mind2mouth's review against another edition

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informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

naomiirvin's review against another edition

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informative reflective slow-paced

3.0

Maybe a better read than listen

lkedzie's review against another edition

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3.0

I am manifesting you clicking 'like' on this review.

Mind Magic is a self-help book. It looks at positive thinking/affirmations/visualization/law of attraction/et al, heretofore manifestation, and looks at it from a scientific angle, specifically neuroscience and psychology.

The hook here is how the author calls out the proponents of it as bullshit artists, or at least as morally unglued, as the opening scene has him having manifest a life that he hates.

The author presents a good theory as to why manifestation works, which amounts to the factory settings of your brain not necessarily being those that serve the intentional part of your mind. Manifestation works to set your preconscious act in concert with your conscious towards accomplishing things.

The premise is a mild bait and switch. The lessons here are about meditation and mindfulness. That is the core skill around which all the other work is built. But it makes sense in the context of the author’s theory. You need to practice awareness in hearing the erroneous messages to find out how to turn down their volume. And if you can get what you want, are you sure that you know what you want?

The author is a gifted writer. I am envious of his turn of phrase, and how he can write a sentence that sums something up while also presenting a novel way of thinking about it. I was going to make a further joke about envying the author’s worldly success, and snarking about crying into his Châteauneuf-du-Pape over the Gatsby act the book opens with, but this is one of those cases where I will give it a pass. Yes, the stories tend towards people of enormous achievement, where I am left feeling like these people at their reported worst do better than me at my seeming best. But all reinforce the author’s theme around the importance of values and service, even when they get immodestly wealthy in the course of things.

The book is aware of the structural limitations to this sort of thing, both social and biological, and takes a additive approach. You can’t stop racism or ADHD, but you can build around them. The book makes a point around focusing on the goals and not the methods, and being open to things that might change in the process. And the book scores big on being oriented towards its functional use, both in the process-loaded meditations but also affirming the validity of ‘skipping to the end’ and only reading the how-to as opposed to why. I find it interesting that in a book where I think that the author is particularly skilled in writing, but he is less precious about it than writers of similar books, who insist that you need to understand it all to understand one part.

My first problem is that it is more sciencey than scientific. This is not a study of manifestation, but taking modern science and creating a framework for how manifestation might fit in it. Since it is psychology and neuroscience, it is more credible than if a physicist did it, and there are studies that are adjacent to it that back up things, but it lacks the sort of trenchancy that I want.

My second problem gets a little bloggy, but it feels like there is some unspoken information here. The author tells the story of the problems of building a habit of exercise, specifically after getting older and fatter and having an injury that made progress difficult. At this point my eyes perk up, and I suspect that this is something that a lot of us are nodding along with, myself included. And so I am expecting to read about how the author puts some of the ideas that he has here into practice, and interested to see how I can appropriate them.

Instead, this is the suck it up buttercup section of the book. I understand this in the macro, that sort of Do the Work, you cannot manifest your way into being an actor if you do not audition. In the micro, I am reminded of the Art of Gathering: if I could do the thing, I would not be reading a book about the thing. Or I guess that I am reading the wrong book?

Rephrased, there are points in the book where the order of operations flips. It switches from here is the way to think about doing the hard thing and becomes here is the hard thing that gets you to think the right way. I do not think that the author is incorrect in this sentiment, (or I am wiling to act on it as if), but I feel like there must be some categorization function that I do not see. Or maybe the error is going into a generalist book with specific questions.

This is a self-help book, and so the value and utility of it is what you get out of it, which is related to what you put in. (Brief aside to Hoff and Castañeda aside) there is nothing harmful here, where there could be a lot based on the scope of the content. I hope it helps you, but I also think that there a question of who it can help.

vibesonlyreader's review against another edition

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informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

3.0

quietmarki's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective relaxing tense medium-paced

3.0

kokokiero's review against another edition

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informative reflective medium-paced

3.0

saraallen24's review against another edition

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I read his previous book “Into the Magic Shop” and I felt like the direction of this book was trying too hard to expand on that book

katnipd's review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

3.75

j0098's review against another edition

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inspiring

3.0

luckylumpia's review against another edition

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informative lighthearted

3.5

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