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E-mail StoryHerb Benham: Self-helping my way out of the self-help library
| Friday, May 16 2008 11:24 AM
Last Updated: Monday, May 19 2008 10:52 AM
You know you are improving when the self-help books you’ve been going through like a beaver through a cord of wood suddenly seem ridiculous.
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You go from yellow-penning every third paragraph of Eckhart Tolle to watching the Lakers/Utah playoff series, looking forward to “Desperate Housewives,” and catching up on back issues of Us Magazine.
The self-help books follow a reassuringly familiar pattern. In the first 10 pages, the author talks about his or her meltdown, the event that made the writing of the book possible.
Meltdowns include horrendous divorces, custody battles, job losses, heart attacks, brushes with personal danger or the death of an animal, most likely a cat.
The reader, who has had one of the aforementioned meltdowns, is hooked.
“That’s it. That’s me. How did they know?”
Heretofore, it had seemed as if your situation was not only unique but perhaps even revolutionary. It was one-of-a-kind. The reader is pleased to find out there are shelves of books on the subject.
After recounting the meltdown, the author goes to India. When Carlos Castaneda was writing “The Teachings of Don Juan,” pilgrims traveled to Mexico but that was only because the peyote was better and the mushrooms packed an extra psychedelic wallop.
Castaneda, it turned out, made most of it up, which didn’t make his books any less entertaining.
These days it’s India — even better, the Himalayas, where the author and soon-to-be entrepreneur tracks down a holy man who has never seen a white man but because he is so impressed with the effort the seeker has made, reveals the meaning of life.
“I have only one thing to ask of you,” the holy man says to the white man. “Go back to your country and write a best-selling book which will make you millions in book sales, lecture fees and three-day seminars.”
After giving his final instructions, the holy man either dies or gets eaten by a cave bear.
The seeker, whose previous job was either a chiropractor, a lawyer or somebody selling farm equipment, then boards an airplane, shaves his head and adopts a new name. Instead of Harry Johnson, he is now Ardracharmambaravritah — meaning clothed in the skin of an elephant.
The last half of the book details a series of exercises that has the reader either placing his attention on his right knee, the stop sign at the end of the block or a flower from his garden, preferably a rose sparkling with morning dew.
I knew I had hit the wall when I started reading “Passages” by Gail Sheehy, which was recommended by a reader and is a classic in the meltdown genre.
I made it through 40 pages learning about my “inner custodian,” the “deferred achiever,” and the “male climacteric.” Could I crawl my way through another 536 pages of this in order to reach my “Refreshed 50s?”
No, I couldn’t. It’s enough to know that people go through changes; I don’t have to know what every one is. It appears that I’m right on schedule.
I put the book down for a mystery by T. Jefferson Parker where a girl gets her head chopped off. I’m not sure what it was, but it cheered me right up.
Opinions expressed are those of Herb Benham, not The Californian. Call him at 395-7279 or e-mail him at hbenham@bakersfield.com.