Our local Barnes & Noble was closed during the lockdown and didn’t open until about a month ago. When I walked into the building for the first time in about two months, I was shocked and delighted by the way the place had been rearranged. Everything was more open – that 6 feet of distance – and more accessible.
Today, June 30, was my third visit since it reopened, and I went with the intention of finding some mind-blowing new book. I usually have a circuit in this newly arranged bookstore. Magazines: anything on astrology. New fiction arrivals: a book whose cover or title leap out at me and I’m prompted to pick it up. Sci-fi: same. Today I notice that some of my science fiction favorites are new editions with more compelling covers – like Octavia Butler’s books. Then I cross the bookstore to my favorite section. It used to be called New Age, then Live Your Best Life, Self-Help, Transformation. Here you find books on astrology, tarot, happiness, self-transformation.
Since author Pam Grout will be a guest on our podcast in July, I bought a new copy of E2, which we bought and read several years ago, but we couldn’t find our copy. We may have given it to our daughter. Then I scanned the rest of the books in that section and one caught my attention: Scripting the Life You Want by Royce Christyn. I noticed that Mitch Horowitz had written the intro. I loved Mitch’s The Miracle Club, so I picked up this book.
I’ve read a lot of books like this. Most are based on an idea that probably has been around forever, but which came into Western awareness through the Seth books, channeled and written by Jane Roberts and her husband, Robert Butts, in the early 1970s. The idea: We create our own realities. All of it, beginning with our choice of parents, family, siblings, situation, time, place, and date of birth. The Seth books were philosophic. Much of what has come afterward has evolved into pragmatic, self-help books and techniques.
Abraham-Hicks, now a cottage industry, is about the law of attraction, how it works, and how you can employ these techniques to create the life you dream of living. Pam Grout’s E2, E3, and The Course in Miracle Experiment, provide her particular – and usually humorous – take on these ideas.
Mitch Horowitz’s The Miracle Club is especially engaging because his take on these ideas is so focused and directed. He’s a no bullshit kind of writer. If memory serves, he’s the only one of the bunch who talked about synchronicity.
After I picked up Scripting, I stood there reading Mitch’s intro and decided to buy the book. I realized this was the book I’d come to Barnes and Noble to find. This happened to me in 2003 or 2004, when I was at B&N, on the same sort of hunt, and Lynn Grabhorn’s Excuse Me, My Life Is Waiting, leaped out at me.
In 1999, I was in a Borders Bookstore, browsing, and a book dropped at my feet. It was Carol Bowman’s Children’s Past Lives. These books were life-changing. So when I walked to the register today with Scripting, I was pretty sure it would be that kind of book.
So far, it is. I love Royce Christyn’s voice, his authenticity, his personal stories. I’ve created my first intentions list. He’s two years older than our daughter, Megan, and knows how to use the Internet and social media to promote his book. He’s already giving online manifestation courses. I’m eager to see how his techniques differ and, bottom line, how and if they work.
And some synchro expers, BTW, call this phenomena, The Bookstore Angel. I’m not convinced about the angel part of this, but when I’m in a bookstore, on a hunt for whatever I need to read right then, I’m nudged toward certain books.
Are you? If so, how?
