The Complete Idiot's Guide to Reincarnation

I found this book to be very thought-provoking. I am really surprised at how it has affected my viewpoint of the world and life in general. When you see life as a mixture of chance and fate, you realize that the major challenges in life are just as important as the best things in life. You realize that the people that have hurt you have provided valuable lessons that your soul needed to know in order to become complete and join with what I term as the Unity (of which I am writing my own book). I have found that these ideas are very hard for many people to grasp, but we must know pain to truly know pleasure. We must weep to experience happiness. There can never be one without the other. My only complaint is that this did not do a whole lot in looking at Western civilazation's view on reincarnation such as the Celt's belief of a spiral of life. Otherwise, this is a sparkling gem of a book with a title that makes it only seem dulled.

I really enjoyed this book, overall. The only flaw I found in it was an erroneous statement regarding Buddhism and the Dalai Lama. The book states that Tibetan Buddhists believe the Dalai Lama to be the 14th reincarnation of the Buddha. This is incorrect. They believe him to be the 14th reincarnation of Chenrezig, or Kuan Yin, the Bhudda of Compassion..not, as the book implies the reincarnation of "The Buddha," or Sidhartha Gautama. The author seems to not have grasped the fact that there are many Buddha's, indeed that the basic Buddhist belief is that we are ALL potential Buddhas. Besides that, though, I did find the book to be thought-provoking and useful for anyone interested in exploring this subject, whether you are a beleiver in reincarnation or a skeptic.