Undulating Ungulate

Have been meaning to do this for a while.

I have had the privilege of reading widely and in depth during a prolonged period of self-education. This is a rare thing, and I am very grateful for it.

So: here is a list of the non-fiction books that are most highly recommended by the moose.

This is a really hard list to make. I want to get a sense of what has most influenced me, and what would be most useful for others to read. The real challenge is what amazing mind-blowing stuff to leave off; what entire disciplines don’t even get a mention.

I could rant at length about each of the books listed, and someday mean to, but for now the list and a brief precis will suffice.

Over time I have found the one of the most important laws of scholarship to be “always read the original”. Reading these volumes will repay truly great dividends. In some cases I am picking authors rather than books, as it is difficult to fit many thinkers into one volume.

-=-=-

Robert Anton Wilson: Quantum Psychology.

Wilson is like the Irish Buddha. Compassionate, funny and wise, with an uncanny ability to explain complex things in ways that make you feel much smarter than you are, as he teaches you how to think for yourself. His books are wide ranging and profound, and totally unique.

QP deals with quantum physics, language, the mind, and how we make ourselves a reality tunnel to live in; it is gentle and funny and unspeakably brilliant, and will free up your view of things by stealth with its mix of theory and practice.

Prometheus Rising, and Cosmic Trigger Vol 1, are the other two must reads of his non-fiction. They are both also pretty indescribable, but totally worthwhile. (Also recommended is the audio set Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything, particularly the 2nd and 3rd lectures.)

His humour, and staggering originality and clarity of communication, make him the best entry point into the world of ideas that interests me.

David Bohm: Wholeness and the Implicate Order; Thought as a System.

Quantum physicist and philosopher whose thought touches on the most fundamental questions of existence. Bohm is much more than a physicist. In my eyes he is quite possibly the most important philosopher of the late 20th century.

WATIO is about his take on quantum physics, and relativity, and their implications for everything else. There is one long chapter with many equations that will be over most people’s heads (sure was over mine), but it is interesting to read along the development of the logic. Also discusses language and philosophy, putting forward fascinating and brilliant stuff as he grapples with the deepest issues of meaning and existence.

TAAS is much easier going, taking the form of a weekend long dialogue he led, and covers analagous material in a completely non-technical fashion. Both are very brilliant.

(I often feel much of my own work is covering ground that Wilson and Bohm covered better.)

PD Ouspensky: In Search of the Miraculous; Tertium Organum.

Russian philosopher from the early 20th century. Genius in his own right, while perhaps best known as a disciple of Gurdjieff.

ISOTM introduced me to the best, most lucid, most grounded and practical model of human psychology and spirituality I have encountered; a genuinely life-changing experience.

The first ten pages of TO are still probably the most comprehensively mindshattering thing I have ever read; in fact, in many ways that is where my journey began, and the return was being able to say what had already been said, but from myself, in my own words.

Buckminster Fuller: Critical Path

Visionary genius, design scientist, humanist; original thinker par excellence; world-system thinking at its finest; one of the most optimistic paradigm shifting thinkers of all time.

Want to save the world? Start here. Not easy reading, but off-the-charts brilliant. Written the year before he died; a summation of his life’s work. Almost impossible to communicate just how powerful, joyous, and uplifting this work, and Fuller’s vision, is. (Actually, we wrote a – frankly awesome – song about Bucky in Idle Faction: right click to download Go Bucky Go, which maybe captures some of how rocking this stuff really is )

-=-=-

Those four, in particular, are giants whom I am standing sheepishly on the shoulders of, feeling out of place.

Now two which are just things any intelligent person in the West should have read, or the equivalent thereof, in answer to the basic questions of where did we come from, and how our current world and ideas about the world came about:

Richard Tarnas: The Passion of the Western Mind

The best one volume history of western thought I have encountered. A truly incredible performance, weaving together the many strands of thought into one amazing narrative.

(An excellent Eastern complement to this is Heinrich Zimmer’s “Philosophies of India”.)

Arnold Toynbee: Mankind and Mother Earth

The best one volume history of the world I have encountered. Written the year before he died, and after his mammoth 12 volume history of the world, here Toynbee brings it all together, revealing the patterns of things across time.

History, in general, is vital for any understanding of what we are. Though also a highly problematic, impressionistic art. A discipline I wish I was better read in.

-=-=-

While I could go on and on listing many great books, with vital insights, I am also aware they form part of my process, and may or may not be essential to anyone else.

Honestly, the above would keep most people going for quite a while, and would gird you well to take on the world; the first four in particular feel essential, and have done a lot to shape my thinking and experience.

Filed by billy at 12:49 am under consciousness,culture,reading,the moose,utopia
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One of the things I am toying with doing before going overseas is giving a talk about my most recent non-fiction manuscript, the practically-oriented one about consciousness.

Essentially it is asking the question: given the nature of consciousness and reality and how they interact, what is the best approach we should take to engaging with it on a practical individual level?

There is a small group interested in such matters that is the obvious audience, but what I am wondering is if there would be wider audience, and I should look at making it a semi-public sort of thing.

So yeah. If this sounds like something you would be interested in, comment or contact me.

Filed by billy at 3:05 pm under consciousness,the moose
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Maverick marketing gurus unite to explain the heart of persuasion: relatively hard to find half hour video, up on Google video.

Almost worth it just for Howard Bloom explaining why country music exists, around 28 mins.

Filed by billy at 9:36 pm under consciousness,culture
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So you can check out the video of my nerdnite presentation here: http://vimeo.com/22866786.  (Why embed no work? Shrug.)

The topic is consciousness and reality, the nature of story, and bad SF movies. It is kind of amusing and maybe a touch mindblowing. It is about 25 minutes long and structured in a way that you would have to watch the whole thing to follow it.

It doesn’t have the Q&A afterwards, which is a shame as that seemed interesting at the time.

(The slideshow itself is at http://prezi.com/xvws90nq7rt-

if you find yourself curious about any illegibility.)

Filed by billy at 3:23 pm under consciousness,culture,the moose
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God’s noblest work? Man. Who found it out? Man.

- Mark Twain

Life’s noblest work? Science. Who found it out? Scientists.

- me

Filed by billy at 2:08 pm under consciousness,culture,quotes
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For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.

- Joseph Glanvill

(Just one of those random samples from a Suns of Arqa track that has been bothering me for years that I have been meaning to look up. The guy who reads it (and more) has an amazing voice. Apparently Glanvill was “the leading propagandist for the English natural philosophers of the late 17th Century”. A longer version of the quote appears at the start of Edgar Allan Poe’s story Ligeia.)

Today’s post brought to you by sleep deprivation and old tapes in the car.

Filed by billy at 6:30 pm under consciousness,quotes
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Every now and again Warren Ellis justifies his existence in the most excellent fashion.

This time via providing this treasure from Ubuweb, a documentary about Buckminster Fuller..

“This film by Oscar-winning filmmaker Robert Snyder, like his other documentaries on “the greats” (Michelangelo, Henry Miller, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Casals, among others), transports the viewer into Fuller’s mind and soul. Told entirely in his own words, the film is an intimate, personal and inspiring message from Fuller to our fragile world.”

Filed by billy at 1:49 pm under consciousness,culture,research,utopia
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What Technology Wants Kevin Kelly

Pretty interesting, there is lots in it, not sure it is essential though.

Argues all sorts of things, but essentially that there is a “technium” – the totality of culture and technology – which can be considered an evolving entity in itself. More interesting for the specifics of the data he brings together than the thesis itself, as he pulls pretty gnarly stuff in from all over the show. The chapters on the Amish and the Unabomber were both fascinating, and not for the usual reasons one might expect. Particularly, the Amish come across not as Luddites but very conscious of the effects of technology on them, individually and socially, and choose only to adopt technologies, which, after testing, prove to enhance their values and goals; which strikes me as about the sanest approach. However, most of us do not have such a strongly defined group with shared values, so we get dragged along into adopting technologies with no thought for the effects, because everyone else does, and we need them to stay in touch, conform and function. But the idea of selective adoption of technologies comes through really strongly, and I have nattered on about the need for this elsewhere, a la McLuhan; and indeed in Kelly’s own life.

The Knife of Never Letting Go – Patrick Ness

Ripped through this in a few hours. Young adult SF novel, set on a pioneer world where, so it seems, a disease has killed all the women, and the men can all hear each other’s thoughts. From there it goes in pretty consistently unexpected directions. Tight, gripping, fun.

Cults of Unreason – Christopher Evans
Excellent history of early Scientology, and other cultish stuff. I can see why they try to suppress it.

Counting Heads – David Marusek
Debut novel from a guy to watch. A SF future world with virtual immortality, mucho AI, clones, crazy nano, and fabbing, all happening all at once, and really well integrated into a fairly dizzying experiential ride of what living in that would be like on a regular human level, while dealing satisfactorily with humanity and emotions. Impressive. Biggest gripe: it feels like an episode of something larger, rather than a really complete entity in itself. (Which, to be fair, it is.)

Michael Moorcock – The Warhound and the World’s Pain
Years back I bought a bunch of Moorcock omnibus editions and never read them. Read this novel after snooping around the web and it coming up heavily recommended a lot. It was fun, diverting, and there was a lot I enjoyed in it, particularly its fluidity and narrative sweep, yet even with the philosophical resonance explored via its quasi-Faustian bargain, it felt sort of… empty afterwards. Like the depth of imagination that goes into creating a world is somehow lacking when you churn out books at 15000 words a day, maybe. (Any other strong Moorcock recommendations? I think I read the first Elric novel and didn’t think much of it, and one of the Jerry Cornelius novels (The English Assassin, I think), which was totally demented.)

The Possessed – Dostoyevsky
Felt I had been reading a bit too much genre insubstantiality, and prevailed upon my friend Brian for the Best Novel Ever Written; this got the nod. It is pretty remarkable how gripping a novel which is mostly people standing around chatting in polite society in 1800s Russia can be. Brilliant psychological observation, and in general brilliant; not sure it is the best novel ever, but it is pretty damn impressive. Left me wondering what its equivalent would look like if it were written now. Ultimately seemed to be arguing that we are lost without God, or some Idea on that scale.

Jan Fries – Visual Magick
Really good, grounded, experiential guide to creativity, magic, art, and presence in the moment.

Filed by billy at 11:04 am under consciousness,reading,technology
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Heh. Has been a while. Trawling the mutants list, we find:

* Josh Harris (of We Live in Public fame) makes a bid to head the MIT media lab

“If I become director of the MIT Media Lab, the institution’s primary focus will be to build a working singularities effect of the future, now, in order to understand how it all works.”

* Psychedelic sequence removed from Avatar would probably have made it more interesting.

The ritual consists of the initiate having to eat a worm as well as endure the sting of a scorpion-like creature.  The worm is significant as it eats from the “sacred tree,” presumably the Tree of Souls, and contains a psychoactive alkaloid.  The scorpion provides a potent neuro-toxin that brings the Na’vi close to death.  When combined together, the two compounds unleash a powerful psychedelic experience that allows for the initiate to go on a “dreamhunt” and attempt to contact their “spirit animal.”

* The Big Deal. Heavy think pieces from Vinay Gupta, who is way out ahead of the curve, about what the hell is going on.

I’ve recently written four essays, The Big Deal (#thebigdeal) which combine to paint a new picture of the current state of the world and a future picture showing how grass roots political power can achieve what current models of governance, including government, cannot do alone. This work is partly a critique and expansion on the British government’s Big Society concept, but it also draws heavily on my own experience in futures, complexity science and engineering for the bottom billion. It is an attempt to model the world in a new way; a way which reveals otherwise hidden paths to achieve change.

Yet to read them but flag them necessary.

* Ten myths about welfare. Actually not via the mutants, but this is getting around. If you are in NZ you probably need to read this as we roll into election year.

* Uncontacted Amazon Indians face annihilation Kind of amazing that this sort of thing is still happening. Also amazing that it can still happen, that there is anyone left out there.

* According to this fun sliding tool, all income growth in America in the past three decades has gone to the top 10% of the population. Thus income has declined for the bottom 90% of people. (Yay for unfettered capitalism!) The same sort of trend is probably at work here, as these things go.

Filed by billy at 1:08 am under consciousness,culture,new zealand,politics,the world
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Go, Egypt. Go, people.

Of course, now the real task begins. Setting up and maintaining the life you want to lead. Because the way things are will do all it can to propagate itself in a new guise with pretty words and a new face at the top.

And yeah, once again, it is amazing to have it reaffirmed that massive change is in fact possible, out of seemingly nowhere, peacefully, through the actions of people working together to make things better.

This is what the future looks like.

We can change. The choice is when, and to what.

Way back I quote Ventura thusly:

We are neither governed nor ruled. We are ignored. That most of usdon’t make a peep about it is perhaps an indication that we deserve to be ignored. We’ve demanded to be flattered, agreed with, and comforted; we’ve demanded almost anything but competence. Only a massive shift in public sentiment – and public action – will change things, and no one knows if that’s afoot.
[...]
The only antidote for a failure of democracy is the exercise of democracy. What every government fears most is a million citizens peaceably assembled at its front door, people who won’t go home until they get what they came for.

Wow, and just while trawling through old quotes, here is James Baldwin

But for power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power – or, more accurately, an energy – which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control. For a very long time, for example, America prospered – or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price payed by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims – the barbarians – are revolting against all established civilized values – which is both true and not true – and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.

(No Name in the Street, 1972)

And as ever, Bucky needs to be reaffirmed:

whether it will be utopia or oblivion will be a touch and go relay race until the very end.

People do stuff, and make stuff happen. Inactivity is also doing. What is your activity, and inactivity, producing in the world? And what do you think the world needs? Because when enough people feel the same, the streets are full.

Filed by billy at 2:41 pm under consciousness,politics,the world,utopia
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