These days I am often asked the question "so what are you reading at the moment?". It's a question that often gets asked of me when I get into conversation with people about books, especially when I mention that I see myself as a bit of a writer and that I have a fiction novel in the works. Truth be told, in keeping with my relentless efforts to challenge myself over the last year and a half or so the majority of my reading hasn't really been in the area of fiction. In fact I've been suffering a bit of a mental overload from studying all manner of non-fiction "how to" books. Books about attraction, self improvement and indeed a bit of card magic too.
It's not that I feel any need to maintain secrecy that these are the food that my brain is demanding these days, but I do feel in a way that saying that I am reading this stuff communicates a feeling of inadequacy so I tend not to advertise it, at least when I'm not around people who are also passionate about their own personal journey. There's no drama or high emotion to this sort of non-fiction either.
Also, I'm told that saying to your date that you're enjoying reading "The Game" isn't going to go down well.
The Game is a good read though, especially the ever-forgotten ending; I recommend it.
In any case my usual answer has been that I'm reading "Time to depart" by Lindsey Davis, one of the Falco detective novels, and then I just hope that they don't ask me how the story is progressing as the bookmark hasn't moved in the last 18 months.
In the last week though I have read an outstanding book that fits into both the category of self help and fiction. It's called The Magician's Way, written by a guy called William Whitecloud, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It was also a bit of a new experience for me because it was the first book I have read on an iPad, an experience I was very skeptical about but I quickly warmed to. It's the same device I am writing this blog post on, and I have to say I'm a big fan.
The book is set in the present day, I think in Australia although it's never placed specifically, and it follows the journey of a man who is having trouble with his job and his marriage in his journey to discover magic, magic not being some mystical supernatural force, but rather a life attitude that can be used to find abundance and happiness in ones life. The details are kept reasonably ambiguous about many things within the book and it is clear that the main protagonist is intended mostly as a vessel through which the author can communicate a set of life principles, which are referred to in the book as laws of magic.
I am very much taken by the idea that magic really is a real force in the world, but that anybody who looks to the metaphysical is looking in the wrong place. No, magic is much more elusive, and yet far more potent. I find myself thinking back to the first few weeks of when I discovered hypnosis, when the boundaries of what I thought was actually possible seeme to melt in front of me. Indeed, I had a similar experience when I started to learn about attraction. In both cases I dared to do things that it had never even occurred to me to do before and amazing things happened.
And what's more, learning magic for a specific purpose has the interesting effect that it spills out into other areas of your life. You start to develop new habits, the world changes, and it becomes difficult to recognise who you were even a year before.
The principles, such as using your focus to create your reality, are all very potent in their own right. For example, if you focus on what your are trying to achieve, your target, you are far more likely to have success than if you instead apply your focus to the goal of not failing.
I tried exercising this principle a couple of days ago when I went out for a ride on my mountain bike. There's a track that I occasionally ride on that features quite deep ruts. These ruts are too deep to cycle in because my pedals hit the sides, so the only way to ride the path is to use the narrow bit of earth in between the ruts. It's quite a psycologically difficult situation to cycle in because it leaves a very narrow path to ride, you feel like you're very high above the ground and putting down your foot isn't going to be easy if you start to topple. So I found the experience of cycling along trying not to fall down one of the ruts in the past has been a fraught one. It could not have been more different from this time, when I mentally ignored the presence of the ruts and instead focused all of my intention on the line that I wanted to cycle. Magic!
The example the book uses, in the first chapter in fact, is a golf lesson. I can relate to a lot of it, especially as I did archery when I was still at university, another sport that depends on good technique, but for which becoming consciously distracted by technique can seriously compromise performance. I of course had a lot of this "focus on the the target and visualise" blah blah when I was being coached, but it wasn't until I read this book that I think I really started to understand what it's all about.
Incidentally, guess what keeps popping back into my mind when I'm trying to go into a hypnotic trance? Yup, I keep trying not to come back up, and guess what happens. I think there's a lot of mileage in this principle for hypnosis too.
Magicians are portrayed in the book as those who not only subscribe to the principles, but as those who differentiate themselves from the majority of individuals by not settling, rather constantly pushing themselves to follow a journey. One of the characters in the book refers to life as a journey to a magnificent palace, but that most people find a liveable hovel by the wayside and are content to make do. It's an analogy I can definitely relate to.
And that's the thing about The Magician's Way. It has this way of reaching inside of you and describing, by metaphor, thoughts and feelings that you may always have had but may never have admitted to anyone, or even yourself, perhaps constructs that are common to most people. Then it addresses them.
So I must recommend Whitecloud's book, it is one of the best reads I have ever come across.
On the day I finished The Magician's Way, reading about a man becoming a modern day magician, I had my own bizarre magical moment. I was stopped in the supermarket by one of my fellow shoppers with the words "Hey magician man!". It turned out this guy had been present when I performed some magic tricks to a group of people on a train, but bizarrely our conversation led me to discover that he actually works in the same Industry as me, and we swapped business cards. Magic indeed.
4 comments:
Hmm sounds like a worthwhile book to read.
So what else have you read about attraction that was good?
Everything by David DeAngelo is a good starting point. There's a lot of material out there. The more PUA-oriented stuff is good if you want to understand the principles, but my advice is to stay away from their underlying philosophy.
This is probably an entire post in itself but I would say the most valuable lesson I have learned is that it's a bad idea to see attraction as a bunch of tricks that can be used to manipulate a situation to get what you want, be that phone numbers, kissing, sex, etc. Instead seek to become more attractive so that you can make the women around you feel really good, and do so in the knowledge that if you give yourself as a gift in such a way there will be plenty of those women who will want you.
Yeah... There's a whole post here.
Looking forward to enjoying that post for sure.
Yeah, one definitely finds that you really have no choice but to transform yourself quite a bit if you want to go beyond just dishing out canned material and using tricks.
And of course to make people feel wonderful there is nothing like "going first" (if Igor L ever does a course on attraction/seduction that will be something! or so I hope, but a whole lot of H+ definitely helps in any case) and using language to elicit a whole spectrum of emotions in another person. I've found JD Fuentes'es stuff to be pretty insightful, he explains the mechanics of what many of the "gurus" tell people to do without really explaining it.
Bordering on that is some of the erotic hypnosis material out there like Major Mark's for example, but that's a whole other topic.
As for the underlying philosophy, I think some of the people who purport to subscribe to it really don't, but they need to sell their stuff and so they just go with what the market out there demands. That's why I asked what you thought was really good as opposed to just the mainstream stuff.
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