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Wildwood house. I first heard of this book in a list of references in Margaret Newman’s Health as Expanding Consciousness, which is itself a work very much worth reading. Because Newman’s book was so interesting I was inspired to follow up pretty thoroughly on the references she mentioned and in Stalking the Wild Pendulum I was well rewarded for making the effort. I had to order Bentov’s book from the regional library (this being a time period before Amazon.com) and, judging by the length of the waiting list, there seemed to be only the one copy around. When I did get eventually hold of the book it was in a great state of dilapidation and the stamps on the front page indicated that it had been out of the library continuously since the first borrower a number of years ago, a fact which naturally lead me to conclude that I was onto a good thing. I felt that perhaps some sort of an arcane secret lay within its pages, and that I was now in a position to find out what that secret was. In retrospect this feeling of excitement seems slightly (if not more than slightly) naïve of me and yet I don’t think it was too misplaced. I imagine that a lot of people would dismiss Stalking the Wild Pendulum pretty quickly as being the work of a serious crank – the sort of a crank the world seems to be all too full of – but for anyone who has a mind that is able to stay open long enough to receive new ideas, and a startlingly new way of looking at the world around us, this is one hell of a book.
David Bohm (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Universe. Routledge & Kegan Paul. David Bohm is a shining example of a top rank physicist who shows how physics – when taken to its limits – shows us a universe that is far stranger, and far more wonderful than anything we might have been lead to imagine by the sort of science education most of us have been unfortunate enough to have received. The dominant trend in science seems at the moment to be to ‘explain everything away’ via a process of closed (or tautological) logic misrepresenting itself as ‘revelation’. This is science as a ‘finite game’ – an enterprise that sets out to prove something that is already contained within its own tedious premise. Bohm on the other hand shows us that there is an alternative to what E.R. Schumacher referred to ‘material scientism’ (which is a sort of ‘phoney science’ that deadens our curiosity and stifles our innate sense of wonder by smothering it with its own spuriously authoritative voice, like some dreadful old headmaster in a typical rotten English ‘public school’).
James P Carse (1986). Finite and Infinite Games. Penguin Books. It is hard to imagine reading Finite and Infinite Games without having one’s perspective on life dramatically altered. Carse differentiates between two modes of thinking and behaving in the world – one mode is where we strive in an essentially humourless way to ‘win’ within the same old meaningless games without ever questioning why we are doing it, and the other mode is where we play in order to be surprised, and where ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ become irrelevant. Carse sees the world as being utterly engrossed in the first mode, in finite games, whereas individuals engaged in the second mode, the players of the Infinite Game, appear very much to be a minority, generally ignored and often actively oppressed by the humourless finite game players. Carlos Castaneda (1984) The Fire From Within. Black Swan. When Carlos Castaneda died, a few years ago now, the English newspapers came out with a selection of obituaries stating that Castaneda was famous for his books about his apprenticeship to the Yaqui Sorcerer Don Juan and that – most scandalously – he had made it all up. Castaneda was debunked, and two generations of hippies and New Agers shown up to be gullible fools (which we all knew anyway). What struck me however was this: none of the psychologists, social scientists etc whose reputations within the circles of academia are faultless have ever (and very probably will never) come close to producing a body of work with anything like the density of insights contained within Castaneda’s books, of which the above is an excellent example. Academically approved authors may not be guilty of ‘making it all up’ but the stuff they come out is dismally uninteresting – a dreary reflection of whatever notions happen to be currently in vogue – whereas one only has to read a few chapters of a book by Castaneda to realize that he actually knew what he was talking about, and was not merely reiterating stale assumptions that he had passively absorbed from the social milieu. Like Jung, the problem with Castaneda is that his critics lack the understanding to actually appreciate what he is saying, and so all we hear about are their dull misinterpretations…
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1985). Order out of Chaos - man’s new dialogue with nature. Flamingo. This is a fairly technical but nevertheless fascinating book on ‘non-equilibrium thermodynamics’ dealing with what is pretty much a whole new way of looking at the world. In the past scientists assumed that the only way that order could ever be in a system was if that order was put in it, via a pre-existing (and very specific) set of instructions. Prigogine received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for demonstrating the existence of self-organizing, non-linear systems – systems which evolve in an unpredictable way by entering into the ‘instability phase’ and then appearing on a higher level of order. Entropy, instead of increasing, actually decreases in a way that is entirely out of accord with classical thermodynamics. In this book the authors show by many examples how nature behaves in surprising rather than predictable ways. There is a clear parallel to Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games here: Carse’s finite games can be related to optimization, or ‘equilibrium-seeking’ systems, whereas the infinite game corresponds to the idea that an unexpected source of order can be found in disequilibrium, or ‘risk-taking’.
Robert S. De Ropp (1968). The Master Game. Picador. There are innumerable books on psychology written by those designated by our culture to be experts on the subject and whilst these books are undoubtedly ‘authoritative’ in the sense that they are heavily backed up by the weight of the academic establishment, they are still as near to useless as makes no difference. Although not a psychologist by trade but a chemist De Ropp writes with a different type of authority – the authority of a person who knows from personal experience what he is talking about. The result of this type of ‘individualistic’ authority is that this book – on the subject of what De Ropp calls ‘Creative Psychology’ – is both highly enjoyable to read and genuinely educational in terms of the subject. Sogyal Rinpoche (1992). The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Rider. Sogyal Rinpoche states that one of the intentions behind this book is to make the Tibetan Book of the Dead (or Bardo Thodol) more understandable to the Western reader. The Tibetan Book of the Dead became well known in the sixties as Eastern ideas started to be imported in ever increasing amounts. It was considered one of the key Eastern texts (if not the key text) by the first wave of hippies (Dr Timothy Leary used it as the basis for his Psychedelic Manual). There are however - Sogyal Rinpoche suggests - potential problems with the popularization of such a highly esoteric text as this however because the context of understanding assumed by the Tibetan Book of the Dead is so very different from our own. Basically, it was not written for us and as a result may quite easily lend itself to misunderstanding. Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is however specifically written for the Western reader and it is written extremely well into the bargain – it is also available in audio format with sections read by (amongst others) John Cleese.
E.F. Schumacher. 1977. A Guide for the Perplexed. Abacus. Schumacher is an example of someone who, whilst having worked his whole life within the established social structure, and having achieved widespread recognition and respect within that conventional realm, did not subscribe himself in the least to the conventional way of looking at things. In this book Schumacher puts forth his own personal and original view on life – a view that is unique to himself and, because of this fact, highly interesting and valuable (in contrast to those untold reams of orthodox works clogging up the shelves of libraries everywhere, works containing recycled ideas, ideas that do no more than endlessly reiterate the prevailing fashion or paradigm). One of the ideas to be found in Guide for the Perplexed is that of the ‘discontinuous ontological hierarchy’. Normally we assume that our present mode of understanding can be effectively used to map out the whole of everything and for this reason when (or if) we try to think about what levels of organization might exist above and beyond the one with which we are familiar we think about them in terms of the mode of perception that we are presently (and quite unconsciously) utilizing. What Schumacher points out is that any level of organization must necessarily be completely inconceivable from the point of view of all the levels below it and so when we do try to understand what a ‘higher order of reality’ might be all we do is to bring it down to our own. So instead of forcefully trying to subject a higher order of things to our present understanding what would be more helpful would be to let the higher (and therefore unknown) order bring us up to its level, a process which would involve us discarding all our outworn assumptions and redundant agendas. Needless to say, this is the last thing we want to do and that is why books like this are outnumbered by conventional dross by a ratio of about sixty billion to one.
Alan Watts (1957). The Way of Zen. Vintage Books. Anything written by Alan Watts is very much worth a read. In this book, as in his others, Watts makes clear a way of seeing the world that is very much in contrast to our usual ‘default’ mode of perception and cognition. Watts is able to explain Eastern Metaphysics in a way that is still unparalleled by any Western writer that I know of. Just to read of few pages of something written by Watts seems to induce a state of mental freedom. Given that our current Global culture is very much rationalistic, very much goal-orientated and very much locked into the cul-de-sac of its own appallingly limited world-view, Alan Watt’s work represents a priceless (if thoroughly neglected) panacea. Robert Anton Wilson (1990). Quantum Psychology. New Falcon Publications. This is arguably one of Robert Anton Wilson’s best books, along with Prometheus Rising. Although not a quantum physicist by trade or by training, RAW, with unfailingly skill and humour, applies the insights of quantum theory to the psychology of everyday life. If this book alone out of RAW’s huge catalogue of works were to be read (and understood), that would be enough to guarantee severe and lasting damage to your previously immutable assumptions... Bohm, David. 1994. Thought as a System. Routledge
Ivan Illich. 1976. Limits to Medicine.
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