Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Joe Dispenza

          When one of my nieces was really young, she, like many children, refused to eat certain foods. I forget which food it was, but one day my mom made it and my niece ate it. Surprised at the sudden change, my mom asked her why she ate it now all of a sudden and my niece responded with something like, “I just told my brain to like it.”

To me, that’s Joe Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself in a nutshell. Subtitled How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One, the book is essentially a nonfiction guide to manifestation and the quantum field. If I got one thing out of the book it’s the idea that we should operate as though we have already become what we want to be and have what we want to have. Dispenza gives the example of his daughter wanting to work abroad for a summer and then giving her the advice to operate as if she had already been on that trip and become the person she wanted to be, gained the things she wanted to gain. So then it worked out. There’s another anecdote of a woman who won the lottery with the exact amount of money she had in debt, manifesting herself out of crisis.

Naturally, I’m a skeptic. If it were so easy to just get the things we want, there would be a whole lot less pain in the world. I think it’s hard for me to look past the material realities of our world and the systemic issues we face. Can we just manifest our way out of capitalism? Out of racism? The idea of there being a quantum field and we just have to claim a certain reality of many possibilities is spurious, and the evidence for such is primarily anecdotal and philosophical. There is one study that was fascinating but needed a more thorough justification to be fully persuasive. The study had people pray—another form of manifestation—for sick people or not. The participants didn’t know who they were praying for, and the twist was that it was people from the past. The researchers knew who recovered and who didn’t. When they compared results, they found that the people who were prayed for in the present recovered in the past; the people who weren’t prayed for didn’t. It’s a crazy interesting study, and supposedly it’s been replicated but Dispenza’s book does not really delve into the science.

In turn, I’d say that Dispenza’s research is more valuable in terms of perspective. If you take him on trust, then I think you can explain the positive effects of shifting your mindset. We are already what we want to be; we already have everything we want and need. If we operate that way, it can allow us to be better people. For example, if I operate with the assumption that I’m already the person I want to be, it forces me now to be kinder because I want to be kind; I can choose to be happier now because I want to be happy later. It’s a shift in mindset that lets us feel more at peace with ourselves today, and I appreciate that.

Towards the end of the book, there’s a step-by-step guide to meditation. I have to admit that I didn’t actively follow the meditation practices; it was more theoretical for me. I would say, though, that Dispenza’s guide for meditation isn’t as clearly delineated as it could be. It was broken down into steps but also into days, so on Day 1 you might do 4 steps, Day 2 you might do steps 5 and 6, Day 3 you’re only doing step 7, etc. I couldn’t help but think there was a more straightforward way of building the practice.

I’ll try to live as the person I want to be and overcome my skepticism at the full power of manifestation. I’ll try to be the kind of guy that meditates and feels more connected to the quantum field of possibilities. I know, at some level, it’s true: quantum physics is a thing where both possibilities are true until one isn’t. If we extrapolate to the greater context of all matter, it stands to reason that we could decide how each particle should behave—but whether I have the brain power and meditative expertise to make all things behave as I want is another question.

Happy reading!

Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier

  This is not my first Jason Schreier book and I hope it won’t be my last. Making a name for himself with Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Schreier now offers a compelling follow-up to the volatility of the market with Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. Each chapter focuses on a studio or developer and how the forces within the industry that led to their rises and falls.

What really stands out to me about the book is that Schreier really knows how to tell a story. Going beyond the scope of regular reportage, every interview and board meeting and game release is imbued with a sense of high drama. On occasion, I was familiar with the games being discussed (Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite get particular attention; XCOM and the Firaxis team is a particularly tragic tale). Schreier’s ability to balance first hand accounts, raw data, and narration makes the stories riveting and dynamic. These could be presented as timelines or dry nodes on a path to a bigger picture, but Schreier’s voice engages readers far beyond the facts.

I’ll have to admit that I don’t remember most of the details from each of the chapters. I was along for the ride, but my memory is pretty faulty when I don’t take notes. Some of the trends that emerged across contexts were conflicts between executives and developers, budget adjustments and restructuring, teams working on projects piecemeal, and other kinds of corporate challenges. Schreier really exposes the challenges of being a game developer—beyond the regular effects of crunch and burnout, the number of times that developers find themselves unemployed is wild. Studios get closed and employees get reshuffled. Employees get jobs and move across the country for a year or two only to watch projects fall apart. Employees finish a project they’ve worked on for years and find the next day that they’ve been laid off. Teams get collapsed or rejigged and people get lost in the shuffle. It’s intense and it’s unpredictable. The book tells stories of individuals in the broader context of an industry that is routinely exploitative, exploitative as a matter of course. Hopefully this book serves as the impetus for widespread unionization, but I’m not holding my breath for now. 

Unfortunately, I don’t have many notes to extend this conversation. All I can say is that Press Reset was a wild ride that was both informative and entertaining. Since Schreier has a knack for finding the emotional core of the story; the ‘angle’ he finds and the way he digs in makes something as commonplace as turning on a video game console into an epic tale of betrayal, desperation, and empowerment.

It’s definitely worth a shot.

Happy reading!

H of H Playbook by Anne Carson

  There will come a day, or series of days, when I finally stop confusing Anne Michaels and Anne Carson, but that day hasn’t yet arrived. The last time I read Anne Carson was when I picked up The Autobiography of Red, and when my partner and I saw the format of H of H Playbook in the poetry section of a book store, she picked it up immediately, knowing nothing about it.

The reason for that is because H of H Playbook is an oddly shaped rectangle that opens up to part play-script part scrapbook part art collection. That’s one of the highlights of Carson’s book: there’s a haphazardness to it, as though these fragments are compiled from an ancient manuscript for a play about Herakles lost to time. In fact, one of the opening pages denotes the book as a translation of Euripides’ play first performed in 416 BC—a statement that quickly becomes ludicrous when reading the rest of the text.

Carson’s “translation” is replete with modern colloquialisms and allusions to events that happened centuries after Euripides’ death. In particular, there are references to Jane Austen and the Bolshevik revolution, and so on. This approach gives the book a whimsical freshness that helps to enliven the classic tale, which is, in my view, in need of it.

I’m not a classicist. I know very little about the ancients and discussion of Greek gods often slips through my ears. Reading the back of the book was critical for me to really process the book. Herakles is a hero who goes off on labours to defeat enemies and kill monsters and whatnot. The book makes reference to about two of them explicitly and then glosses over the other ten as boring retrod ground. Apparently, Herakles also went beserk and killed his whole family before considering suicide. In Anne Carson’s version, it’s somewhat implied that he has PTSD and that he has a psychotic episode in the same way a Vietnam veteran might. At the same time, it’s as though he’s controlled by malicious Gods. Again, Carson blends the ancient explanations for more contemporary ones.

A number of aspects of the book remain obscure to me. It’s one of those unfortunate things about revising the classics: the commentary and elaboration of the classics is often more impressive to me than the classics themselves, but I also don’t know the source material well enough to make the discussion truly meaningful. So, when the redwinged man shows up or when Theseus shows up to guide Herakles away, the significance is sort of lost on me.

The artwork is what really helps to clarify the spirit of the book. First, the text is presented in small fragments, sometimes isolating a single phrase on a page to elevate its emotive power. The artwork throughout the book embodies a kind of loose style, occasionally depicting sketched human forms and often splashes of colour. Red for violence and blood. Yellow and blue strips when the mood changes. All of them adding to a sense of disorder mimicking Herakles’ disordered misadventures, perhaps.

I’ll have to admit: the story of Herakles is not close enough to my heart for this book to really rock my world. It’s a nice, short book, but one I’m not likely to return to or have linger with me. I appreciate its inventiveness as an experiment and multigenre text and the way it makes time fold over itself. I’m sure there’s a genius at work here; I’m just not smart enough to really let this book thrive.

Happy reading!