Theology, Philosophy, and Physics explain the world we live in in The Black Book by Ivomir

Nobody ever sees anything. Nobody every hears anything. Nobody ever tastes anything. Nobody ever smells anything. The material world as we know it doesn't exist. Merely, it is a hologram created in our mind. Yes, you heard right. I am not touching or seeing my laptop while I am writing this. I am not seeing the words on the screen. I am merely in touch with the computer's energy field. You can shape the world any way you want it because this world exists only in your mind.

Basing his research on philosophy, theology, and physics, Ivomir carefully proves that all of our senses are biased. Quantum theory itself states that electrons have both wave-like and particle-like characteristics and they behave as particles only when we observe them. The common idea that we see the world because it exists turns to the world exists because we look at it. In fact electrical signals are sent to our eyes, nose, ears, fingers. These signals then interact with the mind to produce images, smells, sounds, and feelings. According to this theory, one is perfectly capable of controlling his world, because it only exists in his/her mind. As Salman Rushdie himself said it: "Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogenous but usually coherent version of events; and no same human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own." In other words, I can't complain the world is like this; the world is like this because I myself created it in my mind.

One of the questions that has tormented human kind for centuries is where we came from. Stephen Hawking, the brilliant scientist and Cambridge professor gives a plausible answer in A Brief History of Time, a book I highly recommend. Similarly, Ivomir draws on physics and religion to explain our existence. The author places cogitality at the center of the world (rather than logic). According to the laws of physics (and most specifically quantum physics) even in vacuum there must be something. Ivomir assumes that at the beginning the vacuum was filled with still cognitive (thinking) particles. Since they were not in motion, time for them was moving with infinite speed and they possessed all the knowledge in the world. Hence, they didn't feel any emotion. Intuitively, since these cognitive particles hadn't felt emotion, they didn't know everything. So they moved. And what is the primary reason to move - to accomplish something. Through this movement energy was released and BOOM (or in other words The Big Bang).

I have got to say, even though it took me a lot of time to grasp the theory, I actually really liked it. My logical mind (which even now refuses the accept that the material world doesn't exist) was extremely satisfied with this explanation. Until God came along. Hawking also incorporates religion and God in his theory but to a rather minimal and acceptable level. Ivomir goes way too far. He draws on physics and philosophy to explain the beginning of the world but at times he gives examples from the Bible. To be honest, I am not sure how the fact that God himself said let there be light proves that we came from cognitive particles that started moving. I was rather annoyed at that point, which in fact ruined my opinion for the rest of the book.

Going back to the idea that the material world doesn't exist, Ivomir comes to the conclusion that our physical body doesn't exist either and that we can change it anyway we want. Philosophically, I embraced that idea and I prepared myself for something very good to come. Indeed it did. Fortunetellers. People who don't eat for more than 30 years and don't die. Psychics who help solve crimes or see that your heart is bad. Moreover, psychics who tell you to be gentle to your heart and tell IT nice stories so that it feels better. People that see other people's aura (i.e the energy field) and are able to predict their future. Don't get me wrong. I am one for positive thinking and I am one that believes that stress is the cause for all illnesses. However, 1)believing that by talking positively to my heart I am going to cure it and 2) believing in psychics, fortunetellers, etc is simply something I don't do. I would be a perfect victim for Ivomir, who challenges us to let go of the logic, that in his opinion, only obstructs us from seeing the world. However, basing one's theory on such stories merely ruins the good impression from the extensive philosophical and scientific research.

If you manage to disregard God and the psychics (who occupy one good 50% of the novel) you can get some valuable ideas from it. Mostly I was impressed by the theory of negative and positive feelings. When we feel said, depressed, or pessimistic, our brain cells create a very strong connection to these negative thoughts. The more we thing that way, the stronger these links become. Think about it as a habit. It becomes much easier to go to the gym if you have been doing it for a couple of months, than if you started yesterday. In the same way, negative feelings tend to stick and more and more energy is required to break these links and turn them to positive thoughts. In fact, the more we train that, the weaker the negative links will be and the stronger the positive. A rather simple explanation for depression and how easily one falls in the trap of pessimistic thinking.

At some point, Ivomir resembles Jorge Bucay and Andy Andrews, especially when he starts giving advice on how to be happy, nice, and thankful for the little things. By now you should know my great hatred towards the shallow so called self-help books so I was rather annoyed when Ivomir began giving to-do lists on how to change your life for good.

Overall, The Black Book started very promising. Impressive theories, backed up by extensive research, paradoxes explained and proven, and plausible explanations about how and why we came to life. However, the frequent use of God's words, the implausible stories about psychics, fortunetellers, aura-feelers, or crazy people who don't eat or drink for 30 years and are still alive, made Ivomir look more like a fraud rather than like an inspirational writer, who is here to free us from all our logical biases.

Love

Before writing a review about a book I spend a lot of time actually thinking about the title of the post. I try to incorporate the name of the novel and the most distinguishing aspect of it for me. I have only one blog post with a one word title - Hunger. Now I have another - Love. I guess when the words are so important in my life, I don't need any further explanation.

Elif Shafak's Forty Rules of Love is a tale about love, in all its forms, that transforms people, opens their hearts, and sets them free both from society's and their own boundaries. Shafak unfolds two paralel stories, one set in contemporary time and the other in the 13th century. The author successfully escapes the cliches and the trivialities and by exploring the nature of sufism, shows that love is transcendental; that it goes beyond race, age, and sex; that it is the sincerest and strongest force; that it makes us better people; that it helps us lose ourselves and find ourselves; that allows us to die only to be reborn; that changes us; that shows us the path towards happiness. Love is the ultimate goal and ultimate truth.

Ela is a bored middle-aged housewife, who has given up her dreams in order to take care of her husband and her three children. Days before her 40th birthday Ela realizes not only that she is not happy but that she hasn't been happy for a long time. Her estranged and unfaithful husband doesn't give her the love she thought she didn't need. Her daily activities are trivial: cooking, meeting with housewives as herself, taking care of the children. For 40 years Ela never broke any rule, never crossed any line, and never lived. Until she meets Zahara.

In a slight effort to change her life, Ela takes a job as a literary critic. Her first assignment is a manuscript by an unknown author, Sweet Blasphemy. It tells the story of a 13th century wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz and his inspirational relationship with Rumi, the greatest poet of the Sufi canon. Most importantly, it shows how the love between Shams and Rumi helps transform the latter from a conservative literator of the Koran into one of the most praised mystics in the Islam and one of the most famous poets. Ela is so impressed by the novel that she contacts the author Aziz Zahara, never expecting that similarly to Rumi and Shams, this relationship is going to change her life.

Told through the view point of a range of characters, The Forty Rules of Love follows the development of two types of love, separated by more than seven centuries. Shams introduces to Rumi a new religion - the religion of love. His forty rules of love philosophy implies a gentle and non-judgmental reading of the Koran, which rejects religious fundamentalism and is accessible to all, drunkards, whores, intelligence. Through his love for Shams, Rumi denies his former way of living, his strong reliance on reputation and other people's opinion, and his conservative reading of the Koran. Instead, he turns to Sufism and writes Masnavi, a key Sufi tract which weaves Koranic analysis with poetry, parables of the everyday, the mythic and miraculous. This inspirational bond sets Rumi free from any conventions, opens his heart to spirituality and teaches him to accept people for who they are.

Similarly, Aziz appears to set Ela free. All of her life she believed she didn't need love. She looked down on the concept of eternal and passionate love and she despised romance. At least she thought so. Upon realizing there is a terrible void in her heart, one that needs to be filled exactly with love, she starts a passionate on-line affair with Aziz, an affair that is set to have life-changing consequences.

As much as I liked to avoid the religious part, I indeed have to touch upon it. Shams's philosophy focuses extensively on love for God and on the eternal search for God within yourself. I am not religious but I am willing to accept people that are. Without going too much into the subject, I would just say that the God part of the novel did indeed irritate me. I personally don't see the need of religion to prompt people to be virtuous, to love one another, and to accept other's faults by a simple fear of being punished or by a blind fate that they are serving some omnipotent creature. And for me religion in its essence is the cause of an infinite number of conflicts and confrontations, of unnecessarily strict rules, of the church's desire to control and guide people, and of endless hatred between people.

Otherwise, the novel is positive and inspirational. It has a great attention to detail. Every chapter starts with a "b" (even in the Bulgarian translation), as for Sufi mystics the secret of the Koran lies in the verse Al-Fatiha, the essence of which is contained in the word bismilahirahmanirahim (in the name of Allah, the Benevolent and Merciful), with the quintessence of the word in the dot below the first Arabic letter, a dot that embodies the universe. Moreover, Shafak offers a popular and understandable introduction to sufism as a religion towards spirituality and self-awareness. The author wrote the book for more than 15th years and the result is obvious. She is one of the most read female authors in Turkey, a direct competitor to Orhan Pamuk, and possibly a challenger to Paulo Coelho's dominance. The Forty Rules of Love indeed flaws easily and is perfect for people on a verge of their lives when they simply need encouragement, positivism, and hope. I am sad to say that at some points it greatly reminded me of Andy Andrews and Jorhe Bucay, which for me as a reader, is a great offense.Still, Shafak manages to go beyond the cliches and to offer an inspirational tale of love as the most important thing. If it makes readers better people, if it indeed teaches them that religious differences don't exist and should not be a reason for violent acts (something we are quite familiar in contemporary society) and if it actually influences them to love each other and themselves, I believe this novel's value will be even greater. It also reminded me of Eat, Pray, Love, where similarly a disillusioned woman goes on a search for spirituality and falls in love.

It seems that contemporary authors now more than ever attempt to imply that love is the answer to all of our questions, our ultimate goal, our only purpose. Andrews, Bocay, Gilbert, and now Shafak tell tales of despair and hopelessness, of lack of ambition and desire to live, which are all solved byt the power of that one person, who opens your heart and soul. As much as I would like to believe this positive view of life, I am skeptical. Reading about it is ok, but until it happens to me, I stand convinced that even the greatest love in the world is not enough for a fulfilled and happy life. Still a good thought, though. I will give it a try. After reading, I even started my own forty rules of love but I ended with only one: "Lora, don't be afraid."

Life Can Be a Miracle, says Bulgarian Psychologist Ivinela Samuilova

You must have heard a million times Albert Einstein’s famous thought: There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. I don’t like it. Probably because miracles haven’t happened to me, or I was too busy being negative to notice them. But I feel that throughout my whole life I have always worked for what I achieved and I have never received anything for granted. Let alone a miracle. Miracles have this unfortunate characteristic of not happening when you most need them. And when (if) they indeed happen, you realize it was a miracle very quite later on. Like the time I met a guy accidentally on the street while reading a book and several months later I had some (un) fortunate relationship with him. But at the time when he asked me whether I liked A Clockwork Orange I didn’t even expect this would turn into some kind of relationship. You may call this a miracle but I realized it might be so quite after that.

Secondly, Einstein’s thought is quite banal and trivial. These quotations never work for me. In my notebook for exquisite thoughts I only write down original, unpopular, unconventional sentences. I never do write the trivial ones because I’ve just heard them way too many times to even notice them. Still, there is one unarguable argument for banal phrases – they are banal because they are sometimes painfully true. So when I received Ivinela Samuilova’s novel Life Can Be a Miracle and I saw Mr. Einstein’s words on it, I felt something boring and trivial was ahead of me, in the style of Bucay or Andrews. However, it was not as bad as expected. Indeed, some parts were worth reading and reflecting upon.

The story is simple. Adi, the heroine (who astonishingly resembles the author herself) has everything in her life – a good job, a loving fiancée, honest friends, and a stable family. She hasn’t experienced any trauma or suffering and she hasn’t endured any sufferings. Her only problem is that she doesn’t know what her vocation is. Similarly, the author has studied religion, economics, administration, PR, journalism, and finally psychologie. Looks like we are dealing here with a confession of how difficult it must be to find a job that suits you. Adi feels something vital and essential for life is missing; her mind is filled with saudade. This is Adi’s favourite Portuguese word, which doesn’t have an equivalent in any language she knows of. It mainly refers to an inexplicable void, to a longing to something that is not there or may not exist, a feeling that something vital is missing. I loved that word. I identified with it. In fact, I read something similar in Nothombs’ The Life of Hunger and ever since this particular expression has become my explanation about what is wrong with me. One red point for Ms. Samuilova.

In order to find her vocation, Adi joins a psychological group with the weird and unconventional Alexei. These psychologists disprove the conventional methods of treatment and insist that Froid was a fool. In other words, you might have had the perfect childhood, the ideal parents, the best friends, and the coolest boyfriend, and still you might be unable to deal with your life. Adi enjoys this explanation and excitedly joins the group to try and find what she is supposed to do.

More or less the novel is predictable and simply written. There are rarely profound and deep investigations, conclusions, or ideas. Most of them we have read in one form or another or we have personally tried and found out they don’t work. The aspect I disliked the most was the concept about miracles. To say it plainly, you can transform anything in your life by writing a letter to the given problem (illness, love issue, work problems, etc) and release it. Adi used this technique upon some of her best friends and it worked immediately. Call me sceptic or cynical but this is never the way the world works. I need a positive book but mostly I need a REALISTICALLY positive book. Not some science-fiction about how happiness is just around the corner and all you need to do is write one f*cking letter.

On the contrary, the idea about “No” is great. We all know (or we should know) that “no” doesn’t work. All psychological books say that you should construct your positive statements avoiding the word “no” because the human mind is constructed in such a way as to avoid it. For example, you shouldn’t say ‘I will not drink beer today’ but instead ‘I will drink only juice today’. The words send positive waves to your brain, which it understands. Samuilova explains this amazingly using the simple example with the squirrel ‘If I tell you not to think about an orange squirrel, what did you just think about? An orange squirrel of course’. This ‘no’ concept also explains why the best way to seduce a woman is to ignore her. Women most of all simply do not get the word ‘NO’!

Samuilova scores another point by explaining with an original metaphor how the way we see the world shapes our life. Basically, she compares our mind to a map. We have a mental map and the world is one big territory. Depending on our map, the territory that will fill it is different. If we offer a positive card we will see that only good things happen to us and vice versa. A more original and interesting way to say that if you expect happiness, that is what you will get and if you only see the worst, the worst will happen to you.

In conclusion, most of Life Can Be a Miracle you have heard a billion times and you will find boring and predictable. However, the books is worth reading for these several passages I mentioned (and maybe a couple more), which offer a different perspective to conventional psychology.

The Noticer - Positive Thoughts for the Dummies

Inspired by the amazing reviews read in the newspapers, I finally bought Andy Andrews's novel of positive thoughts, The Noticer. A huge huge disappointment. The author is celebrated as one of the most influential American authors; he has read lectures as a personal favor to four American presidents. His novels are worldwide bestsellers. So what? The Noticer just doesn't do it for me.

My father was the first one to read it and he just said "Well this book is a joke". I know my father and his skepticism towards the so-called "self-help books". So I didn't really believe his review. Unfortunately, this time he was right.

The Noticer is the story of an old man called Jones (not Mr Jones, just Jones), who goes around Alabama talking to its citizens and pointing out what is wrong with their lives and how it can be fixed. As the old man says himself "I am a Noticer. I notice things that are invisible to other people. " So far so good. Jones insists that for one to change his lifestyle, one just needs a new better perspective. Indeed true. Andy Andrews's ideas are brilliant but their implementation is just mediocre. The Noticer consists of several tales, in which Jones meets a person or a family with a problem, talks to them for several hours and suddenly changes their life for good. Call me realist, pessimist, or cynic, but this is highly unlikely to happen in the real world. If we could fix our problems by just talking to a wise old man, then there will be no problems to solve. I mean, the self-destructive habits that rule our life are rooted so deeply that it takes more than one talk to change them. Not so in the novel though. Upon talking to Jones, people miraculously realize all their wrongdoings and start changing their lives for the better. I do not buy this even a bit. Having experience a lot of problems and a lot of people with problems, I can claim with certainty that this kind of talk will only provoke ridicule and laughter. It would never change the person.

Do not get me wrong. I know The Noticer is just a novel and I might be judging it far too severely. However, I have read many psychological and positive books and I know what I am talking about. Some novels, like Laurent Gounelle's touch your heart and show you the SLOW and DIFFICULT process of realizing your mistakes and fixing them. In Laurent Gounelle's literature, the protagonist again meets his old man but the process of transformation last a lot more than one conversation and is accompanied by disbelief, rejection, suspicion, and downfalls. And indeed, this makes it more realistic and close to the human heart. What Andrews does is create a positive novel for the dummies: "You will meet a strange old man, who will point out all of your misfortunes, you will realize your mistakes, and you will start changing them within 10 minutes". This really sounds like positive thoughts for the dummies. I have had my problems, people have shared their wisdom with me in their 15 minutes of fame, and trust me, this has changed nothing. The only feelings it has provoked in me are hostility and anger towards the unasked advisor.

The only thing I liked in the novel is Jones's metaphor about the four different ways people love. Some people love with words; they need to hear the actual words and express their affection similarly. These people are like dogs, who constantly need your approval to feel appreciated. Other people love with their actions. They will iron your shirt, cook you diner, fix the house, and they expect the same from you in return. These people are goldfish - the goldfish care whether you change their water or give them food. Third people love with their touch. They express positive affection by staying closely to their beloved. They are cats, who need attention and a gentle hand to feel loved. The last group of people love with time. They measure love by the time spent with the object of their affection. They are canary birds. The canary birds just wants someone to stay close by and to listen to its song.

I must admit the above metaphor is quite original and interesting. What Andrews ingeniously points out is the reason that many marriages fall apart, is that people express their love differently. What is more, the way they express their love is the way they expect their spouse expresses it as well. Thus, even though people may still love each other, they are confused and lost and fail to revive their relationship.

Given the above, if you are looking for a positive self-help book, look somewhere else. Andy Andrews's The Noticer is just too shallow a reading for intelligent people like us.