Good advice

Shaving the Inside of Your Skull goes beyond self-help

by Bill Rodriguez

Shaving the Inside of Your Skull by Mel Ash. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnum Books, paperback, 219 pages, $15.95.

I think that I like Mel Ash's latest self-help book because it so stubbornly undermines its own best interests. Like a lot of its competition on the drugstore racks, it could claim to have more Answers per page than the Bible has verilies. But Shaving the Inside of Your Skull is perverse. Like the title of Abbie Hoffman's auto-bio Steal This Book, it's entire contents is dedicated to pointing out the ways it's not needed. Before you can get to the help part of "self-help," it drums into the reader, you've got to sit down and figure out just what you mean by self.

Perverse. Billing itself as "A User's Guide to Psyche, Self & Transformation" and subtitled "Crazy Wisdom for Discovering Who You Really Are," what does it tantalize the possible purchaser with as an opening quote? The Buddha's observation that "If the mind depends upon anything, it has no sure haven." This volume offers a methodology of pragmatism rather than an answer book.

Thus warned off, why let ourselves be cajoled into reading 200-plus pages? Simple. For the exercise. Shaving the Inside of Your Skull alternates between short, smart essays on self-identity and exercises for putting the observations into practice. Five sections focus on who we're supposed to be, told to be, think we are, might become and really are. As indicated above, Ash contributes to any conclusions less by instructing us than by leading us to our own discoveries. (Of course, with these particular leading questions we are nudged toward discovering our inner Timothy Leary rather than any inner Charlie Manson.)

The book's title refers to the need for shorn Buddhist monks to alter more than appearances. The five topics of concern he calls shaves, and the exercises to realize them he calls razors. Those exercises set this book apart from the common run of life guides that drum up a breathless sideshow atmosphere about sage goals ("Be here now!") but leave the readers wandering aimlessly when the tent revival leaves town. So after Ash discusses, say, how we're told by society and religion to be other than our authentic selves, he goes on to suggest things we can do to practice being and observing our uninstructed selves. Such as talking to yourself in a mirror, or turning a coffee break into a tea ceremony meditation by focusing conversation on the simple pleasure of the experience.

The last, and ultimate, "shave" is on "Who we really are." To the extent that Ash has designs on our conclusion, they emerge most explicitly here. Yet in that chapter he persists in subverting any tendency we might have to accept his guidance blindly. "This book refuses to become another jailer," he writes. "All this book can do is to describe our prison and furtively sketch a couple of risky escape routes."

Sprinkled within the text are Ash's whimsical little ink drawings, and in the margins are advice and observations quoted from a wide variety of sources. There's jazz icon Charlie Parker ("If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn") and Northern Exposure DJ Chris Stevens ("Have you ever tried thinking like a shower?") as well as expected run of Zen masters, philosophers, psychologists and poets.

Although many of the observations in Shaving the Inside of Your Skull are New Age truisms, the book doesn't market the obvious as painlessly profound. On the contrary, Ash's roll-up-your-sleeves approach to personal development testifies to the fact that putting good advice to practice can be hard slogging, whether you're talking Ten Commandments or the Four Noble Truths. No, this new soldier in the self-help bookshelf phalanx is more like a curious scout rather than an opinionated general.

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An interview with Mel Ash

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