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In celebration of the lunar eclipse – and an early Christmas gift for the family – we bought the virtual workshop in Phoenix that was held on the day of the lunar eclipse, December 10. It was the first Esther Hicks has done since the death of her husband, Jerry, about three weeks ago.

I was curious about how Jerry’s death might impact Esther’s ability to connect with the nonphysical group, Abraham, that she channels.  On a personal level, I was trying to put myself in her shoes. Not only did she lose her spouse of decades, but the man who was  her business and spiritual partner. This workshop was the most powerful I’ve seen, either virtually or physically.

In a nutshell, the Abraham/Hicks premise is that we create our own realities through our emotions, beliefs, and thoughts, which determine our “vibration,” a magnet through which we attract everything in our lives. This premise isn’t new.

Carl Jung, in his introduction to the I Ching, wrote, “like attracts like.” He was discussing why the I Ching, an oracle that uses coins and 64 hexagrams, was able to answer questions. But like attracts like also became the basis of his theory of synchronicity.  Seth, a nonphysical energy channeled by author Jane Roberts, put it more bluntly: You get what you concentrate on…there is no other main rule.

My introduction to these concepts began with the I Ching when I was about 18, and then continued with the Seth material when I was in my twenties. The Seth books were the first channeled books I’d ever read that resonated on an intuitive level. Seth and Jane wrote twenty some odd books before her death in 1984. I read all of them. I even bought the books that contained “the deleted material” – information Seth provided to Jane and her husband, Robert Butts, about her physical ailments, their private lives, their marriage. Some of the deleted material is difficult to read, particularly the stuff that was channeled when she was bedridden for  a year because of her rheumatoid arthritis.

But the messenger can never be confused with the message: that’s what I ultimately took away from the Seth books – and from the virtual Phoenix workshop we watched. And yet, the messenger’s presence is important.

In the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, when Jane and Seth wrote most of their books, there was no Internet, social media, cell phones, iPad, iPhones, Facebook, blogs, Amazon, Twitter…you get the idea. Jane and her husband worked out of their home in Elmira, New York, holding regular Seth sessions for more than twenty years. To my knowledge, there is only one video in existence of Seth speaking through Jane. Today, of course, there are many websites about the Seth material, but these are not written by Jane Roberts or Seth.

For awhile, Jane held sessions in her home for outsiders and some of these outsiders, who were really young when they attended, are now carrying on her work – Rick Stack, for instance, and Sue Watkins.

Esther Hicks is a whole different ballgame. She and Jerry, when he was alive, embraced every social media venue to promote Abraham’s ideas and products. And there are many products – books, CDs, workshops, a cottage industry.  And yet. There’s Esther herself. When Megan and I attended one of her workshops in person in 2009, I went with the intention of trying to determine if she was in a trance during the entire six hours of the workshop. By the end of the workshop, that point was rendered irrelevant because the message, the philosophy, the core of the material is so inherently positive and resonates for me.

During tonight’s workshop, the impact of Jerry’s transition was apparent. As Abraham said at one point, Jerry’s transition was the next logical step. His overwhelming desire to know and understand had triggered their journey and now his transition gave him the ability to view the larger picture, from a nonphysical perspective.

The best parts of these workshops are the questions that are posed when someone is selected to sit in the “hot seat.” This is like a one on one with Abraham, and never is there any apparent struggle on Esther’s part to answer the questions. She’s always composed, listening intently, and you sense that she’s tuned in to something other than herself, something greater than herself. Now and then, when the person in the hot seat talked about suffering and the great works of art that came from pain, Esther made these very strange sounds, a kind of high pitched shrieking, and then looked off to the side and murmured, “That was Jerry.”

Suffering, apparently, is not the preferred method for creating great works of art, music or literature. But it may be the point where the musician, artist or writer releases  his or her resistance to success, beauty, whatever. Even though Tchaikovsky’s life was one of pain and suffering, when he composed music, he released himself from resistance and the universe flowed through him. Isn’t this process the epitome of creativity? Of synchronicity?  Abraham is quick to say that suffering isn’t necessary to release resistance, that awareness is key.

During the last segment of the workshop, Rob, Megan and I kept relating our  personal experiences to what Abraham was saying,  a sure sign of psychic resonance. And in the end, there really isn’t any other criteria that matters more than what we ourselves feel and know when evaluating information.

The other day our next door neighbor asked me if I wanted to split a pallet of sod. Both of our lawns had patches of dead grass and weeds and I quickly agreed. I began clearing out the old grass and prepping the ground for the new sod.

We were supposed to leave the next morning taking K’s trailer to Odom’s, a company that sells sod grown on the edge of the Florida Everglades. The next day came and went. I only saw  K once walking away talking on his cell. Two more days passed and on the second evening I spotted him in his backyard. K seemed distracted as I approached and before I said anything he muttered that we could get the sod in the morning.

K’s usually an early riser so I was surprised when I didn’t see him at eight the next morning. He came out at 9:30 and we drove off. I was a bit annoyed by the way he’d put off our plans without even saying anything about it. I just figured he was preoccupied with something.

By the time we reached Odom’s I found out what it was. The airline where he works as a pilot had filed for bankruptcy. As a result, he was taking a big pay cut, the second since 2003, and there was something else.

The company, like many large corporations, matched deposits in a 401K account. In other words, for every dollar that K saved in his pension plan, the company also put a dollar in the account. A good deal. The catch, though, was that if the company went belly up, employees might lose their entire pension. That’s exactly what happened, K confided as we waited for the sod.

Now I knew why he hadn’t been too concerned with our plans. He was expecting to retire with about $1 million in his pension fund. He’d just lost the entire thing.

I mentioned that, sadly, his story sounded like an increasingly typical American tale with middle class people taking the blows when companies were mismanaged. Meanwhile, the executives responsible for the collapse would escape with golden parachutes, maybe even handsome year-end bonuses.

It’s a synchronicity because this American tale involved a company named American Airlines.

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PS Are we looking at the demise of the middle class? It certainly seems that way. Today, the U.S. senate rejected a bill that would extend the payroll tax – FICA deductions (Social Security). It means that most Americans will be paying about $1,000 more in taxes while the one percent continues to benefits from the Bush tax cuts. Interestingly, it revealed that Republicans will raise taxes – in spite of their pledge – as long as the rich are spared.