Tag Archives: self help

My Impossible Life by Canadian-born Writer Charlene Jones Offers Profound Insights Derived from Epic Healing Journey

Review by: KEN KORCZAK

This book might be compared to On the Road if Jack Kerouac had been a woman and talented. Kerouac was merely a social malcontent and a drunk. I tend to agree with Truman Capote’s conclusion on Kerouac’s work: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

CHARLENE JONES, however, turns in a story about an epic road trip that traverses an international path. That path does double duty as both a physical journey around the planet and an esoteric trek into the deeper levels of the soul.

MY IMPOSSIBLE LIFE is not typing. It’s writing.

I would describe Jones’ writing style as organic. Other good words might be earthy, sensual and visceral. At the same time, her result is vivid and immediate with everything laid right out on the surface. Each page will sting the reader with the author’s palpable sense of psychic pain. It’s easy for us to grasp – at least intellectually — what’s generating her agony. At the tender young age of 16, she was abducted and brutally raped and tortured by two escaped convicts.

If that’s not bad enough, Charlene Jones came to this nightmarish experience with a psyche that was already damaged goods. From the time she was a little girl, she had been battered by dysfunctional behavior in her family which inflicted wounds upon her that would be more than enough to screw up any person for life.

I don’t want to give any more away, except to say this book is about so much more than a person desperately seeking an escape hatch from the misery of her own existence. Like Odysseus blown off course and lost in what seems to be a relentlessly weird and hostile universe, Jones is sailing the ship of her life from destination to destination, only to discover that no matter how much she travels in the physical world, she brings her essential self with her.

Namgyal Rinpoche, born Leslie George Dawson 1931-2003

Understandably, Jones was ensnared by a powerful guru. This was the legendary Namgyal Rinpoche, a Canadian man born as Leslie George Dawson in Toronto. He was of Irish and Scottish descent but remarkably ascended to an extremely lofty status of Tibetan Buddhist empowerment. He was given his Tibetan name and designation by none other than the 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje. Dawson taught in the Vajrayana tradition.

The insights Jones offers regarding her years of following Dawson around the globe to partake in his meditation, teaching and healing ministrations should be considered a masterclass in the benefits and deeply dangerous pitfalls of giving over one’s spiritual development to any guru. I think readers will be profoundly impressed by the measured way Jones sums up the lessons learned from her association with Dawson. She fulfills her duty to expose the man where he was a charlatan, a fraud and demented – but also rightfully acknowledges that this can’t be the full story of a person who was, in many ways, authentic and remarkable.

Charlene Jones

The courage of Jones to be unflinching yet fair about the legacy of Leslie George Dawson is a significant illustration of the expanded understanding she eventually achieved about the complex nature of the human condition. Reading this book means we get to benefit from that same hard-won wisdom.

There are so many extraordinary elements to this wonderful memoir that I could pick just one and write my entire review on that. I’ll settle for a couple of highlights and encourage the reader to get this book and discover all it has to offer for yourself.

One primary takeaway for me is the literary skill Jones leverages to craft a nonlinear timeline and weave it together for a story that takes place over multiple years – yet remains a clear and coherent narrative that flows amazingly well from first page to last. This tale has an engaging back-and-forth rhythm that carries us along as if riding in Elton John’s blue canoe — “dazzling, dancing, half enchanted.

In sharing her traumatic experience with brutal honesty, Jones provides us all with better answers to age-old questions like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Mainstream religion offers pablum, such as, “the Lord works in mysterious ways,” or, “evil is real, and/or the devil is at work inflicting suffering on God’s children.”

Jones is the author of The Stain, a novel.

Jones’ conclusion about what happened to her and how she found the strength to continue on and eventually extract serenity out of the rotten deal she was handed by the universe is not just inspirational – it’s practical. This book has the potential to help uncounted people who are suffering and desperately searching for that elusive get-out-of hell-free card. My Impossible Life is proof that an escape hatch exists.

View at Medium.com

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Intuitive Counselor Mellisa Feick Offers A ‘Radical’ Approach to the Akashic Records In Engaging, Readable Book


Review by: KEN KORCZAK

This book offers a “radical new approach” to the Akashic Records. That would suggest there is an “old, tired approach” to leveraging what is both a steady artifact of ancient wisdom and what has become a staple of modern New Age thought.

Certainly, what we call the Akashic Records today can be found described in the texts of the world’s oldest systems of thought, philosophy and religions. That includes Vedic texts, the Torah and Kabbalistic writing, such as the Zohar, Greek oracular divination, Sufi wisdom, even the Bible — and much more. To take just one specific example, the sages in the Indian regions of the Himalayas proclaimed that the soul of every person — their “jiva” or “atma” — was recorded in a divine “book” that would remain for eternity as a permanent record of every second of every person’s life.

Fast forward to the 20th Century and we find guys like Edgar Cayce telling of his ability to travel to that certain etheric or astral realm where he could find a specific “book,” not only for the life of a specific person, but information on absolutely any event that ever happened in history — or all of time.

C.W. Leadbeater

The Sanskrit word ākāśa translates variously as “sky,” “aether,” or “space” and is also sometimes said to refer to “the memory of nature.” The term Akashic Records itself was not in popular use until a founding member of the Theosophical Society, C.W. Leadbeater, solidified the concept in his 1899 book CLAIRVOYANCE. But it should also be noted that Henry Steel Olcott wrote in his BUDDHIST CATECHISM about, “a permanency of records in the Akasha, and the potential capacity of man to read the same when he has evolved to the stage of true individual enlightenment.”

But wait — there’s more. The case for the Akashic Records has gotten even better in recent years.

A growing cadre of outlier physicists and cosmologists are floating the theory that we live in a simulated universe, a virtual reality — a kind of cosmic computer. That would mean that each of us are akin to an avatar playing in the greatest computer game environment of all time. That would also suggest that when we die, our avatar could be “saved.” Everything we ever did, thought, hoped and dreamed would be kept like a computer file — and in this way we would never die. Furthermore, the “program” that is/was our life can be “called up” or “resurrected” at any time.

This is the way physicist Frank Tipler or Tulane University described it in his 1994 book, The Physics of Immortality. He makes a strenuous argument (along with a lot of mind-numbing math) that if our universe is not already a cosmic computer, of sorts, it is evolving toward becoming one — something he compares to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the OMEGA POINT.

In Frank Tipler’s scenario, being “saved” like a computer file is almost an exact analog for being “saved” for immortality in the traditional religious sense. Perhaps all of those blinking “Jesus Saves” neon signs hanging over those gritty inner-city missions have something going for them after all!

About a decade after Tipler’s book came out, noted Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom made waves with his proposal that we live in a simulation in 2003. Since then, the idea has continued to gain remarkable momentum, even among popular mainstream scientists, such as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. He puts the odd that we live in a virtual reality at 50-50.

Tom Campbell

Perhaps the foremost champion of this model is TOM CAMPBELL, a physicist who enjoyed a long career working on hard, nuts-and-bolts science projects in missile defense and statistical risk analysis for NASA. In his exhausting trilogy of bookS titled, My Big TOE (Theory of Everything), Campbell lays out across some 900 pages in excruciating detail — technical, scientific and philosophical — his argument that we live in a virtual reality, a digital universe in which he says, “all reality is data.

Implicit within Tom Campbell’s model is the existence of what is essentially the Akashic Records. Campbell would say (and has said), “It’s all data, and that data is available to anyone who can learn how to access it.”

So all of this is a long-winded way for me to say that no reader should dismiss MELISSA FEICKs book as just another selection in the popsugar New Age candy store. She’s on solid ground here working in a system that combineS an ancient pedigree with growing support from modern hard science.

But what is her “radical” new approach? I won’t give too much away except to say that Feick models the Akashic Records — or perhaps re-envisions them — away from the standard “cosmic library” motif that has long characterized it. Up until recent times, using a “library metaphor” to describe the Akashic Records has made sense because a library has been the closest physical analog we have to a cosmic storehouse of knowledge.

But we’re in the digital-computer age now and print books, and even libraries, are fast becoming passe. Furthermore, classical physics has given way to quantum physics. Every culture tends to frame transcendent ideas using terms and imagery that reflect what we have now, and what we can understand in terms of framing comparison models today.

Melissa Freick

So Feick describes for us an Akashic Records that looks more like a combination of cosmic helical DNA model and multidimensional levels that fit togethers in a dynamic, ascending spiral configuration that is fluid and omni-directional and interactional. She suggests that, through a process of meditation and focus of intent, anyone can reach the Akashic Records, find their own “strands” and manipulate them to make corrections that will re-wire or reprogram our entire lives and existence, past, present and future.

Worried about the burden of “bad karma?” No problem, says Melissa Feick. Now karma is erased, rewritten or rendered mute by some simple adjustments in the patterns that represent our own “file” in the Akashic Records. I’m not being glib when I say “simple adjustments.” I’m only echoing the way Feick describes the process. Not only can anyone learn to access their own Akashic file, she says, it’s super easy.

Feick herself is a working intuitive counselor and spiritual guide who uses her gifts and developed abilities to serve clients who want to know more about what’s in their own Akashic files. She holds a degree in psychology and also lists a variety of skill on HER WEBSITE, from Reiki Master to Angel Therapy Practitioner.

This book is well written with a relaxed, easy prose that is easily accessible and engaging for the average reader. She never lectures or talks down to us. She offers lofty ideas without being preachy. The tone is friendly, positive, chatty and informational. Melissa Feick seems a happy warrior eager to share her gifts and life experiences which clearly have been focused on helping other people in big ways and small in the daily game of life.

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Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Marine Biologist Ingrid Honkala Tells The Story Of Her Near Death Experience And Subsequent Life Guided By Spiritual Beings Of Light


Review by: KEN KORCZAK

This is a book about love and agony — love and agony, love and agony – love discovered, and love lost – love rediscovered, only to slip away once again – until finally an ultimate answer is found hiding in plain sight amid the thorny, tangled thickets of this elusive game we call life.

It’s the story of a unique life, but at the same time, not so terribly unlike billions of other people. That’s a central paradox that rings throughout this narrative – everyone is “special” – but if everyone is “special” then no one is “special” — because if everyone is “special” then that would be the norm!

Well, the reality is that everyone IS special — while at the same time — everyone is one and the same because we are all part of the totality of All That Is. Each of us manifests our individual nature while we remain an integral part of a cosmic whole – and the fundamental quality that makes up this Cosmic Wholeness is Love – with a capital “L.”

Ingrid Honkala, Ph.D.

Colombian-born INGRID HONKALA grapples with these vexing philosophical concepts as she relates to us the story of her life which was shattered when, at the age of three, she fell into a giant tank of water and drowned.

She experienced an NDE – Near Death Experience – during which all sense of time and distance vanished. She felt herself “become a part of everything” and as if “the Wholeness and I were one.”

Needless to say, she was rescued from the frigid water and resuscitated, but about a year later, she began to sense the presence of intelligent entities which she describes as “star-like figures of pure shining light.” They were of many different colors. They seemed interested in her and cared about her. She soon understood these light-form entities were concerned about her life. They were willing to speak with her and offer her guidance.

Thus, at age 4, began the journey of Ingrid Honkala, an odyssey of being guided by spiritual Beings of Light who were clearly there to help – but as she would also learn — to never interfere.

She still had to make all her own decisions, make her own mistakes and be responsible for whatever good or ill she created. She still was required to struggle through adversity – often with great pain — when the pitfalls of life came calling time and again.

The author is an expert on mangrove ecosystems.

If all this sounds a tad Airy-Fairy-New-Agey to you, consider that Ms. Honkala – that is, Dr. Honkala – is a Ph.D. scientist who earned her doctorate in marine biology. She has worked for NASA, is a world expert on mangrove ecosystems and spent three harrowing years doing research while dodging bullets in the war zone of Tumaco, Colombia, during that country’s grinding war against the FARC rebellion.

When it comes to hard sciences like biology, math, chemistry and oceanography, this woman takes a backseat to no rational-material scientist. Her husband is a former United States Navy Special Forces dude.

Dr. Honkala’s résumé gives her a certain grounded aura of authenticity – in any case, this is almost besides the point. That’s  because I think the way she tells her story in these pages comes across with a hard-to-miss sense of credibility, honesty and no-nonsense truth. If this woman says she has maintained a life-long relationship with intelligent guides manifesting as points of light – I think we can believe her – and give pause to contemplate the inspiring message she feels compelled to share.

So, I give A BRIGHTLY GUIDED LIFE my best recommendation. It’s a heartfelt rendering of one’s person’s life story that is unflinching and honest – dealing out the good with the bad – and ending with a message of hope for all.

NOTE: PLEASE SEE MORE BOOK REVIEWS ON THIS SITE BY KEN ON THE NDE TOPIC:

APPLICATION OF IMPOSSIBLE THINGS by Natalie Sudman

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES by P.H.H. Atwater

DEAD OR ALIVE by Erika Hayasaki

THE BOY WHO DIED AND CAME BACK TO LIFE by Robert Moss

WOLF’S MESSAGE By Suzanne Giesemann



Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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British author Martyn Wilson’s “Enlightenment: The Keys to Consciousness” is a worthy addition to an ancient topic

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

One of my favorite sayings from the Zen tradition is: “To talk about Zen is to not know Zen.”

I think it’s also true, then, to say that, “To write about Zen is not to know Zen either.”

Furthermore, reading a book about Zen is no way to get to really know or understand Zen.

We can substitute the word “Enlightenment” for Zen in all of the above statements. To talk about Enlightenment, to write about it, to read books it is no way to truly understand Enlightenment.

I suspect the author of this book, a down-to-earth, working-class British man by the name of MARTYN WILSON, would agree.

No one else can describe for you or explain Enlightenment. No one else can give it to you. You can only find it for yourself. And once you find it for yourself, you’ll never in a million years be able to fully explain to someone else just exactly what it is that you have found.

Why, then, did Martyn Wilson write this book? Indeed, why have whole forests been cleared by gurus, shamans, yogis, monks, teachers, etc. — all writing books about Enlightenment? For something that can never be truly explained, people sure like to blather on about it endlessly.

Mr. Wilson explains his motivation for writing his book this way:

“I believe that I have been given a gift that has completely changed my life. I also believe that it would be a waste of this gift not to share what I have learned and experienced, not because I am on some spiritual mission to convert the entire population of earth, but to point out that there is another way of living, another choice.”

He also says:

“Whatever you think Enlightenment is, it is not … Enlightenment cannot be thought no matter how many books you read, how many seminars you attend, how many meditation workshops you take part in or how spiritual you think you are. Enlightenment can only be experienced and this is why it is so difficult to explain to others.”

martyn_pic

Martyn Wilson

It can’t be explained, can’t be done … but Mr. Wilson certainly makes a heroic effort in this slim volume. And you know what? He comes as close as anyone or book I have read to giving the reader an inkling of what Enlightenment might be, and how to at least start your journey toward getting it for yourself.

(Yikes! I’m already in trouble! If you think that you need to go on a “journey” to find Enlightenment, then you will never find it. There is no journey to take, and nothing to find!)

But let me struggle on.

Keep in mind that when writing about Enlightenment, both authors and guys like me who review their books are grappling within a situation pitted with paradoxes. You’re always saying something seemingly contradictory, such as , “You must seek something that can never be found.” Or, “There is no journey because you are always already there,” Or, “You can never arrive because there is nowhere to go.”

So if I say that Martyn Wilson has written an excellent book and that these pages are a good place to start on your search for Enlightenment, I am already veering off track and headed for the ditch.

If you think you have to “start a journey to Enlightenment” then you are already lost. Also, if it is anything that is “out there” — such as a book, seminar or some guru, then that is something that is “outside yourself” and will do you no good.

At the same time, I will dare to say: This is as good a book to read as any if you want to seek Enlightenment.

After all, Mr. Wilson’s started somewhere, albeit someplace unusual — an all-out effort to prove that there really is no such thing as Enlightenment!

It was his wife who was really into all this stuff. She was one of those people who was deeply involved in reading books on the subject, going to seminars, practicing meditations, and so on.

Wilson thought his wife’s pursuit was 100% preposterous. Thus, he became determined to do everything he could to prove that all this stuff was just a bunch of baloney — a loony pile of eastern-religious-mystical nonsense for modern-day hippies and delusional New Age flakes.

He did tons of research on the Internet, read books, and then started testing methods, such as meditation and other “techniques” to show that they did nothing for anyone. Indeed, he found meditation to be worthless in his own case.

But then Mr. Wilson stumbled upon a certain method that seemed so simple and ludicrous, he called it “laughable” — and yet he tried it anyway, and (laughable or not) kept at it for weeks and months on end.

And guess what? Martyn Wilson was stunned one day to find that he had become Enlightened!

I’m going to say no more because I don’t want to give too much away. I would encourage all readers to buy, discover and encounter this fine and delightful book for yourselves.

Just a couple of last points. Wilson drops a couple of delicious bombshells in these pages:

1. His comments on the subject of forgiveness may cause some people to have a brain aneurysm!

2. His opinion on the subject of non-duality is unique, bold and matter of fact!

Not to be missed! I like it when an author of a book about Enlightenment manages to break new ground. Martyn Wilson does it. This is one of the best books on the topic since the sublime LAZY MAN’S GUIDE TO ENLIGHTENMENT by THADDEUS GOLAS. If it’s not as profound as Shunryu Suzuki‘s masterpiece ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND, it packs a similar punch in a more “common-working-man” sort of way.

Go ahead, get the book, have a read — just don’t expect this to be your road map to Enlightenment. There is no road map.


Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Maximus Freeman delves into his own psyche seeking the answers to spiritual growth

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

This book has an intriguing title, and it is aptly chosen because the author is attempting to dig into his own psyche, striving to uncover the greater meaning of what makes himself tick. He is on a courageous mission to find spiritual growth, but also to relieve the fundamental suffering that all human beings feel – what the Buddha called “the dukkha.”

The dukkha is the agony of the self. It’s that all-pervasive, undefinable pain and misery we feel that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere. It can be depression, it can be anxiety, it can be alienation, it can be a nagging sense of dissatisfaction, it can be loneliness, it can be persistent anger and contempt for others.

Many people today attack this suffering by reading the reams of self-help books on the market today. There’s never a shortage. Suffering is a universal phenomenon and wherever you find a universal problem, you’ll find hundreds of people offering a solution.

Like many people, the author has spent years in the New Age candy store, devouring the endless tomes of self-help gurus from all walks of life. He acknowledges the drawback of this approach. In the Prelude, he writes:

“Many books are informative and helpful, but usually within a week or two, I have forgotten most of what I have read and have resorted back to my old comfortable ways of being.”

His goal is to make this book different – more practical, effective, useful and leaving the reader with genuine tools that will get the job done – the relief of suffering and the discovery of greater spiritual meaning.

Does he succeed? Yes, in part, I think he does. His approach is at times brutally honest and sincere. His effort to penetrate to the fundamental elements of what makes us unhappy – and provide solid solutions — is downright heroic. MAXIMUS FREEMAN is clearly an author who deeply cares about his readers. He honestly wants to help you by showing how he tried to help himself.

He gets the job done partially with a lot of heavy leveraging of other self-help luminaries who are giants of the field – he quotes liberally from Gary Zukav and Dr. David R. Hawkins, for example. But he also dabbles in a bit of light channeling, connecting with a source he calls “The Universe,” from which we get insights in a question and answer format.

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Maximus Freeman

Mr. Freeman also serves up some of his own advice, some of which comes off as perhaps a tad “corporate speak” in flavor, as when he offers his “Mechanisms of Transformation” which he describes as a “six-step spiritual maturation process.”

I don’t give this book my tip top rating only because I set the bar very high in this genre. As we all know, entire forests have been cleared to accommodate the truck loads of self-help books published year after year, decade after decades.

Consciousness Archaeology, although a fine book, is not destined to become a classic of the field. The structure of the book is a tad disjointed and uneven. I also found more than a few points I might quibble with, which I won’t air here – but when a book is just a 100 pages, it should have that power-packed “this is a home run” feeling or “this is a small gem” aura, which it just doesn’t have for me.

For example, “The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment” by Thaddeus Golas is about 80 pages, and after reading it you think: “All my problems are solved! Everything is so crystal clear now! I’ll never have to read another book again!” Other classics come close this feeling, such as “As a Man Thinketh,” by James Allen or “Acres of Diamonds” by Russell Conwell – and these latter three masterpieces are available for free across the Internet.

Let me just say, however, that I would recommend anyone buy and read Consciousness Archaeology. The way it work for people who are seeking answers through reading a lot of books is this: You never know when you’ll find that one book that really clicks for you; something that just happens to resonate with you in just the right way at the right time.

Consciousness Archaeology may be the book you need right now that has that certain something you need to hear at this moment in your life – you never know.

Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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