This book espouses some philosophy that will seem far out to many readers, but it also offers many positive life tips.
A debut mind/body guide that advises people to control their own thoughts to take charge of their health, wealth, and more.
After taking a course that taught her “our thinking causes everything that we experience,” Harris (Healing Alcoholism Invasion Revealed, 2013, etc.) says that she came to believe that her son Michael’s glaucoma “was caused by my feeling of being pressured (controlled, domineered) by my mother-in law.” By finally taking a firm stand against her, Harris says that she healed Michael “by taking an action that changed the way I felt….Now I felt in control.” In this guide, the author, who founded GodSpirits United, a company that aims to help people recover from medically incurable illnesses, provides commentary and instruction on how to live out her philosophy: “reverse your feeling to get your healing.” She encourages readers to focus positively on their bodies as “an organ-ized system,” consisting of “seven major Virtues,” divided among what she calls “male” (heart, stomach, and lungs) and “female” (liver, kidneys, blood, and brain) organs. She also discusses “energy treatments,” including tapping into chakras, and urges readers be open to “illumination,” or life’s finer energies, and reject the “invasion” of damaging thoughts and behaviors. She concludes with a chapter on manifesting money as a reflection of “what you believe you deserve.” Harris embraces a healing ideology that will likely be too far from the medical mainstream for many people. That said, she still offers an engaging blend of positive psychology tips and varied cultural references (including a reference to Jesus Christ’s mind/body method of healing) in this self-help tome. Her upfront mention of family tragedies, including Michael’s death in a car accident at 18 and her elder son’s suicide at 48, are initially shocking, yet Harris powerfully expands on these topics later in a heartfelt plea to fight addiction and depression.
This book espouses some philosophy that will seem far out to many readers, but it also offers many positive life tips.Pub Date: June 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9815046-4-3
Page Count: 168
Publisher: GodSpirits United
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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