“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 channel between your conscious and subconscious mind. Your subconscious is often better than your rational mind at predicting your future. If your subconscious allows you to write ‘I will be a famous ballerina’ fifteen times a day for a year, it’s telling you something. Your subconscious is saying it likes your odds, that it will allow you to make the sacrifices, that it will give you the satisfaction you need to weather the hard work ahead. On the other hand, if you try writing your affirmation for a few days and find it too bothersome, your subconscious is giving you a clear message that it doesn’t like your odds.”

“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.

“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.

“I understand. Yes, I am human. I’m a fifth-level human; an Avatar.”

“Fifth level?”

“People exist at different levels of awareness. An Avatar is one who lives at the fifth level.”

“Is awareness like intelligence?” I asked.

“No. Intelligence is a measure of how well you function within your level of awareness. Your intelligence will stay about the same over your life. Awareness is entirely different from intelligence; awareness involves recognizing your delusions for what they are. Most people’s awareness will advance one or two levels in their lifetime.”

“What does it mean to recognize your delusions?”

“When you were a child, did your parents tell you that Santa Claus brought presents on Christmas Day?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I believed in Santa until kindergarten, when the other kids started talking. Then I realized Santa couldn’t get to all those homes in one night.”

“Your intelligence did not change at the moment you realized that Santa Claus was a harmless fantasy. Your math and verbal skills stayed the same, but your awareness increased. You were suddenly aware that stories from credible sources—in this case your parents—could be completely made up. And from the moment of that realization, you could never see the world the same way because your awareness of reality changed.”

“I guess it did.”

“And in school, did you learn that the Native Americans and the Pilgrims got together to celebrate what became Thanksgiving in the United States?”

“Yeah.”

“You figured it must be true because it was written in a book and because your teachers said it happened. You were in school for the specific purpose of learning truth; it was reasonable to believe you were getting it. But scholars now tell us that a first Thanksgiving with Pilgrims and Native Americans never happened. Like Santa Claus, much of what we regard as history is simply made up.”

“In your examples, there’s always learning. That seems like intelligence to me, not awareness.”

“Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew.”

He described what he called the five levels of awareness and said that all humans experience the first level of awareness at birth. That is when you first become aware that you exist.

In the second level of awareness you understand that other people exist. You believe most of what you are told by authority figures. You accept the belief system in which you are raised.

At the third level of awareness you recognize that humans are often wrong about the things they believe. You feel that you might be wrong about some of your own beliefs but you don’t know which ones. Despite your doubts, you still find comfort in your beliefs.

The fourth level is skepticism. You believe the scientific method is the best measure of what is true and you believe you have a good working grasp of truth, thanks to science, your logic, and your senses. You are arrogant when it comes to dealing with people in levels two and three.

The fifth level of awareness is the Avatar. The Avatar understands that the mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality. The Avatar recognizes science as a belief system, albeit a useful one. An Avatar is aware of God’s power as expressed in probability and the inevitable recombination of God consciousness.