Book Review : Return to Eden

Title : Return to Eden
Author : Anthony Raimondo
Publisher : dogear publishing
ISBN : 978-160844-113-6

Return to Eden is a spiritual book aiming to guide readers to live a joyous life. This book helps in making readers realize that the ultimate theme of one's existence is to attain Oneness with God and to reach that state, the one most important ingredient which needs to be present throughout this learning process is to have a focused pure thought.

God is waiting for us asking 'If you desire only me, you will find me and I will be One with you.' For that to be achieved, there needs to be a conscious detachment from the worldly desires. Meditation and fasting facilitate in bringing this detachment from the worldly desires and only then the desire for the Oneness with God will get the required focus.

I specifically liked the order of the chapters - Theme, Mission, Affirmation and Outcome Oneness. As it is prerequisite to have a central idea for a story or a narrative, the first step towards self-empowerment is to understand the Theme of our existence and the theme then becomes the force behind the thoughts, behaviors and actions. Having a theme and supporting it with repeated affirmation, makes the theme transition from subconscious to the reality. Affirmation can be positive or negative but what and how we feel gets manifested in life.

I must appreciate the way author has compared the two states - 'no-where' to 'now-here', the former gets manifested when there is total chaos and our emotional experience is that of worry, fear and anxiety while the latter is that of oneness with the Father which places us at the right place at the right time.

This book offers some wonderful thought provoking ideas, explanations and conclusions and great guided meditation techniques as well as some exercises which readers can make use of to create checkpoints in the journey to self realization.

But can't help pointing out a few spoilers in this book - the first being, a lot of mistakes in the written language, there is wrong usage of some words as simple as 'then' and 'than' and not just once but at many places and some grammatical mistakes.

Also, in some chapters the narrative becomes too complex which hampers the connectivity that any book should attempt to build with the reader. Some books, in spite of offering very complex concepts or ideas, beautifully manage to flow neatly in the minds of the readers through the words that are chosen to convey the same. However, in some, that flow appears to be very jerky and ambiguous. My personal opinion : this book could have been edited properly and the bumpy ride could have been made a pleasurable journey for the benefit of readers.