What I Just Read

It might be best to read this book as metaphor: a metaphor for personal development, as well as for developing openness, perception and acceptance. The average reader will likely find the underlying ideas (astral projection/out-of-body experiences, lucid dreaming, interactions with other consciousnesses and so on) to be too woo-woo, too bizarre, and possibly even too threatening to engage with directly. Author Robert Monroe first chronicled his lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences in his 1971 book Journeys Out of the Body . This book begins where that book left off, describing his experimental methods as well as some of the tools and techniques he developed over the years (including, interestingly, the use of binaural beats). But the latter half of Far Journeys is where things get weird. This part of the book could be interpreted on one level as a science fiction story, but it is actually (the author claims) a literal account of Monroe's explorations out-of-body, where he c...

Fun, engaging novel about a very intelligent--and very naughty--boy. If we're lucky, we will all have a little bit of Tom Sawyer in us: we all misbehave, we all show off, we all counted the interminable minutes until recess, and we all have our little schemes and connivances. Nobody remembers the boys who behave themselves all the time. There's some subtlety to Twain's writing too at times: we see a good example in Chapter 6, when Tom is late to school. [1] You have to read with fairly close attention to note that Tom sees an empty seat, the only empty seat, next to Becky Thatcher on the girls' side of the classroom. He was thinking several steps ahead, and this was exactly why he spontaneously admits to his teacher, loudly, that his tardiness was due to talking to the town's black sheep, Huck Finn. He did it because he knew the teacher would put him on the girls' side of the schoolroom, right next to Becky! [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers...