Ancient teachings helpfully repackaged for a modern audience.
Payne channels the sages of Chinese, Japanese and Indian lore in preaching meditation for a new generation of spiritual seekers.
Payne’s book seems to advertise a radical, new, edgy, anti-establishment project. Yet in some ways, that’s far from the truth, since Payne peddles religious ideas whose roots stretch back thousands of years. For nearly a decade and a half, Payne has practiced the ancient art of meditation, which he now sees as a path toward peace and fulfillment. Thus, in around 60 short sketches—some poetry, some prose—he sets out to explain some of the many lessons he’s learned while on his spiritual journey. As Payne notes, many of the lessons echo those taught by the great saints of Asian religion: Buddha, Lao Tsu, Shantideva and Bodhidharma. Payne teaches that attachment to things of this world is frustrating because those things are mere images that may change and pass away. Our grasping for these images is fruitless and pointless. Even the self is an illusion; “In reality I does not exist,” Payne writes, “I, me and mine are wordless words.” In the end, our misconceptions bring us pain. Yet meditation, which puts us in touch with reality, is a methodical forgetting of all this falseness: “Meditation is a simple process of unlearning everything you have been forced to learn by others.” The great value of Payne’s slim volume is that he expresses such old lessons in sleek, punchy, modern prose. Those intimidated by classic Buddhist texts such as the Lotus Sutra might find Payne’s contemporary message refreshing and enlightening. Perhaps the only drawback here is that in trying to express paradoxical truths, Payne sometimes falls back on stilted idioms: “The world has become a business with it’s [sic] own board of directors acting like gods within the balance of things, only it is the minds of those within the world that are in the balance.” Metaphors can only hold so much water.
Ancient teachings helpfully repackaged for a modern audience.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477250846
Page Count: 118
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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