58 pages • 1-hour read
Ask And It Is Given: Learning To Manifest Your Desires
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Abraham
According to Esther and Jerry Hicks, Abraham is the true author of Ask And It Is Given. Abraham describes themselves as a collective of non-physical energy beings, brought together by their shared intention to help physical humans. The book explains that because they communicate without language, they find “channels” through which to translate their ideas for human understanding; Esther believes herself to be one of these channels. Abraham states that she was chosen due to her openness, although Esther herself writes that she was resistant to accepting them at first.
Throughout the text, Abraham directly addresses the reader. At certain points, they express frustration that their ideas must be diluted by the limitations of human language. Esther and Jerry write that to mitigate this issue, they capitalize certain words to indicate that the true meaning is far greater than what those words can convey. Abraham outlines how the Law of Attraction works and offers specific techniques to begin perfecting the use of this principle. Abraham also offers tangible ways to measure the effects of the Law of Attraction on one’s own life. They say that for non-physical beings like them, the fact that the universe is a place of attractive energy, and nothing else, is indisputably clear.
Esther Hicks
Esther was born in Utah in 1948 and worked as a chiropractor before becoming a “channel” for Abraham. She purports to have had no interest or belief in channeling until the early 1980s, when she read a book on the subject. She claims that shortly after that, Abraham first visited her. By 1987, Esther began taking private clients, using Abraham to guide people through various personal and professional issues. Throughout her controversial career in the spiritual self-help genre, Esther has risen to become a leading figure in the New Thought movement, and she claims to act as the channel through which Abraham communicates with the physical world. The text portrays her as an average, middle-class American woman with a Christian background. Before Abraham first contacted her, she did not believe in the Law of Attraction, nor did she believe that channeling was possible. As Abraham states in the text, something about her energy attracted the non-physical beings, and she maintains that she then became an open line of communication for their messages. Esther writes that Abraham first communicated by forcing her nose to draw letters in the air, which her husband Jerry then wrote down. Later, Abraham learned to use her mouth to speak and began talking directly to audiences.
Jerry Hicks
Jerry Hicks is Esther’s husband and the coauthor of the couple’s Abraham and Law of Attraction books. Like Esther, Jerry also had no background in manifestation prior to Abraham’s arrival. Before he became a motivational author, he followed a diverse career path and had completed stints as a circus performer, a musician, a comedian, and a distributor for a multilevel marketing company. During Abraham’s nonverbal communications, Jerry also served as the translator who put Esther’s symbolic movements into words.
Few details of Jerry as an individual are revealed in this book, beyond the personal thoughts that he conveys in the preface. Jerry Hicks died in 2011 of leukemia, although the couple initially attempted to hide the progressive illness from their followers with claims that Jerry was recovering from the effects of a spider bite. Skeptics have speculated that the ambiguity was engineered because of the Hickses’ awareness that Jerry’s diagnosis contrasted sharply with their most prominent teachings about the Law of Attraction, in which they claim that cancer (like all other aspects of life) is a direct physical manifestation of a person’s own thoughts and emotions.
Unlock analysis of every key figure
Get a detailed breakdown of each key figure’s role and motivations.
- Explore in-depth profiles for every key figure
- Trace key figures’ turning points and relationships
- Connect important figures to a book’s themes and key ideas