Don Miguel Ruiz: The Four Agreements

A friend visited me while I was bedridden a few months ago, and noticed that I was reading The Celestine Prophecy. She suggested that this book was a nice follow up to that one and mailed it to me. Jane is, by the way, the sort of person who follows up on things she says. So I started reading it and, sure enough, there was a remarkable confluence between the messages of the two books. I was, therefore, expecting to enjoy The Four Agreements as much as I did The Celestine Prophecy. No such luck.

To distill my experience into one phrase, my overall impression was that of listening to a string of vaguely memorable semi-aphorisms mumbled in no particular order by a mildly retarded hillbilly. The author claims to be a master of Toltec wisdom, a fact which reduces my respect for the Toltecs considerably. In fact, it almost feels like he was actually a Los Angeles native who claims to be a Toltec so that his otherwise less than memorable book will have some sort of mystical allure.

Which is a shame, because if the book was reduced to a list of its chapter titles, it would actually be greatly useful. The four agreements themselves are a great distillation of functional living. The problem is that Ruiz goes into such painfully rambling detail about what each of the agreements means. I choose, therefore, to take away from this book the names of the four agreements, and to discard the rest.

Keep Your Word
It's Not About You
Don't Make Shit Up
Do Your Best

Toni Morisson: Song of Solomon

I have only one complaint with Toni Morisson's work, and until I read this book it was just a vague impression, but I now percieve it to be a pattern. She clearly has few peers when it comes to inventive characterization that skillfully treads the line between the mythological and the possible (much like Gabriel Garcia Marquez). Similarly, she creates stories that feel as though they have existed for for generations, and have simply been passed on for her to transcribe. Nonetheless, I always leave her books a little bit dissatisfied. While the stories that compose her novels are themselves are juicy and indisputably alive, they have the feel of being strung together haphazardly, and the novel as a whole suffers.

Song of Solomon, for instance, seems to have three verdant threads running through it. Milkman and Pilate each have a clear line running through the book, and it is my personal opinion that Guitar's story is separate from either of them, even though it is not as elaborate. Each story is, as I cannot state clearly enough, the sort of story that is so alive, one wonders if some version of it might have happened. It would make this book a masterpiece of craftsmanship instead of a delight, though, if all three stories came together in the end to some sort of resolution. In short, I love Morrison's books until they end. I always feel like there should be more, that something clever should have happened to make the reader satisfied. Instead I am left feeling like I followed a trail at length, only to be left standing abruptly at the edge of a cliff. "Where do I go from here?", I ask myself. In fact, I think I'll stop right now to show you how it feels.

Yann Martel: Life of Pi

This is the best book I've read so far this year. Even as I was reading it, I understood why it was so widely acclaimed. Up until the last fifty pages, I was convinced that it was a brilliant psychotheological allegory, and treated it accordingly in my mind. After finishing it, however, I was left dumbstruck with the brilliance of its culmination. Without the final few chapters, this book is a wonderful, thought-provoking read. The ending makes it an enduring masterpiece of literature.

To begin with, I related to and agreed with Pi's religious discoveries and conclusions. The way he describes his simultaneous practice of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity reminds me of a set of concentric circles. Christianity is the religion of the self, surrounding which is Islam, the religion of society, which is in turn encircled by Hinduism, the religion of the universe. This model is vaguely mirrored in his description of the carnivorous island later in the book. So much time has elapsed between my reading of the book and writing of this reaction that it is difficult to capture the glow I recieved from it, and I regret that I find myself unequal to the task of relating it to you, gentle reader. Suffice it to say that I found myself reconnecting with my spiritual side after a lenghty period of dulled senses.

In the final analysis, however, the book transformed from a religious allegory to a practical manual on life. I was left wide-mouthed by the realization that Pi and Richard Parker were one and the same. To survive, as we are, adrift in the universe, we must not only be in touch with our profound, spiritual humanity, but with our inner tiger. We must simultaneously be zen and aggresive. Lao Tze and Dr. Phil both have a place in functional humanity. Each needs the other to live, and to believe otherwise can only cause us to hate ourselves.

James Redfield: The Celestine Prophecy

Well, I suppose I better get around to updating this blog, or else forget about it forever. I actually read this book months ago, but haven't been feeling particularly motivated. As a result, my impressions have dulled a little bit and I don't expect this post to be very long or informative.

I read this book on the strong recommendation of a respected friend, and, as it happens, many of my friends are familiar with and recommend it. Several times, as I was visited in the hospital, friends would notice what I was reading and and express their general approval. And understandably so; the first half of the book is nothing short of visionary, and I find it remarkably well-fitted to what I have come to believe on my own. The idea that our unseen energy fields interact as described in The Celestine Prophecy is a conclusion I have come to on my own, based on personal impressions and the occasional striking experience. That the book is a thinly disguised theophilosophical treatise is a mixed blessing for the reader; Redfield is not a strong prose writer, and his characterization is so weak as to be painful. Nonetheless, the tone of the book is far less didactic than one might expect, and the narrative format generally makes the clearly evangelical message more palatable.

Up until the midway point of the book, in fact, I found myself agreeing with the author point for point. It is when Redfield crosses the line from philosophical to psychological that I began to have a problem with his premise. It is one thing to delineate a model of the energetic universe, and another to superimpose on that nicely functional model an explanation that feels oversimplistic and false. I have this problem with most so-called new-age thought. Whereas I agree with their descriptions of the way the universe functions, most feel the need to explain in detail why it does so, either with alien intervention, marginally Christian theology or faux science, and such explanations always feel post factum; they come up with the explanation to fit the experience. I do not happen to think that human experience needs a "why;" I am perfectly happy to know and trust how things are and to live in line with that information without tacking a story onto it to make me feel better. In short, the what of existence is more imprortant to me than the why or how.

I guess I had a lot to say after all.