The Deal
A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Here is the greatest “deal” you will ever find: This concise, deeply practical guide shows how to forgive anyone who has ever hurt you and to receive a payback of enormous personal satisfaction and inner peace.
“What I am offering you in this book is the best deal you have ever gotten in your life, or ever will. Even though I know nothing about you, I’m willing to make this claim with complete certainty.”
With elegance and absolute persuasiveness The Deal explains how forgiveness – rather than being a squishy, eat-your-vegetables virtue – is actually the key, perhaps the sole key, to a happy life.
If you perform the one simple but vital forgiveness exercise in The Deal, you will forgive and be forgiven. You will be free. You will enter a new phase of life.
A widely respected spiritual writer and thinker, Richard Smoley doesn’t hand you the standard promise that this book will change your life. When you finish it, he concludes: “It already has changed your life.”
This is the simple, radical truth of The Deal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking a brief detour from his usual writing on esoteric spiritual topics, Smoley (Inner Christianity) offers a more psychological perspective in this short, superficial look at the power of forgiveness. Smoley's proposed key to happiness is succinct enough that he explains the whole concept in his second chapter. This is the Deal: a nine-step process for forgiving all others and accepting forgiveness for yourself, which Smoley says will change you for the better. Instead of offering contemporary examples of ordinary people who have been helped by this exercise, or significant evidence that this sort of cognitive restructuring has proven effects, though, Smoley offers notes about karma, A Course in Miracles, and fairly mundane acts that are not difficult to forgive: examples include a broken pair of glasses and neighbors who play loud music. He saves more convincing historical examples, including Christ and Lincoln, for the second half of the book, where he also entertains questions in an engaging q&a format. Always provocative, Smoley asks important questions but offers an inadequate foundation for his answers.
