Yoke: The Gateway of All Problems

What if every problem you carry began with a word?

We are taught that sticks and stones break bones, but that words can never hurt us. This book begins by overturning that comforting lie.

Trace any wound to its root - the fear that has no reason, the bondage you cannot break, the mood that descends from nowhere, the gift that will not come - and you arrive, every time, not at a blow, but at a word. For a word is not a sound that fades. It is a living spirit that lodges, dwells, and steers; and a word that has taken root in you is a yoke.

Yoke: The Gateway of All Problems is an investigative inquiry into the oldest and most layered idea in human speech - the yoke that joins two and delivers their motion to a driver. From the ox's wooden beam to the Roman yoke of spears, from the chemistry of the brain to the gate of the heart, it follows the word from the moment it is spoken to the moment it becomes a problem.

Along the way it asks:

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• Why does the small man command the giants?
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• Why does a friend's arrival change your whole personality - and your departure change it back?
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• Why does the cast-out trouble return worse than before?
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• Why can neither strength nor brilliance break a yoke from within?
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• And why is one yoke, alone of them all, called easy and light?

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This is not a book of easy answers or borrowed comfort. In the patient, witness-driven manner of the Let Us Crack All Odds! series, it calls its witnesses - ancient and modern, scriptural and scientific - weighs them in the open, and leaves you equipped to navigate for yourself. It honours the help of the physician and the mentor, and adds the dimension they leave out: that behind the chemical there is a word, and behind the word, a spirit that entered by a gate the heart still keeps.

For the serious reader who carries real questions - and suspects, rightly, that the answers lie nearer than the experts have looked.

From the author of The Chemical Being and Mind Hacking, in the Let Us Crack All Odds! series.