Not a patch on the original. The little sayings at the top of each chapter are worth a read though. They do a good job of making you think about the big questions on your life. The rest of the book though... just go read Illusions again and skip this one. ( )

How the mighty are fallen. It isn't just that this is a retread of Bach's earlier work, albeit retold in the context of his near-fatal aircraft accident. It is that he was reduced to self-publishing, a fact that appears in the editing lapses. Granted, even the likes of Kurt Vonnegut turned to smaller presses for some of his later work (e.g., A Man Without a Country), but to find no publisher at all, for someone whose work shaped the seventies, is sobering.

Perhaps the answer lies in the quality of this particular effort. The tropes that soothed and gave hope almost fifty years ago, today sound threadbare. Revisiting Donald Shimoda is interesting, and certainly captures the current trend for sequels, but Bach goes on to imagine conversations with his fictional characters (not even Jonathan Livingston, but a boatload of ferrets), his dead dog, and a wrecked airplane. Any philosophical system that deems literally everything a fully sentient immortal entity has multiple hurdles to avoid sounding puerile. These are the spinnings reminiscent of a freshman philosophy student, newly awakened to the power of imaginative world-making, earnest but still naive and shallow. Bach, however, is in his eighties, so cannot claim this excuse. His work has not matured at all, which is a real disappointment, especially to those of us who were so impressed when he began.

The worst of it is that, because everything is an illusion, this includes illness. Bach argues that anyone who is sick or disabled is that way because they have chosen to accept the "lie," and thus in that sense at least they deserve their condition. He offers himself as a counterexample as someone who chose to overcome a serious accident without any permanent injuries. We saw a lot of this garbage in the 80s, when hucksters made huge bucks selling false hope to dying AIDS patients, saying that they could "think" themselves well. That Bach attempts to recycle such nonsense is both disappointing, and oblivious to his privilege

For example, he was able to overcome his own challenges because he could afford to employ two full-time "assistants" for over a year to help with whatever he needed. In this case, choice is a code word for money. As for the rest of us without large bank accounts, the lesson is apparently that we're simply not evolved enough to make the right choices, which of course includes choosing to be rich. That's why we're sick, suffering, and physically infirm. The most we can hope for is to be an audience appreciating his marvelousness. I decline. ( )