Seeing all the reviewers who've rated this as 5 stars, I'm guessing there are a lot of believers amongst the reviewers (I'll put my hands up and admit that I am not). However, to anyone who believes this stuff, please don't take my review as an attack, but rather as a "forgiveness opportunity". How could it be otherwise, since I'm apparently not a separate person from you? Now, on to the review:I couldn't decide whether the author was schizophrenic or just a canny business man, who had realised that the New Age market can be very lucrative, especially if you promise the key to eternal life or a return to the source. Towards the end of the book, I was leaning towards the latter, because of all the inconsistencies between what he was purporting to believe, and how he was actually acting (and in fact how his ascended master guides decribed their own behaviour)
The premise of the book is essentially: the world does not exist, and we do not exist as separate consciousnesses from fellow humans (or Martians, or Alpha Centaurians for that matter... or dogs or cats or beetles I shouldn't wonder). Anyway, the world is an illusion that we have constructed and are projecting from Heaven, because we mistakenly once had the idea "what if" (there was something beyond this unimaginable perfection that we experience all the time). Because this is an imperfect thought that cannot exist in Heaven, we had to create an illusory world outside of heaven, this being the universe that we believe we are experiencing now. Buried deep within us is the belief that God would be angry with us if he knew we'd created this horrible imperfect universe, so we fill this illusory world with pain and hurt, to distract ourselves and keep ourselves from knowing who we are. All other humans are just projections of our same consciousness, and whenever another person does something we don't like, it's because our consciousness scripted them to do such, so that we could have something apparently external to blame (still following me?). The "truth" is that God was never angry with us, because this universe is not real, and we never left Heaven. What we are experiencing is akin to a dream. All we have to do is realise this, and wake up from our dream, and then we can realise that we are still part of Heaven (albeit with one collective consciousness, because our individual characters do not actually exist). Time is also an illusion, and everything that has ever happened is going to happen. The story is all told, and we have all gone back to God. In the end of the universe (which is happening right now, and has already happened), we have all gone back to God.
I realise some readers may think that the above is the crazy part, but I didn't particularly have a problem with any of this (well, except the idea of, if there is no such thing as imperfection in Heaven, how could this part of Heaven have created something imperfect, even in illusory form? I'm sure they've got an answer to that, but I think it's on the level of semantics).
No, for me the crazy part was, if the author actually believes all of this, why does he still write the book as if we are all individuals? Why does he still describe his day to day interactions as being with genuine separate entities? For example, he pontificates about politics. Oddly enough, I agree with all of his politics, at least the taste he's given in his book. But if he believes it's all illusory, why would he care so much? When he blames Bush or the Republicans or corporate America (and I agree with his blame, that's not what I'm knocking) -- how is it possible, in his belief structure? He should just immediately see them as projections of himself. Throughout the book his spirit guides remind him that the world is not real -- he appears to believe this whole-heartedly, and yet continues to react each and every day to the world as if it *is* real.
Even his spirit guides are guilty of this: for example, Arten and Pursah explain that they are a couple in the future. they live together, but are not married, because they do not want to offend the memories of the people they were previously married to (both dead by the time they meet). If we're all the same non-existent person, who could they possibly offend? The author might try to back-track on this by saying that they didn't understand all of this at the time, but Pursah was apparently an Ascended Master for the last 11 years of her life. It just doesn't stack up.
What also doesn't stack up is that Pursah tells Gary that she is actually an incarnation of him in a future life, and that she was also Saint Thomas during the time of Jesus. But.... if we're all the same person, how could you possibly distinguish one person from another, from lifetime to lifetime? On the one hand he says that we are all Jesus, because we are all the same person, and that the man who cuts you off on the freeway is just another manifestation of you.... but somehow they are able to distinguish all these people, who are really just one, but somehow are not, as they pass from life to life. It makes no sense.
And another thing... they often talk of good and evil. Things which are apparently only possible in our "false world of duality" (in Heaven there is only one thing, and that thing is good, or love). But if the world is illusory, how can there be any good and evil? At one point Gary has learned to "forgive" a film for being rubbish and having wasted his time watching it, and then one of the spirit masters says, "What you don't know is that, if you hadn't gone to that film, you would have been killed in a car crash". Again, if this world is an illusion, and the ending already played out, and we're already back with God, what does it matter if he dies in this life? I think the author would say that, by being given the opportunity to stay longer in this existence, he can undertake more "forgiveness lessons" and so hasten his return to Heaven. But if time is an illusion, the conception of which ceases to exist once we are all back in Heaven, and if we are all back in Heaven anyway, because the story was over as soon as it began, then why does it matter how long it takes or how much suffering you go through to find it?
I could go on and on, but the simple version is that the book and the experiences of the author and his spirit master(s) are completely at odds with each other.
I gave it three stars however because it was a fairly entertaining read, and it's probably a good idea to learn how to take things more lightly, not blame others so much, and "let stuff go".
