The Inner Game of Life. (Books).

Stewart W. Holmes. The Inner Game of Life. Haverford, PA: Infinity, 2001.

Stewart W. Holmes is interested in relations between our symbolic language and our behavior -- specifically, within the disciplines of general semantics and Zen. In prior books, Meaning and Language and Zen Art for Meditation, he wrote about these fields. In The Inner Game of Life, he describes ways in which general semantics and Zen may be correlated.

To win the "inner game" of life Holmes maintains that we must combat life-degrading assumptions and attitudes. To do this he describes, in chapters 2-10, how we build a model of ourselves and examines how the parts of this model operate with each other and with the rest of the world. Then, in chapters 11-13, he describes how stresses originate and how we can distinguish constructive stressful reactions to environmental impacts from destructive stressful reactions. Finally, in chapters 14-19, the author looks at various ways of getting rid of destructive assumptions and attitudes that we already suffer from.

Holmes, a frequent contributor to ETC since 1943, has worked as an editor and collaborator with authors of English textbooks and has written English in Action Composition, English in Action Grammar, and Meaning in Language. His Zen Art for Meditation, published in 1973 and continuing in print, has a companion volume Zen Haiku. Holmes has also written articles for publications of the Modern Language Association and he currently composes weekly essays for a Zen meditation group. He is clearly a man of letters, with a deep interest in Zen and general semantics. I highly recommend Holmes' latest book to those interested in learning useful ways to consciously adapt stress-reducing attitudes toward situations that arise daily.