Ask And It Is Given by Jerry and Esther Hicks

Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires

by: Jerry Hicks, Esther Hicks

Amazon Price: $15.65 (as of 05/27/2012)

Possibly the most troubling feature of what Jerry and Esther Hicks and Abraham claim to be the "Teachings of Abraham" is that the basic claims are so fabulous no rational person would believe them if not tricked out in a clever sales pitch that reduces everything to processes or "games," as they call them in the book.

First and most ravishing is the claim that everyone has total freedom to create whatever reality they want, "no exceptions." The converse of this is total responsibility, of course, which is what seduced most of us in the beginning. But you get into trouble when you try to apply it to real world situations.

According to the teachings of Abraham and consistent with what they insist is the most powerful law in the universe, the Law of Attraction, each of us chooses our time of birth as well as death, making every death a suicide. (I am not making this up. Honest.) It gets worse.

Pressed to clarify this "teaching" in subsequent workshops, Esther Hicks (Abraham) was asked to explain how all three-thousand victims of the World Trade Center disaster could have chosen to die that morning in a horrible conflagration none of them could have seen coming.

Stating, as usual, that there are "no exceptions. It is law," Esther meandered around this preposterous claim by reminding listeners of the few non-victims who canceled their flight that day or rescheduled for another day and were spared. She also mumbled about how a bomb attempt had previously been made on the facility, which meant people working there must have known it was a target.

This, she concluded, proved her point that people jumping from ninety stories up to avoid being consumed in fire and others sitting calmly at their desks when a jetliner came through the windows--all were dying by choice, then and there. Were this claim not sickening and disgustingly disrespectful to the victims and their families, you might be able to laugh.

The idea of creating your own reality was lifted from Jane Roberts' Seth, by the way, but Jerry and Esther Hicks dumbed down Seth's version considerably, probably make it accessible to less educated or more gullible followers, until it became mean and goofy.

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There are a couple of cliches that make my hair stand on end. The new age one is: "...who you really are," as if what you are living is some odd brew of who you really aren't.

Jerry and Esther Hicks version arrives when she is explaining that your ultimate freedom and ultimate power is part of some bargain you enter into "when you come into this physical body." They never explain who the bargain is with, but given other aspects of the teachings, they seems to be implying that it's God or, as they say, "Source: "Do you know how loved you are? Do you know how adored you are?"

Easy enough, of course, to accept that you are given life by God and are "blessed." Nothing so unusual about that. But there's a problem: if you came into the world, direct from God, with all this power and ultimate freedom, what went wrong? Obviously, you're not living that way.

This is where Scientology lends a hand. The problem is that you forgot. Fortunately, for a fee, Jerry and Esther Hicks, with Abraham as their authority, will help you remember your eternal being-ness. But if you want to follow their road map with the tedious emotional guidance scale they inflict on you, your threshold for boredom needs to be very high.

For me, the place where the wheels actually come off and show this collection of wisdom to be, not the teachings of an eternal "nonphysical entity," as they describe Abraham Hicks to be, with access to all wisdom since the beginning of time, but the concoctions of exploitative hucksters who take strands of legitimate wisdom from multiple sources and patch them into a single package of nonsense that falls apart upon examination.

Wise people are clear in what they have to say. That's part of the deal with penetrating insight.

With Jerry and Esther Hicks, there is a continuous bouncing back and forth between the claims that your thoughts create your reality (You get what you think about, whether you want it or not.) and another that "It's a vibrational universe" in which your vibrations attract like vibrations. They also claim that your thoughts attract similar thoughts and so forth. Then, at one point, they conflate the claims and say that your thoughts create vibrations which create your reality totally.

You, sir and madam, are responsible for Madagascar, global warming, Holland's tulips and the musical history of Fats Waller. Wherever did you find the time?

An overarching thread of foolishness starts when Jerry and Esther Hicks write that they admire Joseph Campbell's famous advice that, to achieve happiness, you "follow your bliss."

The Esther, Jerry and Abraham Hicks version of this is that you look (or reach) for thoughts that "feel good." Gradually, you change your "emotional set point." Not a bad idea, but then, they go off into hyperspace. The make a quantum leap from feeling good to feeling joy. It's the difference between inspired passion and giddy narcissism.

Kids, these are two different things, but they make the leap without any interval or step between. One minute, Jerry and Esther Hicks are encouraging you to find thoughts that feel good. They next, you are told that your purpose in life is to find "joy."

Joy is something we can all appreciate. The joys of a new birth or music that touches your soul are wonderful. But is that really my purpose in life? What about passion and desire? What about the mellow, low key sensation of being "in the flow?" What about efforts to reach a goal, the struggles of creativity and the integration of imagination into reality?

Expanding on this, Jerry and Esther Hicks (on stage as Abraham) declared that you should "joy, joy, joy" your way to happiness, not work hard and struggle. Told that this is a Pollyanna-like approach to life, Abraham advises sagely that "Pollyanna was a happy ending."

Nobody has yet reminded them that Pollyanna was also a fiction.