Helping Yourself.

I went through a phase once in which I examined my history, my nature, my difficulties, my place in the scheme of things etc, etc quite intensely for about five years. During that process I drifted into an affinity with what is generally described as ‘New Age Consciousness,’ and one exposition of that movement was an annual event called the Body, Mind and Spirit Festival.

I made enquiries and obtained some promotional literature. It had lots of glossy photos in it - marketing pictures obviously taken by experienced advertising photographers. And the pictures concentrated predominantly on two things: merchandise and men in suits. It didn’t feel right, and so I never attended one.

Another exposition of the New Age movement has been the proliferation of ‘self-help’ books. I’ve read quite a few of them, and none of them did any good whatsoever. They were mostly full of overly-simplistic and often spurious advice, dragged out with lots of repetition in order to be big enough to command a commercial price. And recently I had some dealings with a publisher which specialises in self-help books. I came to the conclusion that the genre really is full of the self-help principle – publishers and authors helping themselves to nice incomes on the backs of the gullible. So now I’ve decided that real self-help is about:

a) Being totally honest with yourself about what your problems are.

b) Working to change the things you dislike if you have the strength and means to do so.

c) Accepting the things you can’t change and learning to live with them.

Maybe it isn’t always quite that simple, but it’s what works best for me; and it’s a lot more efficacious than relying on the fatuous advice of some get-rich-quick author who has managed to contrive a new ‘theory.’ It’s cheaper, too.