Title: Two Rivers of the Mind: A Simple and Fun Guide to Your Desires in Life
Author: Christopher J. Bourg
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 978-1-5320-7041-9
Pages: 270
Genre: Self-Help
Reviewed by: Jason Lulos

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Having read thousands of self-help books and having attended hundreds of seminars, author Christopher Bourg is a self-help academic. He is an industrial engineer by training but has held a plethora of different jobs and has been to fifty different countries. Through his vast array of experiences, he has refined a comprehensive, effective, and fun system for transforming dreams into reality.

Meet Captain Bon, a fictional character who has a dream of traveling to Mount La Felicidad. Bourg encourages the reader to live vicariously through Captain Bon to learn how the process works. Using determination, constant self-reflection, and mental flexibility, Captain Bon overcomes his fear and doubt. He transforms himself introvert to extrovert and from an idle dreamer to a driven go-getter.

Bourg’s program is holistic. He addresses every aspect from the goal to planning to execution. He begins with the notion of making a “true decision” to follow a dream. And though this may come as a conscious decision, the key to this whole process is to train your mind on a subconscious level. Bourg uses Neurolinguistic Programming and selftransformative affirmations in order to remake your/Captain Bon’s subconscious. This process works because it relies on practice: unlearning bad, ingrained thoughts and creating positivity.

These techniques teach you how to deal with fear and doubt, which is a major point in the book. Most people float down one river of life. This book is for those who want to find the courage to break away from the safety, comfort, and monotony of their lives. That being said, the tools in the book can work for dreams big and small. In this particular story, Captain Bon retrains his subconscious. He builds a mastermind team to help him achieve his goal by thoughtful networking, cultivating friendships, mutual respect, and reciprocal learning. As a result, Captain Bon reinvents himself both as an individual and as a co-dependent member of a group dynamic. Captain Bon’s system prepares him to chase his dream and, in the process, his life and his marriage improve in a myriad of ways.

Two Rivers of the Mind: A Simple and Fun Guide to Your Desires in Life is a great book for getting you started on a path of reinvention. It is well written and the program of self-transformation is structured to be fun and rewarding: perhaps as much as achieving the goal itself. Captain Bon illustrates the importance of team building, self-awareness, flexibility, positivity, learning, and, above all, cultivating passion.