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This site is my blog and personal zone. I'm David Matthew Weese, and I'm glad you're here. I want to share some discoveries I have made in my life journey and offer some ideas you may find helpful or encouraging. I call my approach "Timeless Manifestation".

You know the pop psychology buzzword "manifestation"? This is a little different.

I'm not here to tell you that you can manifest your most deeply held desires and bring them into reality. Rather, that you are already doing so and do not realize it. It turns out, our minds both protect and hijack us at the same time.

However, the mind is hackable! Once you understand how it works, you are empowered to claim control of your life trajectory, get off "auto-pilot" and discover a compelling future that you create.

Here's a brief overview of topics we'll be covering :

The Problem : Something prevents us from living consistently happy, self-actualized, satisfied, fullfilled lives, and abiding angst is a common experience. Why? How? And what practical steps foster mastery over the unfolding life experience - steps that should generally enable us to achieve our dreams and avoid the psychological, emotional, financial, vocational, and relational pitfalls that seem to trip us up.

The Promise : Timeless Manifestation provides a tight model of how the mind works so we can understand the forces that affect our choices. It reveals how we mostly create our own circumstances (for better or worse), and can - if we have the resolve and courage to do so - fearlessly and tenaciously invest our energies congruent with values, beliefs, and aspirations, steering our experience inexorably and inevitably toward the realization of those aspirations.

The Premise : We are our own worst enemy, and the stuff that makes life difficult is usually (but not always) created by ourselves - informed by what we recall and the manner in which memories invoke emotion which informs our beliefs based on narratives we create in our minds. Our confidence in narratives powerfully influences the actions we will or will not take.

As a practical example, if you truly believe you cannot successfully do [xyz], then you will not try [xyz] and so, in practical terms, you cannot possibly do [xyz]. But it turns out the choice not to try is informed by beliefs that may not be valid at all. This sort of preemptive self-sabotage is simply an attempt at control and protection - it's normal because stored emotional memory is precisely how we evaluate and understand experiences and ideas - we compare them with what we know from the past. Repeating the familiar is what our subconscious mind always sees as the safest, most predictable path, and it turns out this must be countered by your Intentional Conscious Mind (ICM) making the decision to assert control and ACT in spite of a narrative of uncomfortable fear or uncertainty.

Somewhat nonintuitively (and this will become clear), it also turns out that this model of mind - that pits the conscious, curious present adventurer against the intertia of the known, seemingly safe past - can be applied to everything from nature to culture to cosmology. Indeed, the principles are recursive across all scales from the atomic to the galactic.

The Principles : The Timeless Manifestation model attempts to understand how normal mental processes actually inhibit free and unencumbered self-expression - authenticity, if you will - specifically as a survival mechanism - which tends to keep us firmly ensconced in the familiar.

It almost seems to be a way that the universe sort of coldly separates winners from losers, to put it crassly. Winners learn to interrogate and challenge mental narratives because they understand that those narratives are simply stories we concoct based on the combination of recalled emotion and a loose collection of "facts" - which it turns out are not facts at all, since the same forces that are affecting you today also affected you when you formed the very emotional memories that guide you today.

The Process : We all have the ability to overcome hindrances in life for the simple reason that most such hindrances were created by our onw minds in the first place. Thus liberated from our worst enemy (ourself), we can reboot and begin to steer our own lives in directions we choose - directions that are challenging, satisfying and fullfilling.

Who is this for?

This content is for anyone who feels like they've painted yourself into a corner professionally, relationally, or creatively. Whatever you've been doing so far has clearly served you in some ways, but there seem to be missing pieces - there's no good reason why life should not be a fun adventure of discovery, yet you find yourself strangely inhibited, most significantly from expressing and presenting as your most authentic self.

You're pretty sure there's a deeper, richer experience of self-actualization, relationships and achievement, but you can't seem to find the combination to the lock. I've come to believe this - let's call it "angst" - is very common, at least in modern Western culture, and it turns out that a combination of brutal honesty with yourself about what you most care about - plus a hearty helping of courage to be who you really are - is what is needed to change course.

Remember, you are trying to turn a ship that has been moving in one direction for your entire life to date. Change is possible, but cut yourself some slack to bone up on what's been going wrong, and understand that all good change is slow. It's like building muscle with exercise; you can only go so fast, and you simply risk injury by being to anxious for results.

I know that's not what people want to hear - they want it all now!

We're going to see why the desire for rapid change is a misguided symptom of the problem you are trying to solve. Your very biochemistry is "designed" to only assimilate changes that you get used to as changes become familiar experiences - and after a while become normal - instead of unusual - for you.

I noted that this "manifestation" is a little bit different than what you may have encountered elsewhere. Exploring these sorts of ideas suggests that you might be at a place in life where changes have become sort of non-optional, so it's understandable that you would be in a hurry. Well, that desire is what the pop psychology concept of manifestation feeds on and the promise of almost 'magical' results is what you pay for. You engage in meditative process, go on retreats, and adopt new beliefs that suggest if you do the right things, visualize in the correct way, hold onto the emotion of what it would feel like to have what you want, then it just comes to you.

These activities may be useful forms of instruction or encouragement. The problem is that they tend to come with a great deal of esoterica baked in. If you truly believe forces outside of yourself can be 'magically' invoked on your behalf - but only if you do, say, think and feel the right things in the right way - then you will have a strong proclivity to offload your expectations to that force.

Well, that force may indeed be a thing, k? But if you consider for a moment that after you go through all those gyrations, all of your challenges are still waiting for you when you get home. So of course you might get a happenstance that you are powerfully tempted to call a miracle - and invariably that will be the happenstance you report, glossing over all of the infinite layers of happenstance that carried on as per normal.

Not only that, 'magical thinking' acts as a powerful filter on your perceptions. Quite literally we do find what we look for, so if you expect the miracluous, you are more likely to find something you can sieze upon as "your" miracle.

Hence reports of people who 'claim' their million dollars, then tell everyone who listens when they happen upon a much smaller but otherwise unexpected windfall. These good fortunes are perfectly fine and welcome, but I trust you'll go with me on this one : if we have a strong proclivity to resort to the magical in our thinking, then it is probably quite instructive to see how we act differently as a result.

I'm saying that it is more negative than positive no matter what, and here's why :

If your confidence in your miracle is strong enough to prompt you to act in a manner congruent with the achievement of what you want, then when you get a positive result, you will be strongly tempted to attribute it to the magical and overlook the change and efficacy in action that most likely made all the difference.

How else do you explain very self-actualized people with widely divergent beliefs?

Or worse, because you are waiting for your miracle (not to disparage the value of a toaist, chillax approach to life) then you are encouraged to not act, and miss great opportunities to affect change. On balance, then, it is far more useful to look at how mastery of our own psychoemotional machinery might encourage and equip us to ACT in ways that, it turns out, are actually most (but not all) of what is required to get where we want to be.

In short, we squander a lot of energy on dreaming and hoping when we could be acting, and having a wonderful adventure in the process. I approached Timeless Manifestation with a bent toward "no magic required", so you might argue that I, likewise, simply found what I was looking for. The insights that emerged emphatically showed me that spirituality and esoterica can be very interesting and valuable, but when it turns to expecting a magical force to do something for you and make the path easier, it becaomes more counterproductive than halpful as you to invest tons of attention (arguably you most valuable resource) on something that might be helping - but you can never be sure.

Perhaps you feel resistance to the possibility that your magical thinking does more harm than good. If so, take a short jaunt over to this blog article which describes the "Jim Carrey" problem. There's an oft told story of Jim writing himself a $10M check then later manifesting it as payment for a film. This is what appears to have happened but is, in fact, not what actually happened at all.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the more these ideas have assimilated for me, the result is quite the opposite one might expect. I am much more contented, present, and happy, but not more ambitious and high achieving. It's actually the opposite. Chasing after achievement and recognition for the wrong reasons (mainly what I call "ego dividends" instead of lasting rewards) was a big part of my unique issue, so what's been helpful for me is moving much more slowly and relaxfully through life. Frankly it's freaky how much letting go of "pushing" situations and asserting control has resulted in much more satisfactory experiences and outcomes, as well as opportunities I would probably have sabotaged had I been in too much of a hurry for things to play out. Speaking of my unique experience ...

So, what's YOUR problem??!?

I feel this information must be shared since it has so revolutionized my own happiness and approach to life. It took about three years of rigorous self-examination of my own psycho-emotional pathways, but I seem to have stumbled on the answers I was seeking.

Still, you could hardly be blamed for asking why I was groping for such answers in the first place! Fair enough. Let me share a little bit about me.

I got off to a pretty rough start as a child given up for adoption at birth and growing up in a family where I did not quite fit in, but on balance I feel I have been quite fortunate - relationally, financially, and vocationally. The biggest bump in the road as a 40-something was an unwanted divorce after 24 years of marriage, but in hindsight it was the right choice.

That painful transition was pivotal, but it took several more years to hit a breaking point.

As a 50-something I was relationally satisfied, more financially secure than at any other time in my life, and my professional opportunities were wide open. I have always been involved with creative activities ranging from voiceover, radio jingles and website development to corporate video and ultimately filmmaking (I wrote and directed a minor hit in 2011), and most recently having released an animated cartoon I wrote, animated, voiced and scored all by myself.

Like I said, a creative life. What I do is not only challenging and fun, but I am fortunate enough to be able to pick and choose the kinds of projects I take on.

But that's what's so strange. I just did not feel as happy as I might expect. Something felt "off". I suffered from more "angst" than seemed appropriate. I was also pretty sure that the negative attitudes that seemed to affect me routinely were probably of my own making somehow.* Was it possible that in some convoluted way, negative feelings and attitudes were actually being created by myself, completely out of wholecloth, and in some bizarre way did these crummy feelings of angst, unease, and frustration actually serve me somehow?

I realized that the most challenging creative adventure might be to hack my own psychology - to discover how to be happy by coming to understand why I wasn't already.

For me, that meant engaging in a rigorous examination of my own thoughts, feelings, motivations and memories. Answers slowly began to emerge. Over three years of nearly daily insights, each discovery built upon or clarified previous ones. These "brain dumps" seemed to come from a higher wisdom, and each time I thought I had it figured out, I would get more the next day.

A model emerged. For reasons that will become clear, I called it "Timeless Manifestation". This model turned out, to my own surprise, to be much more than a model of human behavior. I stress tested the principles aginst questions about politics, culture, and even cosmology, it surprised me how well the principles seemed to hold up, from the atomic to the cosmic scale.

Unintentionally, I had tripped headlong over a "Theory of Everything".

The ideas on offer here are mostly empirical, not scientific, which is to say it would be challenging to craft controlled experiments to validate the hyptheses about how the mind works. My priority was not scientific rigor, but honesty and practicality. I was pragmatically seeking truths about why we do what we do and feel what we feel, and translate those understandings into policies and habits one can apply to life and generally expect certain kinds of results.

You want to believe you can have, do or be whatever you can imagine and have the tools to bring those desires into reality. Let's rock.