Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a review of the book, which is impossible to cover in it's entirety save for vague generalization due to it's mammoth size and diverse contents. In addition, I believe it's important for the reader to know where the ideas in the book come from and I would also like to share my experience as a dabbler in the author's world... I remember when I discovered the author's website (type "cassiopaea" into any search engine to find it), I was deeply in "seeking" mode and would leave no stone unturned, so naturally Laura's website, the ideas of which form the basis of this current book, intrigued me. I had read a few traditional (and confusing) Western Alchemy/Occult type books (or parts thereof) as well as a great deal of the sort of armchair philosophizing books that attempted to sort of "bring it all together" for the neophyte seeker. I'm talking about the standard sort of books any fledgling dabbler in the occult is bound to read first: stuff by Israel Regardie, Dion Fortune, Manly P. Hall, Gurdjieff, Franz Bardon, etc. At the point when I randomly came across the author's website I had come to appreciate something in Buddhism that I had not really found coherently expressed in the various other forms of mysticism/occult I had studied for the previous 10 years or so with all my sincere efforts. When I stumbled across this author's website, my mind tumbled into an abyss of total doubt and real spiraling "out of control" feeling, but I stuck with it. I read and entertained her beliefs honestly and open-mindedly until I really understood her reality. And it disturbed me to believe it was true. Then, one day, I woke up and realized something I had read by RA Wilson really applied here: "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves." This was a reality tunnel nobody has any way of proving or disproving... and it's completely negative, not unlike all the religions this author condemns as evil tools of manipulation! I would almost guess if I stuck with her ideas for too long, it would have caused some sort of psychotic break or something. Now, I personally believe in non-carbon-based life, as have some of our most brilliant scientists, such as Planck and Shrodinger (so I'm not a kook!), so when the author explains that she receives this information from a Ouija board, I don't discount her offhand as a nut-case. However, you should be aware that this is how she comes to a lot of her conclusions; she asks "the Cassiopaeans" about something and they give her answers on a Ouija board. She then mulls it all over and comes up with some truly terrifying ideas about reality. It took her a while to fully trust them and, actually, she's still not completely certain if she can trust what's coming out of her Ouija board because it could be misdirection coming from other entities, who naturally want to keep the author and everyone else trapped. In the author's eyes, pretty much everything is mind-control (and I don't disagree with her here). The problem, for me, is that what she presents as supposedly a fully-researched and presumably legitimate approach to the subject matter is anything but that. She certainly knows a lot of general and fragmentary information about a lot of subjects which she pieces together methodically and thoroughly-- not unlike David Icke, although I'm sure some will not appreciate that comparison. It took Icke several books of terrifying paranoia before he finally came to the conclusion Hindus had expressed far better a thousand years earlier: all is love... so what is with all the paranoia-inducing speculation and hearsay?) This author's conclusions (opinions) are basically all the result of sheltered personal interpretation, perhaps an overactive imagination and perhaps the ideas of those beings she might possibly channel through her Ouija board. Her opinions on various religions or mystery traditions are not those of one who has actively experienced them as a part of the community. Without any firsthand knowledge of many of these subjects, she tends to resort to conjecture. As a matter of fact, she HAS to resort to conjecture, unless she is depending on her supposed spirit guides... in which case, she is then resorting not simply to speculation, but also to hearsay. If it is true that the mind creates its own reality, it is not surprising that the author seems to be living in her own private hell, complete with death threats.