You can tune it by simply deciding rather than, say, going through a complex technique or magick ritual etc…

Exactly.

But sometimes you may (optionally) want to deliberately limit your ability to decide if you notice you tend to decide haphazardly and carelessly at times (sometimes it only takes one bad decision to ruin something important), you may want to put a conceptual magickal “wall” between decisions and emanation so that only especially empowered decisions are allowed to affect something more than the body and the personal conscious mind. That’s where the value of ritual may show itself, but for this one doesn’t need ornate and elaborate rituals, but one just needs a special marker of some sort.

So I agree with you, but personally I have some degree of protection that would protect me from randomly deciding something that I think is “cool” on the spur of the moment and 1 hour later regret. In other words, I have deliberately somewhat constrained my ability to decide some things. I can still decide anything but if it’s really important I have more hoops to jump through, and that’s intentional.

And this has been liberating to me, because it means I can think freely, including having incredibly stupid thoughts, and I can think about what it would be like to decide some dumb things, and I never have to worry that my stupid thoughts will leak out and manifest at large.

It’s like having a manifestational scratch pad that’s not intended as a work of art. On a scratch pad I can try stuff out only to throw it away. If I like how something looks on my scratch pad, I may bring it out more into the “external” sphere.

Maybe if I could trust myself to never even need something like a scratch pad in the first place, I would simplify my internal mental setup even further, but until then I will keep my “wall.”

What I was also getting at is that “desire” as you experience it in the context of being a human is not the same thing as volition, it’s rather an experience. Volition is the act of deciding.

I completely agree. That’s a very important point.

I feel I need to distinguish these two things because “desire” is aim without volition and is more akin to yearning/craving.

Exactly!

That’s also why imagination and thinking do not necessarily change manifestation. Only thought with intent to manifest has that power, not just any old random thought. I can think “let it rain” and I can think “let it rain” and intend for the rain to be my relative reality, and those two thoughts will “sound” the same in my mind, but the meaning is completely different and only the second one will manifest while the first one is just me thinking. It’s like thinking “I will scratch my itch” but then refusing to move my arms. It’s just a thought. It doesn’t scratch anything by itself. But if I focused on the idea of my itch vanishing and I was serious and fully expected this to become viscerally realized with good justification (such as having subjective idealism as my worldview in addition to also using intent in that way), then my itch my indeed vanish.

So I completely agree. You’re pointing out a very important distinction, which is also subtle and can be easy to miss.

Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2019-07-16 15:14:31 (etw4vsu)