Going in to read this book, I was really excited to read it and thought I would enjoy it. Which I enjoyed the beginning, but as I got more into the book, it continued to lose me and I started drifting from the book. You have to be committed to reading this book and you have to take in in weeks because of the material and reflecting on it. It was a good book for someone who needs a mental break for a while, but not for me personally.

[Note:  This book was provided free of charge by Books Go Social/Net Gallery.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

This book is not very good.  While it is at least coherent on the sentence level, this is a book that is incoherent on the larger level and, even worse, the sort of book that seeks to indoctrinate its readers in a form of New Age spirituality that they are not even honest even to correctly label.  An example of the high level contradictions of this book is the fact that early in the book the authors talk about how at one point the authors talk about the past determining today and in a later part of the book the authors talk about how today does not rely on the past.  Which is it?  It is at least impressive in a fashion that the authors manage to deal with the monism of New Age thought by appealing to a misreading of the Bible as well an appeal to behaviorist psychology rather than to the New Age beliefs about karmic debt and energy [1] that lie under the surface of this book.  This book intends on leaving its reader wanting more but ends up making the sound reader want a lot less.

The contents of this mercifully short book are divided into six short weekly exercises, making this book a somewhat perverse form of devotional of the kind that is popular among Christian writers.  The first part of the book discusses how the person who wishes to achieve the reptilian enlightenment of the writers has to prepare themselves by coming to terms with the futility of life as it is lived by most people.  After that the authors talk about the way that people are supposedly a tabula rasa determined by their childhood and upbringing and societal context.  The authors then ask what is real by appealing, no joke, to quotes from the Matrix.  A diatribe against the belief of a higher power outside of the self follows that questions the justice of the way that God has designed this world, after which the authors try to make a decisive break between the present and the burden of the past by encouraging the reader to take absolute responsibility for themselves and their response to the trials of life.  After an appeal that life should be simple and easy the authors end on a cliffhanger that encourages the reader to go to their website and become part of the elitist community exploring other supposed truths that the authors have to offer the reader.

At the heart of this book is the problem of monism.  The authors propose to deal with the problem of stress and pressure and the dysfunction of life by cutting oneself off of all sense of concern or obligation for others and a devotion merely to one's own thoughts and wishes and creating a self-absorbed world of self-idolatry that views oneself and one's own god and one's own authority.  The authors try to present this as an elite way for the 1% as opposed to the 99% of humanity that struggles through life doing the best they can and believing in a higher power that will make everything right in the end.  The way that they propose, though, makes one a sociopath concerned only for the self and simply using other people for one's own benefit.  The impoverishment that results from using only one's reptilian brain does not make one elite, it makes one a danger to humanity and someone to be avoided.  This book somehow manages to adopt the approach of New Age self help and end up even worse than most books of that kind, which is an impressive achievement but not the sort of achievement I would wish upon anyone else.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013/12/20/book-review-christianty-karma-and-reincarnation/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/09/17/book-review-money-consciousness/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017/07/28/book-review-the-path-to-meaning/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016/11/30/book-review-the-four-agreements/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016/06/11/book-review-the-art-of-raising-children/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016/05/12/book-review-worldview-2026/

This is a self-help book that does not tell readers “how tos,” it shows them and more importantly “reminds” them what life is about. The book is divided into six weeks and that is how it is supposed to be read. It is the authors’ goal that the readers should realize the answers in a slow and easy manner. Most of us will probably go through the book in less than a week, it is a very short book, but to really make the most of it readers must take their time and go easy.

Uh, nope. Didn’t like the tone or set up for this book. In spite of the title, the book requires strict following of instruction and the punititive and preachy tone did not echo the feel of the title or blurb. Needless to say, I made my life easier by not reading this in its entirety.