The Path to All-Consuming Joy - Self Help Book By Dr Werner Fiesenkopf Hypnotherapist and Speculative Gynecologist
Daniel Selikowitz was recently trapped in his basement. While waiting for someone to free him, he discovered a ground-breaking, unpublished self-help manuscript that explains the secrets to absolute happiness. The following is an extract.
About the Author
Dr Werner Fiesenkopf has a Ph.D. in pop psychology that he found in a bin behind Taco Bell.
Introduction
I respectfully ask that you forget everything you have ever been told about unhappiness, depression, pessimism, cynicism, anti-depressants, self-help books and copyright infringement. Try to forget about all the times you have read books about achieving happiness on the bus to work only to miss your stop and end up last in line at Starbucks. Also try to forget about how much you paid for this tome – it’s in your interests as much as mine.
I am going to explain to you how to feel better now, but I don’t ask you to believe me with blind faith. Rather, I ask you to believe me with the desperation of a person who has been repeatedly failed by gurus, motivational speakers, religious leaders and mental health professionals, and is therefore in a state of abject misery and slavish neediness. By the time you finish this book I believe you will not only feel better, but also understand why most approaches failed you before - although I also believe that standing in doorways for three seconds before entering a room increases your chances of finding love, so you may or may not want to bear that in mind.
The way to get the most out of this book is to open it and scan the words from left to right at a comfortable speed. Approach it with an open mind, by which I mean an uncritical alcohol-induced stupor. See whether it makes sense to you and if it sounds like something that you already know intuitively. If that is the case, you may be eligible to fill in for Eckhart Tolle by ghost-writing my next book: Wonk! A Reader’s Guide to Ploink!
The information given here is different because it represents a new understanding in the field of parapsychology. Indeed, parapsychology is a new field in the field of Raelian thermodynamics, so this is all very innovative indeed. In any event, the information here doesn’t build on other approaches you may already be familiar with. If you can digest the information in this book, you will feel better right away. Do not digest this book, however, as you will probably feel worse and require gastric lavage.
There is very little effort involved – for me, that is: all you have to do is understand what you read on an intuitive level and make a gentle effort to put your understanding into practice. As you will see, I don’t offer any fancy techniques or any sophisticated psychological theories to sift through, primarily because I am not aware of any. What I offer you is a common-sense method to achieve happiness that really works, particularly when memorized in verse. I have seen people who have been unhappy or depressed for as many as 60 years walk away from my office feeling better than they can ever remember, although to be fair they had retrograde amnesia and I don’t have an office.
Nonetheless, I am eminently qualified to help you achieve happiness. Like Eckhart Tolle, I was once depressed and have brought myself back from the brink with a combination of positive thinking, cognitive-behavioral therapy and medium-strength opiates. And, like Eckhart Tolle, I have spent significant periods of time on park benches wearing nothing but a beatific smile. All of this, coupled with my sunny disposition and predilection for novelty neckties, makes me perfectly suited to the self-help business.
My approach is based on a set of principles known as the Parapsychology of Phenomenological Analysis1. It is being used by a growing number of therapists, or by a number of growing therapists – statistics are unclear, but either way it has spectacular results. The methods you will learn have been developed from these principles in a way that is geared towards freeing you from unhappiness, and freeing $22.95 from your wallet.
Many professionals now teaching this approach have come to believe that the more conventional approaches available today make matters worse instead of better, particularly for the professionals teaching this approach. This is not to say that there aren’t excellent, well-qualified therapists practicing traditional therapy... wait, maybe it is.
Old-fashioned therapists insist that people must deal with their negative experiences and unconscious drives, or else they will be miserable (the therapists that is). You must bear in mind that these therapists are almost always paid by the hour, as opposed to forward-thinking therapists such as myself who bill per minute and let you rollover your unused time to the next month. Does this mean that traditional therapy is useless? Perhaps, but the publishers wouldn’t let me say that outright. I’m certainly thinking it loudly.
I will show you how to access a place within you in which happy feelings are kept, without the use of a Stanley knife and a tourniquet. I will also show you how to detect mental processes that take you away from this place. I have never met a person who didn’t feel better after learning this simple approach, or a person who didn’t not feel worse. For that matter, I have never met a person who didn’t need the approach after meeting me.
Approach the ideas here with an open mind and a curious heart, although not with a curious heart condition (which may require surgery or a lie down). Don’t discount anything as being too simplistic until you’ve had an honest chance to practice it, just as we won’t discount this book until at least 300,000 copies have been sold to people other than employees and blood relatives.
If you read with commonsense as your guide, God as your witness and a handful of pretzels, I believe you will be pleasantly surprised at how good you can feel. And remember, if all of this seems like commonsense turned into jargon so that I can pay off my gambling debts, I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth: it is simply an indicator of how close to recovery you already are!
The Rich Tapestry of Thought and Feeling
All of us are thinking all the time - with the notable exceptions of civil libertarians and cheerleaders - and it’s a good thing too!
Without the ability to think, our lives would have little significance, not to mention that simple tasks such as tying our shoelaces would become holiday projects and passing high school would be comparable to a space mission. So I suppose it would be like living in Brisbane. But I digress.
Thinking has become an automatic function for us, like breathing or abusing telemarketers. And when you’re always doing it, it’s easy to forget that it’s happening. But, without realizing it, our negative thoughts are becoming negative feelings, just as bad breath becomes farts.
Many of you may be unconvinced at this point, so let’s take a more detailed look at thoughts.
What are thoughts?
*News flash*
Your thoughts are not real!
Sure, your thoughts may be real thoughts – you perceive them as real – but are they actually a part of ‘concrete’ reality?
To test this and find an answer for yourself, see if you can carry out some of these tasks:
- Eat a thought
- Kick a thought
- Tussle with a thought
- Cut a thought in half with a bread knife and bury it in the garden
- Take a thought to the movies and touch it inappropriately
Any luck? Didn’t think so. That’s because thoughts are intangible, which means they don’t exist – just like altruism, compassion, good, evil, liberty, justice and the Easter Bunny, although my cousin claims to have photos of the last two.
When you think about something, you are creating images in your mind – copies, if you will – of real events. The real event is not in your mind, it is in the kitchen or possibly behind a box in the basement. So the thought is nothing more than an imaginary reconstruction.
Now that you understand the nature of your thoughts, how should you deal with them?
What would you say if a child was frightened of monsters underneath her bed? Would you ask her to come round every week and describe the monsters in great detail? Perhaps if you own a large ranch and regularly entertain children, but most of us surely would not.
What you probably would do is tell the child that monsters aren’t real and are just figments of our imagination – although it would probably be an opportune moment to warn the child about the very real danger of Christian Slater.
Once this is done, the child will no longer be more frightened than your average complex-ridden 7-year-old and will revert to lusting after her father.
Let us change the child to an adult so that the example becomes the least bit relevant. What would you say to this child, now grown up and stricken with guilt and neuroses, if she said: “I hate my life and I want to end it.” You would say, “Not on my new carpet you don’t, and mind those chintz curtains because it took half an hour of haggling to get the deal we got.” Or something to that effect. But how do you actually change your thoughts? Keep reading Bozo.
OBSERVE - STOP - DELETE - REPLACE
This is undoubtedly the world’s most bestestest method for defeating negative thought... You simply do the following:
As soon as you feel a negative emotion coming on, observe it to determine the thought by which it was caused. You can usually recognize a negative emotion by a sudden and uncharacteristic desire to punch a baby - or, in the case of British nannies, a sudden and uncharacteristic desire to stop punching a baby. This emotion will allow you, by gathering mental fingerprints and dusting your cerebellum for clues, to identify the unconscious negative thought: e.g. “This man sitting in front of me on the bus reeks horribly of fish sauce, and will therefore most likely kill me and harvest my organs.”
Once you have identified the thought, stop all physical movement and allow your mind to come to rest. You may wish to think of a large, red stop sign appearing at the forefront of your mind – do not confuse this with the large, red stop sign appearing through your windshield because you have stopped turning the wheel and are now on the pavement. It is important to remain calm.
Bring the thought to the front of your mind – don’t let it slink away from the scene – and enunciate it clearly. You may like to articulate it into a song. Then record it. And send it to me if it’s any good, accompanied by an intellectual property waiver.
Now is your chance to replace that negative thought with a more positive one. Let them clash like Brendan Nelson and AC Nielsen and may the best thought win.
If you find that you’re struggling with this method and can’t stop horrible, depressing thoughts about domestic dysfunction, environmental degradation and socio-economic strife entering your mind every waking hour of the day, you aren’t trying hard enough.
Summation
The point I’m trying to get across is this: you can’t see thoughts, so they’re not real, and if they are then they’re probably more scared of you than you are of them. Or perhaps that’s Alsatian dogs. Either way, make sure you’re getting enough Vitamin D.
Ploink! is due to be released by Allen & Unwin as soon as they get it in the mail.