88 Rules

Foreword

I grew up not believing a word of this. Manifestation, vibration, the universe taking orders: it all sounded to me like the talk of people who were naive or selling something, and on a bad day I’d have said both. Anyone who claimed the universe answered their thoughts had, I assumed, never been unlucky in an interesting way.

It took me a long time, and a good deal of personal wreckage, to see where I’d gone wrong. About the sellers I was right. There are plenty of them and you don’t have to look hard. About the thing they were pointing at (clumsily, usually, and often for money) I was wrong. The world does answer the way a person moves through it. No magic is needed for that. My inner state changes how I stand and talk, and what I signal to people in a few hundred small exchanges a day, and what comes back follows from it with a regularity I eventually stopped being able to explain away.

I first saw it clearly in my late twenties, when very little was working for me. Nothing dramatic. Just door after door staying politely shut. Meanwhile a friend of mine was moving through almost the same circumstances with an ease that baffled me. We worked in the same industry and came from similar families, and I couldn’t name a single advantage he had. Things opened for him. They didn’t open for me, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that the difference was in his posture, by which I mean the inner kind, the way he stood in relation to what he wanted.

This book is my attempt to describe that posture and what it does. Some of it comes from my own mistakes, of which there’s no shortage. Some comes from years of reading in the old contemplative traditions and in modern psychology, where I’ve kept only what holds up when you check it. When I mention a study, it’s a real one, described as plainly as I can manage. When a famous story turns out to be a legend, I’ll say so.

Chapter 1: Wanting Without Strain

For two years Maya checked her company’s internal job board every morning before she brushed her teeth. She told me this with some embarrassment, and then admitted it had sometimes been twice a day, once in the morning and once in the car before she drove home. She wanted the promotion badly. Each time she looked, the gap between where she was and where she meant to be got measured again, and each measurement left her a little tighter.

I’ve done the same with email. For most of one year I did it with the bank balance of a small business that was failing slowly, twice a day, like taking a pulse. When results don’t come, the first thing most of us examine is the desire. Did I want the right thing? Did I want it too much? It feels like responsible self-examination. It nearly always aims at the wrong target.

Desire was never the problem; a life without it just drifts. Where things go wrong is the state I’m wanting from, and especially whether the wanting has hardened. Over the years I’ve come to separate two conditions that feel alike and behave very differently. The first I call preference. I know what I’d like and I’m open about how it might come. The second I call pressure, and under pressure I insist on a particular form and a particular timetable, and every delay lands as a small personal failure.

Rule 1: keep the desire and drop the strain around it. The direction earns its place, and the tightening that rides along with it has never once helped me get anywhere faster.