A moderately intriguing book that may cause readers to think twice about their actions—but that may also leave them largely...
A succinct look at the junction point of psychotherapy and Buddhism.
In this how-to self-help guide, psychiatrist Epstein (The Trauma of Everyday Life, 2013, etc.) attempts to find similarities between Buddhism and psychotherapy, though he never tries to equate them, and, in doing so, qualify them as the same practices. “The ego needs our help,” he writes, “If we want a more satisfying existence, we have to teach it to loosen its grip.” So begins the author’s efforts to understand what practical measures exist in both practices to help us cope with the weight of our selves. In undertaking such a complex question, Epstein makes it clear that there is only one way to comprehend this exercise: “Awakening does not make the ego disappear; it changes one’s relationship to it.” To reach such states of wellness, the author explains that we must reposition our attitudes toward the vicissitudes of life, opting for a series of approaches: Right View (be present in the now), Right Motivation (“we do not have to be at the mercy of our neuroses”), Right Speech (how we talk to ourselves), Right Action (“not acting destructively”), Right Livelihood (“avoiding…deceit or exploitation”), Right Effort (do not allow the ego to “sabotage its goal”), Right Mindfulness (“a dispassionate knowing of thoughts…as they come and go”), and, finally, Right Concentration (“temporarily dispelling the repetitive thoughts of the everyday mind”). To illustrate these mindsets, Epstein sprinkles the text with personal anecdotes, which are alternately pedantic and useful in visualizing his arguments. The author often refers to his patients and his friends to demonstrate how one mindset can quickly change to a healthier one, though it is clear he has taken himself as the primary example, with Freud and Donald Winnicott as theoretical foundations.
A moderately intriguing book that may cause readers to think twice about their actions—but that may also leave them largely unchanged.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56432-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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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