ARA Review by wakechild of In It Together

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wakechild
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ARA Review by wakechild of In It Together

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[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, In It Together.]
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2 out of 5 stars
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In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All, by Eckhart Aurelius Hughes, tell us that we have two selves. Hughes refers to these two selves as (1) the real you, meaning your consciousness, versus (2) the rest of your unconscious mind and body. We do not realize or recognize this higher self and perceive ourselves to be a body and accept the limitations that come with that body. We failed to realize that as consciousness we have a choice in how we choose to relate to our world.

He states that we can't help starving children because we can't even help ourselves. Why? This is because of our own self-destructiveness. We treat others cruelly because we treat them like we treat ourselves, which unfortunately is also cruel. If we are to obtain the peace and happiness that we seek, we need to first make peace with our own two selves if we are to have peace with another. When we do, we will realize that as consciousness, we share a common connection with each other and at that higher level we are interconnected and One.

To make peace with these two selves, we must make peace with our past self, present self and future self. We have a relationship, not just with others, but with our own state of consciousness throughout time. Our goal is to move into a truly conscious love with all our relationships but most importantly with our two selves and our relationship with our past and future. Without this recognition, one will mistake the body costume for our true reality and perceive this lower self to be the recipient of our attention.

I am familiar with, support and follow this philosophical viewpoint espoused in this book. Unfortunately, I found this book to be redundant, rambling, incoherent and short on support for this philosophy. The first third of the book seemed preaching, a downer and a guilt trip laid upon the reader. It failed to provide meaningful support for the idea that we are one or that we have this higher self. It was not clear nor concise as to what points the author was trying to make.

This book contains many good ideas that can help someone find inner peace but it is poorly presented. It just took too long to get to any point. Even when a point was made, it was difficult to decipher due to all the prior and continuous background noise. The book could have been edited down to a short pamphlet of about 20 pages. It would have been more clear, concise and allowed me to know what the author was really trying to say. All the “filler” left me wondering if the author knew what he wanted to say.

The writing style was tedious, excessively long winded with long run on sentence that often comprised a whole paragraph. This made it difficult to decipher what point the author was attempting to make. Little or no personal, anecdotal or scientific evidence was provided to support this “Oneness” philosophy. This was unfortunate, since it meant these ideas might be construed as just unsubstantiated opinion or wishful thinking on the author’s part.

To someone totally unfamiliar with these concepts, the redundancy, lack of clarity and evidence might be helpful in introducing these ideas. Although redundancy may help, I don't see the benefit of poor clarity or lack of supporting evidence. In the last chapter the author does clearly provide a number of suggestions that he's believes, if adopted, will lead the reader towards the realization that as consciousness we are connected and One. Because of this I rated this book 2 stars out of 5 instead of 1 star. It did not warrant a 3 star rating since I would not recommend this book to anyone who is vaguely familiar with these concepts and principles.

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