The Guided Missile
An answer to a friend who asked what the plan is
After I published “Throwing the Burden Down,” a good friend of mine, Dr. Gene Shirokobrod, asked me a question I have been sitting with ever since.
“What is the action plan?”
It is a fair question. It is the right question. And I have been working with it, because the honest answer does not look like what most people mean when they say plan.
The bills are still here. The thermostat is still trying to reset to its old coordinates. The people closest to me, some of them, are still wondering why I don’t just take insurance and play it safe. Nothing has visibly changed since the last piece. I did not write about surrender and wake up to a miracle. I woke up to the next morning.
But I sat down again. And the morning after that, I sat down again. And something is forming that I want to try to put into words, because I think a lot of people are about to need it.
The aim
The first thing I did was something I learned from Napoleon Hill a long time ago. I wrote a Definite Chief Aim.
Hill introduced the idea in 1937 in Think and Grow Rich, and most people who encounter it treat it like a vision board exercise. It is not. It is a conscious act of targeting. You write down, in specific terms, what you intend to become and by when. You name the work you will do to get there. You name what you are willing to give in exchange. And you read it to yourself every day, morning and night, until the words stop being words and start becoming instructions your nervous system can act on.
Hill’s formula is simple. State your aim. Set a date. Name the service or value you will offer. Describe the plan, even if the plan is incomplete. Read it aloud, twice a day, and as you read it, feel yourself already in possession of it.
That last part is what separates this from a goal sheet. You are not hoping. You are rehearsing. You are giving the self-image a new target to lock onto. Not through force, but through repetition and feeling. Maltz would have recognized this immediately. It is a cybernetic instruction. You are reprogramming the servo-mechanism.
And here is what most people miss about the servo-mechanism, because Maltz buried it in a metaphor that sounds mechanical but is actually profound. The guided missile does not fly in a straight line to its target. It is off course almost the entire time. It corrects, overshoots, corrects again. The corrections are the flight. The missile does not need to know the route in advance. It only needs the target. The system does the rest.
That is what I am doing. I set the aim. I sit down every morning and do the work. I fly off course. I correct. I do not need to know the route. I need to know the target and I need to keep showing up.
The people who tell me to play it safe are asking me to abandon the target. To go back to the old coordinates. To let the Failure Mechanism choose the destination. I understand why they ask. It comes from love, most of the time. But going backward is not the answer. It never was.
Why it is lawful
There is a question underneath all of this that most people in my field avoid. Why should any of this work?
The cynic has a ready answer. It shouldn’t. The Definite Chief Aim is a placebo. The servo-mechanism is a metaphor. Prayer is talking to a ceiling. And whatever results the seeker points to are confirmation bias, the mind finding patterns where there are none.
I used to give that position more respect than I do now. Not because I found religion. Because I read the physics.
In 1949, Richard Feynman, then a professor of physics at Cornell, published a paper on the behavior of the positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron. A summary in the Science News Letter that October described his findings in language that was precise and startling: the positron is a wrong-way electron. It starts from where it hasn’t been, and it speeds to where it was an instant ago. Feynman won the Nobel Prize in 1965. No one has accused him of magical thinking.
Neville Goddard read that summary and recognized something he had been teaching for years. In a 1965 lecture called “On The Law,” he cited Feynman’s positron directly. If a particle can begin where it has not yet been and arrive where it already was, then time at the most fundamental level of reality does not work the way the materialist insists. Creation is not a line moving forward into an empty future. It is a field. And what we call imagination, or prayer, or the assumption of the wish fulfilled, is not fantasy. It is navigation.
I am not asking you to believe that. I am asking you to notice that the strict materialist position, that consciousness is an accident, that the universe does not participate in your aim, has had a crack in it since at least 1949. And the man who put it there was not a mystic. He was a physicist at Cornell who followed the math wherever it led.
Mitch Horowitz, an author and occult historian whose work I respect, put it as plainly as anyone I have encountered. “I do not distinguish between prayer and action,” he wrote. “I have never met a seeker who does. Only cynics do—in their imagination of the search, a thing they misunderstand and fear because they doubt their semi-rational certainties.” That is Mitch’s language, and it is sharper than mine. But the observation underneath it is one I have tested in twenty years of clinical work and found to be true. The people who show up and do the inner work do not waste time arguing about whether it is prayer or action. They just do it. The people who argue about it are usually the ones who have never tried.
The floor is cracking for everyone
I am thinking about this right now because the world is about to hand a lot of people the experience I have been writing from.
Meta is laying off thousands of workers. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said publicly that AI will displace a significant number of jobs in the coming years. This is not speculation. It is already beginning. And it is not going to stop.
The disruption that is coming is not a temporary dip. It is a restructuring. The jobs, the titles, the institutional floors that felt permanent are shifting underneath everyone, not just the people who took risks. The people who played it safe. The people who took the insurance, kept their heads down, stayed inside the structure. They are standing on the same floor. It is cracking for all of us.
There is no playing it safe anymore. That door closed while most people were still walking toward it.
Which means the question is no longer whether you will face an identity shift. It is whether you will choose it consciously or have it forced upon you. Whether you will look inward now, before the ground moves, or scramble to find footing after it already has.
I am not writing this from the other side of that shift. I am writing from inside it. The insurance companies changed the terms. My practice changed shape. The identity I had built over twenty years stopped fitting. And the people closest to me, some of them, told me to go back. To take insurance again. To play it safe.
But safe was already gone. I just received the news before they did.
What I found, once I stopped trying to go backward, was not a new structure. It was a practice. An aim, consciously set. A willingness to persevere toward it without knowing the route.
I want to be honest about what that perseverance looks like from the inside. It is not serene. There are mornings when the Failure Mechanism is louder than the aim. There are weeks when nothing moves and the people who told you to play it safe start to sound reasonable. There are moments when you wonder if the whole thing, the DCA, the practice, the traditions, the physics, is just a story you are telling yourself to avoid the obvious conclusion that you should quit.
You do not quit. But you do not pretend it does not cost you. The cost is the practice. The willingness to stay in the chair when the chair is uncomfortable is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is the practice working exactly the way it works.
And underneath the difficulty, something else. A deepening suspicion, confirmed by the physics and the traditions and my own experience, that the universe is not indifferent to the effort.
Still in the chair
So here is where I am. In a chair in Columbia, Maryland, in 2026. The aim is set. The servo-mechanism is running. I am off course, as I am most days, and I am correcting, as I do most days. I have not arrived anywhere. But I am not going backward.
I know that my persistence will pay off. Not because I am special. Because it is lawful. Because Gurdjieff, in Meetings with Remarkable Men, described it as the law-conformable result of unflinching perseverance in bringing all his manifestations into accordance with the principles he consciously set for the attainment of a definite aim. Because Feynman’s own equations describe a universe where the destination can precede the departure. Because every seeker I have ever met, and every tradition I have ever studied, points at the same door.
The unseen forces are at play. They are interacting with each thought, each emotion, each action. I do not have to understand the mechanism completely to participate in it. I only have to keep showing up.
For you, if you are in it. If the floor is shifting under you. If the title you built your life around is disappearing. If the people who love you are telling you to go back. I want you to hear this.
You do not have to go back. Set an aim. Make it conscious. Make it specific. Give it a date. And then show up every morning and do the work, badly, off course, correcting as you go. The guided missile does not fly straight. It flies true.
Gurdjieff fled civil war, crossed continents, lost everything, and kept going. Not because he had certainty. Because he had a definite aim and the unflinching perseverance to stay in accordance with it. And at the moment of greatest need, something happened. It is lawful. It has always been lawful.
Prayer and action are the same gesture. The seeker knows this. The cynic will learn it when the floor he is standing on cracks. And it is cracking.
We are out here. Still practicing. Still correcting. Still in the chair.
May you be well.