Bait and Switch (10 page)

"progress" compared to some earlier condition, and the rest of us making logistical-sounding calls on his cell phone. "Working on are not too subtly encouraged to undergo the individual Saturday?" "No," he tells me, "Cub Scouts."

coaching ourselves. It's unclear why the graduates of Patrick's In the car on the way back to the Hampton, I tell James that I personal coaching are here at all, unless just to pad out the ses-was surprised he brought up Nietzsche, who seemed, well, a little sion for the rest of us, making Patrick seem to be more in de-out of place here. "Patrick's philosophy is so upbeat and positive, but Nietzsche's outlook was "—I struggle to come up with a word from "low-grade depression" and "feelings of loss that aren't career that might locate the author of
Thus Spake Zarathustra
in related at all." To my alarm, she starts to cry, confessing with tears the same conceptual universe as Patrick Knowles—"you rolling down her cheeks that her father just died and that a know, kind of tragic."

long-term relationship broke off only a few months ago.

"Well, he was really smart anyway" is James's rejoinder.

In a softened tone, Patrick admits that he knew about these life I can only agree, and urge James to continue on his chosen crises from a prior one-on-one session with Cynthia but professes to path, no matter what the philistines say.

have "forgotten" them and based his diagnosis entirely on her After lunch, it's Cynthia's turn. She describes herself as "living current demeanor. He sits down directly across from her with on the edge . . . seeing life as an adventure," but there's more one hand on her knee and the other lower down on her crossed defensiveness than bravado in this, as if she's anticipating a leg, which looks to me like borderline harassment. The cure for rebuke. The problem is she's burned out on real estate; the Cynthia is further one-on-one coaching with him, which he market has collapsed, and she can't break even. She's putting urges her to undertake immediately. As for the rest of us, he longer and longer hours into the company but finding herself advises: "Extrapolate to your own experiences. She's you; you're losing ground financially every month. "What should I do with her." All, in other words, in need of further coaching.

my life?" is the question that brought her here. "What do I So he set her up. Maybe she had cried during her private session want to do when I grow up?" She has some dim notion of the with him, where he had learned what buttons to press, because there's direction she would like to take: "I'm a people person nothing like tears to give group therapy a veneer of intensity and hard-passionately—and I want to help people."

won "growth." If I am indeed her, then I am entitled to the All this sounds pretty unexceptional to me—an unrewarding resentment this little drama has inspired in me. I blame myself too, job, a desire for more socially useful employment—but though, because she must have wanted to have lunch with me Patrick leaps in with a psychiatric diagnosis: Cynthia is suffering alone, and by letting all the guys troop along, I may have brushed off a bid for sisterly support.

lobby where we stand around a coffee machine, there's a TV

After Cynthia, the afternoon sours for me. The air has tuned to CNN's coverage of some celebrity CEO's trial, and I grown stuffy with postprandial exhalations and deodorant laughingly suggest to Billy that there ought to be plenty of demand breakthroughs. My back hurts from sitting so long—whatever for PR people, given all the corporate scandals.

happened to the "kinesthetic" part of this experience? One after

"I blame it all on the last administration," he says gravely.

another, the remaining campers are processed and dismissed.

"On Clinton?"

Allan, who was downsized after twenty years at an investment firm,

"Yes, his behavior."

is told, "It's not about getting a job"—an observation so important

"With Monica?" I'm confused. "How is that on a scale of that Patrick repeats it. "It's
not
about getting a job. It's about these multimillion-dollar thefts?"

knowing yourself . . . The issue is Allan knowing who Allan is."

"Clinton was responsible for twenty-seven deaths."

Jason, who feels he has very little to show for his forty-two years

"Huh?" I quickly search my internal database of right-wing and is now facing the near-certainty of a layoff, is scolded, conspiracy theories. "You mean like Vince Foster?"

as I was, for even mentioning the age issue: "It's all internal—

"And other people he knew. Check it out."

whether you're sixty-two or forty-two or twenty-two . . . It's

"And Bush isn't responsible for any deaths?"

never about the external world. It's always between you and you."

"That's war."

Thus we are sealed into our own version of Plato's cave—

I start in on the war before biting my tongue in midsen-wrestling blindly with what Patrick construes as our failings, tence. Why I am arguing with him? I have no hard-and-fast deprived of even the slightest glimpse of the waning afternoon rules to govern my behavior here, other than to keep a low profile light outside.

and get as much job-related information as possible. But At the afternoon break, Cynthia rushes off, with only a political discussions are clearly beyond the pale, even if I am rueful glance in exchange for my belated commiserations. In the itching for a fight.

In his wrap-up, Patrick writes the word
MAGIC
on the if you can't feel yourself pressing up against the resistance, how do you board, with the letters running downward. This too is an know that you're moving at all?

acronym: Making decisions, greater Accountability, Growth, reduce your Isolation, deal with issues of Change. He puts yet another version of the
EP/PSWB
formula on the board, repeating that ONE OF MY subsidiary missions, in the weeks that follow, is to try
PSWB
is based on "authenticity" and "congruency." I finally venture to get a better grip on Patrick's strangely ghostly world-view. If the to ask what congruency means in this context, and am told that it belief is widespread, in the corporate culture, that there's no external

"means to do it in a consistent fashion." OK, whatever. The man world of any consequence, that we are responsible for everything who lost his trade show business after 9/11 turns up his hands in a that happens to us, then I should know this and perhaps be gesture of acceptance and offers his own summary: "We have met prepared to expound it myself. There's certainly a heavy dose of the enemy, and he is us."

Mary Baker Eddy in it, and the mind-over-matter philosophy We break up with vague promises to stay in touch; Patrick embodied in her Christian Science. Nor should we omit Norman himself will be calling each of us in the corning week "as a means of Vincent Peale and his mid-twentieth-century opus
The Power of
accountability," though to whom remains undefined. I step out of
Positive Thinking.
Mostly, though, what Patrick's the Hampton lobby to discover that the sky has cleared and that weltanschauung puts me in mind of is EST, the pop-psych fad the sun is already low behind the Holiday Inn, a couple of blocks that bubbled out of the hot tubs of Esalen in the seventies and away, where my suitcase is stashed. A wind has come up, a little too into the executive suites, with the message that you and you cold for my fashionably thin new winter coat, but welcome alone are responsible for your fate. It's a long-standing American nonetheless. Yes, Patrick, of course, we make our own lives, but we idea, in other words, that circumstances count for nothing make them out of
something.
The wind bites my face; the pavement compared to the power of the individual will.

pushes back against my feet. There is an external world after all, and I order one of the books Patrick recommended to us, which is seductively titled
The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything
vice president of PaineWebber (now UBS), the company that handles
You Want,
although focused almost entirely on the getting of my Keogh plan. I can only hope that its employees retain some dim money. When he wrote the first edition of the book in the early sense that the market is not entirely an emanation of their interior eighties, the author, Mike Hernacki, tells us, $1 million was lives.

an appropriate goal. Now, however, "you really can't call Reading along, I discover how it is that our thoughts and yourself rich . . . unless you have at least three million bucks." So desires mold the world around us. "Things attract other that's where the bar is set; now how to get over it? We have to things," meaning that there is a kind of gravitational force con-start by acknowledging something that "may be difficult, even necting our thoughts to their real-world fulfillments. "Whenever painful to look at":

you think something, the thought immediately attracts its physical equivalent." Thus, for example, the thought of $3 million can be You must recognize that
you alone
are the source of all the conditions and relied on to exert a powerful attractive force on whatever situations in your life. You must recognize that whatever your world looks like right now,
you alone
have caused it to look that way. The state of your health, your currency may be lying around, and this force actually increases in finances, your personal relationships, your professional life—all of it is
your
doing, strength as the dollar bills get closer. How can this be? By way of yours and no on
e else's.23

explanation, Hernacki enlists some physics in the form of the law Lest this sentiment sound like a psychotic delusion, the blurbs of gravitational attraction:

on the cover of the book announce that it is shared, or at least has been endorsed, by Norman Vincent Peale and Mark Victor Hansen,
F= GM1M2/R2

coauthor of the
Chicken Soup for the Soul
series. More troublingly, from a personal standpoint, there is also a blurb from a senior Here, the M's are the masses of the two attracting objects;
G
is the gravitational constant, and R is the distance between them.

23

Obviously, as R—say, the distance between you and the Mike Hernacki,
The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want
(New York: Berkley, 2001), pp. xii, 47.

money—gets smaller, F the force attracting the money, gets (meaning that Hernacki's
F
is always and inevitably zero).
25
In radically larger. Confused? Hernacki is reassuring.

Doyle's scheme, thoughts fulfill themselves without help from any Now, I congratulate you if you were able to follow that discussion intervening force, and they can do this because each "thoughtform"

and understand the mathematics of this phenomenon. But if is really "a minute wave of energy . . . operating] faster than you didn't understand a word of it, don't worry. All you have to do the speed of light." Fortunately for us, "the mission of each is think the thought. Simply by saying the word, you put the thoughtform is to fulfill the intent of the thought," and it does so law of attraction into motion. The rest is taken care of,

"by attracting similar thoughtforms to help it fulfill itself." How automatically and with accelerating acceleration.
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do you make your dreams come true? Simply by beaming them out Appallingly, he has even screwed up the purloined physics from your mind. "Scientifically," Doyle asserts—and it is hard to here: the
acceleration
is not accelerating; only the
motion
accelerates.

think of a setting in which that adverb has been more But what am I nitpicking for? No dollars are flying into my flagrantly abused—"one might say that focusing your attention on pockets at any detectable speed.

the energy field of consciousness, which contains the waves of all I move on from Hernacki's physics of wish fulfillment to possibilities, creates the particles (events and materializations) that
Before You Think Another Thought
by Bruce I. Doyle III, you experience as your reality."
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which, Amazon.com informs me, is popular with Hernacki's readers. In this slender book, we no longer find gravity con-

25 In yet another scheme, which was forwarded to members of the Atlanta job Search necting thoughts to their real-life equivalents, which is some-Network, it is magnetism that connects our desires to their fulfillment: "Dr. Karl Pribram, the respected neuropsychologist, has found that . . . the law of what reassuring, since thoughts of course have no mass attraction' is alive and well and working within the mind of every human being.

Dr. Pribram discovered that any visual image, imagined in complete detail, sets up a force field of energy that begins to attract into your life the people, ideas, things and even circumstances that are consistent with that image. If you visualize a positive outcome ... you begin to exert a powerful magnetic force that brings the desired goal or outcome into reality.”

26 Bruce I. Doyle III,
Before You Think Another Thought
(Winter Park, FL: Rare 24 Hernacki,
The Ultimate Secret,
pp. 90, 95.

Shares Ltd., 1994), pp. 18, 19, 48.

Among other things, these books explain the importance of Hernacki, Doyle, and Knowles—pummeling them, knocking the "winning attitude" I have been urged to adopt: a positive them to the ground, all the while accusing them of unconsciously attitude "attracts" or "fulfills," depending on which author's bringing this assault on themselves. Because how else could anything weird science you go with, positive results, with little or no action happen to these fellows, except through their own will and desire?

on your part required. Herein, too, lies the answer to the question I But from the point of view of the economic "winners"—once posed to Kimberly: would it be enough to just fake a those who occupy powerful and high-paying jobs—the view that winning attitude? No way, according to Doyle:

one's fate depends entirely on oneself must be remarkably convenient.

It explains the winners' success in the most flattering terms while People who just pretend to have a positive attitude may be more invalidating the complaints of the losers. Patrick's clients, for acceptable, but they will still attract according to how they are really vibrating—the energy they are emanating will attract their example, came to the boot camp prepared to blame their circumstances.
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