Create more financial flow, live with serenity and clarity, deepen relationships, heal your dying mother.

Apparently, all you need to do to make great things like these happen is train your unconscious mind to manifest your wants to the universal force, and the force will bust its hump to make sure you get it.

Or so say proponents of one of the latest trends to make the rounds.

Recently I read an advertisement for author Eva Hartley’s book “Manifest and Receive,” which claims the practice “blends modern neuroscience with timeless spiritual wisdom to show you exactly how to make this shift — not through magic, but through practical, repeatable steps.”

The ad goes on to claim that the brain science behind manifestation, including neuroplasticity, uses the Reticular Activating System (RAS), and emotional imprinting. The role of your nervous system in all of this is “receiving mode — but you have to regulate it using breathwork, movement, and simple rituals.”

Sounds great, right?

But nothing new. We’ve heard it before. I met up with these ideas more than 40 years ago in Christian circles, only then critics derided it as “name it and claim it.” One fierce acolyte even assured me, red-faced, spittle spraying, that “a lot of evidence shows that Jesus was very wealthy.”

Apparently, Jesus was really into being a rich man.

Really? Same Jesus who claimed to be God and ended up nailed to a stake of wood? Same homeless guy who said, “the Son of Man has no place to lay his head?”

The very Jesus who, says Luke 17, advised a wealthy man who wanted to know how he could enter heaven, said “Go and sell all you have, and then follow me?” Apparently so.

All this to say that this new idea of “manifest and receive” is the child of “name it and claim it.”

I could multiply my reasons for disbelieving in manifest and receive, but I lack the space here. So, allow me to quote from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”: “It’s a load of dingoes kidneys.”

And why do I say this?

Because, if I am certain of anything, it’s that too many men and women, suckered by the underlying arguments for “manifest and receive,” have bought lottery tickets expecting the universe to grant them big winnings, but walked away with empty pockets.

Incidentally, that’s a whole lot of people crying out for the same thing at the same time. Could millions of people strike the same lottery jackpot at the same moment? Call me skeptical.

I am also certain that many a person who has wept at the bedside of a dying friend or relative, called on the force for a miracle, but sadly attended their funeral soon after. In this world, the death rate has always been, and will always remain, one per person.

I see people getting hurt and losing money to unscrupulous elements in all of this, just as they have been by the name-it-and claim-it movement when things don’t go as they’d expected.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.