Contemplate This: Gilbert Mane on True Inquiry.

Sit quietly and relax. Let the mind come to rest and equilibrium.

Reflect on a genuine question, on an issue which you would like resolved. Imagine that there is a universal consciousness; a source of knowledge and compassion. Throw caution to the winds for the purposes of this exercise - what have you got to lose?

Frame a question and, with a spirit of openness and a willingness to accept help, ask the question quietly in your mind, or speak it aloud. Then gently let it go. Maintain this state of open willingness for a few moments.

Sometime an answer can come surprisingly quickly and clearly. Sometimes it takes a little time - hours, days, even weeks. Sometimes it pops into your mind or heart. Sometimes a chance phrase jumps off the page or from a snatch of conversation. And sometimes nothing appears to happen. Great. Give it another go. Rome wasn't built in a day.

This contemplation comes from Gilbert Mane's brilliant book, Seven Steps to Freedom.

Richard Wiseman on Goal Achievement and Doublethink

The following is a short quote from the wonderful book by Richard Wiseman, ':59 Seconds'. Fill out the following forms to create a precise goal and plan. This will greatly increase your chances of achieving your goal.

What do I want to be, do, and have?

Goal Planning

My overall goal is to...

Now write no more than five subgoals:

My first subgoal will be to...

I believe I can achieve this goal because...

To achieve this sub-goal, I will...

This will be achieved by the following date...

My reward for achieving this will be...

My second subgoal will be to...

I believe I can achieve this goal because...

To achieve this sub-goal, I will...

This will be achieved by the following date...

My reward for achieving this will be...

My third subgoal will be to...

I believe I can achieve this goal because...

To achieve this sub-goal, I will...

This will be achieved by the following date...

My reward for achieving this will be...

My fourth subgoal will be to...

I believe I can achieve this goal because...

To achieve this sub-goal, I will...

This will be achieved by the following date...

My reward for achieving this will be...

My fifth subgoal will be to...

I believe I can achieve this goal because...

To achieve this sub-goal, I will...

This will be achieved by the following date...

My reward for achieving this will be...

What are the benefits of achieving this overall goal?

1.

2.

3.

I will go public by...

Doublethink.

1. What is yoaur goal?

2. Write down one word that reflects an important way you life would be better if you achieved your goal

3. Write down one word that reflects a significant barrier in the way of your getting your goal.

4. Repeat steps two and three.

5. Elaborate on the one word answers in steps three and four. 

How To Change A Habit - the Best of the Best Tips, Studies, Insights, and Practices.

Nothing else works in changing a habit other than making a daily change.

Single points of change increase change across the board. You can start with:

- Positive thinking
- Exercise
- Single-tasking
- One-goal focus
- Eliminating the non-essential
- Kindness
- Daily routine.

So, how do we change a habit?

First of all, we need to understand why: habits save mental energy, so healthy habits mean healthy lives.

Second, the trick is not to resist bad habits but to replace them with good habits. Charles Duhigg is the recognized authority on the subject of habit change, via his brilliant and easy-to-read book The Power of Habits.

Third, to do this, follow this 3-step process:

1. Identify the bad habit you want to change. What happens right before the bad habit? Is it a person, place, thing, feeling, or time? What is the cue?
2. What is some good habit you want to do instead at that time. What is the routine?
3. When you do that good habit, what reward are you going to give yourself? What is the reward?

Cue - routine - reward is the basic formula for habit formation.

How do we keep the changed habit in place? This has to do with other cues. People, places, things and feelings are the main ones that can bring us back into the old habit. Here are some suggestions:

- Change your environment.
- Put up barriers between you and the people or places.
- Make a public declaration of your work to as many people as possible.
- Associate with people who have good habits and do not have your previous bad habit
- Accept and be patient with yourself, knowing that it can take a while to eliminate all the cues.

Here's a simple visual flow-chart of these basic ideas we've discussed.

Here's a great re-statement of the same basic principle of cue - routine - reward and replacing bad habits with good:  "The Golden Rule of Habit Change says that the most effective way to shift a habit is to diagnose and retain the old cue and reward, and try to change only the routine."

Good news! It takes about 66 days on average to develop a new habit! Learn about the vital research into the question here.

Want to learn the basic habit research by psychologists? Jeremy Dean's genius is simply presenting it all in as few words as possible. His book of the same title present eye-popping notions in the same engaging prose:

Making Habits Breaking Habits.

Scott Young breaks the conditioning aspects of habit change down into action steps quite clearly here.

The role of patience, self-acceptance, simplicity, and gentleness is vital to habit formation, and Leo Babatua seems to head this group of memes. For example, nomeatathlete writes about patience beautifully and inspirationally here.

Here is the contrary view (as always on the internet) on how to use pings and sticknotes to learn multiple habits at the same time. The basic idea is to put a reminder in your phone, and a physical bit of paper where the new habit will be performed, eg - flossing - sticky note on the bathroom door; stretching - sticknote in the bedroom when you wake up. The author of this excellent piece also suggests that we can chain multiple habits into a super habit of effective rituals when you wake up.

Here's another marvellous contrarian view of changing multiple habits and building super habits.

Finally, the chief web guru on habit formation, Leo Babatua, holds forth here in a comprehensive checklist of to-do items for habit formation.

Self-control is essential in habit formation, and Jeremy Dean on the marvellous psyblog has a bunch of suggestions:

- Abstract thinking renews self-control. So dig into your copy of Hegel or Kant on your lunch break! :)
- Self affirmation, thinking about your positive traits, and contemplating what you value and cherish increase self-control. Maybe a new habit can include those things.
- Accept that self-control is a limited resource, use rewards and penalties, lower expectations, and pre-plan around achieving your goals ahead of time, according to this blog entry.
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Contemplate This: Richard Wiseman on the Psychology of Goal Achievement.

1. Make a step-by-step plan.
2. Tell other people about my goals.
3. Think about the good things that will happen if I achieve my goal.
4. Reward myself for making progress towards my goal.
5. Record my progress (in a journal or on a chart).

Each of these five tools significantly increased the likelihood of people successfully achieving their aims. Let's look at each one in turn.

1. Make a step-by-step plan. Successful participants broke their overall goal into a series of sub-goals, and thereby created a stop-by-step process that helped remove the fear and hesitation often associated with trying to achieve a major life change. These plans were especially powerful when the sub-goals were concrete, measureable, and time-based.

2. Tell other people about my goals. Keeping your aims to yourself makes it too easy to drift back into your old habits and routines. People are more likely to stick to their views and promises once they have gone public. Other work suggests that the greater the public declaration, the more motivated people are to achieve their goals. 

3. Think about the good things that will happen if I achieve my goal. Those who frequently reminded themselves of the benefits associated with achieving their goals weren't imagining their perfect selves, but rather having an objective checklist of how life would be better once they had obtained their aim.

4. Reward myself for making progress towards my goal. Successful participants ensured that each of their sub-goals had a reward attached to it. Often it was something small but never anything that conflicted with the goal itself.

5. Record my progress (in a journal or on a chart). Successful participants made their plans, progress, rewards and benefits as concrete as possible by expressing them in writing. The act of writing significantly boosted their success.

This short quote comes from Dr Richard Wiseman's book, :59 Seconds. The book has excellent exercises linked to these insights and adds the power of doublethinking to goal setting, looking at benefits and obstacles simultaneously to trigger motivation. It's an excellent book which I recommend.

Contemplate This: Rob Yueng on Brainraining.

Brain-storming takes a lot of time and energy. But brain-raining applies the same principles on a smaller scale even when we are trying to think more creatively on our own. Try this.

Simply work through five questions:

1. What's the rational course of action?
2. What's the emotional thing to do?
3. What would the cleverest person you know - someone you like and respect - do?
4. What would your most compassionate friend do?
5. Finally, what should you do?

This comes from Rob Yueng's brilliant book, The Extra One Per Cent.

Contemplate This: Rob Yueng On the FASTER Way to Resolve Emotions; and On Emotional Writing

The FASTER technique is a thought record, a proven method for combating negative thoughts and becoming more centered.

When you feel in an emotional funk, take pen and paper and work through the 6 steps of the FASTER technique:

1. Feelings. Write down the unhelpful instincts, the tumultuous emotions you're experiencing. Be specific. Rate each emotion from 1 to 10 based on how strongly you feel each one.

2. Actions. How might your feelings be affecting your actions in unhelpful ways?

3. Situation. Describe briefly what happened to trigger those feelings. What were you doing? Who were you with? Who said or did something, or what is certain thoughts or feelings or images that triggered those unhelpful feelings?

4. Thoughts. Write down the unhelpful thoughts that are running around in your head.

5. Evidence against your negative beliefs. Time to look for ways to contradict your unhelpful thoughts. Imagine your most supportive friend asking you questions like "Is that really true?"

6. Review feelings again. Do you feel less emotional, more centered?

On Emotional Writing. 
Writing about our experiences enhances our emotional and physical health. Based on research examining what makes for expressive writing, there are three important guidelines to follow:

- Go back to the episode, but take a few steps back and more away from the experience.
- Write about the meaning of the event and its implications rather than simply describing it again.
- Remember to look back on your situation with compassion.

Researchers found that words to do with insight (eg, 'realize', 'see', 'understand') and words to do with causation (eg 'because', 'infer', 'thus') were most strongly associated with benefits. People who merely described the situation or reported how they felt at the time reported fewer benefits.

These are quotes I was impressed by from Rob Yueng's book, 'The Extra One Per Cent', describes psychologically validated small changes that make massive differences, and I highly recommend all Doctor Yueng's writing.

Contemplate This: Richard Rohr on Transformation:

Vulnerability is the only space in which transformation takes place. 

Allow the pain of other people to get inside them. Allow other people to change your life, especially the little ones. Allow the world's suffering to influence you. 

So people need to be more present to death. Not just going to the funeral; then it's too late.  You've got to be talking to the person at the death bed two weeks before, three weeks before. Because the veil gets very thin in those last weeks, and people say things and see things and know things. 

And people who were arrogant and invulnerable all their life, you sometimes see these transformations in the last two weeks of life. Get close to it and it's all you ened to change you. You can never live inside the isolated self again. 

So I would encourage people to draw close to death.

- Transliterated from a verbal interview.

Contemplate This: Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy on Turning Goals into Actions.

Anthony Robbins:

When people say "Teach me something new" I can tell they're not into mastery, because it's the consistent daily practices that make our lives a success.

The rule is: never, ever leave the site of a goal without first taking action to build momentum towards the achievement of that goal.

Brian Tracy:

The key to happiness is setting goals, working toward them day by day, and ulitmately achieving them. The very act of thinking about your goals makes you happy even before you have taken the first step toward achieiving them. You should make a habit of daily goal setting and daily goal achieving for the rest of your life.

You can release your full potential by continually working on being, having, and achieving more and more of the things you really want.

Imagine you have the inborn ability to achieve any goal you could ever set yourself? What do you really want to be, have, and do?

What are the activities that give you your greatest sense of meaning and purpose in life?

Look at your life today. How has your thinking created this? What should you change?

Do you think and talk about what you want most of the time - or what you don't want?

What price will you have to pay to achieve the goals that are most important to you?

What one action must you take immediately as a result of your answers to the above questions?

Contemplate This: The Spiritual Practice of Simple Meditation.

Simple meditation is the best meditation to practice. Simple meditation is sitting quietly for a specified amount of time. It need not be any more than that, but people try to complicate it with instructions.

Sitting quietly, you can watch the breathing. Sitting quietly, you can intend the body to stay completely unmoving. Sitting quietly, you can be aware of what is arising, passing, present and absent. But you can also simply sit quietly.

You can pray to know what the best meditation practice is for you. The best practice is the simplest, quietest, and commonest practice, and that practice is sitting quietly. You can sit for five minutes a day. You can sit for an hour a day. You can sit when you are on a bus or waiting at lights or in a meeting. You can stand quietly or lie quietly.

The best spiritual practice is simplest. It is simplest to do this practice simply, without dressup, heralding, or notice. In time it becomes common to everyone: because we all grow old and must sit for certain periods of time.

A meditation teacher was once asked what she taught. "We teach sitting quietly," she said.

"Yes," the questioner asked, "But what religion or school do you belong to?"

"We don't belong to any school or teaching or religion," she said. "We simply meet together and we simply sit together."

That is the simplicity of simple meditation. It is like the simplicity of God Himself. The fact that we can simply sit is a great good. Does it have any effects or rewards? No. The effect of sitting is sitting. The reward of sitting is sitting. And what that effect and reward is, is the sitting itself. Over time it becomes clear that sitting and the rest of life is not two things, but it also becomes clear that sitting and the rest of life are not the same as one another. From sitting, then, a tacit - that is, a felt or a sensed - understanding is born.

Contemplate This: How Brian Tracy Uses "I am responsible!" to Resolve Negative Emotions.

The negative emotions of fear, self-pity, envy, jealousy, feelings of inferiority, and ultimately anger are mostly caused by four factors. Once you identify and remove these factors from your thinking, your negative emotions stop automatically.

The four root causes of negative emotions are:

1. Justification. You can be negative only as long as you can justify to yourself that you are entitled to be angry and upset for some reason.

2. Rationalization. When you rationalize, you attempt to give a socially acceptable explanation for an otherwise socially unacceptable act. You create an explanation that sounds good but is not good.

3. Hypersensitivity. Almost everything we do to earn the respect of others or at least to avoid losing their respect leads to anger, embarrassment, shame, feelings of inferiority and even depression, self-pity, and despair.

4. Blame. The propensity to blame other people for our problem is the trunk of the tree of negative emotions. Once you cut down the trunk of the tree, all the fruits of the tree - all the other negative emotions - die immediately.

Responsibility is the antidote.
Simply say "I am responsible!" and you free yourself from neagtive emotions, begin taking control of your life, and short-circuit and cancel out any negative emotions you may be experiencing.

Saying "I am responsible!" whenever you start to feel upset frees you mentally and emotionally so you can begin to channel your energies and enthusiasms in a forward direction.

Without saying "I am responsible!" to negative emotions, no progress is possible.

Once you start saying "I am responsible!" to negative emotions, there are no limits on what you can be, do, and have.

Adapted from Brian Tracy's great book "Goals!"

My comment: There really is no such thing as a justified resentment!

Contemplate This: Success is a Goal, a Goal is a Habit, a Habit is a Set Daily Practice:

Brian Tracy writes:

A group of successful men once got together. They discussed the reasons why they had managed to achieve so much in life. The wisest man among them spoke up and said that: "Success is goals, and all else is commentary."

Charles Duhigg writes:

It occurred to me that the US Military is one of the biggest habit-formation experiments in history. Basic training teaches soldiers carefully designed habits for hot to shoot, think, and communicate under fire.

"Understanding habits is the most important thing I've learned in the army," the major told me. "It's changed everything about how I see the world. You want to fall asleep fast and wake up feeling good? Pay attention to your nighttime patterns and what you automatically do when you get up. You want to make running easy? Create triggers to make it a routine. I drill my kids on this stuff. My wife and I write out habit plans for our marriage... once you see everything as a bunch of habits, it's like someone gave you a flashlight and a crowbar and you can get to work."

Mark Houston says:

"You will observe in a monastery they do everything at the set time, 365 days a year. They taught me the value of discipline. That's why Monday through Friday, 4:30 AM, my feet are on the floor, because in times when the minions don't want to do it my feet are still on the floor because it's a habit. They taught me to find God in the pots and the pans in my dull boring mundane repetittive life. Wow! in washing dishes. In making toast. Find God in the pots and pans. They taught me all those things. They taught me the sacredness of all things, everything. What is not of God? So we handle everything as though it is of God. Woke me up to something again. You pick set times to do things, and you do them, regardless."

Practice, by Mark Houston:
Spiritual success is gained by daily cultivation. 
If you practice for the day, you have won.
If you are lazy for the day, you have lost.

Self-cultivation is the heart of spiritual attainment. 
Gaining insight and ability is not a matter of grand statements, 
dramatic initiations or sporadic moments of enlightenment,
Those things are only highlights in a life of consistent activity.

Whatever system of spirituality you practice, do it every day.
If it's prayer, then pray every day.
If it's meditation, then meditate every day.
If it is exercise, then exercise every day.
Only then will you be able to say that you are truly practicing spirituality.

This methodical approach is reassuring in several ways.

First, it provides you with a process and a means 
to maintain progress even if that particular day is not inspiring or significant. 
Just to practice is already good.

Second it will give you a certain faith. 
If you practice every day it is inevitable you will gain from it. 

Third, constant practice gives you a certain satisfaction:
how can you say to yourself you have truly entered your spiritual path, 
unless you have had years of daily practice 
and can take comfort in the momentum that it has given you?

Contemplate This: A Peaceful Mind Generates Power, by Norman Vincent Peale

The chief struggle in gaining mental peace is the effort of revamping your thinking to the relaxed attitude of acceptance of God's gift of peace.

Simply tell the Lord everything that is bothering you.

Have you experienced a sense of release when you have been able to pour out to somebody whom you can trust worrisome matters that lay heavy upon your heart?

When you empty your mind to God, you receive peace as a gift from God.

Definitely practice emptying your mind of fears, hates, insecurities, regrets and guilt feelings. The mere fact that you consciously make this effort to empty your mind tends to give relief.

Immediately start filling your mind with creative and healthy thoughts.

Let pass across your mind the most peaceful scenes of a beautiful valley filled with the hush of evening-time as the shadows lengthen and the sun sinks to rest.

Let pass across your mind the most peaceful scenes of the silvery light of the moon falling upon rippling waters.

Let pass across your mind the most peaceful scenes of the sea washing gently upon soft shores of sand.

Speak peaceful, quieting words, and your mind will react in a peaceful manner. Repeat that word slowly several times.

For example:

Tranquillity.
Serenity.
Equanimity.

Going about your day, use this line of the 23rd Psalm:

"He leads me beside the still water; he restores my soul."

Go about your day repeating this idea over and over gently.

Why Kafka Is Overrated: 12 Reasons Why We Should Never Read Kafka's Major Works

Franz Kafka, sainted by literati, is the single most overrated writer of the twentieth century.

1. Franz Kafka's novels and stories are in fact not novels and stories at all; they are sketches, incidents, dream-records. We cannot call Kafka a novelist unless we stretch these terms to include incidents without meaning and random dream-records. Granted, we can include as a experimental novel such as "Tristram Shandy", but that book has the virtue of being both a good book and completed, virtues Kafka lacks.

2. All Kafka's major works are incomplete. We can only judge the start and middle of a piece of writing accurately if we have the ending, because the ending is what gives the middle and start their meanings. But we do not have the ending because Kafka did not write the pieces. Therefore, we cannot judge Kafka's major work accurately, because we do not have a complete major work.

3. We can however, judge Kafka's workmanship. Kafka is self-evidently a terrible craftsman. If a man makes chairs, and he is considered the best chair maker of his time, we would need to sit on his chairs when he is done. And if a woman knits woollen hats, we would need to have a hat which sits on the head, instead of falling off. And if a group of people make a ship, we would need to have a complete hull or else the ship would sink. Likewise, Kafka's craftsmanship is a failure: Kafka's "novels" are chairs that cannot be sat on, hats that do not stay on, and ships that sink. By contrast, "Anna Karenina" is a novel which can be tested from any direction and provide satisfaction and interest.

4. Kafka is also not a good host to his readers. He subjects his readers to mean, vicious, negative, manipulative, unkind, and distorted views. He tries to make his readers suffer. He misleads his readers to suppose they are reading a novel when in fact it is a record of ideas and incidents. It seems sure that Kafka never intend to have a readership, since he asked for his work to be destroyed and destroyed much of it himself. By contrast, the best writers treat their readers with respect and consideration.

5. Kafka is a terrible philosopher. He has no clear view of life, cannot define or explain any central view or doctrine, and uses negative emotions in place of reason or logic. He makes no attempt to suggest a happy, wise, or healthy way to live. He does not love wisdom. He demonstrates a love of violence, instead. The Philosopher in his dialogs consistently uses Socrates to dismantle pretentions to wisdom such as Kafka uses, from small dialog about courage like Charmides, about friendship like Laches, and about wisdom like Alcibiades.

6. Kakfa is glamorized by his adoring readers as absurd and existential. But these fancy word choices, when the projected glamor is taken away, change meanings. "Absurd" in Kafka's writing really means the same thing as "nonsense". And "existential" in Kafka's writing really comes down to "meaningless and depressing". And a mood does not make a thing meaningful: just because Kafka's writing is depressing nonsense, doesn't mean that it is philosophy. The fact that Kafka's writing is depressing nonsense simply means that it is depressing nonsense, and nothing else.

7. Kafka uses language which says that a thing is so, then that it is not so. Then he uses images which suggest that a person is kind then unkind, or good then evil, or powerful then weak. In other words, Kafka uses language badly. We can dress this up as "paradox", "metaphor", "insight into the human condition", but the fact remains that in talking about a thing, we must agree on the meanings of it before we can have actual communication. When Kafka not only fails to clearly use a term, image, or character to have a fixed significance, he is also failing to communicate. Therefore, Kafka is a poor communicator. See William Empsom's famous study, Seven Kinds of Ambiguity, for an exploration of how to provide clear and unconfusing poetic ambiguity.

8. At all the basic elements of the novelists art, Kafka's "novels" are a signal failure. These elements are: characterisation, dialog, story, plot, and theme. The characters do not grow. The dialog (which does feature good naturalistic diction), does not advance the plot or reveal character. The story has no beginning, middle, nor end, because we know these novels are unfinished. The plot has no tension because nothing is at stake (we already know K. in the Trial will die, and that K. in the Castle never get a solution). Finally, there is no theme, because the nothing in it has meaning. So in all the basic elements of the novelist's art, Kafka is a conclusive failure.

9. Kafka focuses on expressing negative emotions of guilt, fear, confusion, negativity, meaninglessness, and apathy. Kafka therefore is a bad moral and poor emotional example.

10. Kafka focuses on criticising society. He criticises the law, bureaucracy, government, and nations. He never praises or appreciates or builds up, but only tears down. He has no solutions or even answers to the things he has criticised. He has expertise in the law and bureaucracy, but expresses no positive aspects. Therefore, for anyone wanting a positive role in the world, he is unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst.

11. Kakfa enables his readers to indulge in negative over-intellectualization and feel justified and righteous. Kafka empowers readers to become resentful and bitter against authority instead of seeking the good and working through the bad. Kafka empowers readers to project their own notions onto his work, and thereby enables people to have a good mental masturbate using his work. Therefore, Kafka's emotionally negative and morally negative words are a pornography of the spirit.

12. Finally, the "novels" need not exist. Hamlet cannot kill his step father for many reasons: perhaps he desires his mother as Freud suspected, or perhaps he secretly believes that his step father is in fact his real paternal father, or perhaps he has mental illness. But K. in the Trial can move home, change jobs, or leave town if he does not like the legal treatment, and K. in the Castle can simply go home and not worry about the crazy foreigners if he likes. Unlike Hamlet, these "novels" can be called off at any moment by their main characters! So the lack of succifient motive for the characters' actions in Kafka leads us to question their possibility. The "novels" need not exist because the mainspring of the characters, their motives, are insufficient to establish their reality.

There we have it. To summarise, Kafka's incomplete, poorly-crafted, nonsensical, depressing, morally and emotionally misleading, poorly communicated, unnecessary, and spiritually pornographic major works can now be ignored and thrown away.

The "novels" of Franz Kafka have been in the world for almost a century and can now be relegated to the library stacks and trashcans of people's personal libraries. His work showed some small promise, and this promise is not only not delivered on, but the existing works deliver downsides in spades. 

I hope after reading this, many others will feel happy to avoid having anything to do with these bad books. 

I do recommend a few of Kafka's most famous short stories, one of the which, Metamorphosis, provides the world with the word "kafkaesque" and is a wonderful riff on Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Why We Should Not Read Marcus Goodrich's Novel Delilah

Delilah is a novel about a United States Navy destroyer just before the start of World War Two. Goodrich takes the reader into the day by day workings of the ship and the hearts and minds of the men. 

The book has echoes of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' (a study of human brutality) and 'Lord Jim' (pride and prestige as a 'code' of integrity) and uses symbolic and rhetoric means developed by Melville via Shakespeare (the ship Delilah as a woman, the stars as a symbol of the transcendent, the ocean as the engagement with the feminine flow of aliveness, from which the men themselves are cut off by duty and pride). 

Notable to a reader, but irrelevant from the novel itself, is the 2013 point of view: the colonialism and imperialism of the crew regarding their filipino peons; the shocking absence of any workplace health and safety regulations; the abusive and macho culture of unquestioning obedience; the differing notions of professionalism and the greater predominance of notions of personal integrity over professionalism; and the fragile and superficial ego structures of the men on board. This comparison is drawn not to say the world of 2013 is so much better, but simply to point the differences.

The key to the novel is the fragility and vulnerability of the men to the ship, nature, and their own instincts. Specifically, the men are driven by pride and prestige. Ego and posturing predominates. Rage and lustfulness off ship erupt when the pressure of egotism gets too great. The entire system is intransparent and ritualistic; the men are slaves, and must resort to pathetic signs of personal dignity like where their cot is placed to gain some sense of personal significance. All intimate communication is censored dramatically by egotism, and friendship is a function of role and status rather than common virtues or interests. 

This sense of hysterical masculinity often comes to the surface: each character ruminates over interminable fears of dishonor and considerations of pride. Goodrich shows these ruminations in detail; this feeling of tension and eventually hysteria is the result of the physically unsafe and emotionally unfeeling reality of the ship life, where no due regard for the body or soul is given.

The writing is interesting, as is the tone. Let's examine the writing first. The diction is simple and poetic and manly. But the sentences are longer when the writer wishes to express emotion, and shorter when he is reporting. The downside of the writing is that the same point will be repeated two or three times. Sometimes the effect is of an incantation, creating an emotional connection; but mostly a slowing, an impatience, and a slight distancing of sympathy from the characters are the effect. It is a book that demands leisure, but frankly, as we'll see later in this review, it does not warrant that investment of time.

Now, to the tone. Reportage alternates with interior reflection. Consistently Goodrich's interior writing refers to the pride and ego dominating the souls of the men. Their inner lives, it seems to me, are impoverished and narrow, but Goodrich seems to find interesting the tedium of his characters' posturings for status. I do not.

There is a passing reference in chapter 12 to a liberal education. Warrington stashes a variety of good and great books in his locker. This is not to suppose this incident will be used in any way, but simply to allow Goodrich to establish that in chapter 13 that Warrington reads the Meditations of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, which in turn establishes that he is a man of virtue, which in turn establishes that he is as tough, prideful, and ego-driven as the rest of the men. The only difference from the other men is that Warrington is prideful in an intellectual way rather than an instinctual way.

The overarching story is of the preparations of the ship Delilah for World War Two. Until the second last page the reason is unknown for these preparations by the crew. They flail about with no idea what's going on for the whole book. Delilah, the ship, goes about some missions, gets refitted; the book features some episodes of brutish incidents which might be salvaged from the whole as short stories. In the end some sailor, O'Connel, suffers from alcoholic insanity and has to be violently subdued by an officer, Fitzpatrick. 

Does that sound like a novel to you? It sounds like half a novel. In the opening inscription of the novel, Goodrich promised and failed to deliver on part two, the actual ending with World War Two. This is like cutting the Battle of Borodino out of Tolstoy's War and Peace, or excluding the hunt of Moby Dick from Melville's novel. It is the fatal weakness in an otherwise strong, masculine novel.

Let's examine Delilah clearly as a book among books: if we have two people offering us a novel, one complete and one incomplete; and if the person with the incomplete novel promises to complete it and does not complete it, then which person should we trust? Clearly the one who has completed their novel. And the one who has not completed the novel has in fact not written a novel, in the sense of a whole novel, but only written half of a novel.  

Marcus Goodrich at the start of his novel Delilah promised the reader he would finish the novel, and he did not keep his promise. He lived fifty more years after the book was published and he failed to keep his promise. It is a good half of a novel, but it is not a whole novel, and cannot be judged as a whole novel.

So, what we need to do with Marcus Goodrich's Delilah is not read it. We should avoid Delilah not because it is not good, but because the writer did not keep his promise to the reader to complete the book. The writer did not keep his promises in good faith with the reader, and therefore should be not have readers. I recommend avoiding this book and reading any of the other magnificent books of the period but this one.

I will conclude with a magnificent piece of Proustian writing from near the end of the book, a moment of calm before O'Connel's alcoholic insanity from the character that seems to bear some of the writers' consciousness, Warrington:

"He turned his gaze upward to the sky in a gesture that might have appeared to an onlooker as one aimed at detecting the cause of the intimidation. His gaze encountered no fabulous, predatory hovering, nothing but the infinite blackness; save where a small, sharply defined, uneven rift in it disclosed, as above the top of some chasm in the universe, and at a greater distance that he ever had imagined or dreamed, a few eerily vivid stars that gave no light, that hung there, in the sombre blue clarity above that unthinably deep hole in black nothingness, looking awesomely, three-dimensionally like monstrous speck of reflective dust, like spheres, glittering and iridescent, of frozen ash, like swirls of flaming gas towering higher than the world, all unconvincingly decreased by the illusion of the visible distance, frightful in itself, to a size no greater than that of animal eyes peering from thickets on summer nights."

Reading Elio Vittorini's Masterpiece, 'Conversations In Sicily': A Review.

I've just read the famous novel by Elio Vittorini, Conversations In Sicily. 

The words of this novel echo in the heart after they are spoken. We feel the consciousness of the narrator, Silvestro, resonate in the events of the story. This is set up very simply in the opening pages by contrasting the mice of dissatisfaction eating away at the hero's soul within him with the actual cheese he is eating outside him. Silvestro begins to awaken spiritually to the world as he travels and we wake up with him on the train. How many times has a short holiday woken up the senses and soul again? The poetry of the opening is beautiful.

And after all, the events of the trip over to Sicily are very mild events, but frightful in their way. We experience indirectly the horrors of fascism and we understand the risks the author is taking, the courage in these simple repeated words of the travellers he is travelling with.

Because when he is on the train with the two government agents, With Whiskers and Without Whiskers, we feel the reign of terror that comes with fascism. Then we contrast it against the sufferings of the malaria victim and the big Lombard, the common people and the bourgeois folk. I can most readily identify with the big Lombard, with their casual protest against political repression and their sense of material comfort and ease. The poverty of the early twentieth century Italians is alien, but the politics are not. 

Also alien to us is the sense of provicialism: these men act as if united Italy is the whole world unto itself, and the Italian man is the measure of the human: they characterize men of different cities as different human types, but the sense of the national Italian lack of unity is palpable. The center of it all, Rome, is almost never mentioned. We in the West have lived under federalism for so long that the apparatus of bureaucracy and big business, and the regular, unwelcome intrusions of government and business into everyday life are regarded as normal now. The chaos of the age immediately before us seems strange now compared to the long peace of Western 21st century life.

When Silvestro is visiting his mother, the tension and humor is exquisite. The psychodynamics of the mother, who conflates her husband with her father in her memories, and the contrast between Silvestro's memory of his childhood and his mother's memory, have an exquisite, universal, and painfully tender irony. There is no place for sentiment here, and the stories of his mother bearing children and having sex are recounted with straightfaced and respectful humor. 

The sensibility and wit of these pages with Silvestro and his mother are delicate and bold: the color is broad and operatic. I cannot think of their equal outside Stendhal's "Charterhouse of Parma", or some few pages of Balzac. 

Beside these pages, Benjamin Constant's "Adolphe" seems a juvenile imitation of a romance. Why does French literature borrow vigor from Italian literature? And why, in turn, does the more sophisticated and complex northern Italian literature seem to refer back again and again to the rude south of Italy for its vitality? Why refer back to Sicily?

The answer seems to be at least in part in the historical and geographical position of Sicily, which has been among the most hotly contested pieces of real estate throughout recorded history; consequently the Sicilian people carry inside themselves the Gordian knot of history with a kind of helpless resignation, unable to undo it nor to avoid adding to it, but yearning to cut through it in one blow and return to the life of the senses only. The epicurean ideal wars against the stoic necessity, perhaps. Perhaps, maybe, the historical vulnerability of Sicily to extreme criminality in its politics is part of the urge to cut through history and free human nature once and for all from ideas.

One reads in Thucydides the ill-fated expedition against Syracuse; in Plato's Seventh Letter, Plato's ill-fated mission to reform the kings of that city; in Plutarch, the ill-fated lives of Dion and Dionysis and the other heroes of Syracuse; in Tacitus and Polybius and Titus Livius the ill-fated riots and wars over Sicily. 

Sicily seems ill-fated! And yet the conversations of Vittorini show something different, something hidden from the eye of history, about Sicily; at the end the closing three or four images of the book - Silvestro speaking to the soldier, Silvestro returning to his mother to find an unexpected guest, Silvestro hearing what the ensemble of characters must say gathered around the extraordinary statue of the Goddess in the village - resonate like a dream, their meanings fleeting, elusive, manifold. The closing images - I cannot give them away because you must read this novel yourself - keep on opening out in the imagination about Sicily. They have potency as guiding images. I am sure when I visit Sicily they will be the images that rise before my eyes.

The novel is short. It took me four hours to read. It was an utter pleasure. I recommend it.

The Ancient Hidden Sources of the Best Self-Help Books of All Time.

The best self-helps books are obviously the ones which have lasted the test of time. But in many ways, great self-help books are just like families. They conceal a common ancestor under various new names and faces, but the hidden sources remain evident to the well-read reader.

All the best self-help books form a "family tree" of lineage. That is, families of books radiate from single ancestor books. And just as there are central lines of transmission, so also there are black sheep and rebels, those who react against the family storyline. So it is far from clear cut. However, by following the lines of influence backwards, we can discover the best and the deepest influences.

Let's look at a pair of books to illustrate this idea of families of books: Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking" and Charles Schwartz's "The Power of Thinking Big". Clearly written in opposition to one another, these two books are remarkable because they give the exact same message is the exact opposite way. 

Whereas Normal Vincent Peale acknowledges the source, Charles Schwartz conceals it. Both men cloak their words with the imprimatur of authority: they claim to both be doctors, and often quote verbal evidence of completely unknown men. But Dr Peale quotes professionals and Dr Schwartz quotes ordinary folk.

And what is the source of their ideas? Both books come directly from the Bible. As such, Peale acknowledges this directly, while Schwartz conceals it. This pattern of concealment and exposure of the source of teachings continues through the entire field. Schwartz is the rebel, hiding his books' origins behind a pragmatic facade. Peale is the conservative, simply stating what works and why and where it comes from with little interest in creating controversy about religion.

This gives us our first core self-help text:

The Bible, specifically the New Testament and Proverbs.

Other books draw on pagan philosophy. The three great schools of the ancients were and are Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Platonism. Among the stoics we have M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled, derived from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius in an effort to conceal its Christian sources. Among the epicurean we have Anthony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within. The platonic path has always been the richest lode of literature, and this trail follows up through many and great forebears:

Marsilius Ficino, a pioneer psychiatrist.

Emerson, a public speaker.

Thoreau, a backwoodsman, loner, and apologist for antisocial sentiment.

Wallace Wattles, a loner.

James Allen, a loner.

Kahlil Gibran a sybarite.

Of these few are read today in any depth, because the message has not changed substantially in 26 centuries. Yes, we realize, ideas DO create reality. Duh. So the tendency is to admire the old platonic books from afar and read the new. Which accounts for the endless profileration of books of platonic idealism.

Platonism today manifests in various trite forms of idealism, more or less anchored in practical reality, from the Law of Attraction crowd to the sunny good cheer of the Dale Carnegie "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

Many interesting attempts to conceal Christian sentiment do so by taking on a platonic facade: for example, Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" is pure Platonism in tone and diction, while remaining in content purely New Testament character-building. It is a successful modern cross-insemination of Platonism and Christianity. When an early review of Covey's book fawns over Covey himself by calling him "a modern Socrates", the reviewer has clearly over-rated this modern Plato, Stephen Covey, by confusing Plato with his teacher Socrates.

Plato's influence is also evident in the fable books, such as Who Stole My Cheese, The Richest Man in Babylon, and The One Minute Manager. Whilst they aspire to have biblical (or, worse, messianic) resonance, they end up having ironic platonic complexity, and sound far more like Plato's fables than Jesus' parables.

Aristotelian self-help begins and ends with Napoleon Hill. He analytically breaks down the categories of success into 17 master principles. Hill's astonishing analytic genius allows others to synthesis new knowledge based on his original insights. When someone says that a self-help book is a rewritten form of Napoleon Hill, they usually underestimate the cognitive flexibility and power of Hill's original analyses. 

Why is that? Because, like Aristotle, Hill lays the foundations for entirely new fields of knowledge. The PMA/Positive Mental Attitude later philosophy evolved out of Hill's "Think And Grow Rich" as a derivative (or perhaps a falling-away) from the original vision. W Clement Stone's "Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude" begins the trend, which focuses on causes and imagines that by producing causes thereby effects are also created. For example, smile and you will feel happy may be true sometimes, but not all the time, because sometimes you smile and feel miserable because a smile is an effect, not a cause. 

When Hill expresses the truth that "thoughts are things" he is not kidding around. He means they are things as in tools for producing effects. For Hill, a thought is a screwdriver. But when platonist interpreters, who idealistically suppose that everything is a thought, use Hill's philosophy, they immediately overlook Hill's ideas of cause and effect, and lose some of their scientific flexibility and strength. Because this idealistic, platonic oversimplification of Hill's philosophy is so predominant, and often mistaken for Hill's philosophy itself, it has paradoxically created a valuable market for Hill's books for many decades, because Hill's actual books do not oversimplify the matter. Hill retains the natural Aristotelian complexity of his ideas only in his early books and lectures.

From Napoleon Hill's Aristotelian sophistication we get many amazing books: Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, the stream of "art of living" books by Brian Tracey, Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield books on the various dispositions of success. What distinguishes these authors and books as Aristotelian is their emphasis on discovering the elements, energies, and realistic, (scientifically knowable insofar as ethical and metaphysical matters can be known as delineated by Aristotle) true nature of things. They are Aristotelian scientists, in the same way Francis Bacon was attempting to create in his own times and Aristotelian vision of the world. They are significant sources of clarification and power, but not of consolation. For consolation we must turn to the Christian and platonic revelations.

So far we have a significant list of Pagan and Christian influences. Let us attempt to discover the basic source list:

Epictetus

Epicurus

Aristotle

Plato

Saint Paul of Tarsus and the other New Testament authors.

The authors of the Psalms and Proverbs.

The forthright Dr Peale acknowledges his philosophical sources as Thoreau, Emerson, and William James, two platonists and a skeptic. In the "Power of Positive Thinking" Peale writes:

"It may be said that three men vitally affected the thought processes of Americans - Emerson, Thoreau, and William James. Analyse the American mind even to this late date and it is evident that the teachings of these three philosophers combined to create that particular genius of the American who is not defeated by obstacles and who accomplishes 'impossibles' with amazing efficiency.

"A fundamental doctrine of Emerson is that the human personality can be touched by Divine power and thus greatness can be released from it. William James pointed out that the greatest factor in any undertaking is one's belief about it. Thoreau told us that the secret of achievement is to hold a picture of a successful outcome in mind."

- Power of Positive Thinking, Chapter 8 page 147.

Brian Tracy tells in his famous 1000 per cent formula of a young man who complained to him that he had stopped achieving and growing. Brian asked him what he had done differently, and they discovered he had stopped listening to and reading success literature. All he had to do, Tracy implies, is to start doing that again in order to have success.

Similarly, Dr Schwartz points out that Coca-Cola re-sells us on coke every generation and every summer, because otherwise we would cool on Coke and lose interest in it; so also we must re-sell ourselves on ourselves, discovering new enthusiasm and interest as we go along. So perhaps self-help books market our interest in ourselves, and refresh and renew our enthusiasm.

One long paean to the fun of self-help is Dale Dauten's "The Max Strategy", which presents experimentation and creativity as essential human functions of work, thereby effectively seeking to integrate work and leisure. Here is Dauten's daring view:

"'...you coudl do with a thirty percent increase in your productivity and your income, right?'

"I gave the expected answer.

"'Well, change all you can. Change enough so that people notice that you're changing. Arouse curiosity. Get a reputation for being an experimenter and people will bring their ideas to you.'"

- page 79, The Max Strategy, Dale Dauten.

The entire book celebrates how much fun it is to piddle around with our lives. On pages 79-80 he points out that the wellspring of ideas is to continually inventory problems, mistakes, and every daily custom. He says if you're going to change everything, start with problems, mistakes and customary actions. Change them first.

And isn't that what self-help books encourage us to do: change stuff around and see how it works? 

Dauten suggests a three-fold inventory process: the List of Problems, the List of Duties, and the List of Mistakes. Essential we're dealing with resentments, fears, and guilt here, it seems, since problems can irritate people, duties can cause fear they might not be fulfilled, and mistakes can cause guilt. Dauten suggests inventorying old material for solutions and recombining it in new ways to come up with solutions for the problems list. For the duties, he suggests using analogy: that is, how is this like something else? And for mistakes, finally, he suggests we befriend our problems, and go into them and through them and out the other side. Mistakes, failure, catastrophe, can be openings to new things too.

Conclusion: present day success literature is the result of recombination of previous success literature with modern practices. As a result, experiments are born. By reading the success literature, one accesses this stream of experimentation and becomes inspired and encouraged to experiment oneself.

The best books, then, will be the source books read in conjunction with the modern classics. So here they are with their modern interpreters:

1. Epictetus, Enchiridion and Dialogs. 

--> Peck, The Road Less Travelled. All the thought-changing-by-willpower advocates, from the extreme stoicism of Albert Ellis and David Burns to the milquetoast stoicism of Richard Carlson ("Don't Sweat the Small Stuff"). W Clement Stone's "Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude" and other PMA material.

2. Plato, all. 

--> Carnegie "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Covey "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Fable books: Who Stole My Cheese, The Richest Man in Babylon, and The One Minute Manager, The Max Strategy, etc.

3. Aristotle, Metaphysics book I, Nichomachean Ethics book I and II, and Rhetoric book I. 

--> Napoleon Hill, all; Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics; the "art of living" books by Brian Tracey, Mark Victor Hansen, Jack Canfield books; Julie Morgenstein; David Allen, Getting Things Done.

4. Epicurus - any anthology of his sayings. Lucretius' poem, De Rerum Natura, is the best single-source gloss of his ideas. 

--> Robbins Awaken the Giant Within. Martha Beck. Robert Kiyosaki. A lot of coaching has epicurean qualities to it, with the focus on quality-of-life issues.

5. Psalms, Proverbs, and all the New Testament. 

--> Peale: "The Power of Positive Thinking"; Schwartz "The Power of Thinking Big"; Dennis Waitley.