Telling the story of Abraham’s birth, Esther Hicks has told at least three different stories, but they are not consistent. Not even close. Which is true? Any of them? Hicks says she channels divine wisdom from Abraham, a group of 100 “dead people.” Wouldn’t you think she’d remember how this alleged miracle started?
by David Stone
Special to the Roosevelt Island Daily News
Esther Hicks and Abraham
When a woman gives birth, it’s a usually painful, dramatic event leading to the beginnings of a life and natural connections. When Esther Hicks gave birth to Abraham, it was something like that to a degree. The pain was less, and the beginnings were not of new life but expressions from some unreachable spiritual realm. Regardless of how you feel about the values and benefits of the “Teachings of Abraham,” the birth stories are strange and conflicting. You have to wonder if any of them are the truth or whether they happened at all.
Following are the three birth stories Esther and her husband Jerry told at different times. There are in the order I heard them, recorded by them.
“Take the next exit.”
Jerry and Esther are driving in heavy traffic. Jerry makes a point that he’s driving a Caddy. A small man, he often seemed to overcompensate with big cars, which he called “vee-hickles.” This day, he suddenly finds himself stuck between a pair of large trucks. As they close in on him, an unfamiliar voice, deep and accented, emerges from Esther.
“Take the next exit,” it says, and Jerry does.
Then, parked under a bridge, he spends the next few hours talking with Abraham for the first time. Esther describes this as her vocal cords being taken over. Later, she changes her explanation for how channeling takes place. She describes “interpreting blocks of thought.” But then, where does the strange accent come from? This, too, soon changes, replaced by clear patterns of speech.
This is my favorite version because it has a kind of drama. It led to a recorded version of a dialogue between Jerry and Abraham/Esther, once distributed on a series of tapes. In Audible’s early days, they sold it online. I recall listening, fascinated, while stranded one winter night in the Buffalo airport. But for reasons unknown now, it was later suppressed along with two early Abraham books, New Beginnings I and II.
Esther Hicks and Abraham by the nose
As Esther tells it, Jerry drags her off to a meeting with Shiela Gillette, an established spirit channel of the entity Theo. Esther says she’s not into it; it’s Jerry’s thing. But as the session ends, Gillette says a spirit guide will come to Esther but doesn’t share any details. In the meantime, she suggests that the couple begin meditating, which Esther says she thought of as weird.
Before setting down to meditate though, they stop at a dinner where a stranger suddenly tells them that “Jane Roberts just died.” Roberts was also a channel, writing books fed to her by Seth. Why this matters is never explained.
Their joint meditations are exciting and simple… until they become funny. During one session Jerry and Esther share, he notices that her nose is spelling out letters. He jots down each letter her nose spells. You couldn’t make this up, could you?
Abraham has introduced itself by spelling it out by way of Esther’s nose. This story doesn’t reveal much, but it gives them a chance to show themselves as fun. The senses of humor that later play a big role in their popularity are on display.
“We’re going to write a book together.”
Years later, Jerry and Esther, pre-Abraham, read to each other in bed, him tickling her toes while she tries concentrating.
One night, though, Jerry sees that Esther is thumping her chest with her fist. Not her vocal cords, in this story, but her arms are taken over. Eventually, Esther goes to a typewriter where her fingers, out of her control, begin randomly typing out letters. After a few minutes, whatever is in control taps out a coherent sentence.
“My name is Abraham. We are going to write a book together.”
In the published version, that’s their giant seller, Ask and It Is Given. But the trouble is that the New Beginnings books mentioned above, were also dictated — they say — by Abraham… ten years earlier.
Esther Hicks Abraham: Which Birth Story Is True?
My vote is: None of the Above, because each story has fatal flaws. Why were they ever told at all? Who knows? Esther and Jerry may have talked a lot, but one thing they never did was answer questions.
For the umpteenth time, I’ll repeat a guideline I always use: People with nothing to hide don’t hide anything. That anyone would have to is a revelation all its own.
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Just got into the Abraham material for the past few months, but to me it seemed clear that all of them are true? First she was meditating for months, the nose thing happened, then again a lot of time passed while Jerry was noting down things that were happening in meditation. As she got better at it, she started feeling the urge to write and then Abraham wrote a few pages getting the hang of writing and wrote that they’d write a book together. And then again a lot of time passed between that, and the first time Abraham “spoke” in human words was the “take the last exit” phrase.
I don’t mean to disregard your doubt, but at least I never saw any inconsistency in their stories about it. It wasn’t a thing that happened in a day, and it couldn’t be, as channeling is not supposed to be some kind of sudden possession.
Interesting take on it, but that’s not how they tell the story. You’re helping them out here, IMO.