Kripal’s book won’t quite silence the inner skeptic in those trained in such truths as the laws of thermodynamics, but it...
In which the material world dissolves into the immaterial and all that we know from traditional material science melts into air.
What’s a flip? By the account of Kripal (Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions, 2017, etc.), who holds a chair in religious thought and philosophy at Rice University and a research post at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, it’s an intuitive leap that leads to a new understanding of a scientific problem or reality: “a radically new real can appear with the simplest of ‘flips,’ or reversals of perspective, roughly, from ‘the outside’ of things to ‘the inside’ of things.” Some of these flips might be such things as Archimedes’ bathtub-born insight into the displacement of volume and Friedrich August Kekulé’s dream about the snake eating its tail that led to his divination of how the benzene ring works. Kripal goes a little farther into the land of esoterica, noting, for instance, that Marie Curie was no stranger to séances, while Wolfgang Pauli “was a pioneering quantum physicist around whose presence poltergeist phenomena erupted regularly.” Philosopher A.J. Ayer returned from a near-death experience rather confused about what he saw on the other side, except to announce to the medical staff who revived him, “you are all mad,” while neuroscientist Marjorie Hines Woollacott drew scientific insight from an experience with a swami in the nature of consciousness, which is “most likely not an emergent property of brain matter, contrary to what everyone around her in her professional life seemed to assume.” Some of the science seems squishy even as Kripal insists that quantum physics is a “flipped science”—i.e., “one in which consciousness is no longer understood as an epiphenomenon, but as fundamental to the very nature of nature.” More easily comprehensible is the author’s idea that the humanities be reconceived as “the study of consciousness coded in culture," which has fruitful possibilities.
Kripal’s book won’t quite silence the inner skeptic in those trained in such truths as the laws of thermodynamics, but it offers plenty of points to ponder.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-942658-52-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Yes: it's high time for a de-romanticized, de-mythified, close-up retelling of the U.S. Space Program's launching—the inside story of those first seven astronauts.
But no: jazzy, jivey, exclamation-pointed, italicized Tom Wolfe "Mr. Overkill" hasn't really got the fight stuff for the job. Admittedly, he covers all the ground. He begins with the competitive, macho world of test pilots from which the astronauts came (thus being grossly overqualified to just sit in a controlled capsule); he follows the choosing of the Seven, the preparations for space flight, the flights themselves, the feelings of the wives; and he presents the breathless press coverage, the sudden celebrity, the glorification. He even throws in some of the technology. But instead of replacing the heroic standard version with the ring of truth, Wolfe merely offers an alternative myth: a surreal, satiric, often cartoony Wolfe-arama that, especially since there isn't a bit of documentation along the way, has one constantly wondering if anything really happened the way Wolfe tells it. His astronauts (referred to as "the brethren" or "The True Brothers") are obsessed with having the "right stuff" that certain blend of guts and smarts that spells pilot success. The Press is a ravenous fool, always referred to as "the eternal Victorian Gent": when Walter Cronkite's voice breaks while reporting a possible astronaut death, "There was the Press the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion. . . live. . . with no prompting whatsoever!" And, most off-puttingly, Wolfe presumes to enter the minds of one and all: he's with near-drowing Gus Grissom ("Cox. . . That face up there!—it's Cox. . . Cox knew how to get people out of here! . . . Cox! . . ."); he's with Betty Grissom angry about not staying at Holiday Inn ("Now. . . they truly owed her"); and, in a crude hatchet-job, he's with John Glenn furious at Al Shepard's being chosen for the first flight, pontificating to the others about their licentious behavior, or holding onto his self-image during his flight ("Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! . . . The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to dear Lord could not be clearer"). Certainly there's much here that Wolfe is quite right about, much that people will be interested in hearing: the P-R whitewash of Grissom's foul-up, the Life magazine excesses, the inter-astronaut tensions. And, for those who want to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt throughout, there are emotional reconstructions that are juicily shrill.
But most readers outside the slick urban Wolfe orbit will find credibility fatally undermined by the self-indulgent digressions, the stylistic excesses, and the broadly satiric, anti-All-American stance; and, though The Right Stuff has enough energy, sass, and dirt to attract an audience, it mostly suggests that until Wolfe can put his subject first and his preening writing-persona second, he probably won't be a convincing chronicler of anything much weightier than radical chic.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1979
ISBN: 0312427565
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
BOOK TO SCREEN
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