An academic and experiential guide that requires rereading for absorption.
A handbook to consciousness as rich and complex as the topic it explores.
Alliende’s book interweaves science, anthropology, history, psychology, pharmacology, string theory and memoir in a tour-de-force examination of the existence and nature of consciousness. The universe, our planet, nature and everything else in existence consists of fractals, says the author, with each individual component containing the same core characteristics as the whole of existence. Alliende investigates and painstakingly demonstrates how the evolution of life, society, the developmental path of the human psyche, the chakra system and the author’s own life have all developed according to a similar pattern and structure. This ambitious and comprehensive work, which is both scientific and arcane (bordering on overwhelming; this is no quick, light read), reveals intensely personal information. The author harnesses his wide-ranging material with a framework based on Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model, exploring consciousness and all its components, from the material plane of survival to the causal plane of spirit. The interwoven autobiography illustrates and makes accessible the theoretical sections of the text, while also providing a model for living in connection with the greater consciousness. Alliende is a transpersonal therapist who regularly practices and guides others through many of the consciousness-enhancing techniques he surveys (from meditation to gardening and other community-building concepts) and shares experiences about raves and hallucinogenic drugs. Exercises throughout the book encourage the reader to join him in moving from passive understanding to actively expanding awareness. Of these, the meditation techniques are particularly well-crafted and inviting, while other suggestions are more likely to spark thought than follow-through (“Go to a school and witness the teaching process”). Also thought-provoking is his suggestion that the Internet and social media link us all to a greater consciousness. That link, and increasing reliance on technology, he argues, could save the Earth—and our continued existence.
An academic and experiential guide that requires rereading for absorption.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478151876
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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