I change my opinion on God every day of the week, depending on who I am talking to, and what I am going through at the time. Despite fluctuations, I do tend to settle back to the opinion which satisfies my needs most, which is that the only version of God that exists is the one within my own power to create. So when I need him or her, voila: existence.

When I heard that religious people lived longer, and presumably died more soundly with the faith that a heaven anticipated their arrival rather than a deep resounding nothingness, I resumed my attempts to formulate a religious structure in my life, but to date I have failed miserably in achieving any sort of faith in any one idea that is being proclaimed as being the right one. I just have too little faith in our capacity as humans to understand anything more than our own mottled interpretations of the world, and as such, all these concepts and experiences of God are, to me, fabrications by us foolhardy and desperate humans which cause more war and shame and pain than relief.

So when I was directed towards Abraham Hicks, the collective consciousness behind the Law of Attraction, by someone whom I have a lot of respect for, I was almost excited by the prospect of going into battle with another one of these so called right ideas, breaking it down into pieces, taking the best bits to surgically attach to my own version of the world, and leaving the rest in the scrap heap of concepts that don't resonate with me.



Battle is never easy. You go in there with your cynicism shield on, wary of ideas that could damage the healthy stability and clarity of your interpretation of the world that you have fought so hard to attain, to preserve all the concepts that you are attached to, that define your existence, that enable you to get up in the morning. I didn't want any collective consciousness, especially one named Abraham, of all names, translated by Ester Hicks, first in head movements, spelling concepts with her nose (oh pur-lease) and then speaking with her voice, hanging out like a group of salesmen spirits in the vortex to interfere with humanity for a while before they get returned to wherever they were evicted from, to cult-ify my brain that I have spent years pruning and cult-ivating.



Associations make battle more bloody - Abraham Hicks and Esther Hicks were in the first version of The Secret, explaining the concept of The Law of Attraction which Wikipedia defines as:



I watched part of the Secret until the bit about the woman who claimed her breast cancer disappeared because she watched a week of comedy nonstop, and I had to turn it off for fear I would vomit in disgust on my laptop.

It took me a while to let down my shield, and once I did, something about the whole thing managed to stir up a heap of anger and fury and frustration in my soul - no doubt explained perfectly logically in paragraph three of section 7, part 8A: Reasons why you will feel doubt and how to overcome.

I really did try to separate the wheat from the chaff. I was willing to overlook the obvious question of why a collective consciousness would bother its collective ass trying to answer our questions anyway.

I was willing to overlook my doubts about whether it is practical or healthy or possible to achieve everything you want to achieve, simply by thinking about it, without taking from someone else; or whether it would be an enjoyable existence, to have everything you want and keep wanting more, instead of being grateful for what you've got.

I was willing, as were a lot of people I read on forums, to overlook the manner in which the ideas were being spread, as long as they were healthy ideas that spread positivity and hope, and enable people to make great positive changes in their lives.

And looking at the ideas themselves, I couldn't find anything objectionable exactly. There is nothing that I would disagree with in particular, that isn't explained somewhere else in a perfectly logical manner. Abraham seems to have the answers to everything and anything, including why dogs persist in sticking their heads out of car windows when the car is moving, even though they get flies stuck in their eyes when they do so.

After immersing myself in their world, listening to various recordings, and part of their first book, as well as searching on the internet for any evidence I could find, positive or negative, about the whole concept, I went off for a walk, and sifting through the data I had accumulated, I finally found something I could win the battle with.

They made me feel inferior:

Having grappled with Buddhist principles and complex language previously, I know that it can be a challenge to understand something at first glance, however their use of "translations" means that the language seems almost deliberately complicated, filled with new vocabulary; and although I agree that you hear what you want to hear, when you need to hear it the explanation that you will understand what you need to know now, and more will be revealed every time you read/listen to it, serves as another convenient explanation for all this frustration that builds up when you can't understand something.

If these guys know everything, don't they know how to make their concepts simple for everyone to understand? Didn't they take Marketing at collective consciousness school? Why all the complexity?

e.g:

What does that even mean?

It all left me feeling inferior. Overwhelm someone with their complete lack of knowledge about something, and you will make them slaves for life.

I cannot agree with a system that makes it so effortful, that requires hundreds, if not thousands of hours of investment, in order to reach a promised state of understanding, a state that is always just beyond the next corner. If you would only spend more time, read the book again, listen to the next track, and the next one and the next one - the answers that you are searching for might be there; and if not, perhaps you need to go and ask Abraham Hicks in person.

It becomes like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, trying to find the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, when they have determined the answer of the Ultimate Question to be 42. If you can't find the right question, poor Abraham will never have the answer that you crave.

Positive thinking doesn't work all of the time:

I always hate being told it's about positive thinking because it puts so much pressure on you - it makes you scared to experience the true nature of life, it makes you ignore, pretend, run away from, or try to resist facing the reality that life sucks sometimes.

I have lived through enough shit to have the experience to say that life does suck sometimes and that's ok. At times it seems to rain down stinking slurry, burying you deep within its wet and sticky embrace. You can't simple wipe it away with a positive Law of Attraction baby wipe, it just doesn't work that way. "Oh, but you just aren't being positive enough," is so frustrating precisely because it is a statement you can't argue with.

Having specific, logical, verbal solutions to something, or tools and charts and wheels to find your own solution may be somewhat helpful to people, but it shouldn't substitute for your own inner wisdom, or make you feel guilty that you can't access it until you know how to do all of these specific things.

Esther Hicks is not doing anything that I can't do by myself: