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“A person who does affirmations takes mental tuning to a higher level. The process of concentrating on the goal every day greatly increases the likelihood of noticing an opportunity in the environment. The coincidence will create the illusion that writing down the goal causes the environment to produce opportunities. But in reality the only thing that changes is the person’s ability to notice the opportunities. I don’t mean to minimize that advantage because the ability to recognize opportunities is essential to success.”

“Well, maybe that’s part of it,” I said. “But I’ve heard of some pretty amazing coincidences that happened for the people doing affirmations. One of my friends was writing affirmations to double his income and he got a phone call out of the blue from a headhunter. Two weeks later he’s in a new job at double his salary. How do you explain that?”

“Your friend had a clear goal and was willing to make changes in his life to accomplish it,” he responded. “His willingness to do affirmations was a good predictor of his success, not necessarily a cause of it. The headhunter in your example increased the pay of many people that month. Your friend was one of them.

“People who do affirmations will have the sensation that they are causing the environment to conform to their will. This is an immensely enjoyable feeling because the illusion of control is one of the best illusions you can have.”

He continued. “Another way to look at affirmations is as a communication cha

“I don’t see why my subconscious would be better than my conscious mind at predicting my future. I thought the subconscious was irrational,” I said.

“The subconscious is an odds-calculating machine. That’s what it does naturally, though not always to good effect. If your subconscious notices that you lost money on your last three business dealings with people who wear hats, you’ll never trust people in hats again. Your subconscious isn’t always right; it depends on the quality of the information you feed into its odds-calculating engine. Luckily, the topic your subconscious knows best is you, because it has known you since you were in the womb. If your subconscious allows you to spend ten minutes out of every busy day writing, ‘I will double my income,’ your subconscious likes your odds and it is qualified to make that prediction.”

“Couldn’t affirmations be more than that?” I asked. “You made a big deal about saying things aren’t exactly what they seem, but who’s to say that concentrating on your goals doesn’t change probability?”

“Go on,” he said.

“Okay, imagine you’re a sea captain but you’re blind and deaf. You shout orders to your crew, but you don’t know for sure if they heard the orders or obeyed them. All you know is that when you give an order to sail to a particular warm port, within a few days you are someplace warm. You can never be sure if the crew obeyed you, or took you to some other warm place, or if you went nowhere and the weather improved. If, as you say, our minds are delusion generators, then we’re all like blind and deaf sea captains shouting orders into the universe and hoping it makes a difference. We have no way of knowing what really works and what merely seems to work. So doesn’t it make sense to try all the things that appear to work even if we can’t be sure?”

“You have potential,” he said.

I didn’t know what that meant.

Fifth Level

“Who are you?” I asked. I didn’t know how to phrase the question politely. The old man certainly wasn’t normal.

“I’m an Avatar.”

“Is that some sort of title? I thought it was your name.”

“It’s both.”

“Excuse me for asking this. I don’t really know how to phrase it, so I’m just going to come out and say it—”

“You want to know if I’m human.”

“Yeah. I apologize if that sounds crazy. It’s just that...”

The old man waved off the end of my sentence.