This Side of the Gate is a story with a really innovative concept. The entire
book is made up with short stories each detailing the life of a particular individual. In each of these pieces, the reader learns a little about the character of that person, some of his most defining moments, what he has learned from these
experiences, and the karmic debt he has accumulated. The tie together of these chapters is that these lives are the reincarnations of one single spiritual
entity and the book follows his existences from his life in Atlantis where he seeks
spirituality to his life as a major in the Crimean War. His experiences in these thirty-two different lives varies dramatically from an individual
seeking spiritual knowledge to another seeking only monetary gain and from the ultimate pacifist to the killing machine. I loved the idea of tracing an entity’s lessons and common patterns through analysis of each life and through the process as a whole. I thought it was a particularly good touch that the reincarnation
pattern was not evolution-like so the individual tended to learn a lesson in one life and then fall back into the same destructive pattern in another experience.