I’m surprised at how often I find myself thinking of a video clip that I saw nearly a decade ago. In an interview, the exact nature of which I can’t remember, Candace Cameron Bure, an American actress and conservative Christian influencer, expressed her opposition to TV and movie scripts that encourage characters to follow their hearts or their intuition. In a book she wrote around the same time, Bure warns readers that our culture, by encouraging us to trust our inner feelings, is leading us straight into a Satanic trap, meant “to trick us into turning from the truth of God’s Word.” For Bure, truth is not found in inner human feelings. It is found outside of us, specifically in the Bible.
She’s right to point out that in contemporary Hollywood storytelling, intuition often functions as the primary moral compass for characters, guiding their life decisions. Intuition can be broadly defined as knowledge or wisdom that comes from within. It’s often contrasted with reason and described as a feeling or sensation, the origins of which, while certainly located within the individual, are otherwise difficult to parse. Generally, the choice to follow intuition requires subordinating logical reasoning to some sort of faith or trust in this inner sense.
Intuition, as a concept, is rooted in philosophies that are linked to modern American spiritual traditions, including Transcendentalism, New Thought, and manifesting. There is a salient throughline in how intuition has been understood within these different historical frameworks, and it has to do with a particular conception of human nature.
This conception of human nature, which is central to modern American spirituality, is what I will call the emanant self. This self is experienced and understood as an emanation—a radiation, emission, efflux—of a divine source. Intuitive knowing comes from within each individual human being, but, and this is the important part, the interior of this individual human is neither fully individual nor fully human. The emanant self is a wave in a sea of divine mind, and, in this view, a clear boundary between human and godly knowledge becomes nearly impossible to discern.
The emanant self is illustrated clearly in a 1997 book by the popular spiritual teacher Wayne Dyer, titled Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want: “Think of yourself as a consciousness being played out by God just as a wave is part of the ocean that is being played out by the ocean….This unseen, divine energy is the ocean that your wave form is a part of.” Dyer is explaining manifesting, which can be defined, in short, as any practice rooted in the conviction that the human mind is more powerful than we realize, and that our untapped mental power can be harnessed to effect desirable changes in the material world. For Dyer, the creative capacity of the human mind lies in its deeper, divine nature.
Dyer is certainly not the first, nor the last, to connect this idea of an emanant mind to creative power. Manifesting is a direct descendent of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century New Thought movement, which likewise preached the mind’s ability to generate health, wealth, and happiness. New Thought author Ralph Waldo Trine, in his popular 1897 book In Tune with the Infinite: Or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty, explained, “The great central fact of the universe is that Spirit of Infinite Life and Power that is behind all, that animates all, that manifests itself in and through all.” Trine told his readers that the greatest and most central task “in human life, in your life and in mine, is the coming into a conscious, vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow.” To truly harness the power of the human mind, in this view, is to tune into its connection to this ultimate, infinite source. Once again, discovering the power of the human mind requires discovering its divine nature.
In this more mystical strain of manifesting, attunement and communication between part (human) and whole (divine) hinges on the faculty of intuition. In a recently published book, Intuitive Manifesting: Align with Your Inner Wisdom and Attract Your Dream Life, author Brigit Esselmont emphasizes that the key to successful manifesting is “staying receptive to the subtle yet transformative nudges the Universe offers.” In contemporary American spirituality, Universe (with a capital U) is the standard term used to describe what Trine alternately terms “God,” “Divine,” “the Infinite,” and a host of other names. “The Universe” is the same as “the universe,” i.e. all of existence, except for one key difference: the universe (lowercase u) is composed solely of matter, whereas the Universe (capital U) is conscious and able to communicate with human beings and intervene in their lives. The Universe communicates in signs, energies, and feelings, all of which require the human recipient to “tune in” to an inner, irrational, and often inexplicable knowing, i.e., intuition.
In proposing the concept of the emanant self, I mean to contrast it with Charles Taylor’s concepts of the porous self and the buffered self. Taylor argues that disenchanted, secular modernity brings about a new experience of human subjectivity. This is the experience of the buffered self, in which each person reigns sovereign and supreme over their own mind and can choose whether things will “get to” them. This is contrasted with the pre-secular-age porous self, which is not buffered from intrusions by outside forces. Porous selves are always aware that their minds and bodies are vulnerable to the entrance and influence of spirits, demons, and other forces. In short, for Taylor: pre-modern, pre-secular people experienced themselves as porous, and modern, secular people experience themselves as buffered.
I want to return, for a moment, to Candace Cameron Bure. As I noted above, Bure writes about the dangers of encouraging people to trust their inner feelings rather than an outer locus of truth. But a story she shares in this same book seems to contradict that conviction. In the anecdote in question, she is bothered by the immorality of a TV script and decides to set a meeting with the show’s producers to express her concerns. Here is a condensed version of the story: “After reading it…my mind was racing and my heart was pounding….there was no denying that something in me was saying, ‘Candace, you can’t stay silent on this.’…That prompting inside to speak up remained, with a fluttering of my heart–always my telltale sign that I’d better pay attention to whatever it is God has put there.” In this example, Bure does trust her inner feelings. It’s just that she doesn’t think these feelings are her own.
Bure’s receptivity to God’s placement of a flutter in her heart bears a striking resemblance to Esselmont’s receptivity to nudges from the Universe. My point here is not that the two are identical. It is, instead, that there is more than one significant, pervasive model in contemporary American culture for rejecting–or at least resisting–the experience of the buffered self. Bure’s experience of self seems to map onto Taylor’s porous self—a self that is open to the intrusion or intervention of spiritual forces. The intuitive-manifesting self isn’t exactly porous, but it’s also not fully buffered. Because this self is understood to be an outflow or emanation of the divine, it is actually not buffered at all—any sense of a buffer is ultimately illusory. This concept is depicted with remarkable clarity by Trine’s namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1841 essay “The Over-Soul”: “…there is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause begins. The walls are taken away.” In the vision of pantheistic oneness that marks the more mystical side of New Thought and manifestation, minds are ebbs and flows of a singular consciousness. The boundary of the emanant self is marked not by a wall—whether strong and impenetrable or weak and porous—but rather by gradation. To master the art of manifesting, in this view, is to come to see yourself as a wave and to learn to communicate with the larger ocean about where you’d like to go.
In closing, I want to note another popular framework through which manifesting is understood, one that does align very clearly with the buffered-self ontology.
A 2024 book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How it Changes Everything opens with the following line: “THE UNIVERSE DOESN’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.” The author Dr. Jim Doty, who, before he passed away in 2025, was a neurosurgeon and adjunct professor at Stanford, opens with this line because it sets up his central argument: manifesting, which he fully and enthusiastically endorses, is not a mystical practice involving a higher power. It is, instead, a fully material practice that operates entirely through the phenomenon of neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change, adapt, and reorganize its structure and functions. Here’s what happens, in Doty’s view: You define an intention. You train your brain to believe that this intention is possible, and to look for opportunities in your surrounding environment that can aid in making it a reality. Because you have primed the brain to notice and act on these opportunities, your intention becomes your reality. For Doty, each individual mind is distinct, and the process of manifesting happens squarely within the bounds of the brain. The strong wording of his opening line reflects the current intensity of this debate about whether the Universe is sentient and benevolent or merely uncaring matter. As much as Doty wants to argue for the latter, other manifesters want to maintain the former.
The concept of the emanant self names an experience of subjectivity that, to borrow Mayanthi Fernando’s metaphor, has been a significant and consistent minor key in US-American secularity, from the nineteenth-century Transcendentalist refashioning of mysticism, on through the New Thought era, and into twenty-first-century manifesting.
