Take Me To Truth

This book by Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira offers some interesting practical insights, and you can find out more about it pretty easily through their website, which simply has the same name as the book, Take Me To Truth. It is also one of the books I consulted in the writing of my book, and so a review of it on this blog is overdue by now. Specifically why I'm doing it right now is also because I'm rereading the book in preparation for translating it into Dutch.

This book is primarily based on the experiences Nouk and Tomas have had in growing through the various phases in their own personal relationship, everything from falling in love, to having children, divorce, and becoming friends and co-authors, and they have developed their own unique vocabulary in the process. For some magical reason it seems to be hitting a nerve with people, and offer just the right balance of generally accessible presentation in their own words. As I've argued elsewhere before, in a way you could view this book as a commentary to the section on the development of trust in A Course in Miracles, and it provides an interesting diagrammatic rendering of that process, including how it sometimes malfunctions. It also has a discussion of the a lot of relationship related issues, for which again they delve into their own experience, and offer a host of very practical ways of identifying issues, and recognizing the need for change. They develop their own language for things which at times seems to borrow from the Course and other sources, but it is uniquely theirs, and unintimidating, and for the most part very intuitive. All in all this makes it very accessible, and where it might not be they included a small list of terms to clarify their usage. Nouk and Tomas are able in this book to share their own growth process, and help us to some clarity, as well as share some practical insights and tools from their experience, and they do so in a language that certainly does not require the reader to have read any of the source materials before they enjoy this book, which is a remarkable accomplishment in and of itself. The reader at the end simply has the option to pursue any of the various source materials or not, but none of them are mandatory to appreciate this book.

What makes the book unique certainly seems to be the very accessible language, as the sales prove. For the rest, there is an emphasis on the practical and the pragmatic, on living it, rather than talking about it, which reflect how Nouk and Tomas grew through their own relationship which started as a special one like everyone else's, and which later involved a pretty extensive extended family group. And then there is an emphasis on tools and practicality which really is the hallmark of this book. The authors suggest using the Enneagram for help in personality typing, just as a broad way of characterizing ourselves, and as a tool that can help propel us to a view from above the battlefield. But like with everything else, it's an option, not mandatory.

In terms of their strong emphasis on the development of trust, which is an oft-misunderstood section of the Course, this book again is very practical, and among other things offers an excellent graphical way of understanding what happens when we try to "skip steps" and have to go back to "Go" without collecting $200. Their example is a bypass from steps 2 to step 4, from "a period of sorting out," to "a period of rest" by skipping the intervening stage 2, "a period of relinquishment." This phenomenon is akin to the ego's tendency of wanting to help out the Holy Spirit doing his job, which is really not in its job description. The result is that people focus on one aspect of the journey and mistake it for the final destination, and it truly explains the phenomena of formation of cults and religions, including Christianity as it derives from Paul's conversion experience. People build a concession stand halfway  up the mountain, and as a result they divert other travelers from going uphill, never mind stalling in their own growth. Being diverted like that results in nothing but painful delays, and in effect having to backtrack later on. The way Nouk and Tomas explain this phenomenon in illustrations is absolutely lucid, though I find that the text explanation is too crypto-Calvinistic in a New Age vein. The way the process is described there makes it all sound too mechanistic, like a precise progression, which is not at all the case in the experience of anyone I know, moreover is really contrary to the forgiveness process which A Course in Miracles advocates, which is by nature asymptotic in the way we experience it. So this is one clear area where the way this book describes the process completely diverges from the Course, which is not to say that some of the insights are not valuable.

Their workshops, of which I have hosted a few in New York City, are very lively, and have this same practical and experiential quality, and I can recommend the experience to anyone. In short this is an interesting book to read. It is a unique and very personal reflection of the experience of the authors, with their own insights, though it is not in the narrow sense e.g. a book about A Course in Miracles, except for liberally quoting from the Course. The Course remains one of the options for further study. Fortunately the authors use their own vocabulary, so that hopefully it will be clear to the reader that this is truly their own nomenclature, and not ACIM, although it does seem that way at times. To me the book is an on-ramp to a highway, which gives the reader options to proceed to any of the directions from which the authors took their inspiration, everything from A Course in Miracles, to Eckhart Tolle, to the Enneagram, and various other writers and traditions. The total framework of the book is more New Age than A Course in Miracles, in spite of the numerous quotes, but the treatment of evolution, energy, karma/reincarnation, and special and "unified" relationships have more to do with a variety of New Age teachings, which are also liberally quoted in the book. In particular the notion of the "unified relationship" in this book, while evidently inspired by the Course's notion of the holy relationship, is evidently not the same thing, since the book continues to frame this in the contexts of relationships between people, and therefore in a dualistic manner, such as there are multiple unified relationships, even though at some points the text seems to try to also embrace the notion of the holy relationship as being one, but it never reconciles these two concepts. In short, the book represents the authors' unique intersection of these various traditions, and quite evidently it is very accessible and speaks to a lot of people, and it's up to the reader where you want to go from there.

From the perspective of my own book I connected of course specifically with the development in this book of the bypass in the stages of the development of trust, the skipping of steps in our process, specifically as it relates to the development of Paul and Chritianity, for it would seem that Paul is a perfect example of what happens when we do skip steps in our process, and the point is that we all do. What matters is to learn to recognize it for what it is, and keep going. We arrest our own development in this process whenever we think we know and we take over from the only teacher there is. And then when we slide on the ice (again) we have the option to start over, and over, and over, until we learn NOT to run the show. As far as A Course in Miracles is concerned, the whole point is not that we should not make mistakes, but rather that we learn to be honest about them and forgive ourselves. Just like the problem is not that we once chose the tiny mad idea, but rather that we are still choosing it minute by minute, and Jesus' counter in the form of the Course is that equally we can choose the miracle instead of murder minute by minute, and if we forget, we can always start again, and by forgiving ourselves in the process, we lose the need to repeat the exercise.

In a more general sense the book stands on its own entirely, and in the context of the Course it seems to want to propose that this book/method is a shortcut to the Course, as is explained in Nouk's bio in the back. It professes the motivation of saving others the challenges they experienced in their years with the Course, which sounds honorable enough, but it does not work. As the standard joke goes, the Course is the shortcut, and therefore, when you're cutting it short, you are needlessly extending suffering. Shortcuts to the Course become like the skipping steps in the development of trust - detours. And in terms of saving others pain, the only effective way of doing that is by living the Course, which the Course also calls teaching it, and which has nothing to do with teaching workshops, or God forbid, being a "Course teacher." Here, just like with the proselytizing tendency in early Christianity, it seems that the temtation to teach is part of the natural ego urges which tend to surface in our Course process, but it is in fact a trap, and even more so when it professes to offer shortcuts, which really abort the process of the work. There is no suffering to be saved anybody, since the pain we experience is only the ego's resistance, which won't be overcome unless we learn that it is not real and cannot rob us of the Peace of God, not by avoiding it, for that IS the lesson, and therein lies the Peace of God. What prolongs the suffering are the ego's avoidance manoeuvers.