Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Writing a Self-Help Book

For those of you who wish to market a new self help book on "the new Secret" of the "law of attraction" I hope you read these thoughts before you go ahead. There are many books out there, even more than I can imagine, written by people who have seen "the secret" or "the bleep" and think they have a unique insight to teach others techniques for personal growth.
I give a lot of seminars, and I personally don't teach people techniques for realizing their potentials and other such ideas as I have found that they simply don't work and are in their own way spiritual "diet books" which may work for a while but in the end fail. Spiritual techniques advocated by people who have never made a serious study of spiritual teaching or base their books on quantum physics principles without studying the subject at length and who really don't know enough to teach others techniques based upon these deeper "secrets" make me really wonder why such people write such books other than the obvious one to make some money. Does your book do other than that? Or are you just another person trying their own hand at writing another imitation "think and grow rich diet book"?
It appears to me that any author who does not understand the quantum field and is only quoting what has been written by others who do understand it and have written for others from the point of view of knowledge, will create a lot of noise and little light. Should your book appear to be written from such a point of view, I would rethink it. Come from your own experience. For example are you a financially successful business person? A book which explains how you made it would be good, but a book advocating spiritual quantum physics techniques based on the quantum field by someone who has no such background in quantum field theory rings a little false to me.
A quantum field consciousness-spirituality and growth book may sound wonderful but it is possibly misleading if you think that this field can give you anything you desire.. First of all the quantum field is not really an energy field and secondly consciousness can not exert a force. Nor is consciousness energy. Consciousness and energy are not the same things at all. Thirdly if everyone could just tune into this hypothetical field and just by doing so create anything they wanted to create, the world would be in a worst mess than it is right now.
For example suppose my neighbor wanted to tune in and create a fence between our two houses higher than my window or have a million dollars appear in his bank account without taking appropriate actions to do so. Innocent enough? But if his wish did create such a fence and the next instant a fence were to appear between our houses or workmen came out and erected one I would lose my view of the mountains. Then I would have to knock down his fence or make a fence low enough to see the mountains and my neighbor would be pissed off at me and on and on our little wish-duel would go. If he just wished for a million bucks to magically appear in his account without appropriate actions, maybe it would appear, but if it did in my account, I would suspect the bank had made a serious error and that someone else was out a million bucks. If I didn't care and only wanted my selfish desires satisfied, the world again would be worse off. Do you get my point here?
The real quantum field has such checks and balances and in fact when it creates from nothing a particle of matter it also creates a particle of antimatter and they cancel each other out in a very short instance. Hence just wishing for things from this field does not make it so.
Our universe works and things are always balancing each other to make it work--such are the laws of nature.
Hence in a world where "wishes were horses" would simply not work. Your creation could very well by an other's annihilation. Let me put this another way.
Reading a self-help book written by someone who really doesn't understand the nature of reality is like listening to someone play a violin who watched a great master play a violin in a silent movie and decided to play for real by just imitating what she or he saw. Undoubtedly it would sound like something near to what the master was playing, but it would give many false notes. Is your book ringing out false notes? Such books appear to me to be like that. Oh by the way, I get a lot of requests to blurb such books, nearly one a day so the field may be getting glutted.