My offical review of The Zahir, by Paulo Coelho
This book was my first exposure to Paulo Coelho. After finishing the book I have read a bit about him online, and have learned more about who he is. But I enjoyed reading this book from a fresh perspective, knowing nothing about him. This allowed me to read the book with no "filters", since I knew nothing about the author.

This book seemed to be primarilly a story meant as a vehicle for his thoughts on spirituality. I think his ideas on this topic came first, and he wove together a story to carry these ideas, but the story seemed to not really know when to stop. I found the ending a bit odd, but I think this was probably the result of Coelho not knowing how to wrap up the story. As a result, I found myself thinking more about the ideas in the story when I finished the book, than the story itself.

After finishing the book I thought about the main point that he makes several times throughout the story: you must forget your personal history in order to experience love completely in your life. You must imagine that you have just been born, that you have no "story" that has been told to you, and you are free to absorb life as if it was completely new, and that this is when pure love enters your soul.

While reading the book, I couldn't help thinking that this idea sounded familiar, that I had heard something like this before, expressed in this same way. But I didn't remember where I had learned this, until I read a bit about Paulo Coelho's own personal history.

He was apparently once a follower of the Peruvian writer Carlos Castaneda, who wrote about the spiritual beliefs of certain Native American Indians. I have read Castaneda, and he writes of this same idea, which he himself learned from a South American Indian who called himself Don Juan, and who guided his tribe of Indians in spirtual questions by taking the Peyote plant, which causes very vivid hallucinations.

I remember now that Castaneda writes about this same idea, when he describes spending time with these Indians and consuming the Peyote plant, and expriencing these very vivid hallucinations and feeling like he was being re-born. He describes this experiences as being extremely happy and new, and that this revealed a completely different reality from our own, existing in parallel with the "normal" reality. Love supposedly passes from this other reality into our own, and wisdom comes from learning how to live in both of these realities at the same time.

The underlying theme of this idea is that there are many "parallel realities" to our own. We live in the world of the 5 senses, of cause and effect. But there are supposedly other realities that require other sense to perceive. For example, God exists in a reality different from our own. When Castaneda ate the Peyote plants with the American Indians he decided that he was able to perceive this parallel reality. And Paulo Coehlo takes this same idea and puts in the ideas of the people of Khazakstan, but without needing to use the drugs that Castaneda used.

Paulo Coelho puts a these same ideas from Castaneda into the mouth of the character Mikhail. The Tengri religious beliefs of the people of the "Steppes" are sort of like a desert version of these South American Indian beliefs, and they are both equally poignant. But Coelho several times uses the term "Warrior of Light" at key points in his dialogs, which is new.

He doesn't exactly explain what this expression means. But I assume he is referring to the Mongolian horsemen, who ride the steppes, and the idea of light as being a spiritual revelation. So a Warrior of Light would be someone who is in touch with these ideas that Carlos Castaneda explained from Peru, but which are shared by the people of the Asian Steppes, and described in a spiritual sense. I like this image, and I see that there is even a society devoted to Coelho's ideas that use this very name:

www.warriorofthelight.com
The book is also obviously about questioning our "story" that everyone inherits and followes blindly. This "story" is our set of values and beliefs and our ideas of what we consider right and wrong, about what our goals should be in life, and how we react to someone who is different.

I found this to be a bit of an old question: how many books and movies over the past 40 years have called on us to question our assumptions? It is an easy question to ask today, and many people use this question as an excuse to abandon their religious beliefs, or to pursue some political agenda like Communism, or to live a life that is defined by being opposed to something else, like old hippies looking for something to protest.

The easy answer to this question is to simply follow your own personal path of protest, and define yourself by what you are against, instead of offering any real coherent solution, like the group of young street-people that he spends time with near the end of the novel.

But I liked how Coelho didn't jump to this easy answer. He even talks a bit about his generation and his own personal involvement in what he calls "the hippy thing" and all those people who questioned the world and thought they could change it 40 years ago. Coehlo himself apparently left his Catholic heritage for a while but later returned to it, since simply opposing the status quo is not a sustainable answer to this question. It makes more sense to live within this story, but then to question and reform it from within.

Coelho does this by learning about the ideas of the people of Khazakstan, and their emphasis on forgetting your personal history as a way of opening your soul to the power of Love.I liked this answer. I'm a bit tired of other books that ask the reader to question all assumptions, and then leaves the question hanging in the air with no answer.

I liked the technique of referring to the little story his wife tells him early in the novel about Hand and Fritz sitting in a bar in Tokyo, 500 years after the imagined success of the Nazi dream, and the entire world is inhabited by blonde-hair, blue-eyed Nordic people. Hans asks Fritz if the world has always been the way it is, and Fritz says that of course it has, and they finish their beer and forget the question. This little story is obviously an analogy to us questioning our assumptions today. I liked how Coelho refers to this larger question later in the book by simply mentioning "Hans and Fritz".

Coelho several times mentions his own journey on the old pilgrimmage route, the Road to Santiago. Coelho personally travelled this 500-mile road, and he apparently experienced some kind of spiritual revelation while on it, sort of like the famous story of Saint Paul on the road to Damscus and being temporarilly blinded during a sudden encounter with God. Coelho even mentions Saint Paul's experience in this book, perhaps realizing the parallel to his own experience. I think this experience is more clearly relevant to his other book, The Alchemist, which I still need to read. It's obviously an important detail in his life, since he mentions it several times in The Zahir.

There was one passage that I thought was very well-expressed, when his wife says that the most important skill in human relationships, which is being lost today, is simple conversation. She says:

"The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don't talk anymore, they don't sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories... I remember Esther saying that all the really important things in our lives had arisen out of long conversations we'd had sitting at a table in some bar or walking down a street or in a park."

I also liked Coehlo's ideas of how to live each moment of life fully, by imaginging your soul as having just been born. I like his general outlook on life, which feels both spiritual and passionate, and I think I would like getting to know him if I met him.

But I couldn't help but feel unsympathetic to his wife at the end of the story. She had supposedly gone on a spiritual quest, which resulted in her seriously hurting her husband. She struck me as selfish. The end was strange, with her almost expecting him to show up, and she greeted him as if they had just parted the previous day. Her revelation that she was pregnant, but that this would not alter their relationship or her plans any, struck me as unrealistic. It all wrapped up a bit too neatly to be taken seriously. But I think that Coelho needed to wrap up the story somehow, so this was a quick way to bring it to a conclusion, even if it wasn't realistic.

I really liked his idea of "The Law of Jante", where we are all given rules and commandments to follow in life, in order to not stand out too much from "the crowd". The safest solution therefore is:

"Mediocrity and anonymity are the safest choice. If you opt for them, you'll never face any major problems in life."

I also liked how he incorporated his own personal story as a writer into the plot. I especially thought his small attacks against literary critics was funny, when he said this:

"Critics are extermely insecure, they don't really know what's going on, they're democrats when it comes to politics, but fascists when it comes to culture. They believe that people are perfectly capable of choosing who governs them, but have no idea when it comes to choosing films, books, music."

I found this short video helpful, where Paulo Coelho talks a bit about his book The Zahir:

www.meettheauthor.com/bookbites/767.html

I also found Paulo Coelho's own Blog, where he talks about UFO's and Aliens...!

paulocoelhoblog.com

I will read more of his books. For some reason, I felt very inspired and happy when I finished this book, and I want to read more of them. Even if he is expressing similar ideas to another reader, he filters this through his own experience. Very few ideas are unique. They all come from somewhere, and the task of an author is to filter ideas through their own experience and perception.