Let me kick this off with a quote from the The Corpus Hermeticum, Part V: Though Unmanifest God Is Most Manifest:

Now were it manifest, it would not be. For all that is made manifest is subject to becoming, for it hath been made manifest. But the Unmanifest for ever is, for It doth not desire to be made manifest. It ever is, and maketh manifest all other things.

One of the items I’ve yet to delve into from Sophia Stewart’s interview is actually very brief, but very deep. The interviewer asks her what she plans to do with the money should she win the court case against the Wachowski Bros. She replies:

When I win… I’ve already won actually its just gonna materialize very very soon upon the earth which a lot of people don’t see that these things are meant to be is already done; they will be consciously aware of it when it happens.

So she’s basically saying that things that are meant to happen, they happen before they “happen”. It all sounds kind of confusing at first. But I think she means that things occur on another “plane” before they become manifested in our reality.

People tend to talk about this type of thing in various ways. Etemenanki actually says something quite similar on his “About” page:

What is this website about? Basically it is about going beyond the accepted realm of ‘reality’ by decoding patterns and symbols of worldly phenomena. Here, the physical world is viewed only as a subset of a greater matrix, a hidden configuration that gives rise to such things as synchronicities and symbolic patterns that we all encounter from time to time even without active interest.

His site is pretty interesting because it attempts to actively uncover the unmanifest realities before they become solid in our own reality as we normally think of it.

Another really good reference point on this matter has to do with the holographic nature of the universe, and the implicate and explicate orders. The implicate order has to do with the totality of all possibilities in the omniverse. The explicate order is the reality that we experience. Using those terms, though, I find that it gets a little too abstract. I prefer to think of it using the metaphor of web server technology:

When you are browsing the web there are (at least) two concurrent levels of interpretation happening. The web server, the computers which store websites, all these computers do is store commands - code. They don’t actually store websites. When a person comes in to “surf” these web pages, the commands lying dormant on the web server are activated [and interpreted] and sent to a browser.

In this case then, the commands on the web server would be the implicate (unmanifest) order, and the web pages you experience in your browser are the explicate order - reality as it manifests for us. Going back into what Sophia Stewart says above, perhaps you could say that the sequence of commands encoding her victory already exist in the unmanifest reality. They have now entered the first stage of activation, and soon they will crystalize into concrete reality in our plane.

Also worth mentioning is the connection to some theories about how the brain works. From an interesting article on placebos and consciousness in healing:

One model of how the brain operates is that any action or behavior is first imaged in the brain, e.g. to turn this page one first creates an image of doing so and the hand then conforms to the image.

This is also very similar to Plato’s teaching that there exist “ideal forms” beyond the realm of human experience - of which the forms we experience in day-to-day life are but a pale reflection. A similar notion is explored as well in Rupert Sheldrake’s modern notions of morphogenetic (or morphic) fields and formative causation. As far as I understand it, that theory suggests that there exist fields or patterns which exert force on both matter and consciousness to create things. An example might be that a particular type of morphic field exists for “dog” and energy and matter are then arranged to suit this pre-existing pattern. Both of these are similar to Jungian archetypes, which are patterns of potentiality which exist within the mind, and are then imprinted with symbols from the culture and life experiences of an individual.

In any event, I find this to be an extremely interesting area of speculation: that events in the future somehow cast shadows into the present. In subsequent posts, I plan on delving into how and why various religious and occult groups deal with this possibility. Until then, you can always try to go read the unmanifest versions of those articles.