n eleventh grade, I got a 54 on my physics midterm. The teacher wrote "show your work" in red pen three separate times, which was funny, because I really had no work to show. I had guessed. I had guessed wrong. And then I had moved on with my life.
So when I started hearing people in manifestation spaces talking about quantum physics like it was obvious, like it was the explanation for everything, I had a very specific reaction. Part confusion. Part suspicion. Part the particular embarrassment of knowing you are the last person in the room to understand a thing that everyone else apparently just knows.
This is the article I needed in 2022. Not the one that throws equations at you. Not the one that says "quantum field" fourteen times and expects you to nod along. The one that is honest about what the physics says, what it doesn't say, and why the practice might still be real even if some of the vocabulary around it is borrowed in ways that would make a physicist wince.
The Part Where I Admit What I Actually Believed
When Priya sent me that audiobook at 3 a.m., the one that started all of this, I was not thinking about physics. I was on my kitchen floor. It was a Tuesday in March of 2022. I was thirty years old and I had been working seventy-hour weeks for eight years straight and something had finally come loose in me in a way that felt permanent.
Neville Goddard does not talk much about quantum physics. His framework is older than the modern use of that word. He talks about consciousness, about assumption, about the feeling of the wish fulfilled. I found it strange and compelling and slightly terrifying, the way things that might actually work feel terrifying before they do.
But as I started reading more widely, as I started following people who were doing this work and writing about it, I kept running into the word "quantum." Quantum manifestation. Quantum jumping. Quantum field. Quantum realm. Quantum this, quantum that.
And because I had failed physics in eleventh grade, I just accepted it. I nodded. I assumed these people knew something I didn't.
Here is what I eventually figured out: some of them did. And some of them were, to put it charitably, doing something closer to poetry than to science, and calling it science because the word "quantum" sounds more serious than "I believe this deeply and it has changed my life."
Both of those things can be true at once. That's actually the interesting part.
What Quantum Physics Is Actually Saying (The Part That's Real)
I'm going to give you the short version, the one I eventually pieced together from books, conversations with people smarter than me, and a lot of YouTube videos watched at embarrassing hours of the night.
Quantum physics is the branch of physics that deals with behavior at the subatomic level. Atoms. Electrons. Photons. Things too small to see, operating by rules that are really, verifiably strange. Rules that do not match how we experience the world at the scale we live at.
Here are the parts that are actually documented and real, and that I'd want you to understand.
First: particles exist in states of probability before they are measured. Before you observe an electron's position, it doesn't have a single fixed position. It exists in what physicists call a superposition, a spread of possible states. The act of measurement collapses that spread into one outcome. This is real. This is documented. This is called wave function collapse, and it is not metaphor.
Second: the observer effect is real, but it's subtle. In the double-slit experiment, particles behave differently when they are observed than when they are not. This is really bizarre and has been replicated many times. But "observation" in this context means physical interaction with a measuring device. It does not mean someone looking at it with intention. The observer effect does not mean that your thoughts about an electron change where it goes. It means that the act of measuring a quantum system necessarily disturbs it, because the instruments we use to measure things at that scale are themselves made of matter that interacts with the system being measured.
Third: quantum entanglement is real. Two particles, once entangled, will have correlated states regardless of the distance between them. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance" and didn't like it. The phenomenon has been confirmed experimentally. What it does not do, as far as current physics can determine, is allow information to travel faster than light, or allow human consciousness to influence the entangled state through intention.
Fourth: quantum effects mostly don't scale up. This is the part the manifestation world tends to skip. The strangeness of quantum mechanics operates at subatomic scales. At the scale of human bodies, rooms, decisions, relationships, the classical physics we learned in school (and that I failed to apply correctly to that midterm) still describes reality with excellent accuracy. Quantum coherence at biological scales is an active area of research, but the straightforward claim that "your thoughts are quantum events that change your physical reality" is not established science.
Sit with that for a second. Because it matters, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Where the Metaphor Becomes Useful (And Where It Becomes a Lie)
Here is the thing about Priya. She works in publishing. She has spent her career reading manuscripts and deciding what is worth the world's attention, and she has a finely calibrated radar for when something is doing the work of thinking versus when something is performing the appearance of thinking.
She and I had coffee one afternoon, maybe six months into my practice, and I was telling her about quantum consciousness and how our thoughts might literally shape reality at a subatomic level. She listened. She waited until I finished. And then she said, with the particular gentleness of someone who has been your friend since you were nineteen, "Mara. Do you actually believe that, or do you believe the practice works and you're using the physics to make it feel more legitimate?"
I went quiet for longer than I should have.
Because she was right. And the answer she was pointing to is actually more interesting than the physics.
The practice had been working. Three weeks after I first listened to that Neville Goddard audiobook on the kitchen floor, I was laid off. Which sounds terrible. But the severance was $8,400, and a six-month freelance contract appeared six days after the layoff. And something had shifted in how I was moving through the world, in what I was assuming was possible for me. Within fourteen months I had paid off $40,000 in debt. I met Daniel in 2024 after a year of doing the soulmate work in a way that felt different from anything I had done before.
I'm not citing quantum physics as the explanation for any of that. I don't know the mechanism. What I know is the experience.
And this is where I want to draw a careful line, friend, because the line matters.
The practice of shifting your assumed identity, of living from the end result, of nervous system regulation and visualization and the feeling of the wish fulfilled: this is real work. The evidence for it lives in neuroscience, in psychology, in documented research on neuroplasticity, in Joe Dispenza's work on the brain and elevated emotion, in Bessel van der Kolk's research on how the body holds belief. None of that requires the word "quantum" to be legitimate. None of it needs subatomic particles to work.
But using quantum language can do something interesting for certain people. It can break open the worldview enough to let possibility in. If you grew up, as I did, in a Midwestern Catholic household where the world was basically fixed and outcomes were determined by hard work and God's will, the idea that reality at its foundation is probabilistic and observer-dependent can be really liberating. Even if the application is metaphorical rather than literal.
The metaphor can do real work. Metaphors always have. Elizabeth Bishop wrote about loss through fish and geography because sometimes the direct approach won't take you where you need to go.
The problem is when the metaphor gets presented as the mechanism. When "quantum" is deployed not to open a door but to deceive. When someone with something to sell tells you that they have scientifically proven quantum technology that will change your brain, and what they actually have is a recording with binaural beats and some marketing copy.
There's a difference between a poet using physics as an image and a marketer using physics as credibility they haven't earned. I think you already know which one you're dealing with, in any given case. Your gut is usually right about this.
What I Think Is Actually Happening When the Practice Works
Let me tell you what I've come to believe, not as physics, but as a working theory built from three years of doing this seriously.
When Neville talks about "the feeling of the wish fulfilled," he is describing something that neuroscience has a name for. The brain does not distinguish cleanly between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. When you rehearse a scene in your imagination with enough emotional specificity, the brain lays down neural pathways associated with that experience. Joe Dispenza talks about this at length in his work: the neurons that fire together wire together, and what you practice in your imagination is, in a neurological sense, practice.
This is not quantum physics. But it is real.
What Neville calls "the state akin to sleep" is basically a period of heightened suggestibility, something close to what the science of hypnotherapy documents. In that state, the brain is more receptive to new beliefs. The assumptions you rehearse in that state have an outsized effect on the self-concept you carry into waking life.
Again: not quantum physics. But real.
The self-concept work, the core of what Neville teaches and what I spent years doing, is documented in clinical psychology under different names. What you believe about who you are determines what you notice, what you reach for, what you tolerate, what you unconsciously communicate to the people around you. The version of you who already has the thing moves differently in the world. She makes different phone calls. She writes different emails. She responds to setbacks from a different internal posture.
None of this requires particles.
What "quantum" offers, as a framework, is permission. Permission to believe that the observed state is not the only possible state. Permission to believe that what has been could collapse into something different if you shift what you are bringing to the observation. That the waveform of your life is not fixed.
That metaphor is not nothing. I'd actually argue it's quite powerful, for the right kind of person in the right kind of moment.
Does it describe a literal mechanism? No. Is it pointing at something real? In my experience, yes.
The Quantum Jumping Question
Because this piece would be incomplete without it: what about quantum jumping?
The basic idea, for anyone who hasn't encountered it, is that parallel realities or alternate timelines exist (drawing on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics), and that through a specific meditative or visualization practice, you can "jump" from one timeline to another, accessing a version of reality in which you already have what you want.
The many-worlds interpretation is a real interpretation of quantum mechanics, proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957. It is one of several competing interpretations of what the wave function collapse actually means, and physicists continue to disagree about it. It has not been empirically proven. It is a theoretical framework, not established fact.
What the many-worlds interpretation does not say is that human consciousness can navigate between timelines through meditative practice. That step, from "multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics exist as theoretical frameworks" to "you can jump between parallel realities with your mind," is a very large step, friend. A step I'd want you to see clearly, even if you find the destination useful.
Here is what I think the quantum jumping practice is actually doing when people report that it works: it is a variant of revision and scripting, dressed in different language. You are practicing a different version of the story about yourself. You are accessing an emotional and neurological state associated with a desired reality. You are doing visualization work under a framework that makes the visualization feel more grounded, or more serious, or more permissioned.
That is not nothing. Scripting under Neville's framework, revision under Neville's framework, have been part of my practice. The neuroscience of that practice is real. The mechanism doesn't require literal timeline travel.
Does the specific quantum jumping narrative help some people access that state more effectively? I think it really does, for some people. The story we tell about the practice affects the practice. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What I'd push back on is the framing that says you have to believe the physics is literal for the practice to work. You don't. The evidence, in my experience and in the documented neuroscience, is that the practice works through psychological and neurological pathways. Knowing that doesn't diminish it. If anything, it makes it more accessible.
What the Observer Effect Can Actually Teach You
This is where I land, after three years of thinking about it.
The observer effect, even in its actual scientific sense, contains something. The act of observing collapses possibility into actuality. Before measurement, a system exists in multiple states simultaneously. The measurement brings one into being.
At the scale of subatomic particles, this is literal. At the scale of human experience, I think it's a useful frame.
What are you currently observing? What are you treating as the fixed, measured state of your life? What are you collapsing into fact by your continual, automatic observation of it?
Can you practice observing differently? Can you, in your inner life, practice treating a different state as the real one? Not once, not as an affirmation recited in the mirror, but as a sustained shift in what you assume to be true about who you are and what is available to you?
That is the work. That is what I have been doing, under Neville's framework, for three years. And the results, in my life, have been specific and measurable and not explainable by grinding harder or being smarter or any of the frameworks I lived inside for the eight years I spent at the agency.
The physics, taken literally, doesn't support it. The neuroscience, taken carefully, does. And the lived experience, for a lot of people I've talked to and a lot of readers who write in, suggests that something is happening that deserves serious attention.
What I'd ask you to do is hold both of those things. Be honest about where the physics metaphor is a metaphor. And be open to the possibility that the metaphor is pointing at something real, even if the pointing isn't precise.
Priya, for what it's worth, has softened on this over the years. She still rolls her eyes slightly when I say "quantum" in the wrong tone of voice. But she also called me last fall to ask which Neville book I thought she should start with.
I sent her The Power of Awareness. At 3 a.m. It felt right.
How to Actually Practice This Without Getting Lost in the Language
Here is the practical version of everything above, for people who want to do the work and not just think about it.
Start with the self-concept. Before you worry about timelines or quantum fields or anything else, ask yourself: what is the version of you who already has the thing assuming is true? About herself. About what's available to her. About what she deserves, what she expects, what she walks into a room believing. That's the work. Everything else is decoration.
Use whatever language opens the door. If "quantum jumping" gets you into a meditative state where you can access the feeling of the wish fulfilled, use it. If it pulls you out of the practice and into intellectual skepticism, drop it. The language is the vehicle. The state is the destination.
Root the visualization in feeling, not image. This is the piece most people undervalue. The brain responds to emotion. A vivid picture with no emotional charge does relatively little. A felt sense of the new state, even a brief one, begins to lay down the neural patterns that shift your automatic behavior. Neville called this "the feeling of the wish fulfilled." The neuroscience gives it other names. The mechanism is consistent.
Do the nervous system work. I came to this through Beatriz, actually. My friend Beatriz, who has been doing this longer than I have, was the one who introduced me to somatic practices as a companion to the visualization work. The body holds the old assumptions as much as the mind does. Regulation practices, the kind that shift your nervous system out of a chronic stress response, create the physiological conditions for new beliefs to take root. Bessel van der Kolk documents this in ways that are worth reading.
Don't need the physics to be literal. You don't. I promise you, from the inside of three years of this practice and some very specific outcomes that I did not get by working seventy-hour weeks, you do not need subatomic particles to explain why this works. You need practice. Sustained, patient, felt practice. The store has a small curated catalog of products that complement this kind of work, if you're looking for structure alongside the reading.
The version of you who already has it is not waiting for you to figure out the physics. She is waiting for you to stop treating the current state as the only possible state. She is waiting for you to observe differently.
That's it. That's the whole thing.