Emails About Kierkegaard

I know what you're thinking: "Gee, Todd, your life must be pretty dull if you're exchanging emails about a Danish philosopher from the 19th century." Ok, ok, I hear you, but hear me out.

Let me give you a little background on how this email came about. A couple of friends of mine read my book, The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder, and one of those friends described my book to the other as, "out there." Which is about the best review a writer can hope for. Why? Because this means that the book contained ideas and concepts that the reader didn't necessarily agree with (or thought he didn't), and yet it was written well enough that he was able to get through it, he was able to finish the book. That's big! I couldn't really hope for more.

This fellow, I'm told, is also a big fan of Søren Kierkegaard, the aforementioned 19th century Danish philosopher (these are the upper crust circles of people who actually have favorite philosopher that I run in, folks, what can I tell you?). So much so, in fact, that he named his child after him (Søren, not Kierkegaard). Which I think is pretty cool because it's a pretty cool name, only I hope he didn't use the o with the slash through it (ø), which would probably get a little annoying for the kid.

Anyway, I was only vaguely familiar with the philosophy of Kierkegaard  (I'm a novelist, after all, not a philosopher, or worse a "philosophizer" as Robert Persig puts it in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), so after the conversation I went on line and brushed up on it, and lo and behold, what did I find but that the depressed Dane agreed wholeheartedly with everything in The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder! He professed, you see, Kierkegaard did, a similar brand of what has been labelled "existentialism."

I had always heard the term bandied about and had an idea what it meant, but not until now did I make the connection between the "existence" in "existentialism" and "being" and "consciousness." These are all exact synonyms. What Kierkegaard was talking about, what Eckhart Tolle is talking about, what I'm talking about in The Self-Improvement Book Club Murder--it's all the same thing.

And now from the email . . . Oh, and be sure to check out the link to the exercise mentioned a couple of times below so you know exactly what we're talking about when we talk about existence.

The Celestine Prophecy - A Cautionary Tale

The Book

A really great idea, poorly executed, and yet James Redfield has sold something like 23 million copies of The Celestine Prophecy. Why? Well, because it's a really great idea for a novel, I suppose.

But just imagine if Dan Brown had written The Celestine Prophecy (23 mil.) in addition to The Da Vinci Code (80 mil.). If I were Redfield, I'd ask Dan Brown to help me write a revision of The Celestine Prophecy for the 25th anniversary of its publication coming up in 2018 (published in 1993, you do the math). It would sell another 20 million easy.

Because there's a lot to like in The Celestine Prophecy: jungles, the Andes, Machu Picchu. But there's also a lot to hate there too. I've tried three or four times over the years to read it but I just couldn't do it. And I like this kind of novel, one that tries to teach you something, especially something about consciousness, enlightenment, awakening--all that crap. Heck, I even write books like that myself and I still couldn't choke it down.

The problem is, it's just so poorly written, and that's where the cautionary aspect of this blog post comes in. The Celestine Prophecy was originally self-published, and it shows. Redfield sold 100,000 copies out of the back of his Honda--Accord-ing to lore (sorry, couldn't resist)--so at that point it must have been tough for the editors at Warner Books, which scooped up the publishing rights to the book after that, to talk much sense into Redfield. And what did they care, really? I'm sure they were happy to keep the printing press churning out twenty-dollar bills. This was an unholy union that I suspect damed the movie version to hell, Satan's spawn that it is, but we'll get to that in a moment.

You might also like: These articles about Eckhart Tolle

The Reading List

These 12 books have helped me. They will help you too. Please buy one or all of the below books and actually READ IT/THEM!

If you can't afford to buy any of these books, send me an email with a request for one title along with your name and address, and I will submit your request (anonymously) to my list of 1,000 friends. No guarantees, but one of them will likely respond. At that point, I will email your name and address to that person, who will mail you a copy free of charge, no strings--just blessings--attached.

For a definitive list of Self-Improvement titles, including detailed summaries, please see my friend Tom Butler-Bowdon's website (and books): www.butler-bowdon.com

Happy reading!

You might also like: Is Eckhart Tolle a Seinfeld Fan?

The Pain-Body: What Is It?

The term, Pain-body was coined (as far as I know) by Eckhart Tolle in his first book, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. He develops the idea much more fully in his second book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.

The pain-body is a complex of built up thought patterns and emotions that results from unprocessed or unacknowledged pain experienced in the past. (Tolle goes so far as to hypothesize that we can be born with a certain amount of pain, but we need not agree with this view for the concept to be of service to us.) It lies dormant for varying periods of time, depending on the person, and is triggered by certain stimuli.

The Pain-Body in the Workplace

If people could take a sick day from work for a pain-body attack, we would probably find much more malady in the general population than we currently realize.

Check out this training video script from the HR department of a future Fortune 500 company I uncovered (humor alert: this doesn't really exist):

The Trouble with Spiritual Teachers

I've just finished a book called A Course in Miracles (the first edition is available online), and I have to say that I am no closer to working a miracle than before I started reading.

It seems to be mostly just one inane non-sequitur after another written in a kind of bible-ese, with a lot of "untos" and "wherefores" and "nors"--lots of "nors"--and awkward syntax that its authors (or as they prefer "scribes") Dr. Helen Schucman (below left) and Dr. William Thetford (below right), must have picked up from contact with the King James Version from somewhere at some point.

I shall select a passage at random to make my point. Let's try this one:

"It is through these strange and shadowy figures that the insane relate to their insane world. For they see only those who remind them of these images, and it is to them that they relate. Thus do they communicate with those who are not there, and it is they who answer them. And no one hears their answer save him who called upon them."

I'm not kidding! I picked that passage completely at random. It goes on like that, meaninglessly, for some 622 long, dense pages. It's gibberish and the intro to the book (also on the website) admits as much:

"The Text is largely theoretical, and sets forth the concepts on which the Course's thought system is based. Its ideas contain the foundation for the Workbook's lessons. Without the practical application the Workbook provides, the Text would remain largely a series of abstractions which would hardly suffice to bring about the thought reversal at which the Course aims."

Eckhart Tolle for Christians

Christianity--and probably most religions--can be broken down into two component parts. On the one side you have its mythos. This is the broad story on which it's based.

For Christianity, that's the story of redemption: how Jesus, before the world began was the Son of God, how He was born into the world, how He lead a blameless life and yet He was put to death, and how He rose again and ascended to heaven, and how one day He will return to judge the living and the dead. That's the mythos of Christianity.