Sometimes books can change your mind, sometimes they can tell you what you already knew, sometime they can make you question everything. And sometimes, they can do all three, and change your life as a result.
Here are 3 books I recommend without qualification, that together have helped to form (or at least self-clarify) much of my world view. Much of it was something I already knew somewhere inside me, but like magic, the act of reading it in these books concretized what I knew in my head into something solid and real. And so ....
The three books cover three aspects of life, which some might say encompass the whole of it: Mind, Body, and Spirit. Here they are:
Mind: The Culture of Fear, by Barry Glassner
Body: Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating by Walter C. Willett, P.J. Skerrett
Spirit: Everyday Zen: Love and Work by Charlotte Joko Beck
The Culture of Fear:
First, I said above that I recommend all of these without reservation, which I stand by still, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't read critically. In fact, one should read any book (including (especially) The Bible) critically, else our minds are asleep.
And so, certainly there are things here with which I disagree. For example, I find Glassner's position on guns to be vastly oversimplified, which is quite unlike the degree of scrutiny he applies to other social ills. But the core concept hypothesized and supported in the book remains strong: Life keeps getting safer and yet people are more terrified than ever. Also, people are afraid of the wrong things. They fear crime in the city rather than their drive to work. They fear the disastrous effects of illicit drug use rather than overprescription by doctors. They fear West Nile Virus or anthrax rather than global poverty and hunger, although in each case the latter is far more dangerous than the former.
These fears are pervasive and powerful and common and totally irrational. Glassner doesn't offer simple answers, as the cause of this national (and even global) mass delusion does not flow from a single source. From the media's desire for sensation to the politician's need to control, there are a large host of influences making our populace more and more insanely scared, and focusing on the wrong things. Glassner parses through these influences and examples and shatters many of our society's pet phobias from killer kids and monster moms to crack babies and the evil young black male. You'll find numerous examples of things you've always taken to be true, which were reported widely in the media, but whose corrections were buried.
Life is too short to live it in irrational fear, and this book points out the myriad ways we all do from time to time.
Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy:
There are no shortage of diet books out there. Eliminate Carbs. Eliminate Fat. Eat more Carbs. Eat more Fat. Eat only whole foods. Eat only between 11 AM and 2 PM. Eat only raw foods. Stop eating meat. Eat more meat. Perform obscure mathematical formulas to your calories. No matter what the most recent fads, the truth about health and nutrition hasn't changed all that much.
But it has changed, and this book is not so much a diet book as it is a nutrition science book. It makes and attempts to compile the latest as well as long-established research on diet, nutrition, and health. There are some surprises, but if you've followed the news or the diet hysteria closely you'll be surprised by how little has changed.
It seems new pronouncements come out every few weeks about the health benefits or drawbacks from some food or another, and sometimes they even contradict each other. But if you understand the nature of science you understand that science is not dogmatic. One study that shows benefits from drinking alcohol does not mean that it is an unalterable truth, science builds upon itself over years and many studies create a body of work. By focusing on individual results, the media misses the forest for the trees.
I'll summarize a few of the items here so you can see both the simplicity and revolutionary nature of current nutrition research.
1. When it comes to weight control, what you eat is totally irrelevant. The only that matters is how much you eat. More directly: The only way to lose weight is to take in less calories than you burn. You can reduce the calories you take in by eating less or increase the calories you burn by exercising more. But what you eat has *no* effect on weight control. If you burn 1600 calories a day and eat 1400 calories of only sweet cream butter, you will lose weight. Its a bad idea for nutrition, but that doesn't affect its weight control aspects.
2. Fat is not evil. Saturated fats and trans fats have been linked to long-term negative health effects from heart disease to cancer, but the unsaturated fats are linked to long-term positive health effects. So you should be eating unsaturated fat daily. To reiterate from number 1 above, eating more than 30% fat in your diet is not linked to health problems if it is mostly unsaturated, in fact it can be better for you, and eating more than 30% fat in your diet has *no effect* on your weight if you are controlling total calories.
3. There are definite real benefits to focusing on whole grains and foods rather than processed when eating carbohydrates. Processed carbohydrate does increase the glycemic load, resulting in insulin spikes which can play with the bodies satiation sense. But eating whole-grain carbohydrates are very good for you, and eliminating them will have negative effects on your health. In fact, eating no carbohydrates at all increases your risk for cancer and liver-failure.
The USDA food pyramid is definitely out of date, and even the new updated version owes more to agricultural interest groups than current science. But that is not a good justification to follow the parade of soul-less pricks willing to sell out peoples health to make a quick buck in the diet wars. Anyone can make a hypothesis and even put together lots of fancy sounding scientism to justify it. But that doesn't make it true. You'd be far better off to focus on the things we *do* know, and this book is the best current source to find that out right now. The upside: Its not as complicated to eat healthy as you think, its just the doing it part that's tough.
Everyday Zen: Love and Work
I toyed with the concepts of Zen as a teenager, but I had always considered it to be beyond me. "I'll get into it when I'm 60 and I have the time," I thought. "I'm too busy with earthly attachment right now."
It wasn't until later that I learned a bit more and started to understand it. I first read Alan Watts, which gave me an appreciation to look further. And that was when I found Joko.
Its hard to describe how incredible this book is. And the thing that is so incredible is its simplicity. Reading it is like discovering the truth of something you've always suspected. And its not about being a perfect emotionless monk, or attaining enlightenment. Really, ultimately it's about sanity.
We live with lots of crazy ideas in our daily lives. We think that we have real problems from anthrax and West Nile. We think that we can have the perfect body by following the latest extreme diet plan. And we think that our opinions about these things have some genuine effect on reality.
That's crazy. Its a widespread and very comfortable delusion for most people, but that doesn't make it less crazy. The universe really doesn't care what our opinions are, and reality doesn't stop and check in with our self-image, but we live our lives as though our opinions and self-image are more important than the world we actually live in. And we keep this delusion running because we want it to be true.
And we've been trained our entire lives. Its a very human tendency to use our minds to create the universe, and think that the universe we created is the real one. This book won't change that overnight. But it will help you to recognize it as it happens in your life. And it will help you to find the path away.
One personal note: Zen is not religion. It came from the study of Buddhism in China (and later Japan), and it does dovetail well with that religion, in that both presuppose some of the same things (the most important being the four noble truths). But Zen is really a process, a method for attaining human sanity that can be compatible with many different faiths. For my own part, I do not consider myself a Buddhist. I value the lessons and respect the faith, but I do not really recognize it as a part of my daily life, and am uncomfortable with its more mythological aspects. If I was forced to classify my spiritual beliefs, I would probably call myself a Zen Agnostic. I do recognize a general sense of design or intelligence in the universe, which you could call divinity, but it does not require an object of this. I'm comfortable with this design being the result of random processes. In short: I don't care, I'm just glad it exists and brought me here.
I think no matter what your background or faith, and whether or not you choose to continue on with "the practice" of Zen, you can benefit from Joko's simple and direct explanations. She does an excellent job of explaining what Zen means to you, which is to say just another person trying to get by day to day and not living in a monestary. And maybe, after reading it you'll find that true sanity is more important to you than your opinions about it.
So give these three a try. They're all pretty short, but pack a lot of power into the small page count. And maybe they'll have as strong an impact on someone else as they did for me.
