of my weirdest intuitions is that I may have manifested my degree from Oxford. After graduation, I took a three-month backpacking trip across Africa with some of my closest friends. One of the many quirks of the Oxford exam system is that the final results are initially only posted on a physical wall in the college. Because we had already left for our trip, I asked one of my classmates to email the results to me. He duly sent me the whole list of our college’s grades. Everyone else shook out roughly where I had expected, but I botched my degree and got a dreaded “2:2.”

About ten percent of people get a First, sixty percent get a 2:1, and the remainder a mix of the more shameful 2:2, Third and Fail. I was DEVASTATED. I was in the Africa of 2003, so I was four days from my next contact with the Internet. I spent those days on a train from Malawi to Tanzania depressed and ashamed, drinking heavily. I recall promising, pleading that if my degree could just be reversed, I would do anything.

When I finally reached Dar es Salaam, I rang my parents to apologize for letting them down. My self-love, and the love of others, felt conditional on my achieving academic success. At first, my dad was confused, but he read me a letter from the university that didn’t list a grade of 2:2, instead a (highly unexpected) First Class degree. It took a while for this to sink in. When I emailed my classmate to clarify, he responded that he’d merely sent me the previous email “as a joke”. But nothing about it had read like a joke, it was just a list of all of our grades. Meanwhile my devastation turned to elation.

The “be careful what you wish for” element appeared rapidly afterwards: due to this entirely unexpected affirmation of my elite intellectual status, I became arrogant and complacent for too long after I graduated. I felt that I was simply destined to succeed without any real effort. So I failed. A lot. I got fired from my first job as a soccer agent within the first ten months. And even well into my thirties I hid behind what the degree inferred rather than who I actually was.

I had not only manifested without using my heart, I had surrendered even more power to my tyrannical head.

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A.I. is a Mirror for Manifestation

It’s shocking to realise the extent to which we are still making these same mistakes, especially in the way we use technology. Social media on our phones is arguably the most devastating example we’ve ever created. It wastes our time, feeds negative emotions and removes us from a direct connection to reality. We wanted safety and entertainment, but it came at the price of our vitality. We created a digital world using our heads, not our hearts.

One of the most interesting reframings of contemporary technology is as an analogy for the way reality actually works. As our technology evolves, it increasingly reveals dynamics at play at a deeper level. Artificial Intelligence is now giving us a window in the creative potential of our thoughts. Vibe coding has given us the power to use simple text prompts that can generate virtual agents that go off to do our bidding, spin up whole websites or found businesses instantly. At times, it genuinely feels like digital magic. Even in just the first few months of A.I. agents being on the scene, we’ve seen multiple Sorcerer’s Apprentice style situations where they’ve run amok and created complete pandemonium. For many of us, our lives are going to be increasingly impacted by knowing the right thing to type into a prompt; knowing what we want to manifest.

What if A.I. is now holding up a mirror to our own untrained manifestation abilities?

The Leading Edge recently hosted dinner in Los Angeles with EarthElder Masaaki Nagai. Along with twelve other Elders from across the globe, he is working to bring wider awareness to the urgent need for humanity to return to harmony with our environment. Masaaki is anticipating an imminent shift in our relationship to technology as soon as the next few months. Spending time with him made me ponder another perspective. What if our material technologies are a sandbox to see how we would use spiritual technologies if they became more fully available to humanity? If there are higher powers, are they watching to see how we behave towards our current technology to see if we can be trusted to shape the very fabric of reality itself? What if the world is like a text box that can generate whatever you want?

Run your own wish list through the filter of your heart. I find it gets a lot shorter. If you could have anything you wanted, but it can only bring joy to yourself and others, what would it be? Now imagine applying that same standard to everything you type into an LLM or A.I. agent.

We have already manifested technology that takes us out of coherence. How can we now use technology to come into more harmonious creation with reality?

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The Intention Economy

An unprecedented convergence is underway between A.I.-enabled breakthroughs, potential disclosure of formerly-classified technologies and the rising acceptance of a new paradigm of consciousness. IONS scientist and psi researcher Dr. Julia Mossbridge recently told Leading Edge she envisions a transition from the parasitic “attention economy” to an “intention economy.” This means actively harnessing individual and collective intention toward positive goals, rather than letting the social media industry monetise our passive distraction. The first stage of that transition is technology that makes the connection between consciousness and reality more tangible.

Adam Curry is an inventor, tech entrepreneur, and a guest on this Leading Edge episode. Adam also sees anomalies in our incomplete materialist worldview as clues to paradigm shifting technologies. [You can listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts].

Adam has helped develop the Mind Lamp, a desk light with a Random Number Generator inside that changes colour to indicate when it’s being influenced by human intention. I have one of Leading Edge member Peter Merry’s Wyrd Lamps above my computer, and I’ve found it useful as a simple feedback device to notice the quality of attention I’m bringing to a conversation or a piece of work.

As we become more comfortable with the idea of our thoughts influencing reality, how can we use technology to come into greater creative coherence with it? The brain’s right hemisphere is more directly connected to the heart, and I believe the heart is in relationship with what I call “attractor intelligence.” One critical intention economy sector to focus on is therefore devices that aim to restore hemispheric balance. In our conversation, Adam tells the story of how a sustained exploration of neurofeedback twenty years ago provided him with a sense of unity that really emphasised what felt like the true goal states of meditation. But he notes that it’s still been difficult to make a reliable consumer headset that’s sensitive and subtle enough to handle the infinite complexity of the human brain. It also helps to have trained supervision of your sessions.¹

The Monroe Institute has been doing this work for decades. Their Hemi-Sync audio technology uses binaural beats to induce specific brainwave states, and their flagship Gateway program has now been attended by over 20,000 people. It gained broader cultural legitimacy when it emerged that U.S. military intelligence had sent personnel there, and a Zen Buddhist teacher reportedly said Gateway students could reach in one week meditative states that took him thirty years to achieve.² Which also makes me ponder Carl Jung’s warning to “beware unearned wisdom.” Wired recently reported the story of a Gateway Tapes user who found herself in a full spiritual psychosis. It ultimately led to positive changes in her life, but she warns against doing it without "a tether to reality." In 2017 I experimented with an early EEG meditation headset. The causality is obviously impossible to establish, but shortly afterwards I experienced an exceptionally intense and destabilising awakening. I'm especially reluctant to move fast and break things when the thing being broken is my psyche. It’s also not clear to me yet how much this technology takes the essential step of reconnecting us to our hearts.

But, like A.I., spiritual tech is probably as crude now as it’s ever going to be, and is surely poised to improve at an exponential rate. Its goal should be to make us feel at home in the world, to allow us to feel safe and held. This tech could assist with nervous system regulation, hemispheric rebalancing, frequency generation or something we haven’t even thought about yet. But most importantly, it needs to bring the heart back into balance with the head. There’s an old African proverb “the child that’s rejected by the village burns it down to feel its warmth.” As both Doty and I learned, if we let our wounded children manifest in isolation, they will cause havoc. Whether it’s AI or our own brains, we need to integrate our powers and creations and let them be beneficially guided by something greater than ourselves. Our brains will become coherent with our hearts and artificial intelligence will return to harmony with nature.

[You can listen to my conversation with Adam Curry on Spotify and Apple Podcasts]

1. Adam has been working with an EEG company called Supermind (the co-founders were recently interviewed by Scott Britton). Over the last couple of years I’ve also spent some time with Jon and Lauren Warren, the founders of Evolve, an early-stage VR headset company that uses EEG technology as well as RNGs and HRV. One of my simple beliefs is that coming into coherence with the attractor needs to incorporate the heart, itself much more connected to the right hemisphere than the left.

2. Podcaster Michael Philip recently described how he had an unexpected Out of Body Experience toward the end of his time there. I’ve come to believe that Out of Body and Near Death Experiences are a key lynchpin for breaking the paradigm of scientific materialism; both demonstrate that consciousness can persist beyond the body.