Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires

Esther Hicks writes for a "nonphysical intelligence" known as Abraham in this former New York Times Best Seller, Ask and It is Given. What I found most interesting in Ask were the deviations from Esther and Jerry (her husband) Hicks' 1989 book A New Beginning I, which predicted various "earth changes" that were on the brink of occurring in 1989, including simultaneous volcanic eruptions that would cover the earth's air with ash. In Ask, these revelations of turbulence are not even touched upon. There are also various inconsistencies within Ask regarding Jerry and Esther's initial encounters with Abraham, including an altered-or cleverly tailored version-of Abraham's first words.

As for the "biographical sketch" provided in Ask about show more Jerry and Esther's life pre-Abraham, it is incredibly vague. It tells us that Jerry was very successful before Abraham, but does not mention that Jerry Hicks was a Crown level distributor at Amway, who was giving seminars about positive thinking and motivation. Only instead of using the Abraham works, he was using those of Napoleon Hill. Dateline did a wonderful expose on Amway, revealing a major business within Amway that was not in selling various appliances/supplies, but in selling motivational courses and materials within the company. It is clear that Jerry was involved in this sort of motivational selling with Think and Grow Rich before his Abraham work. While the effect of Think and Grow Rich on Jerry's life is mentioned in Ask, the Amway link is never made, though it is touched on in various interviews with the Hickses. Of course, this seems to be irrelevant to most readers of the Abraham materials. To me, this was an important fact that made Jerry and Esther appear less like sincere messengers of positive thinking and more like pious frauds for Napoleon Hill.

The chapters in Ask offer an emotional guidance scale to let you know where you are and some 22 processes to help you reach a better feeling place to help you align with those things that you are wanting. The 22 processes include an interesting combination of cognitive therapy, visualization, and New Age woo. Though some of them seem very helpful, there does seem to be some undermining as the processes and rhetoric ask you to set aside critical thinking and replace it with emotional guidance. Also, for the entities that have claimed to not wish to alter our beliefs, these processes suggest otherwise, as they are designed to assist us in altering our beliefs. Various emotional appeals, combined with validation for whatever you want to believe in, make this book very appealing to anyone who wants approval or to believe that they can be, do, or have anything they want. This book operates under the claim that it will help you manifest your desires. But buyers beware, the authors take no responsibility for anything you are unable to manifest using their processes and there are no objective means for testing how well you are doing. And based on the logic presented within the book, even if you are unable to manifest something: All is well. I do not recommend this book to someone trying to manifest something, but rather to someone who wants to become a devotee of one of the most popular channels of our time. When you find yourself needing to listen to their CDs and watch their youtube videos more than anything else, that's when you know you've found a friend. show less

(note: this was among my to-be-reviewed books that ended up in the hands of the wrong people when moving 4/1/18 - see https://btripp-books.livejournal.com/206862.html for details - I did brief reviews of these lost books on recall)
(finished 12/31/17)
A friend of mine is deeply into the whole “Law of Attraction” thing, and highly recommended this title to me. While my cynical mind has a hard time with the genre in general, I found that reading this was not the battle that it often is with this sort of book. Frankly, I found a lot of concepts/tools in this appearing quite useful, and am quite miffed not to have it and my notes on it anymore. Because of the nature of this (sort of a self-development workbook), it has a reasonably good show more chance of being something that I might buy a replacement copy of – which is high praise indeed, coming from me. show less

Teachs that your emotional state is what fuels the manifestation of your thoughts. your desire to have may be offset by your feelings of whether or not you deserve it. the emotional guidance scale is a wonderful tool for persons to begin to identify their emotional state. hicks gives some concrete steps in moving yourself up the emotional scale towards positive, joyful feelings.

The problem with this book, like many others in this "The Secret" category is that it speaks to you like you're a child. It expects you to believe everything they say about the "law of attraction" as gospel without any real commentary about it. But, the book redeems itself with a cool 22-point-scale of emotions and multiple meditation, visualization, and self-affirmation exercises that you can use based on which ones match your style - these exercises have already entered my subconscious.

This is a good book but I've read all this before in other books and already doing all this. If it the first time you read about Laws of Attraction then read this book.

Well, this is an interesting book. It talks about how what you attract in your life is determined by the content of your thoughts, and how you can choose to attract certain things (money, jobs, relationships) if you focus your thoughts appropriately, as long as your vibration is right. Most of us concentrate our thoughts on the things that we don't want, which makes it less likely that we'll get the things we do want. I'm still testing the theory...

Very painful and irritating to read and thus I became not very responsive to the main message. The main problem was that the book promised too much: all the chapters begun with pages and pages on how this will improve your lifequality and how you will gain this and that and the feeling of love and peace and whatnot. To be honest, yes, that's why I picked this book in the first place, but that is not helpful because, yes, that's why I'm reading this so please, get to the point. So I jumped almost directly to the 22 (or something) steps to change your attitude/ improve the quality of your life, but this section also had little to say and went on and on how great the method is and how it will change your life. Boring.

Ok, I admit, there show more was some wisdom behind the boring hype, but most of it seemed to be just common sense hidden behind lots of, well, hype, and dressed as some deeper spiritual knowledge. (It was a little while ago I read this book so I don't remember any examples that I could give here.) show less