lara owen

On the Today program on BBC Radio 4  this morning, (for my non-UK readers, this is an intelligent and lively current affairs/news program that airs every weekday morning) they ran a segment on why so many people buy self-help books, with a focus on Rhonda Byrne’s new book, “The Power”.

The slot featured a discussion with Michael Heppell (whom I had never heard of but who was described as the “UK’s number one self-help author”) and novelist Joan Smith, who writes on the self-help industry for The Times. The self-help writer oozed confidence and had his presentation style down pat (an example: “Well, Evan, there are three types of people who buy self-help books, 1, etc, 2, etc, 3, etc.”). He espoused the line that everything was perfectly correct in Byrne’s book: Yes, you are entitled to everything you ever dreamed and wished for, even if those dreams and wishes were put into your head by Madison Avenue — that last bit’s me, by the way, not him.

He also said, and here I paraphrase, “People can think only positive thoughts and that’s great but it’s not enough, they have to act.” It may well be that most of us need to employ our will in order to succeed in our lives, (whatever success means to us), and I completely agree about the usefulness of tools of personal development, and indeed teach some myself, but behind his statement is the assumption that it is easy–never mind advisable–to be permanently endowed with positivity (whatever that actually is). But even the most stubborn of minds is susceptible to the inconvenience of the unconscious, both individual and collective, and thus it is a rare Buddha indeed who can ever entirely control their thoughts.

Not only is it extremely difficult to attempt total positivity, it is fraught with danger, because unless you understand the nature of the unconscious and the source of your desire, what you wish for may be a false dream, something others want you to want, or your inner two-year old wants. So even if you attain your goal, you won’t be happy.  In addition, as much of the world’s greatest literature attests, the notion that you are entitled to whatever you want is riven with the most ghastly of convoluted ego-traps, a landscape of psychological land mines that go off one after the other until it dawns on you that the pursuit of desire is actually a dead-end unless, as the Buddhist teachings make clear, you can do so with no attachment to the objects of desire themselves.

Here, to use the favored self-help format, are three reasons why the notion of total entitlement to whatever you desire is dangerous poppycock.

1. People’s dreams and wishes are vital to their psychological well-being, may well be worth pursuing, and most likely should be energetically pursued. But a great many desires are infected by capitalism and by immature and selfish motivation. Materialism and egomania drive most ambition, sadly. This always ends in tears, one way or the other. Either you find that what you sought did not bring happiness after all, or along the way you trample on so many other people that your success is shadowed by the suffering of others. A wiser course is to go for your goals in a more tempered way than the extreme positive thinking gurus advise, to accept that, “Into every life, a little rain must fall”, and to read the life stories of the super-successful, which are a good reminder of the old wisdom found in myths and legends: that to push too hard for paradise can bring a counter-balancing reaction with difficult or even tragic consequences. To find out who you really are and to be motivated by true ambition–soul-level ambition–is a different quest than the one outlined in the extreme positive-thinking self-help school. It requires a commitment to personal truth which is the converse of imposed positive thinking.

2. Only the spiritually liberated or the very, very young are untroubled by the unconscious, or by collective woes. How can you think “positive thoughts” all the time when so many people are suffering, never mind about the truth of your own feelings? Denial is a useful psychological strategy in the short-term, but to suggest to people that it is actually empowering is just facile nonsense.

3. The soul, or psyche, is not interested in success as much as it is interested in truth. Speak with someone who is truthful unto their own experience of life and who also listens deeply to the experience of others, and you will come away feeling your consciousness expanded and your heart fuller, able to be kinder to yourself and all you meet, and more in touch with your own truth. Speak with someone who trots out glib and reality-denying platitudes and you come away feeling inwardly conflicted but spurred on, as if by a shot of triple-strength New Age caffeine, to achieve your goals. But there is an emptiness in this stressful relationship to reality, and all too often people feel worse after too much effort in this direction, and end up, as interviewer Evan Davis began to say in the program this morning, with a guilty sense of failure (I couldn’t have tried hard enough) or an aggrieved sense of being hard done by (I was entitled to EVERYTHING and woe is me, I didn’t get it.)

So instead of believing you can have all the candies in the box now and forever, and that you can do all this on your own by merit of your own imagination and control of your thoughts, try this set of instructions on for a while and see how you get on:

Cover via Amazon

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally.
3. Don’t Make Assumptions.
4. Always do your best

These are “The Four Agreements”, taught by Don Miguel Ruiz. It’s a challenging recipe, but a really good one, and like the Buddha’s teachings to which it is philosophically related, this is a meal for a lifetime, not a box of candies whose taste fades in seconds and leaves you feeling nauseous and under-nourished.

So beware the quick-fix, and don’t burden your sweet self with the false promises of extreme positive thinking. Yes, positive reframes and positive goals are good, and doable, and you can improve your life. Everything can feel much better if you apply wise strategies, and you can be healthy and happy, some if not most (but never all) of the time. But when the Buddha said, “Life is suffering”, he was onto something much deeper than the grasping desperation of “The Secret” and “The Power”. Yes, you can move beyond attachment to suffering, but to do so demands that you move beyond attachment to ego (number 2 in the Agreements), and false perception (number 3), and always that you have effectively taken a vow to help others too, (the Bodhisattva principle, which in Ruiz’s elegant synthesis of perennial wisdom, shows up in numbers 1 and 4.)

And yes, the imagination is an enormously powerful tool that quite literally shapes our reality. We can ruin our own lives by constantly imagining the worst and by focusing our minds on unhelpful imagery and content. We can shape our future by moving in healthy directions that imbue us with confidence and an ever-deepening sense of personal integrity.

But when we do imagine a better future for ourselves, it is only viable if we include everyone else in the picture too. For if you have the big house on the hill, who lives down in the valley? We are all connected, always and forever, and no amount of narcissistic Ayn Rand-inspired and capitalist-fueled so-called positivity can ultimately get around that.