An intriguing blend of reincarnation and the quantum multiverse well-aimed at empowering the spiritual seeker.
A detailed lesson plan for tapping into “the divinity that is already inside of you.”
Kelley’s (Healing Through Past Life Regression...and Beyond, 2012) latest book opens with a foreword by best-selling author and motivational speaker Wayne Dyer attesting to Kelley’s experiences with past-life regression, a semihypnotic state in which a participant feels connected to previous incarnations of his or her soul or essence throughout time. Fans of such past-life regression books as Brian Weiss’s Many Lives, Many Masters (1988) will find much that’s familiar in Kelley’s book, in which she asserts her belief that it’s possible “to heal your present by working with your past.” She offers readers a 10-chapter series of revelations that she’s learned through her own experiences recalling her past lives. For newcomers to the concept, she begins by defining her terms—the soul, or spiritual essence, of each person; the vaguely godlike “Oversoul” from which all those souls originate; and so forth—before getting down to specific cases, often highlighted by the experiences of clients she’s worked with in her own past-life regression business. But Kelley broadens the more traditional narrative of past-life exploration by taking a page from the playbook of quantum physics and adding parallel lives belonging to an infinite variety of alternate selves. “All of your present experiences are drawn from what was once a possible reality,” she writes, and each person’s decisions cause their immediate realities to shift and realign with new possibilities. Much of this is couched in a comforting blend of quasi-Buddhist contemplativeness and quasi-Christian determinism in which bad things happen for a reason and even personal tragedies are part of an ultimately uplifting design. Everything, from life’s ordinary little disappointments to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is used in examples of how positive perceptions can rescue even the grimmest realities from pointlessness. The book’s utilitarian aims are emphasized by a series of exercises and Q-and-A’s designed to reinforce the main point that people can be masters of their own destinies.
An intriguing blend of reincarnation and the quantum multiverse well-aimed at empowering the spiritual seeker.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1401946043
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Hay House
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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