Jeff Cannon

The Self Connection – A review of the book ‘The Conversation’

“We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection” – Dalai Lama

Author Jeff Cannon’s book ‘The Conversation: Your Guide to Transcendence’ is a book that encourages lateral thinking and connecting with your inner self. It utilizes a hitherto underutilized phenomenon of lucid dreaming to come up with questions and answers to the very unique experience that’s a human life. Taking full advantage of these lucid dreams, Jeff completely engages in them and lets the dream and the guiding voice he meets help formulate various hypothesis. The author doesn’t preach, profess or impose any particular belief. Instead, he gives an insight from his own personal experiences spread over the course of five days and five nights.

The author invites you in for a magical journey into his lucid dreaming accounts, to illustrate various points he’s trying to make, of stories, of the human element in them; all told with a flowing prose that accentuates the beauty of these dreams. On a holiday on the Greek island of Ithaca, the author gradually slips into these dreams every night wherein he is aware of the fact that he is dreaming and yet is able to interact with the various elements. He finds energy or a guide in his dreams that offers assistance and support to help him decode life’s mysteries. And it is by consciously going deeper into the unconscious that he meets a certain figure that represents the conscious awareness or his inner Self.

On the first night of the dreams, the author and the energy guide talk about a form of energy that goes well and beyond the physical limitations of man. The world we live in is simply a manifestation of the energy we send out; what goes around, comes around. On the second night they talk about love, about commonness & singularity and how no one ever ceases to exist, how they merely transform. On the third night, they talk about how it’s consciousness that holds everything together, a consciousness free from judgement. On the fourth night, the talk veers towards how every experience creates new perspective; questioning & exploration leading to clarity and purity. And on the fifth and final night, they discuss how everything comes from within, understanding your consciousness better by reaching further into the depths of your Self.

The book shows that even during moments when it seems that we are awake and aware; we are in fact sleeping through valuable opportunities life throws our way. Reading this book will lead you to expand your consciousness and get you to ask all the right questions. Then our dormant Self will once again become responsive, conscious and alive. And life will attain its true intensity and luminosity. And only then will the timid and reserved mind become receptive towards real living.

You will find yourself getting emotionally engaged with the content and will experience the author’s enthusiasm as well. It will also ignite or renew your interest in lucid dreaming and will have you practice it yourself. The mix of western philosophy with eastern spiritual tradition works very well and it becomes an original thought of its own. The Conversation will leave you with peace and contentment, it’s a book that reiterates the fact that life is a series of events waiting to be explored and experienced. And to quote a line from the book, “Life is the breath of the soul. Embrace it, share it, let it flow.”… (meer)