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Struggling somewhat to rate this one. There were a few nuggets that were very enlightening but a lot of unoriginal concepts or overly fluffy statements as well.

I found myself thinking "hey, that reminds me of..." very frequently while reading this book. The book reads like retreads of various scriptures, warm fuzzy stories, and self-help manuals. It's not a new concept that words are powerful and we should think and speak positively about ourselves and others. Not taking things personally is another not-new self-help idea. Same with not making assumptions and always doing your best. A lot of the advice is couched in "fuzzy" terms that just irritate me...black magic vs. white magic, visualizing and imagining, we live in a dream of hell? While the concepts behind the language may be accurate I just had a hard time taking it too seriously with language like that.

I particularly struggled as a parent reading the first chunk of the book. We have to teach our children something, just so they can function in society and have a structure to hang their lives on, but Ruiz seemed so against "domestication" that he almost seemed to advocate not passing our beliefs and teachings on to our children because they have no real choice in whether or not to believe them when they are young. I suspect if I had the chance to actually have a conversation with him, he could clarify the confusing and sometimes contradictory passages in the book, but I don't have that opportunity. And I'm left with a book that seems to have some good, though not really original, ideas - with no real outline for how to apply them.

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