If You Go Looking

Abraham

XD/1/N

Abraham-Hicks · the law of attraction

A non-physical collective behind the modern law of attraction.

Since 1985 Esther Hicks, first with her husband Jerry, has channelled Abraham, which she describes as a collective consciousness. It speaks as “we” and makes no claim to come from another star. The couple began after reading Jane Roberts's Seth material. The teaching is the law of attraction: thoughts and feelings draw matching experience, so attention and mood shape what happens. It reached a mass audience through the film The Secret (2006), from which Hicks was later cut after a falling-out with its maker.

If you go looking

Because the teaching holds that experience follows attention, it can slide into blaming people for their own illness or misfortune. It also sits within a large paid industry of workshops, cruises and recordings.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

XD/1/N

Extraterrestrial, unembodied · embodiment 1 of 5, consciousness with no persistent form · source: channelled material · key

Dates

Channelled since: 1985

First book: 1988

The Secret: 2006

Related

The same plural voice as the Ra collective. Bashar teaches a near-identical law of attraction from an extraterrestrial frame; Abraham teaches it without one.

Terms used on this page

XD: extraterrestrial, unembodied

Origin code

Said to come from outside the Earth, whether another star system or another dimension, and to have no physical body now. A few traditions say they once had one; most never say.

Degree of embodiment: 1, consciousness with no persistent form

Scale, 1 to 5

5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.

N: channelled material

Source code

Received by a medium speaking on behalf of the intelligence. The content is generally ethical and cosmological rather than descriptive: instruction, not testimony.

Jane Roberts and Seth

Channelled, 1963–1984

From 1963 until her death in 1984, Jane Roberts spoke for Seth, who described himself as an energy personality no longer focused in physical form. The Seth books shaped most later channelling, including Abraham-Hicks.

Engaged through channelling

Practice-side

Contact in this tradition means trance, mediumship or automatic writing. The risks are the practice's, not the entity's: dissociation, sustained altered states, and the difficulty of telling one's own material from something external. Least suitable for anyone with a history of psychosis, mania or dissociation.

Commercial ecosystem

Documented harm

A paid economy has grown around this tradition, whether readings, courses, retreats and private sessions, or books, tours and media that keep promising more. Not automatically predatory, but it does mean some of what you will read was written to sell something, and that people in distress are a market.

Deliberate contact work

Read this first

The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.

Who should be careful

Practice-side

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.

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