Five Seconds
In July 2019, on the last day of an Abraham-Hicks cruise to Alaska, Nicholas Ferguson finally got the hot seat. The night he got home, he sat down to meditate. This excerpt from his book The Sovereign Mirror, which is told as a conversation with the questions in bold, picks up there.
The recording. You said you’d tell me what happened to it.
Getting home took a day of airports with a seven-year-old, which is work even in first class. When we finally pulled up to the house on the hill I let myself stop. I was sitting on my favorite couch out on the covered patio, listening to the woods, the birds, that hum you hear when everything is quiet, in complete appreciation for the life I was living and for every single thing that had led to it. I closed my eyes to meditate and the flow started almost at once. I was seeing it more than thinking it. Pictures, almost like movies, one after another. My whole body was lit up with thrill bumps. I knew I wouldn’t remember all of it, so I opened my eyes just long enough to open the voice recorder on my phone and press start. Then I closed them, folded my hands in my lap, and began to talk.
I talked for about forty-five minutes. It poured out of me. I was explaining the whole system as it arrived: how the two sides cross, why resistance can’t get into the Current, why anything negative can only make it expand, why the expansion itself is never negative. It was the clearest I’ve ever been about any of it.
When I finally stopped and played it back, there were five seconds on the recording.
Five seconds.
Oh no.
Yeah.
How does a recorder only get five seconds?
Nothing mysterious. When I folded my hands to go back under, I touched the stop button. I didn’t know it. I kept talking for forty-five minutes to a phone that had stopped listening at five seconds. When I saw it, I laughed. It was so simple and so silly, and it felt like part of the fun. The next morning, when I tried to get it back clearly and couldn’t, is when the frustration came.
I’ve come to see it the way I see experiencing something with a camera in your hand. You might get the picture, but you miss part of being there. For me the important part was the experience. I once went on a whale-watching trip, and my camera battery died right before we saw more whales than I could count. I had to put the camera down and just take it in. It was astounding, and I remember it to this day. If the battery had lasted, I’d have the pictures. I don’t think I’d have that.
What did you do?
The natural thing. I tried to get it back. I sat there and tried to return to the state I’d been in, to find the words again, to reconstruct what I’d said. I pushed. I concentrated. I went over and over the pieces I could remember.
And the harder I tried, the further away it got. Every minute of effort put more distance between me and the thing I was reaching for. I’d had the whole of it an hour earlier, and now I couldn’t find the edge of it.
I didn’t understand it then, but I understand it now. I was repeatedly practicing its absence. Every time I searched for what was missing, I rehearsed the fact that it was missing. I was building belief and expectation out of the loss, lap after lap, and every lap made the resistance thicker.
How did you get it back?
I gave up. I didn’t give up on it. I gave up trying.
I relaxed. I let it go and did something else. And after a while, a thought came back. Just one. I followed it, lightly, and it led to another. So I let that one lead me too.
That turned into a game, and the game turned into the method I used for the next year. Release the thought. Let the path show up. When a word or an idea catches your attention, go look it up and see where it points. Follow the relationship. Then do it again. Over the next year, what I’d said into that recorder came back to me one relationship at a time, along with a great deal more. It came back through ease. Effort had only kept it away.
So you’re saying trying harder makes things worse. That’s hard to accept. Effort is how anything gets done.
Effort is fine. It’s Focus. A hard conversation you want to have is still hard, and effort that comes from alignment still feels like work. It just doesn’t feel like drag. What makes things worse is using Focus to push against a gap that’s made of holding on.
When you strain for something, you’re living in the feeling of not having it. That feeling is holding on. And holding on is exactly what blocks the thing from coming In To you. The strain widens the gap you’re straining to close.
You said this connects to time.
It’s one of the thought games that got me here. We all know time flies when you’re having fun. Why would that be? Physically, the clock runs at the same rate. But when you’re having fun, you’re barely resisting anything. You’re close to the Current, and the gap between where you are and what you’ve expanded into gets small. I saw it like an object moving closer and closer to the speed of light. From where it sits, the trip gets shorter and takes less of its own time. The gap closes, and time behaves differently.
A watched kettle never boils. Of course it boils, and it boils at the same rate whether you watch it or not. But staring at it and waiting, you’re tuned to the absence of the boil. That’s watching paint dry. Every second takes its time.
And listen to what we say when something is hard: “This is a drag.” There’s nothing physically dragging. But there’s weight in it, and resistance, and waiting. In that weight our focus changes and our tune changes, and that alters how we experience reality.
Time flies. A watched kettle never boils. This is a drag. People have been describing expansion dilation in their own words forever. They just didn’t have a name for it.
What’s the practice, then? What do I actually do when I’m straining?
Notice it first. The strain is emotional evidence. It’s telling you that you’ve tuned to the absence of the thing.
Then do what I did after the recording. Let go of the grip, not the want. Go find something that feels easy and good, even if it has nothing to do with the problem. Take a walk. Build something. Play. Meditate for fifteen minutes. Let your resistance drop. When a thought comes that feels a little lighter, follow it lightly and see where it goes.
It feels like doing nothing. It’s the only thing I’ve found that works.
Those forty-five minutes taught me the one thing I’d never have believed if someone had just told me it. Forcing closes the door. Ease opens it.
That was 2019. Does it still work?
Here’s the most recent time it worked on me, because I needed it to. I left the fund in 2021, and then I met my wife. I knew the first time I saw her. Thrill bumps, all over, the same ones I’d had on the stage and in the thought games; not attraction, or not only, but something closer to being called. We rented a house on a private stretch of beach for five days and flew in the people who mattered most to both of us, and on the second day we were married there, a small ceremony on the sand. When we kissed and it was done, we looked down. My son was standing right between us, crying, and he hugged us both as hard as he could and said he felt like he finally had a real family. I’m not able to write that sentence with dry eyes, and I’ve tried. We sold the house on the hill and moved to Florida. I didn’t work for a couple of years. I learned what my life felt like without pressure in it, and it was wonderful, and my son felt like he had a whole family. Then I took a consulting job, and the firm began coming apart through a run of decisions from its board that I could see from where I sat. So I started applying for work, and I applied the way I used to run projects: hard. Every day. And every application came back no. My wife was worried, which was fair. My mother was worried. And every day I found myself explaining to both of them, again, that I was looking, that I was doing everything, that I was searching constantly.
Then one day it broke. I told them both I couldn’t talk about it anymore. Every conversation about the job I didn’t have was one more rehearsal of not having it. I want to be exact about this, because the chapter on other people is coming and it says to let what comes back from them reach you. Their worry had reached me. It was real and I’d heard it and it was fair. What I stopped wasn’t their return. It was my own daily report on the gap, which was my resistance wearing their concern as a reason. It was keeping the new thing from coming in. I needed to stop reporting on the gap and act like the thing was already on its way, because that’s what the book in your hands says is true. Two days later an interview request arrived for a role that fit my strange combination of skills better than anything I’d applied for. A month after that I started. The consulting firm closed its doors on a Friday. My first day at the new company was the following Monday.
I’m not telling you the timing was magic. I’m telling you what I did and what came back, in that order, because that’s the only evidence this side of the mirror has. If you want better evidence than my memory, the last chapter has a test for exactly this: an easy break you enjoy against an easy break you resent, chosen before you start and written down before you know how it came out.
About the author
Nicholas Ferguson is a computer systems engineer and painter. In 2019 he came home from a cruise with something he has been putting into words ever since: the Theory of Sovereign Reflectivity. The Sovereign Mirror: A Conversation About Consciousness, Resistance, and the Present is on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, and the opening chapters are free at tsr.wtf.
Kindle: www.amazon.com/dp/B0HL1YBX5K
Paperback: www.amazon.com/dp/B0HL4TQ5RK
Website: tsr.wtf