33 LENSES

A debut guide offers a comprehensive game plan for expanding thoughts and personal beliefs.

McShane characterizes her book as a “call to think…a call to calm and to act as if your life depends upon your thoughts—because it does.” She offers her readers a program designed to help them achieve greater happiness and self-fulfillment through “Creative Believing.” This technique “provides a method of increasing the experience of the joyful mindfulness and then to harness its incredible power through inspired action” in order to achieve “super consciousness.”  In smoothly written chapters that feature many sidebars of bulleted points, the author discusses dozens of aspects of fostering greater self-awareness, emphasizing throughout that readers must take an active role in the journey to their own enlightenment. “You are opening the door to the Infinite,” she writes. “Gently pull back the veil to limitless energy and unconditional love that super consciousness embodies.” The main tools for this odyssey are 33 Lenses, visual aids to meditation and mindfulness, through which readers can realign the ways they think. The manual provides many clear and inviting graphics designed to illustrate these lenses. McShane covers a rich assortment of subjects that will be familiar to readers of spiritual self-help books like this one. (She references other guides.) Her topics range from states of openness toward the universe to how to cultivate a spiritual garden, with allusions to a higher consciousness that seekers can turn to for guidance. But some of the maxims the author relates take the solipsism of self-help books to the extreme: sentiments like “Only I know what is best for me”; “Nobody really knows anything”; and “I don’t care what anyone else thinks.” These thoughts certainly will not lead to self-improvement. But the author’s repeated assurances to readers—that they are not damaged; that there is nothing wrong with them; that well-being is their natural state—are uplifting in ways that anyone can appreciate.

A wide-ranging spiritual blueprint for deepening self-awareness.