Your Immortal Reality

By Gary Renard

Book Review by Sidney Goodwin

I just completed my reading of Renard's latest book, Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death (Hay House), with his two ascended Master Teachers, Arten and Pusah. I had read his first book The Disappearance of the Universe and was interested to see what new information he would reveal from his sources. Now, I must admit that I had not even purchased A Course in Miracles before I read Gary Renard's first book, but I have remedied that problem since.

Your Immortal Reality much like The Disappearance of the Universe attempts to explain A Course in Miracles from the "good old common man" approach. Gary says that he is just a common guy, not all that bright, who just happen to have his future self, who wrote the Gospel of Thomas in a previous life, and a partner appear as physical forms in his living room and give him sage advice on spiritual principles to living in everyday life. Their banter adds color and some humor to the exchange that presses the message of A Course in Miracles that forgiveness is the key to awaken us from the dream of this world.

Outside of a few edited verses of the Gospel of Thomas, there was nothing really new that is not in A Course in Miracles or from other spiritual sources that applies to spiritual progress. However, there were some other interesting comments that I had not expected coming from such "high" spiritual teaching and lead me to question the "True" intent behind the writing of this book.

Mr. Renard seemed to have a lot of ego attachments for someone who is teaching others to escape the ego, which doesn't really exist. First, he was concerned with the book sales of The Disappearance of the Universe and why it was not on certain lists to gain notoriety. I can understand a person wanting to get the information out to the public, but that could have been done freely over the Internet, if that was the major concern.

Of course, he would not have made any money that way, but money doesn't really exist anyway. The two ascended masters tell Renard that they would not appear to anyone but him, so if anyone should claim that they did they would of course be stating a falsehood. Interesting, I have studied several channeled sources and they all seem to indicate that it is possible for anyone to contact them, even if in a slightly different form.

The last two chapters get nice and dicey. They attack other spiritual authors, especially David Hawkins and his kinesiology testing of consciousness. I wonder why Mr. Renard is be concerned with a test to "Truthfulness" at the subconscious level that can be performed by many people. I am not sure why the author and his "masters" were so dogmatic about "this way" being the "best way." Even claiming that Buddha was not truly ascended, but had to reincarnate yet again. This sounds a lot like conservative Christian Religions to me. This of course alerted me to re-examine this whole concept and his books.

Why have the duality presence of human forms appearing and the maintaining of personalities? I was under the impression that with enlightenment we would be more of a Higher Self that is more of a collective of consciousness. Between the two books, we have more details of incarnations, life coming to Earth from Mars, but not a good explanation about how this fits in the dream. They claim that God is not aware of the actions in the dream and yet the Ascended Masters know everything. Are they working incognito? Where is the Oneness in this?

I found good information and insight in both books; granted, I find the same core text in A Course in Miracles as well. However, I am concerned with the validity and integrity of Mr. Renard's books because, he frankly does not pass the test taught to me by my instructors at Atlantic University for channeled sources. In fact everything points to just a good imaginative story that got a guy out of debt. I mean really, you take a core book on spirituality; you add a couple of colorful characters that add the mystical touch and boom you have a hit. You go from dead broke to a wealthy in demand speaker, flying all around the world.

I hope I am wrong about Mr. Renard. He might have just been corrupted by "spiritual ego." But if I were visited by two Ascended Masters, I hope that I would have the spiritual integrity to put the book on an Internet website to be freely downloaded. If, I allow the direction to be by Self, the big "I," that attracts me toward true enlightenment, I would do it anonymously. But what do I know, I am just a humble student or spirituality.