There are a number of quotable delicacies, but I don’t want you to lose all of the context, since that is much of the content; I don’t think Deepak is naive, just like not all puzzlers over Paul are hard-asses, but that is probably the feel you would get from a sort of dismembered review. If you like.

I liked this better than the (somewhat similar) book “The Return of Merlin”, although like “Merlin” I think it’s fair to say I didn’t know where he was going with it for much of the novel. Not that that bothers me—an appreciation of mystery and a pursuit of patience is hopefully what distinguishes the book crowd from the Judd Apatow crowd. (Ah, remind me of my wasted youth, BuzzFeed.)

“Merlin” is an adventure; although it’s an adventure mostly about mystery, about setting out and coming home, without the emphasis on medieval bloodletting like in a historical manuscript. Though of course there are puzzles and tests of faith; I know a new ager who is in denial about suffering in the world, not least her own, but, like I said, Not all new agers. “DoJ”—“an adventure of the heart”, he calls it—is like a sort of “Konstantin Levin”—“Anna Karenina” without Anna Karenina, and the train—a book about meaning, although one of the best parts for me was the at least one or two places, or maybe three, where he pushes back against the daughters of joy being the Perfect Anglos, you know.

That said I did feel—and I do not feel that this has to be a bad thing—pushback/processing of one of the sayings, “I (I, the world, basically—it’s an Anglo-Indian American novel, and both sides of the equation matter), will deny you nothing.” I will deny you nothing…. That you need. That I believe. I know there are hours I spend in prayer without getting ‘nectar’, and things like that, workaday etc, but, and I have been in hospitals and I’ve been crazy and I’ve been wrong and I’ve suffered—whenever I’ve really needed help, there has been, in retrospect, a teacher—at the time sometimes it seemed like such another dolt, you know, but it wasn’t, really—just like Gloria in the book. When you are the bottom, and you meet some crazy old lady, sometimes that is the beginning.

…. I suppose history matters more than the philosopher as such says—the story almost has to be in Boston, for example, a nice city but not fancy—but I’m still sympathetic. You have to look beneath the surface…. Most people can never be happy, in this age of the world—kicking the can down the road….

Happiness is strange. I’ve been happy, from time to time. It’s strange. It’s not like laughing at a joke. It’s uncanny. It’s not like how you’re used to being.

…. After-thought: Life is a strange bird, and so am I.

I will keep this book on the profile, although I’ll give away the paper; there are more extreme intellectuals than Deepak, like samurai poets or whatever, one of whom I’ve read, and who’s nailing down Japan on the map for me, so with that there I can’t in a consistent way forget-away this, or regret it. (I don’t mean that I have ‘hard’ regrets, since there’s no way to know that Augustine was a know-it-all prick who’d have harried Jane Austen for being the only thing she was allowed to be, without reading him—and people do talk about him like he’s someone to know! But in a RETROSPECTIVE way, some books give nothing, but the knowledge that they are ‘empty’, and not in a cool Buddhist way, you know.)

But Deepak’s words of love are very intellectual; it’s a very detached, perfect love, despite him not being as extreme and aggressive as the average, I don’t know, carping angry film critic, you know. He DOES do the necessary thing in talking about the whole Caucasian Grecian American Mythology we are always imagining, and how it’s not real, BUT, from a //psychological// point of view, it is kinda ‘Elinor & Marmee’, you know—no Marianne. And I used to hate Marianne, and in a different stage of life I loved this book, so I don’t know, but…. But I have to explain, obviously. Elinor is from Sense & Sensibility—she’s the Rational Young Woman. Except whereas, according to some people, at least, Elinor has a sort of growth arc and isn’t always right in S&S, DoJ’s Elinor (I forget their names; I just remember what they were like) is so, I mean, the book is so teach-y, you know; its lessons—and I mean, every kind of book has lessons, even the Zig & Nola books have these little security tips, (eg buying an extremely expensive lock tends to attract criminals’ attention), and that’s not “good literature”, you know. But since DoJ is so teach-y, even though it’s not historical and obviously it’s not scriptural, lol, Elinor becomes like Buddha or Mohammad or Jesus or somebody—she’s the Perfect Rational Young Woman, you know. And there’s no foil, no Marianne, passionate and poetic; if you’re like that you’re not even part of the book, which you read to learn about Elinor and how perfect she is because she doesn’t make mistakes, you know—she’s so damn smart. So instead of Marianne we have Marmee, the (Little Women) mother, you know; it’s like—I mean, it is good to have different ages, generations. But if you’re contrast is between the Good Mother/Grandmother, and the Rational Young Woman…. It’s like, that’s kinda a narrow range of affect/personality type, you know.

And women are told that they’re not rational, you know—and girls can be smart, you know, but…. I mean, the thing is, there are these insufferable know-it-all real men out there, and, within reason, in a non-reactive way—WITHIN REASON, and no by ‘reason’ I don’t mean rationalism, I mean ‘soft’ reason, reasonableness, which is usually the Opposite of rationalism—I mean, do most girls identify with the Rational Young Woman, the Perfect Detached Lover? Obviously, they don’t. Nobody does.

So why not give people what they want, you know? I mean, people want different things, but…. I mean, we teach people in school—to the extent that we teach anything, some people just put their heads down in school and survive, the majority, really—but we teach the ‘good students’ to attack and criticize and invalidate and real-man and to anti-ad the physical world away, you know…. And I just think UNCRITICAL—ironic, I know—acceptance of the Passionless Young Woman, and no ‘scarlet sinner’/slut type who also has a growth experience (although DoJ’s Elinor doesn’t have a growth experience, she just always knows everything, but you know what I mean….).

I mean, it comes uncomfortably close to invalidating many people’s, probably the majority’s, emotional style, even though the lauded intellectual minority here often produces many, many sick individuals, and sick patterns too, more broadly. Deepak’s not doing that in this aggressive way, and the whole point of writing the book was to kinda try and taper off that real-man pattern which is out there, but…. I don’t know, “owls fly at dusk”. I can’t quite de-metaphor that, but there you go—at the end, boom. Just when you thought you were out…. they pull you back in!

Favorite quotes:

Love never hurts. What hurts is the fear of not being loved, insecurity about not deserving love, or some other resistance. Love is the greatest purifier, so it can stir up buried wounds, and then these hurt. It can’t be said, however, that love itself causes pain, because the essence of love is bliss.



You can influence a person back to good by your example, and you can improve a person’s energy if you know how. After that, everything depends upon the person’s own will. Changing someone who isn’t willing to change is impossible, even if you love that person from the depth of your heart.



What if you have been so hurt in the past that you are afraid to love? What you are afraid of is your own fear. Fear is an energy, so if you deal with that energy, love will come to you naturally.