Awaken the Power Within You
The sell-help culture in the modern developed countries around the world has become a pervasive social system. Taken as an example North America alone, this issue has become a staggering $12 billion industry. There are over 300,000 books available on Amazon.com in the category of “self-help.” Given this astounding amount of literature, how can one possibly decide where to look for an authentic self-help book? We are becoming quick-fix societies. Nowhere is this more apparent than in regards to individuals flocking to programs seeking shortcuts in the hope of achieving rapid results. It is frequently seen many proponents of self-help, including advocates of positive thinking, mind/faith healing and other fictitious techniques with the purpose to help others; when they real purpose is fattening their bank account.
Self-help is used by some as a business enterprise. No wonder there are many bestselling books in the self-help industry that promise many wonders in a short period of time such as Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, and many others.
The purpose of the book Awaken the Power Within is precisely to analyze the accuracy of self-help and positive-thinking claims and to explore what works, what doesn’t, and why.
Most of the time, people assume to be true the recommendations given in most of these books, audio-books, and seminars. Then, when the material bought does not deliver the benefits promised, they blame themselves and think that there is something wrong with them; thus their effects can be detrimental. Consequently, the self-help programs that are supposedly harmless can do more harm than good and may also reflect the social problems now plaguing our modern society.
This problem has been addressed by many authors, such as investigative journalist Steve Salerno, who wrote a book titled SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. As the title of the book suggests, inauthentic self-help culture can result in clients victimizing themselves. Motivational speakers organize seminars and workshops, where they sell their books, audio-books, CDs, etc., charging seminar fees ranging from $500 to several thousand dollars in the case of Tony Robbins. The same can be said regarding some Christian motivational speakers who use their popularity and their church platforms to indirectly promote their books and audiotapes. Furthermore, Salerno pointed out that market surveys revealed "the most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months." Since the person did not find what he/she was looking for, he/she kept searching for another book, audio book, or CD, or they enroll in future seminars and workshops in an endless search for self-help.
Those who have access to mass communication such as TV and radio have tremendous power to influence naïve and uninformed people. The self-help industry is infested by life coaches but not by authentic self-help providers.
Thus, self-help gurus promote self-victimization; that is, they advocate the idea that people have problems in adulthood because they had been victimized in early childhood. The theory is that their inner child has been traumatized by past events, which have become negative "tapes" that replay over and over in their subconscious minds. They then tell people that redemption comes through empowering themselves with new "life scripts," which are their books, CDs, DVDs, seminars or workshops. The real issue is these “gurus” are selling themselves as the healers and projecting their own shortcomings on their clients. The gimmicks used to sell self-help material and workshops may provide people with temporary relief but this does not last much. They offer only a momentary boost of inspiration that fades away after a few weeks, turning buyers into repeat customers.
Thus, the main goal of this book is to raise awareness about the modern “snake oil” peddlers who take advantage of gullible people. Again, they sell the idea of victimization; once the client accepts this idea, the next step is to propose the idea of empowerment with their techniques. Someone accurately posited the inquiry: Why is it called "self-help" if one has to pay for it?
In this environment, someone has to have the courage to clear the air and put things into realistic perspective. Millions of people are wasting time, money, and energy buying ineffective and detrimental systems.
Nevertheless, we can’t throw the baby out with the bath water; it is imperative that we rescue authentic self-help from the business mindset. Contrary to critics who blithely dismiss self-help methods, or New Age gurus who sell them as miracles, the book Awaken the Power Within explores the conditions under which self-help is authentic and effective.
There is a pattern of powerlessness among common people. From early childhood, we have been indoctrinated with false ideas and beliefs about our true nature as self-sufficient human beings. We took the beliefs of our parents, grandparents, mass media, and the so-called “conventional wisdom” for granted because we did not know better, and with time, they became part of our belief systems. This set of ideas and beliefs is generally oriented to make us feel powerless and victims of circumstances. It seems that there is a huge conspiracy to inflict a sense of powerlessness on humans. Moreover, some religious organizations create a sense of guilt by making us believe that we need them to be saved.
The mass media is basically oriented to manipulate and domesticate ordinary people, creating superficial and unnecessary needs. Most people’s behaviors are based upon the actions, decisions, and opinions of others. Under this scenario come false New Age “gurus,” some Protestant religious leaders, and sensationalistic and fake self-help authors to take advantage of naïve people to financially profit from them. They offer a panacea or “snake oil” to solve all humans’ problems under the name of self-help. They demand that people uncritically believe in them or in their products or services.
The book clarifies the concept of “self-help” as a mental discipline which some abuse for the sake of entrepreneurship. It surveys the main assumptions of inauthentic self-help culture that keeps humans enslaved in a herd mentality and demonstrates that all the power dwells in the individual and only in him or her. Thus, the purposes of the book Awaken the Power Within are as follows:
- To raise awareness about modern “snake oil” peddlers who take advantage of gullible people for financially benefit.
- To elucidate manipulation with false ideas through TV, radio, and newspapers
- To analyze the pseudo self-help movement in America and discuss what makes it a “cotton candy dream.”
- To empower people to rely on themselves and their inner strength for guidance.
- To review the history of the New Thought movement and its offshoots.
- To make sense of positive thinking
- To explain how intentions and the power of assumption play active roles in shaping the future
- To explain the nature of reality, consciousness, and awareness.
To sum up, this is the message of the book in one paragraph: Its goal is to raise awareness about the gimmicks of inauthentic self-help entrepreneurs and empower people in their search for true sources of help. Humans have the inner capacity to confront any difficult circumstances in life; there is no need for external intervention. People are responsible for creating their own reality with their thoughts and beliefs, and they are the only ones who can take back their power and correct whatever is not working for them. The book offers a deeper perspective on the culture of self-help and self-improvement and empowers us to rely on our inner voice as source of motivation for authentic self-empowerment and self-reliance.
Albert Amao Soria, Ph.D.
www.amazon.com/author/amao
Email: stgermain777@gmail.com
Foreword by Mitch Horowitz
Awaken the Power Within
This is one of the most illuminating and unconventional books about self-help that you will ever read. Author Albert Amao eludes either/or thinking on nearly every page. He rejects the false and intellectually withering choice of “take it or leave it,” which often clouds our political, cultural, and social dialogues.
Rather, Albert examines the question of what really works in self-help, at once rejecting overdone promises that emanate from certain quarters of the field (and he names them), while at the same time eschewing the practice of lumping together all self-help under the overused label of “snake oil,” as do many academic and journalistic critics. Rather, Albert writes from three fresh and original points of view:
1) As an author, Albert has personally experimented with the therapeutic philosophies he critiques in this book. This gives him rare insight into the agencies and pitfalls they present. Born into an impoverished urban family in Peru, Albert movingly writes of how his life took an unexpected and fruitful path because he had access to self-help literature as a boy. Specifically, he read works of New Thought, which deals with the question of mind causation.
2) He is deeply sympathetic to the needs and wishes of the individual self-help reader—he does not mock, distance, or place himself above the “motivation junkie” as Barbara Ehrenreich and other critics sometimes term the dedicated seeker. Rather, in understanding the drive and dignity of the therapeutic and spiritual inquirer, Albert can clearly evaluate, as a sociologist and critic, what programs are promising (such as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich), and what modalities rest on oversold claims, and are bound to leave readers dejected and confused.
3) Finally, Albert writes as a dedicated, lifelong spiritual seeker. He is deeply serious not only about conventional self-help philosophies, but is a student and searcher within mystical, metaphysical, and occult lines of thought. I first met him at a summer conference of the Theosophical Society of America, where I was delivering a talk on my first book Occult America. At the time, Albert was a completing his previous book, Healing Without Medicine, an evaluation of placebo and mind-therapeutic phenomena. As you will see, Albert locates some of the deepest and most effective aspects of self-help practice within the continuum of traditional esoteric thought. This is historically accurate. I’ve argued that you cannot fully understand today’s self-help culture without realizing how it arose, in its earliest iterations, from mystical and occult movements, which today would seem as culturally out-of-place as magician’s robes at a business motivational conference; but the thought lineage is nonetheless there, particularly with regard to the positive-mind movement, and its key contention that thoughts are causative.
You need not share Albert’s interests in the esoteric (as I do) in order to profit from his insights. Whatever your intellectual and therapeutic tastes, this book gives you a deepened perspective on the culture of self-help and self-improvement, now an $11 billion yearly industry; a better understanding of what works and what does not; and a new sense of the hopes and needs of self-help readers, who are rarely seen or understood in critical literature.
To evaluate an ethical, spiritual, or therapeutic philosophy, and to grasp its values, weaknesses, and strengths, one must—as Albert does—bring a participatory element to the investigation. William James believed this deeply, and lived and worked by this ethic. I attempt to, as well. Albert’s role as a critical observer-participant allows him to open windows that many conventional observers are unaware of. His revealing perspective will not only add to your own, but may, depending on your outlook, enrich your personal experiments into self-development.
--Mitch Horowitz
New York City
Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian whose books include Occult America and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. A vice-president and executive editor at TarcherPerigee, his latest book is The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality.
