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| Excerpts
From The Preface |
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| The aim of Help! is
to critique a sinister class
of trendy books that rears its
ugly head time and again. In
recent months, this class has
gained popularity through the
much-ballyhooed The
Secret by Rhonda Byrne.
However, the content of this
new mental atrocity has roots
going back a long time ago. In
the interests of brevity, the
present book focuses on the works
of three masters of the game:
Dr. Deepak Chopra and to a lesser,
but relevant extent the best-selling
authors of The
Tao of Physics and The Road Less
Traveled, Dr. Fritjof
Capra and Dr. Scott Peck, respectively. |
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| A
Jeopardy type challenge! |
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| Byrne and Chopra
are the main targets. In particular,
for reasons that will become
evident, Chopra is singled out
throughout because he is an amalgamation
of Capra and Peck, and he is
also the unacknowledged synthesis
by which Rhonda Byrne shouts
her secret. We will focus on
two of Chopra's most famous (or
infamous) books: Ageless
Body, Timeless Mind and The Seven
Spiritual Laws of Success.
Where appropriate, scintillating
connections to Byrne's recent
travesty are posited, much like
the answer in Jeopardy is
resolved by a question. What
category you ask? Ah! That's
the secret waiting to be exposed. |
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| In the spirit of all
this self-help, one segment of this book
issues
the following challenge to the reader.
Sentences from Chopra and Byrne's books
are listed without attribution, and you
will be asked to match them to the correct
author. Additionally, a slightly different
challenge is posed to the two authors themselves
and their followers: I dare them to beat
the best score of any reader to the above-mentioned
challenge! Interestingly, Byrne never acknowledges
Chopra. Well done, Grasshopper, for Master
fails to acknowledge Capra and Peck. Chopra
and Byrne are to this culture what Michael
Jackson and Britney Spears are to pop music
culture. To deflate the student, it is
necessary and sufficient to puncture the
master. |
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| Choprasin and Choprasinners |
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| Some definitions and abbreviations are in order at the outset. Deepak Chopra shall be called DC; his book Ageless
Body, Timeless Mind shall be referred to as a "footnote" because, as will emerge later, its 344-page contents could be debunked via a single footnote. Yarns are a key weapon in DC's arsenal; I will label these Choprantics, which he uses to sway his followers (Choprasinners) and to promote his philosophy (Choprasin). |
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| Anecdotes are critical in self-help books because they deflect attention or snap readers out of sheer boredom. Help! also employs anecdotes to drive home key points, mainly in the form of good-natured humor. My anecdotes are given names so that the reader may quickly recall the details if they are cross-referenced. |
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| The style of argument in certain parts of this book is intentionally dismissive, because Ms. Rhonda Byrne and Dr. Deepak Chopra are consistently flippant and conceited. The severity with which I rap them on the knuckles depends on the audacity of their claims, or, as is more often the case, when they display a toad-like ability to leap from premise to conclusion with nothing in between to assist them in such a reptilian flight. |
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| Choprasin = Zero |
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| The chapter numbers in this book progress through -1, 0, +1, and so forth. Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell's quote at the start of chapter -1 is sufficient to demystify much of self-help literature. But if you engaged Russell's wisdom more leisurely, as I have done Help! in chapters 1 through 7, you would eventually encounter chapter 0. At times, the number zero connotes "useless," "failure," "nada," or "zip." Deepak Chopra's "quantum healing" paradigm is useless and is therefore described and critiqued in chapter 0. Since the followers of Byrne and Chopra are mesmerized by bizarre interpretations of scientific ideas, these self-helpers might appreciate this newer math to understand the logic behind my chapter numbering: chapter -1 + chapters 1 through 7 = chapter 0. This equation is the kernel of this book. Chapter -1 presents a concise description of the entire book. The details are presented in chapters 1 through 7. Together, they add up to the "zero" ideas to be found in most self-help literature; this is the essence of chapter 0. |
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| Some notes: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success will be referred to as The Seven Laws, The Road Less Traveled as The Road , and The Tao of Physics as The Tao. |
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| In this book, the words i-puke and i-crap should be interpreted as intellectual-puke, and intellectual-crap, respectively. This is in line with our penchant for words like iPod, iPhone, etc. |
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| And so, away we go on what I hope is an informative and enjoyable experience for you. |
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