Are you the kind of person who worries about every little thing? Who gets stressed if you’re five minutes late for a meeting? Who is angry for hours if somebody cuts you off on the freeway? If so, TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR MIND by heart surgeon Glenn N. Levine might be the book for you.
Levine’s book, according to him, “presents a secular, scientifically sound paradigm of how we allow our thoughts, emotions, worries, desires, and aversions to perturb our natural state of happiness.” And what is happiness? It is, he writes, “a mind at peace…a feeling free of all negative thoughts, worry, self-doubt, and cravings.” But how does one free oneself of all these things? Despite his bold title, Levine doesn’t really offer much in the way of practical advice. He provides some directions on meditation (concentrate on your breath, imagine your stress is a fire and you are dousing it with a bucket of water, write down your tasks when you start to feel overwhelmed) but insists that his book isn’t about meditation. Instead, it’s more like a series of cautions – 32 short chapters of warnings, to be precise. Levine says that our minds are divided into a series of “sub-minds”, like anger, worry, envy and so on, and that the key to mental peace is to not let these sub-minds take control of our entire mind. The way to do that, in turn, is to practice “mindfulness”, which he defines as “the ability to recognize in real time an emotion you are experiencing, such as when you are beginning to feel frustrated.”
Although Levine says the book is scientific, there isn’t really much science in it – a basic account of human evolution, some opinion polls on happiness, but no psychological research. Levine is also not entirely rigorous – he references Carlos Castaneda’s novels, clearly unaware of his outing as an academic conman, as well as Mother Teresa (which he spells “Theresa”), whose coddling to dictators and refusal to upgrade her order’s hospices have been well-documented. And, even though he’s a doctor, he writes that “Tens of thousands of people, healthy just a week ago, are now dying” from COVID-19 (in fact, 99 percent of people who have died from the virus had serious underlying health issues).
For readers looking for solid information about the mind, TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR MIND is sparse in this respect. But for those interested in lots and lots of advice about attaining inner peace, it’s certainly a good choice.
~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader