Recommendation This book’s focus is love, forgiveness, taking responsibility for your life, and living in the
present rather than hanging onto regret and recrimination. Most
spiritual approaches share these beliefs and the book presents little that is new, except its aloha twist. Author Joe Vitale brings in the Hawaiian perspective of his co-author, Ihaleakala Hew Len, a Hawaiian therapist and Ph.D., who advocates the “ ho’oponopono ” method. The authors’ emphasis on cleansing and love is a lot like the repentance and love of Christianity, and the emphasis on the universe existing only in your mind has a neo-Buddhist flavor. Skeptics may find that the
recommendation to make a batch of special cleansing water pushes their envelope one notch too far. A larger stumbling block is that although many spiritual leaders teach the emptiness of pursuing money and material wealth, this book makes wealth a goal, and suggests that you can receive riches by ridding yourself of blocked memories. To talk of spirituality as the source of record-breaking sales of luxury sedans seems somewhat self-contradictory, but the book is otherwise straight new-age self-help, though getAbstract appreciates its Hawaiian flavor.