Point of View

Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman is told in the first person past tense as though it were a memoir. The Afterword makes clear that it is a work of fiction based on certain events in his spiritual quest. Rather than write a didactic book about the Hawaiian kahunas and the Three Selves, he decides to construct a novel set on Molokai and create a teacher, Mama Chia. It fits into Millman's first book, Way of the Peaceful Warrior, at page 184, but can be read on its own, after the reader is oriented through the contents of the Prologue.

Dan narrates briefly how his life has gotten off-track and how he takes a summer off teaching to rediscover his "transcendent sense of freedom." Dan finds "Sacred India" disappointing, and during a stopover in Hawaii, remembers the shaman that his teacher, Socrates, predicts he...