Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I appreciate a good book. And I'm intrigued by books influenced from Buddhism. But mostly in terms of both seeing a transmission of the dharma AND the ability to break out of standard high mental Buddhist filters into the full field of compassion. For me, this book, through being of wide scope and marked intellectual prowess, did not meet the ability to break out of Buddhist mentalism. (I highly recommend not only reading the book but listening to the author speak in interviews. Tube of you has some by red ice and other sources. You should listen to the authors live mental processing to get a clearer and broader feel for where this person is coming from.) First, the author has appropriated a term, originally Wendigo, from the Algonquin peoples. (You can find The Windigo in the Material World. Robert A. Brightman on JStor. Windigo were giants and a person who was very bad could become one.) More often than not white folks get into trouble appropriating native mythology by not being part of the culture and making assumptions that are not necessarily accurate or justified. The author has not indicated that he has any native person as a teacher or authority who has taught him the context of Windigo/Wetiko. Without this culture immersion and understanding you get all kinds of strange interpretations of native concepts. At the worst 'cultural lifting' is a kind of cultural theft. But at the least, the concepts presented in this book should NOT be accepted at face value as being authentic native thoughts or ideas. Without such cultural authenticity we are left with the greater possibility that many of the specific concepts and psychic details in this book are of primarily of the authors own invention. This can be said because no other standard view of reality, including Buddhism, can be seen as being purely transmitted in this writing. This book is an amalgamation of many concepts and is the authors own thesis. Creation of amalgamation is not always transmission of truth. The book is way too long. How many times do we need to repeat a concept over and over and over. Most folks will get it the first time. So in terms of word count this book is about 1.5x to 2x too much. It could have been half the size. Yes, got that, move on please. Style-wise, beyond the mental chatter (punningly ironic for a Buddhist work), there is way too much slippage between prose/lecture and personal experience webbed together. It's like the book could not decide what kind of book it wanted to be. Verbose-wise, I feel this approach is like using a hammer in terms of trying to exhaust all possible other conclusions a reader may achieve and compel the reader to surrender to what the author is saying. It's almost like I felt the author would not let me go through without intentional repetition and his absolute certainty of his views. I felt assailed and nearly assaulted by the volume of words and the scope of mental hammering going on. It's almost like telling someone that they will reaching nirvana if they only sip a little more coffee, a little more, now a little more. Many times the author would wander off into topics from The Wizard of Oz to economics to 'Vampire Squids' in order to pull in the smallest points. It's almost like you want to teach a kid to swim and you think the best thing to do is to keep pushing their head underwater. It's just overwhelming how far afield and off topic this book goes. And the really ironic thing is that the author KNOWS that trying to kill Wetiko empowers it because we are denying part of ourselves. BUT the author cannot stop killing Wetiko in a very subtle way in how he continually tracks it and keeps throwing these mental spears around. There are aspects of this teaching that hit me as being a bit heyoka (sacred clown or trickster). I also have to object to the level of power that the author attributes to corporatism and it's control of governments and all things. Yes, I agree that we need to look at 'shadow' or truth, etc, and not stay in denial or ignorance. The authors previous book on GWB also goes into these themes of the global 'evil'. However, I do not agree about giving the shadow so much absolute power. As these aberrations are all shadows, it is NOT helpful to concretize them into manifest powers beyond our control. In the externalization of this 'war on consciousness' (being an artifact of Wetiko) this actually contributes to both helplessness and a sense of at least potential inevitability itself. I would argue as strongly, that what we are dealing with is not 'evil' and 'dark' as an intentionality or 'beast' as the author likes to use. And the author knows this and says it. The author says don't give the shadow power and yet keeps going back to how powerful it is. The book is stuck in a loop and the volume of words partly hide this fact of being stuck, of selling both viewpoints and really offer nothing but over-cooked mental concepts. What we are dealing with an un-harmonized vibration that has been (potentially) introduced artificially to our world. You don't heal and un-harmonized vibration by thinking that exposing and overcoming it are the way to actually heal and transform it. For that a good bit of re-singing and re-harmonizing are required. I did not get much sense of those forms of mastery to approach this vibratory and spiritual condition. Wetiko is treated very much as a run away mouse and that the mouse trap is in being mentally smart enough to overcome it. That approach is ill fitting and will also produce more un-harmonic vibrations. The solution given in this book is incomplete and feeds ones mental side in thinking that if you understand the authors mental, concepts somehow you have arrived at your own Eureka! For all these overdone approaches (verbosity, repetition, certainty, self-analysis), I also have to raise both a Buddhist and Taoist flavored objections. First, from the Buddhist view I would just say in response 'It ain't necessarily so'. I disagree with the approach of having to feel like your Wetiko is some kind of mouse and you have to force yourself to look in the mirror until it has no outlet, no chance. These seems to be, ironically, almost a sense of subtle violence itself in how the concept is hounded in the book. I often felt the author no longer cared for the experience of the reader and was on some grand mission and was darned to get there driving spikes into the heart of any possible alternate conclusion or view to exorcise/expose that damned Wetiko thing. In other words, for all the grand spaciousness of neo-Buddhist approaches such as Dzogchen, I felt none of that invitation to really breath freely in this book. This book ultimately becomes a highly engineered paradox. We don't need an anti-virus solution to a virus (modes of conflict again). Maybe some additional reflection on the Heart Sutra would be helpful here. Heart Sutra shows the contrast of seeming paradoxes but does not have the goal of overwhelming the reader, or of defeating another, but of reaching states of realization that are not purely mental as this book is to me. Being under the 'spell' of Wetiko (according to the author) is a form of self-deception. But thinking we are self-deceived is also a form of self-deception. We cannot be isolated from our true nature. These circular references in the book are just a higher level of self-deception. The reverberations of the basic approach in this book are the same 'Wetiko' conundrum as the author claims exist in the entire world dream. Mara does not need to be defeated. Mara is not secretly an allie. Mara does not exist. The author could never cross into this last bit of realization and rise above mental gymnastics. The 6th Zen patriarch Huineng has a clearer message here. "There is no Bodhi tree, No mirror standing bright. If everything is void; Where can dust alight?" Which brings me to my objection to the book in/from the Taoist sensibilities. Lao Tzu basically said it is better to leave things undone under heaven in order to achieve peace on earth. In other words, if we encounter something about ourselves or other that makes us uncomfortable we just watch and observe before deciding if an action if warranted. We allow space. I did not experience much of that in this book. There was no opportunity for watching to access whether Wetiko is real, whether it is a mental construct, or even whether all this mental fluff is appropriate for what, to me, is a collective spiritual malady. Nope, it's in your face throughout the entire book, Wetiko is that thing which we must deal with and according to how the author says we should. And this iron net of mental reasoning presented in the book leaves no chance for other conclusions. No space. No chance to just observe. Seriously, a book of 100 pages could have accomplished the goals of this book in a more user-friendly fashion. I really don't think that taking the high brow intellectual approach is the best remedy for deeply rooted psycho-spiritual problems. Those are the domain of the shaman and generally of years of personal practice. And I'm completely serious about this point. Deep problems are the realm of shamans and harmonizers, not mentalizers. I really object to the concept that this book is some kind of magical pill to help open peoples eyes. The ability to understand and survive the onslaught of advanced concepts and wide range of topics is not something to be proud of. Reading something that you think is smart and wonderful does not mean it really did anything for you. And that, to me, is the hidden and subtle deception of this book itself. Overall this book, taking a psychological approach to what is arguably a spiritual and energetic problem, is the wrong medicine for the task. Mental realization alone is rarely a solution to a spiritual problem. Our society has cut itself off from it's heart and has externalized meaning. The energetic product of that dis-attunement is Wetiko. And just understanding that mentally solves little. Rather than focusing on what we want to lesson, we should be focusing on what we want to nurture. This books focuses heavily on the exposing and killing of something (even though the author knows and says to not do that). But this thesis not really fully address the solutions that begin with the breath and heart of each human being. Lastly, I don't think the cover of this book is very nice. Yes, I get the point about the shadow and facing what is not pleasant. But the cover is just silly. So if you like hard reads and are interested in the shadow, ego, and all that, then you will probably like this book. But this book is no substitute for your own inner work. And I really doubt seriously that anyone already on the path of that work would really miss not having read this book. If you want a much clearer and shorter discussion of shadow processing then check Debbie Ford. She shares a clear message and is not mentally exhausting.