All Things

I do most of my non-technical reading while I'm in the air. Here is one I read while flying from Atlanta to Savannah (45 minutes, so its a quick read).




Let me give you the summary - Dude dies and in "heaven", 5 people he encountered while alive show him the importance of his life on earth.

I've read gobs of books like this one, usually falling neatly into the bucket of "Buddhism for the curious". Written in a typically Christian tone, it still had the familiar texture of the Buddhist belief that your soul is evaluated after you die and only then do you learn why you lived this life.

The author's style is smooth, weaving believable characters and imagery into a digestable, weighty story. The story of the seemingly ordinary man living a life of almost banal quality does a neat perspective alteration trick, leaving you feeling in awe of the power he had to change the course of events in the lives of the five people he meets in heaven.

In Buddhist tradition, books like this, these life-answering, what-is-the-nature-of all-things books, are not to be kept. After reading them, you give them away to the first person who comes to mind. If you get this in the mail, I was thinking of you.