What Moves Through Me?

I’d been listening to Abraham-Hicks since my first cars. If you don’t know it, Esther Hicks stands on a stage, talks for a while, then takes a few deep breaths and centers herself. From then on she’s speaking as what she calls Abraham, which is her name for the nonphysical awareness she channels. People in the audience raise their hands, and Abraham picks the one who “lights up,” in their words. That person walks up, sits in a chair with their back to the crowd, and asks their question. Esther stands in front of them the whole time, close, a step or two away. That’s the hot seat. There are usually five or six conversations in a seminar, sometimes with thousands of people in the room.

Esther walked back out for the last segment and asked for the next person. My hand shot up like something was pulling it. The next thing I knew, she was pointing right at me. The six people around me had their hands up too, and she told them all to sit down and invited me up.

I felt certain. It was my time. I don’t think I’ve felt that kind of certainty before or since. I was the second-to-last person picked on the whole cruise.

I’d love to tell you I asked something clean and brilliant. My question was obtuse. I went on about reflection. I said that, for me, the universe is a reflective experience, and I talked about emotions and what’s wanted and flow and the past. Then I got to the letters. I said “human being” breaks into hum and being, and that the hum is what the flow feels like, like standing near high-voltage power and feeling the current. I said emotion is energy and motion, the E and the M, baked into the very name of the thing we’re living all the time. What it came down to was: are the physical and the nonphysical reflections of each other? I still have the recording. It’s in Abraham-Hicks’s recordings from that 2019 Alaska cruise, the last day’s second-to-last session, titled “The Universe as Reflection.” Listening to it now, I can hear myself fumbling toward all of this: a flow, the letters, how they might fit together.

Abraham answered the way Abraham does, and it went on for a while. They said the physical world could be described as a reflection of the nonphysical. Then they turned it around and said the nonphysical might more accurately be described as a reflection of the physical. The mirror went both ways.

Then they started a sentence the way Abraham does. “If we were standing in your physical shoes, we would…”

And they stopped, mid-sentence.

The room went completely silent for about fifteen seconds, which on a stage in front of a crowd, with Esther standing a step away and looking right at you, is a very long time. You can hear it on the recording. Nothing. The whole room waiting. I’d leaned back from the microphone with my hands folded in my lap, and I wasn’t reaching for anything. I wasn’t trying to work out what they meant, or what I was supposed to say next, which is the first time in my life I can remember not doing that. There was nothing to do but sit there and let it in.

Then: “Did you get it?” That’s when the snickering started, people in the audience letting out the breath they’d been holding.

“Yes,” I said, immediately. I was still leaned back from the microphone, and I’m not sure it even made it onto the recording. They heard it.

“That’s what we’d do,” they said, finishing the sentence they’d left open. I thanked them. “Very, very good.” And I left the stage. I didn’t know what I’d gotten. Several people stopped me on the way out of the theater and asked what the message was. I told them they’d have to wait, but it was coming.

Think of her however you want: a channel, a performer, a gifted intuitive, a woman who’s very good at reading rooms. None of it changes my story, because what happened in that room happened in me. My hand went up. The certainty was mine. The stream of thought came through me. Whatever was going on in the chair next to me, I’m only reporting my side of it.

The best word I have for it is a download. Concepts, information, relationships, all arriving as a flow. It came in pictures more than words, almost like movies. The thought game I told you at the beginning, awareness first and the particles and the collisions, came in that first night. It wasn’t a sentence. It was the whole flow at once, from before the beginning forward.

Neither, and that’s the point. It’s nonphysical. Inside and outside are physical ideas. They need a boundary, and the boundary is made of resistance. The Current doesn’t sit on one side of your skin.

What happened that night is the theory itself, working. After the best week of my life, on the first quiet night home, my resistance dropped lower than it had ever been. When resistance drops, your thinking rises on its own toward the Current. Nothing has to come in from anywhere. You stop blocking what was already there.

It didn’t happen to me because I’m special. That’s the part I most want people to hear. It’s available to every human by default. We block it constantly. Then we decide we don’t have it, or that only certain people have it: prophets, saints, psychics, geniuses. Or we decide it’s God talking to one person in particular.

You already do, in flashes. Every time you have a good idea in the shower, every time you get lost in something you love and look up to find three hours gone.

If you want to do it on purpose, meditation is the simplest tool there is. It works because it quiets the mind, and the busy mind is where most of our resistance lives. As resistance drops, your vibration rises by itself until it lines up with the Current. You don’t have to reach for anything. With very little effort, anyone can touch it for a few moments at a time, as their resistance fades.

I meditated for fifteen minutes a day. Then I wrote a page or two in a journal. Then I painted. That’s all the method there was.

Energy, flowing four ways at once, all of it running through you.

On the nonphysical side, energy is realized. It goes Out For you, and it comes In To you. On the physical side, energy is actualized. It goes Out Through you, and it comes In From the world back to you. Each direction has a name for what it carries, and each lines up with a piece of what we usually call time.

Two words for the present, on purpose. The Now is what’s happening physically, the moment you can point at. The Current is the flow it’s happening in. You’ll see both words constantly from here on, and they are not interchangeable.

I ran projects for a living, so I know that loop well. Here’s what it misses.

First, these aren’t steps. All four are running in you at the same time, right now, about everything in your life. You’re wanting, receiving, acting and remembering all at once. I had to walk it through in order so you could follow it, but that’s only the way I told it. The diagram shows it as one crossing, not a sequence. Your physical resistance is what lets you pull them apart and see them separately. In the nonphysical they’re one.

Second, a planning loop lives inside one head, or one team. This one runs through the whole. What I want doesn’t stay mine. It expands the Current we all share, and what comes back to me is shaped by everything else that has been wanted. That’s why intuition can hand you something you had no way to think of yourself.

Third, the two sides don’t match, and the mismatch is the whole story. Desire and intuition are on one side. Belief and expectation are on the other. Desire is always a little further out than what you believe, and what you believe is always being weighed down by what you expect. Their difference is the contrast you live inside. We’ll spend the next part of the book on what that does to you.

Fourth, nothing comes back the same. The Current has expanded by the time anything returns. You can’t run the loop again from where you started. There’s no “where you started” anymore.

More than you think, and less than the self-help shelf promises.

You control the flow through two things: what you’re tuned to, and what you’re focused on. That’s it. Those are the two handles.

Focus is the physical one, and you know it well. It’s where you put your attention and your effort, the thing you stare at, work on and push toward. Tune is its reflection on the other side. It’s what you’re receptive to. Think of an old radio dial. The music of every station is in the room with you all the time. The dial doesn’t make the music. It decides which station you can hear.

That’s the question my whole life was an answer to, and I got it wrong for twenty years.

I was extraordinarily good at Focus. I read Napoleon Hill as a waiter and wrote down exactly what I wanted, and then I went and got it, mostly by force. I worked my way from carrying plates to running technology for a hedge fund. I taught myself systems. When a project was in trouble, I’d grab it and push until it moved. I was the person you called when something had to happen by Friday.

Focus without Tune is forcing. I was world-class at forcing.

A man who had gotten very, very good at Focus had to discover Tune.

Tune comes first. When you’re tuned to what you want, when it feels good and easy and close, Focus becomes simple. You just do the next obvious thing. When you try to use Focus to make up for being out of Tune, you get what I had at work: a lot of motion, a lot of results, and a body keeping a bill it hasn’t sent you yet.

You can feel it. That’s what emotions are.

Think about how physics knows anything. It reads force. A steady one is a weight sitting on a scale; a change in one is the needle jumping. Both are evidence, and the change is what tells you something happened. Force is mass times acceleration. That’s empirical evidence, the kind science is built on, and it’s how we confirm there’s an objective world out there at all.

Reflect that across the mirror. The nonphysical counterpart of a change in force is a change in frequency. And frequency is Movement times Appreciation. The way you register a change in frequency is emotion.

So emotions are evidence. They’re the nonphysical kind, and they’re every bit as real as a needle jumping on a gauge.

It means there’s a gap. That’s different.

A bad feeling is evidence that you’ve expanded further than you’re currently letting yourself live. Some part of you has moved on, and some part of you is still holding the old shape. The feeling is the stretch between them. It isn’t a punishment and it isn’t a verdict on your worth. It’s a reading.

The best way I know to say it is that negative emotion is evidence of misalignment with the Current. It’s the Current telling you it has moved and you haven’t, yet.

Because there are two kinds of evidence, and neither one gets to speak for the whole.

Emotional evidence tells you about your alignment with the Current. It doesn’t tell you what other people owe you, or whether the specific thing you’ve decided you want is the right shape for it. Empirical evidence tells you what actually happened out in the world, including what happened to other people. You need both. On the diagram they sit at opposite edges, Emotional Evidence on the far left, Empirical Evidence on the far right, and what you actually live is the blend of them, meeting at the Point of Reflection.