The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires by Ester & Jerry Hicks

An Inquiry into Conscious Creation

At first encounter, Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires (2004) presents itself as a self-help manual grounded in metaphysical doctrine. Yet beneath its ostensibly prescriptive surface lies a richly textured text that invites literary and cultural scrutiny. Esther Hicks, channeling the entity known as “Abraham,” delivers a series of aphoristic dialogues that, when examined through a literary lens, reveal both the power and the limitations of voice, narrative structure, and reader engagement in the genre of spiritual instruction.

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The Polyvocal Narrative and the Authority of “Abraham”

Hicks adopts a polyvocal frame: a human interlocutor (Esther) and a collective non‑human consciousness (Abraham). This dynamic evokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, wherein meaning emerges in the tension between voices. Abraham’s authoritative tone—simultaneously nurturing and commanding—establishes an almost prophetic ethos. Yet Esther’s interjections and clarifications humanize the text, creating an intimate classroom atmosphere that blurs the boundary between teacher and student, oracle and disciple.

“You are the creators of your reality—and you are doing it right now.”
(Hicks, p. 12)

This declarative mode functions rhetorically to engender confidence, but also positions the reader as co‑creator in an ongoing rhetorical exchange, rather than a passive consumer of wisdom.

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Structural Poetics: The “Processes” as Ritual

Ask and It Is Given is organized into two primary sections: exposition of the Law of Attraction, followed by “22 Processes” for emotional alignment. These “Processes” read as ritual scripts—innovative incantations of modern spirituality. From the “Rampage of Appreciation” to the “Virtual Reality” exercise, each process employs repetition, metaphor, and guided visualization akin to poetic incantation. Literary parallels may be drawn to William Butler Yeats’s occult poetry, where ritual language aspires to alter the thinker’s consciousness as much as the world itself.

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Language, Metaphor, and the Sublime

Hicks’s metaphors frequently invoke oceanic and vibrational imagery: “emotional guidance scales,” “vortex of creation,” and “universal source.” Such language conjures a sublime cosmos that is at once comforting and ineffably vast. By marrying quotidian concerns (“financial freedom,” “relationship harmony”) with lofty abstractions, the text situates itself in an interstice between the sacred and the secular, a hallmark of late‑modern spiritual writing.

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Critical Reflections and Cultural Resonance

From a critical perspective, Ask and It Is Given can be read as an artifact of early 21st‑century New Thought movements. Its optimism and insistence on personal responsibility echo both nineteenth‑century transcendentalism and contemporary entrepreneurial ethos. Yet feminist critiques might note the absence of structural analysis—social inequities are rendered subordinate to individual vibrational alignment. The text’s emphasis on subjective feeling risks sidelining collective action, a tension that invites further scholarly debate.

Ultimately, Ask and It Is Given transcends the conventional boundaries of a self-help handbook through its poetic structures, dialogic interplay, and compelling metaphors. As a literary object, it offers fertile ground for inquiry into how language shapes belief, how narrative voice constructs authority, and how ritualized prose can become a tool for transformation. Whether embraced or critiqued, Esther Hicks’s work remains an influential testament to the enduring power of words to reshape both self and society.