Influential Books Meme
There is a rapidly swirling game of blog tag happening today. It contains a viral meme targeting the topic of inspirational books. While it might be best to ignore this seemingly childish game of tag, I have come to the conclusion that it entirely boils down to whether or not you believe it will produce a blog post that inspires or educates.
I was tagged by the Widow's Son over at the Burning Taper, but if not him it could just as easily have been someone else.
My biggest challenge is coming up with a list of only three books. Throughout my life I have read voraciously. This reached its highest point while I was in middle school and early on in high school. I read books every single day during summer vacation. During one summer I dedicated myself to read every single book in the 'Junior Reader' section of the public library. I largely succeeded. Even at the very young age of 12 I was reading every book on science that I could find. The bulk of my reading was on science fiction and fantasy but I would also read about philosophy, religion, and science. I generally avoided biographies or histories. An oversight that I am correcting today.
Over the course of a few summers in my youth I *averaged* at least two several hundred page books *a day*! I am a speed reader and can consume massive quantities of material in a short period of time. I don't know how well I am at retention but, nevertheless, I enjoy consuming the words and ideas these authors have to convey.
Today I rarely have time to read. The only occasions where I do any significant amount of reading is when I am on an airplane. I have several books in my queue that I am looking forward to tackling the next time I have a long flight. In particular I plan to read 'Einstein : His Life and Universe by Walter Issaacson'. The last book I read was by the same author and it was his excellent biography of Benjamin Franklin.
After I finish that up I plan to tackle the impressive 'Truman' by David McCullough. David McCullough also wrote the both entertaining and informative novel '1776' which I highly recommend.
Now, back to the topic of this post. I have to identify the three most influential books I have ever read with a bias towards books others may not have read themselves. This is going to be difficult for me, but I will try.
My number one book is pretty much a duplicate of the one identified by the Widow's Son. He lists 'Cosmic Trigger' by Robert Anton Wilson. So as not to have a duplicate, I will list my number one as 'The New Inquisition' also by Robert Anton Wilson. Since this is the first RAW book I ever read it ultimately made the greatest impact. His book 'The Widow's Son' was equally influential and relates closely to the topics we touch on in Freemasonry.
I was tagged by the Widow's Son over at the Burning Taper, but if not him it could just as easily have been someone else.
My biggest challenge is coming up with a list of only three books. Throughout my life I have read voraciously. This reached its highest point while I was in middle school and early on in high school. I read books every single day during summer vacation. During one summer I dedicated myself to read every single book in the 'Junior Reader' section of the public library. I largely succeeded. Even at the very young age of 12 I was reading every book on science that I could find. The bulk of my reading was on science fiction and fantasy but I would also read about philosophy, religion, and science. I generally avoided biographies or histories. An oversight that I am correcting today.
Over the course of a few summers in my youth I *averaged* at least two several hundred page books *a day*! I am a speed reader and can consume massive quantities of material in a short period of time. I don't know how well I am at retention but, nevertheless, I enjoy consuming the words and ideas these authors have to convey.
Today I rarely have time to read. The only occasions where I do any significant amount of reading is when I am on an airplane. I have several books in my queue that I am looking forward to tackling the next time I have a long flight. In particular I plan to read 'Einstein : His Life and Universe by Walter Issaacson'. The last book I read was by the same author and it was his excellent biography of Benjamin Franklin.
After I finish that up I plan to tackle the impressive 'Truman' by David McCullough. David McCullough also wrote the both entertaining and informative novel '1776' which I highly recommend.
Now, back to the topic of this post. I have to identify the three most influential books I have ever read with a bias towards books others may not have read themselves. This is going to be difficult for me, but I will try.
My number one book is pretty much a duplicate of the one identified by the Widow's Son. He lists 'Cosmic Trigger' by Robert Anton Wilson. So as not to have a duplicate, I will list my number one as 'The New Inquisition' also by Robert Anton Wilson. Since this is the first RAW book I ever read it ultimately made the greatest impact. His book 'The Widow's Son' was equally influential and relates closely to the topics we touch on in Freemasonry.
The second book which I found the most influential was 'Seth Speaks' by Jane Roberts. This book is supposedly 'channeled' by a disincarnate personality who calls himself 'Seth'. I picked up this book only after having read 'Cosmic Trigger' by Robert Anton Wilson. Since Wilson makes the case, quite strongly, that once we form 'beliefs' we have stopped learning, I decided to re-evaluate just what I truly did or did not 'believe'. I spent a lot of time reading about UFOs, parapsychology, and physics. (All of the works of Jacques Vallee deeply influenced me during this time.)
Next I decided to go way out on the limb and read something written by one of those New Age wackos you hear so much about. I picked 'Seth Speaks' pretty much at random from the book store. What happened next shocked me. The quality of the material in this book blew me away. It made me rethink pretty much everything I had previously considered as hard coded assumptions about the nature of reality, spirit, and the Universe.
After being amazed by this material I decided that, perhaps, I had been too quick to judge these New Age wackos. So, next I started picking up every 'channelled' book that I could find, but, universally, I was wildly underwhelmed. Either these books were completely a load of horse shit or they were entirely derivative of the 'Seth Material' which had been published decades before. This raised all kinds of questions. Why did the 'Seth Material' 'speak' to me while I ruled the other channeled content out as a load of garbage right away? For one thing it was because nothing in the 'Seth Material' violated what I generally view as my beliefs about the Universe, the laws of nature, or science. Neither did it violate my own personal sense of morality. And, even more fascinating, is that it expressed a spiritual world view which was neither simplistic nor overtly comforting. Instead, it hurt your brain worse than trying to come up with a unified field theory. Oh, sure, it went way beyond that as well, but there were no apriory contradictions.
Much of the content of the 'Seth Material' talks in great detail concepts that were only being discussed many decades later in popular books on the 'New Physics'. Seth proposes a Universe in which time is an illusion and where an infinite number of simultaneous parallel Universes exist, each representing a different outcome of conscious choices by an infinite number of 'selves'. Most of the time Seth alludes to the fact that while we are enmeshed in physical reality we lack either the language or the framework to understand just how the Universe really 'is'. This all sounded a great deal like Bohm's view of the implicate and explicate order of the Universe which unfolds from an eternal state of 'now' that contains within it all potential possibilities.
I found this correlation quite fascinating. Later on, I read more of the Seth books and walked away the most affected by 'The Nature of Personal Reality' and 'The Unknown Reality : Volume 2'.
I would have to list as my third most influential book 'The Matter Myth' by John Gribbon's and Paul Davies'. In a sense, this represents just one of many popular books on physics I was reading at the time. Nevertheless, this is one I read early on and it seemed to state the case in the most unequivocal fashion. No matter how convincing reality may seem to be, at the end of the day, as best we can tell through our observations and models, it is largely composed of 'nothing'. The deeper you get down to the fundamentals of the Universe the more amorphous it becomes. While our experience of the Universe is entirely convincing, solid, and real, nevertheless, when you delve into it the Universe appears more to be more a great thought then a great thing.
After reading this book, and others, I finally abandoned pure material reductionism as a flawed, inadequate, and dying model. That doesn't mean I feel like I should just drive my sports car into a brick wall at ninety miles an hour simply because both myself and the wall are composed of nothing but vibratory super strings in hyperspace. I'm fairly confident that it will still result in a nasty and abrupt experience. However, I no longer believe that everything arises from mechanistic and wholly reductionist processes. Human consciousness, and our experience of the Universe, is highly relativistic based on our culture, language, location, and a wide array of complex circumstances. And, most importantly, is the fact that we each have the capability of reprogramming our own individual human bio computer to enhance, alter, and in all ways attain new ways of experiencing Universe in meaningful ways.
So, to recap, my three most influential books are:
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