Quantum Shift in the Global Brain by Ervin Laszlo

Such a wonderful title -- such a terrible book. I learned a lot from Laszlo's Science and the Akashic Field, but was very disappointed with Quantum Shift in the Global Brain. It seemed to me that Laszlo and his publisher (Inner traditions) just hashed together bits and pieces of writing to put something on the market.

What the author means by "Quantum Shift" is just improved relationships to each other and to nature. He writes with both pedantry and idealism and gets quite preachy at times. The middle section of the book is best because Laszlo is explaining implications of current developments in quantum physics, and he is very good at it. The ending deals with the Club of Budapest which he founded in 1996. Membership includes people like Desmond Tutu, Liv Ullmann, Peter Ustinov, Elie Wiesel, Arthur C. Clarke, Bianca Jagger, Mikhail Gorbachev -- an interesting mix. The club calls for increased creativity, diversity, responsibility, and planetary consciousness. The attitude is "Smarten up or we're doomed."

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins objects to belief in the kind of God many of us have outgrown: the Big-Daddy-in-the-Sky or Celestial-Parent type of God. It is true that this is the kind of God most people believe in, but many of us have moved beyond the duality of "the Creator" and "the created." Dawkins summarizes and dispenses with more sophisticated theistic thinking in his first chapter. He describes pantheism as using "the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe." His only argument against pantheism or what he calls "Einsteinian religion" is semantic; he thinks it is misleading and confusing to use the word "God" as something other than a supernatural being.

Dawkins does a drum beat on the theme of if-it's-not-rational-don't-believe-it. He is so incredibly left-brained that you might as well chop out his right brain and throw it away. Overall, I don't have much to quarrel with in his book. However, he is asking us to get rid of religion without putting anything else in its place; and his defense against this objection is a feeble attitude of look-how-wonderful-science-is. In going after fundamentalists and people who take the Bible literally, Dawkins oversells Darwin and evolutionary theory. Personally I never felt that evolution was in conflict with religion.

On the very last page Dawkins seems to have remembered his right brain and for the first time he uses the word "intuitive." He has been forced into it by consideration of the weird science found in quantum mechanics and cosmology. If you are fundamentalist in your religion, you should probably stay away from this book. But it's an interesting read for those of us who think knowing the nature of reality (the Truth) is more important than whether there's a God or not.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Originally published in 1922, Siddhartha enjoyed a surge of popularity in the 1960's, a time of hippies, drug use, flower power, and spiritual searching. I was one of many young people who were reading it. Decades later I re-read it and found myself much more receptive to its spiritual message.

The title confused me because the personal name of Buddha is said to have been Siddhartha, but this novella is not about Gautama Buddha whose statues we often see. Rather, it is about a fictional Siddhartha who lives at the same time as Buddha.

The spiritual journey of this Siddhartha takes him first into living the austere and disciplined life of a monk; then through a period of worldly pleasures enabled by a businessman who hires him and leads him to wealth and debauchery. The novel's climax seems to be a middle road between these extremes. When Siddhartha finally turns to a simpler life, he reaches a stage of enlightenment that brings him peace and joy and the ability to love all people.

Hermann Hesse does a better job at describing enlightenment than Deepak Chopra does in his novel about Buddha. Hesse foreshadows much of what Eckhart Tolle says about ego and the goal of recognizing and overcoming the ego's needs. Siddhartha comes to realize that wise men are constantly aware of the unity of all life; they feel and breathe unity.

Danish physicist Niels Bohr said that a simple truth is a truth where the opposite is not true and a deep truth is a truth where the opposite is also true. Hesse writes "...the opposite of every truth is also just as true!" Here again is a point where philosophy and physics seem to come together as it does when Siddhartha makes the point that there is no such thing as time.

Buddha by Deepak Chopra

Chopra does an excellent job of pulling together what little is known of the life of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, who lived roughly from 563-483 B.C. His story is told in easy-to-read contemporary English and gets inside what it must have been like to live as a sheltered prince of that time. Isolation, loneliness, friendship, strife, romance, and marriage all figure into Buddha's life before he leaves at age 29 to become a monk. The experience of reaching nirvana that we connect with Buddha is briefly described because it is essentially ineffable, impossible to put into words.

The human predicament is said to be that people are unconscious of their true nature which is that everyone is Buddha or God. Suffering is caused by the illusion that we are separate from each other and from God. Good and evil, summer and winter, light and darkness are described as all just part of nature, and Buddha says that he did not conquer evil or embrace good; he simply detached himself from both. Going beyond good and evil is very scary to many of us because the concepts of good and evil seem so necessary to organizing human life on earth -- they have served us well. But if you are moving more deeply into philosophy and spirituality, they are seen more as human tools, not absolute truths.