The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman

I can't believe I read the whole book! Thomas L. Friedman is fascinating in his exposition of how communications technology is globalizing and, as he puts it, flattening the world. I'm not sure he really needed to drag it out for 630 pages, but he is so entertaining in the stories he tells, especially of global businesses, that a little repetitiveness is easily forgiven.

His is a hopeful perspective paying much attention to India, China, Malaysia, and other countries with large populations of poor people. They are moving more and more people into the middle class, thanks to outsourcing in this country and the technological ease with which people can do business over great distances. Friedman realizes that Americans are going to have to compete more on a global basis and that we will probably experience some economic displacement because of this, but he believes that with better education Americans will adjust and remain leaders in innovation.

Furthermore, the world should be a better and safer place when wealth is more equitably distributed and more of us have a stake in keeping the global economic system going. It is almost as if what socialism and communism have failed to do, technology is going to bring about naturally with an underpinning of democracy rather than totalitarianism.

Excellent book.

Torch-Bearer to Light the Way by Neal Vahle

Ironically, I developed a cold while reading the biography of a spiritual healer. Torch-Bearer to Light the Way; the Life of Myrtle Fillmore is by Neal Vahle and includes an explanation of how Fillmore and her husband started the Unity movement from their home in Kansas City in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Along the way there is much connection with the contemporaneous Christian Science movement, but eventually the Fillmores distanced themselves from it. They felt it is more important to rely on your own inner knowing than to accept the dictates of outside authorities, especially in your spiritual life. And Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy appears to have been pretty dictatorial.

I try not to proofread when I'm reading for my own pleasure but this book was amazingly full of typos and mistakes. At one place I pondered over how a daughter could have been born before her mother until I finally realized that the author had inserted a birth date where he should have used a death date.

Adequate biography if you're interested in Unity.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

The ladies of my book club loved On Beauty and were amazed that the author who was born in 1975 was so able to get into the minds of characters in their 50s. She sets up two academic families, one in England and one in Massachusetts. The English family is black and conservative while the American one is mixed race and liberal. There is professional competition and hard feelings between the two patriarchs; and when the English professor comes to teach at his competitor's college, the men take opposing stands with regard to academic politics. In the small town environment their families also develop interesting relationships.

The juxtaposition of liberal and conservative attitudes is interesting and I kept watching to see which the author was going to prefer. However, she revealed no bias and showed both liberals and conservatives as a mix of good and bad traits with a touch of hypocrisy and a little infidelity here and there.

Good novel.

The Death of the Mythic God by Jim Marion

Jim Marion is the founder and Director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness in Washington, D.C. and one of the founding members of Ken Wilber’s Institute for Integral Spirituality. He is also a public policy lawyer and his book The Death of the Mythic God; The Rise of Evolutionary Spirituality ties levels of spiritual consciousness to contemporary world politics.

The thesis of this book is that people are evolving in spiritual consciousness both individually and within the human race as a whole. They are moving away from the old concept of God as a being who created everything but who is separate and distinct from his creation. They are moving toward a concept of God as the underlying consciousness (Source, Force, Energy, Whatever) of which the Universe and everything in it is made. It's all God.

Marion, who once studied to become a Catholic priest, has great respect for Christianity and all other religions. However, he believes that Christianity strayed from the teachings of Jesus as the early church grew in size and began to hammer out its formal beliefs. "Jesus taught that we are responsible for our own sins and our own salvation. It is not his responsibility but ours. Jesus did not die to save us from sin. That was a theological interpretation added later by others, and one that directly contradicts what Jesus himself taught." (p. 59)

This is a terrific book -- and short (167 pages). I read it in a couple of evenings.

The Hidden Face of God by Gerald Schroeder

In The Hidden Face of God Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder pulls together quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and Bible study to conclude that mind, as exhibited by the ability to make choices, is inherent in every atom of the Universe.

The book shows the place where physics and metaphysics meet and greet (if not merge). In Schroeder's thesis the basic stuff of the Universe is information: "But when we look below the surface, we discover a world made of a mix of identical particles that are actually waves and then realize that the waves are massless expressions of information. Physics has exposed the metaphysical basis of existence." (p. 173)

Schroeder stops short of saying that the Creator and the Created are one thing, but he does seem to support the basic underlying unity of everything in the Universe -- call it God or a force or what-have-you.

One thing that I didn't like was the author's tendency to gush over how wonderfully complex the human body and brain are. To me this is anthropocentric thinking -- he assumes that human beings are smart enough to assess the complexities of reality. I can't help wondering if the perceived complexity is just a reflection of the limitations of our little animal brains.

The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin

String theory has dominated physics for more than twenty years. There are actually thousands of string theories, but they all have limitations and none has provided the world with the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that we all anxiously await.

This fact has been troubling a theoretical physicist named Lee Smolin and he has written a very thorough and readable book about it called The Trouble with Physics. (Houghton Mifflin, 2007.) His conclusion: "There needs to be an honest evaluation of the wisdom of sticking to a research program that has failed after decades to find grounding in either experimental results or precise mathematical formulation."

In 1968 a young Italian physicist named Gabriele Veneziano came up with a formula describing the probabilities for two particles to scatter from each other at different angles. By 1970 some physicists were able to express the data in terms of a physical picture in which particles could be seen not as points but as stringlike things existing only in a single dimension. They stretched when gaining energy; they contracted when giving it off; and they vibrated.

String theory in its various permutations became a hot topic in academic physics from around the mid-1980s, but by the end of the 1990s it had been suggested that all the conjectured and constructed string theories might be unified in a deeper (and mysterious) theory called M-theory.

According to Lee Smolin, the trouble with physics is not only that string theory may be wrong, but that its popularity has squelched innovative thinkers who wanted to take other directions within the field of physics. It became very hard for a physicist who was not interested in string theory to get a job. The academic and research communities simply did not provide jobs or grant money for physicists who disbelieved string theory or who wanted to pursue other avenues of research.

Wading through the actual physics in Smolin's book is a bit of a chore, but his critique of academia is clear and convincing. His overall tone is positive and upbeat in spite of the profuse apologies he keeps making to his colleagues in string theory. He ends with suggestions as to how to move the study of physics forward in ways that are more intellectually diverse than they have been in the era of string theory.

Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Maurice Bucke

In 1901 a physician named Richard Maurice Bucke published a book that attempts to analyse and classify the mystical experience of connecting to the divine. He refers to this experience as "Cosmic Consciousness" and uses the term as the title of his book. Known as a classic in the study of human consciousness, the book is in some ways quaintly out-of-date (occasionally pure hogwash.) However, it makes a good effort to capture in words an ineffable experience that is far beyond anything that can be understood or expressed with our limited human capabilities.

Bucke looks at 47 cases of what he calls cosmic consciousness, including those of Buddha, Jesus, St. Paul, Plotinus, Mohammed, Dante, Blake, Balzac, Moses, Socrates, Pascal, Spinoza, Swedenborg, Emerson, Tennyson, and Thoreau. His favorite seems to be Walt Whitman (whom he knew personally) and he makes many references to "Leaves of Grass." There are also examples of unknown people born in his own era and usually identified only by initials. These cases are told in the words of the person who lived through the experience.

Most of us are familiar with the stories of Moses and the burning bush, the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus after his Baptism, and St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. In various ways, lesser known people have tapped into divine consciousness and Bucke seeks out the common denominators among them. He concludes that they are people who are serious and of good moral character.

"...there comes to the person an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Like a flash there is presented to his consciousness a clear conception ... of the meaning and drift of the universe.... he sees and knows that the cosmos, which to the [common] mind seems made up of dead matter, is in fact far otherwise -- is in very truth a living presence."

The person sees that all life is eternal, that the universe is alive and works for the good of everyone, that the universe is God and its essence is love, that the happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain. The distinction between good and evil falls away and the newly enlightened person sees that all is good in some cosmic way that is not yet available to simple human understanding.

Bucke goes further by postulating that people who have experienced this consciousness are the forerunners of an evolutionary change in the human race. Like the author of The Celestine Prophecy, he thinks we are evolving spiritually and future generations will be more easily in touch with the nature of the divine.Maurice Bucke