A solid read for devout Christians, conservatives and self-help book aficionados; skeptics and atheists may find it hard to...
America is fast asleep and one man believes the key to winning the war for the soul of America lies in understanding hypnosis.
As a teenage boy in post-World War II England, Ruben Obermeister witnessed a carnival hypnotist at work and marveled at how the man made people do things out of their character. But rather than tricks, Obermeister thought that perhaps hypnosis could be used to help people better their lives instead. He moved to America in the early 1950s and became Roy Masters (The Adam and Eve Sindrome, 2001, etc.) and studied hypnosis for more than 60 years. He is still an active author and lecturer at 83, counseling people nightly on his popular national radio show Advice Line. Masters believes that through fear, anxiety, low self-esteem, resentment and addiction to drugs or pornography you are living life in a hypnotized state. Every time you make an excuse, you are denying reality and giving power over to something else, something evil. By Masters’ account, all of America is asleep, as is much of the rest of the world. Additionally, immoral societies, governments and renegade clergy leaders are hypnotizing you into a life of sin. Masters’ quasi New Age philosophy of meditation, “Be Still and Know,” preaches calm and patience through the exercises outlined in the book’s appendix. Although skeptical at first, upon practicing the exercises there was indeed proof of the value to be gleaned. On the other hand, the book is dismissive of women (emotionally weak, thus leading men to sin), rails against ambitious people and compares homosexuals to drug addicts and Nazis in one failed analogy. This casts some shade on Masters’ otherwise genuine intent to help people heal and be happy.
A solid read for devout Christians, conservatives and self-help book aficionados; skeptics and atheists may find it hard to swallow.Pub Date: May 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460939024
Page Count: 293
Publisher: Foundation of Human Understanding
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If Charles Reich is your bag, then this may be your book. If you want your neuroscience qua science, then head over to where...
A head-spinning guide to supercharged meditation.
If life is like a box of chocolates, to quote the philosopher Forrest Gump, then, to quote Siegel (Clinical Psychiatry/UCLA; Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, 2016, etc.), “consciousness is like a container of water”—undrinkable if a tablespoon of salt is put into an espresso cup but just fine if the container is a bathtub. And why is it like a container of water? That’s never quite explained, except to say that cultivating the mind to maximize awareness makes our experience of things different. That heightened experience can be a deeply positive thing, for, as the author points out, neural integration makes problem solving easier, and “open awareness” boosts the immune system. Siegel delivers a “Wheel of Awareness” to visualize the process, with attention as the spoke, knowing or awareness as the hub, and “knowns” on the rim. But those knowns can be awareness-inhibiting prejudices as well as hard-won knowledge of how the world works. Siegel favors a murky, circular style: “When we open awareness to sensation, such as that of the breath, we become a conduit directing the flow of something into our awareness.” Well, yes, that’s how breath works, but Siegel means something different—“enabling the sensation of the breath at the nostrils to flow into consciousness.” Further along, the author complicates the picture: “And so both focal attention involving consciousness and nonfocal attention without consciousness involve an evaluative process that places meaning and significance on energy patterns and their informational value as they arise moment by moment.” Can there be meaning without consciousness? That’s a question for Heidegger, but suffice it to say that it’s a clear if empty statement relative to the main, which is laden with jargon, neologisms (“plane-dominant sweep”; “SOCK: sensation, observation, conceptualization, and knowing”), and lots of New Age cheerleading.
If Charles Reich is your bag, then this may be your book. If you want your neuroscience qua science, then head over to where Damasio and Dennett are shelved.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-99304-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
A sex therapist invites readers to improve their own sex lives by learning from the turn-ons of others. San Francisco therapist Morin developed his Sexual Excitement Survey in the mid-1980s and since then has obtained from some 351 anonymous men and women, both straight and gay, descriptions of their peak erotic encounters and fantasies. Through analysis of their accounts and through his work as a therapist, Morin has come to some conclusions about eroticism, the most important being that it is paradoxical in nature: both joyful and dangerous, life-giving and troublesome. One day while contemplating the elegance of the equation Attraction + Obstacles = Excitement, he had a sudden insight: that eroticism has four cornerstoneslonging and anticipation, violating prohibitions, searching for power, and overcoming ambivalence. Morin also finds that six emotionsexuberance, satisfaction, closeness, anxiety, guilt, and angerare associated with peak erotic experiences and that a unifying scenario, or core erotic theme, shapes each individual's turn-ons. These ideas are explored and illustrated at some length with excerpts from survey responses, passages that some readers may find more of a turn-off than a turn-on, for their language is often crude, colorful, and explicit. Readers are urged to keep private sex journals and to explore their own core erotic themes. For those with what Morin terms ``troublesome turn-ons,'' he proposes a 7- step program for positive erotic change, which he takes care to distinguish from any existing 12-step self-help programs. For those who wish to participate in Morin's ongoing study of eroticism, a copy of his Sex Excitement Survey is provided in an appendix. Interesting for its paradoxical perspective on eroticism, but too abstract to be a truly effective self-help program. ($35,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-016975-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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