Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires by Jerry Hicks, Esther Hicks Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires
Book Review: Feeling good is all that matters!
Summary: 1 Stars
This is yet another book that professes to know the way to riches. Good news! it's easy, I mean it is REALLY easy. Basically; think positive, visualize the 'things' you want, get your vibration all lined up and you're done.
Then add some selfishness, which is important and the more the better! In case you think that the world may need people who actually have empathy and compassion, they cover that one. Simply believe that all those poor sots suffering and disabled choose their lot in life. Got it? OK, let's focus back to feeling good!!!
The two 'leaders' are former Amway sales people (Source: NY TIMES ARTICLE)
This manifesting of success DOES WORK - it works for the people who convince people that it works.
Their law of attraction is true-ish. First, it's not a law. Second it is a small piece of the whole. It's like believing that eating vegetables is the way to health, which is correct, but so are many things IN CONJUNCTION. With this book, it's just vegetables or just LOA and that's all.
Shallow with tunnel vision and a desperate need to believe that things will be easy? Then this is the book for you!
Book Review: Former Amway Distributors Find Riches in New Age woo
Summary: 1 Stars
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 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.
Book Review: Give this book a try
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is meant to be read many times. It will change the way you think out yourself and the way you view your world. This book taught me that raising my vibration(simply put, feeling better) will allow me to open myself to many more wonderful things that are already waiting for me. Give it time and a chance as their is a lot to be learned from this book. It will also explain in very real terms what "The Secret" truly is and how you can integrate it into your life. I bought this book recently and am taking my time reading it again. Give yourself a chance to learn something that can change your life.Book Review: Good Guidance
Summary: 5 Stars
This book offers good guidance for those interested in changing their lives through positive thinking. I recommend reading it a little at a time and letting the words sink in. One interesting thing I've come to discover through this book is that you tend to draw in whatever it is you are thinking about, whether it is good or bad. There may be no significance or meaning or "magic" to what you attract; you just attract it because you are focusing on it. That's pretty much the only "magic." This may sound unenthusiastic, but really it's a good thing, because if we spend too much time assigning importance to "coincidences" this can be unproductive. The book shows us how to just keep focusing on what we want, on the positive, without getting caught up in "what does this mean?, what does that mean?, is it a sign?, what am I supposed to do now? and all that kind of thinking. It is a very helpful in explaining to us the simplicity of the mechanics of thought.Book Review: Great Primer for the Law of Attraction
Summary: 5 Stars
It really explains how and why the law works. The "how" as explained in the book is actually quite simple and easy and can be boiled down to a few pages at the most. I would get this book if you just want to get comfortable with the idea of the law of attraction and seek a deeper understanding of how it works. This book will tell you how you can draw "wanted" into your life, but not the manner in which it will unfold because there are just so many ways for things to manifest. How to realize the vibration that will draw the circumstances that you want into your life. You will learn how to do your part, but the rest is up to the Universe. The essence of this book is about finding relief to get what you want as relief is a sign that you are allowing more of the Stream of Wellbeing where your "wanted" is. Your ultimate goal is finding complete relief to let it all in. So in essence, this book is about how to remove the resistance that keeps you from getting what you want. Because it is already out there. You just need to allow it into your life.
Once you get comfortable with the idea of relief, I would read Telementation: Cosmic Feeling and the Law of Attraction. Because this is really the essence of manifesting. "Ask and It is Given" explains how to find relief in a gradual way. I would definitely start out with this book as it helps you get comfortable with the way of relief and effortlessness, going downstream. But "Telementation" explains how to get there quickly and easily once you are comfortable with going downstream. How to work with your consciousness on a deep level to manifest what you want. They are both great books that I highly recommend.