Messiah’s Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul
Product Description
In Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, Richard Bach met Donald Shimoda, a fellow pilot with the keys to the universe who barnstormed the Midwest in a Travel Air biplane. Part of Shimoda’s secret was a small book, bound in a what looked like suede – Messiah’s Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul. “Open it,” he said, “and whatever you need to know is there.” Lost for decades and rediscovered, here it is in print at last – reminders for those who have outgrown cynicism and doubt.Amazon.com Review
Readers of Richard Bach’s Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, will recall that said messiah, Donald Shimoda, carried with him a small book entitled the Messiah’s Handbook. According to Shimoda, all Bach had to do was, “Open it, and whatever you need to know is there.” Now, decades after Illusions was first published, Bach has made the handbook available to all of us “advanced souls in training.” Rather than reading… More >>
Messiah’s Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul
To the credulous, Richard Bach always seems to have beautiful poetic answers for any of life’s little complications. But as I see it, the credulous never seem to ask any questions of Richard Bach, particularly any tough ones. I ask questions all the time, and in doing so I have discovered it takes almost no effort to unravel Bach’s written metaphors for life.
Consider the following Bach passages for instance:
“If it’s never your fault, you can’t take responsibility for it. If you can’t take responsibility for it, you’ll always be its victim.”
“Every person, all the events of your life,
are there because you have drawn them there.
What you choose to do with them is up to you.”
Try to explain these passages to a 5-year old child with diagnosed with leukemia or to the parents of that child a year later at a funeral home.
To me, Bach ignores the everyday realities of life. He comes across as all-knowing, almost mystical, but in truth he is just a person like anyone else… but who has found a VERY lucrative form of writing.
The Stranger To The Ground only seems to write about silly and weird things anymore, those which are well-outside the boundaries of reality. My guess is he’s well-aware he has a very gullible audience that never dreams of checking how weightless his passages truly are, and that he’s not missed the fact that two poetic lines per page is quite enough for millions of credulous fans to eagerly shell out $13 to make him even wealthier.
After reading the book Illusions, I expected so much more of the Handbook. What I expected was something fresh and poignant-what I got was unenlightened.
THe book is everything I had hoped it would be. Delivery was fast and the book arrived in excellent condition. I love shopping on Amazon..and will return many times over, I am sure.
It is a mistake to think of this Handbook as a novel, or short story. It is actually a book of common one line, philisophical quips. It doen’t really guide you at all. It is like having a positive fortune cookie you can open on a daily (or a more frequent) basis.
If you’ve read the “Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah”, then you need this Handbook also. It contains answers to main questions of Being.
And remember: Everything in this book may be wrong…