The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Capra has written the classic book about the parallels between modern (quantum) physics and eastern mysticism. My copy is the 25th anniversary edition of this work which was originally published in 1975. His description of the evolution of physics is juxtaposed with summaries of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, and classic Chinese thought. This makes it very easy to see that both quantum mechanics and religious mysticism point to an understanding of the universe as a dynamic whole. In describing particle physics Capra writes, "The vacuum is far from empty. On the contrary, it contains an unlimited number of particles which come into being and vanish without end." And then he quotes Chinese sage Chang Tsai who wrote "When one knows that the Great Void is full of ch'i, one realizes that there is no such thing as nothingness."

Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer

"Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind" is the subtitle of this first person account of a highly credentialed (Harvard, Stanford) psychotherapist whose view of reality was upset, midlife, by a freaky experience with a dowser. Her response was a skeptical and intellectual inquiry into psychic phenomena in the course of which she became acquainted with Freud's writings on telepathy, CIA experiments with remote viewing, cutting-edge neuroscience, and quantum mechanics. Mayer focuses on why we humans want to reject the reality of these phenomena which are experienced frequently enough to warrant serious consideration. Mostly she chalks it up to our fear of losing the firmly logical and rational grasp of reality provided by a certain portion of our brains.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Ignore the scurrilous language and the burden of tiny-print footnotes and you can't help being drawn in by this novel about a family with one foot in the Dominican Republic and one in New Jersey. Oscar is a normal but enormously unattractive guy who is often hopelessly in love and in the end gives up his life to it. In the background there are stories of the horrors endured by the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo years. The footnotes that look so daunting at first are actually amusing bits of historic scuttlebutt and the story is all the more vivid for the casual attitude and language of the author.

The God Theory by Bernard Haisch

Subtitled Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's behind It All, Haisch's personal take on the nature of God is typical of a spiritual man of science. His answer to "What's behind it all" is consciousness; God is an infinite, timeless consciousness. But he also honors the Kabbalah in noting that "all descriptions of God are necessarily wrong, because an infinite, timeless consciousness can have no characteristics that can be properly translated into physical terms. Love, light, and bliss come the closest."

Haisch is an astrophysicist and Catholic seminary drop-out; currently he says he's an independent Christian who occasionally attends a Unity Church. He believes that scientists who rigidly adhere to a reductionist materialism are as dogmatic as religionists who ignore the principles of science.

Mystics of all religious traditions invert science's assumption that consciousness is a byproduct of the material brain and its neurochemistry. They say that matter does not create consciousness; consciousness creates matter. Quantum mechanics is coming close to agreeing. "In the physics laboratories of today, we acknowledge an enigmatic, but undeniable, relationship between consciousness and the outcome of quantum experiments."

Excellent book for pulling science and spirituality together.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

A Spanish shepherd named Santiago sells his sheep and ventures into northern Africa to travel to the pyramids and find his "treasure." The adventures he has along the way increase his life skills and enhance his spirituality. There is much that is mystical in his experience, the basic lesson being that "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." As a simple moral tale, The Alchemist has been compared to Jonathan Living Seagull and St. Exupery's The Little Prince. It is pretty easy to read but difficult to pull Santiago's experiences into a cohesive philosophy.

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

A twenty-four year old librarian in Slovenia makes an attempt at suicide and lands in an insane asylum. There she meets people whose stories give her insight into how she has lived her own life. Coelho is a Brazilian author who has remarkable clarity about the struggle between conformity and individuation, the need to be true to yourself, and the tenuousness of our understanding about what it is to be insane. With the subtitle "A novel of redemption" Veronika's story is compelling and thought provoking. Great read and probably a good discussion book.

Blindness by José Saramago

José Saramago is a Portuguese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is also a communist and atheist but these things are not obvious in his dark novel, Blindness. In it he posits a city whose inhabitants are stricken with a sudden "white blindness." Perhaps you can read political implications into the resulting chaos, but it was really more about individual suffering.

I found this book difficult to read for a few reasons. First are the run-on paragraphs which sometimes go two pages or more. Within those paragraphs, whole sentences are often not separated by periods but merely by commas. There is lots of dialog but no quotation marks (seems to be publishing style these days). You know someone is speaking just from context and the fact that a word following a comma is capitalized.

Secondly, there are many philosophical ruminations embedded in those long paragraphs and they slow down plot development without really adding much to knowledge of the characters. Thirdly, the book seemed repetitious to me. I was eager to know what would happen to the characters, but dipping into their harsh, bleak world was not exactly fun.