I think the point from Formless Mountain was this: wishful thinking is not enough... true IM (in the Napoleon Hill sense) is about thought leading to action leading to opportunity leading to more action and so on, until someone has amassed the requisite resources to achieve some audacious goal, but the movie The Secret glosses over the hard work part to make it sound like wishful thinking is sufficient. As a corollary, he suggests that true IM is more inwardly reflected than external, and the application of self-awareness in one's thinking (including the willingness to hold oneself to a high ethical standard), is the difference between a kid's wishful thinking and a mature adult's focused thinking... therein is the nuance that The Secret blows off.
We can use his example about the scarcity of resources to illustrate the piont... think land for a moment, which is the ultimate "fixed" resouce: if all six billion people on earth tried to manifest a 10 acre plot of land for ourselves, we'd overshoot the total inhabitable acreage on the planet by about 4 acres per person, if my math's right. So some people would have to change their goals and either accept less land or accept land someplace else, like the moon... so to work, our collective use of IM requires that we know this limitation and account for it, either by wanting less or by being flexible about the ultimate location of our plot.
I didn't understand the spiral dynamics guys... how can one extend one's consciousness without becoming smarter? Intelligence is a measure of the level of abstraction one can handle in one's thoughts... and since the ability to extend one's awareness is an application of handling abstraction, it would seem that broadening one's perspective as they suggest would necessitate more smarts to accomplish. I didn't get it.
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