Book Review: The Essential Ken Wilbur: An Introductory Reader, Ken Wilbur

This book is a compilation of excerpts from various Ken Wilbur books written, apparently, prior to 1998 by the woman who edited many (all?) of them. I say this because The Marriage of Sense and Soul was written in 1998 and there are no excerpts from it. However, the more I read the more I noticed that it didn't really matter much that some books weren't included because Wilbur is basically saying the same thing over and over again in his books. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of The Marriage of Sense and Soul and I thought it was a fantastic read. But since it was my first experience with Wilbur, I didn't realize how unoriginal that books was in his repertoire.

Anyway, the books was fine and it even got me to do some thinking about many things. And this is the point, isn't it? The middle section talks about his theories of hierarchies and holons. It's like the mathematics in Physics; it takes the fun out of it completely. But that's not to say there's nothing good in there.

One thing that was in this book that was missing from the other one that I read is his cheesy endings to chapters. Now, I don't know how much of this was the compiler's doing and how much of it was his, but you'll get some really deep thoughts with a concluding paragraph about how if manage to understand these things, then the skies will open up to you and the seas will roll in your heart and the clouds of your mind will lift like a gentle fog on a crisp morning in the foothills of the Tibetan rain forest. Okay, so I made all of that crap up, but that's the kind of mood-killing fodder with which he'd end some very fine ideas.

One last negative note before I finish: There was a very short section on Academic Religion. It was only a paragraph, really. Since I intend to go into Academic Religion, I was very interested in this section. I'll sum it up for you. In the first paragraph he talks about how, when he was a child, he'd put bugs in a "killing jar", which is a jar with a lid into which you'd drop a lethal fluid on cotton balls and insects so you could mount and display the insects. The last paragraph, which I will quote in its entirety was "Academic religion is the killing jar of spirit". I feel that Wilbur is elevating Spirituality over the social and anthropological aspects of Religion. Religion is both social and spiritual. To claim that one is inherently better than the other is... well, let's just say it... elitist.

OK, so I said only one more note, but here's another while we're on the topic of elitism. Ken Wilbur is an elitist. There's no two ways about it. He likes to make hierarchies because that allows him to place himself at one end and everyone else at the other. He likes to structure ideas in lists and orders because, if you know the lists and orders, then you obviously are clairvoyant enough to understand why they are this way. It's annoying, Ken.

Finally (yes, it really is final this time), I want to say that Ken Wilbur's books are pretty good. I wouldn't recommend that you read them all, but I would recommend that you read at least one. I liked Science and Religion: The Marriage of Sense and Soul and after reading The Essential Ken Wilbur I have a feeling I would have liked One Taste, or Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, or any number of others. Not because they have something new to offer, but because they are effectively the same books! Or at the very least the same ideas laid out differently.

So, go buy yourself a Ken Wilbur book. Read it. Enjoy it. Learn from it. Then, it's "move along folks, there's nothing more to see here".

I've been reading some more Ken Wilbur recently (review in a week or so) and it's gotten me to thinking. Many religions have a concept of non-dualism, which - as you may be able to figure out - means two things that are one. They are "not dual". Buddhism has this idea when it talks about the body and the spirit and Taoism represents this idea with the symbol of the Yin-Yang (And Christianity has taken non-dualism to a new extreme with its talk of the "three in one", or the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost). My point is that this concept of two things that are actually the same thing is not so far-fetched as it sounds.

So, it occurred to me that perhaps Science and Religion - which seem to be day and night opposites - may be complementary parts of a larger whole; they may be non-dual. In this case, Religion would be the yin (or the dark, passive, subtle) and Science would be the yang (or the light, active, outgoing). In the West, we seem to think that yang is inherently better than yin, but I think this judgment comes from the same worldview that claims Science is better than Religion, so this isn't too shocking.

Now, I want to make a brief sidebar here and say that the symbol of the yin-yang really needs to be understood for what it means (it means a lot of things to a lot of people, but I will attempt to explain its meaning in my context). Take a look at the symbol again and you'll see first a circle. Now imagine, if you will, that the "teardrop" shapes in the yin-yang are moving in a circle. Do you see each of the colors pushing the other one in a circle? Or do you see that one color is
withdrawing from the other and causing motion by its absence? If you're from the West, you probably initially saw that the two halves are pushing the other. You're not wrong, by the way, you're just half right. It is true that one half pushes the other, but it is equally true that one half "pulls" the other along. Neither perspective is right and neither perspective is wrong. This is the important aspect I would want one to understand. And so I'll give another, perhaps more pertinent example: We all know that Optimism and Pessimism are opposites. We also generally associate Optimism with "positive thinking" or as "hopeful" and Pessimism as "negative thinking" or "doubtful" and we then proceed to assign the label "good" to Optimism and "bad" to Pessimism. My take on this is that Optimism and Pessimism are, in fact, the two halves of the yin-yang. They are two ways of viewing the same thing and neither one is right or wrong (or, more importantly, "good" or "bad"), they are just different perspectives. I can't drive this point home enough. Don't JUDGE each side, just realize that the two sides are DIFFERENT and NECESSARY.

Back to my point, Religion and Science are the yin and the yang. They, too, are not good and bad, they just are. They are different. They are necessary. And most importantly, they are non-dual, which brings me to my point.

I've been thinking that Science and Religion will eventually end up being two ways to describe the same universe. Right now, Science is the stronger of the two, but I think this is more a sign of our times than any inherent quality of Science. As progress in Science slows (which it will eventually) progress in Religion (or call it "spirituality", if you want) will gain ground. Some day we may just find out that the truths Science has found explain what Religion is. And we may also find that Religion will explain why Science is. Then we'll see that the battle between Science and Religion was as silly is saying that left is better than right, or blue is better than red. They are the same, but different. They are parts of a whole. They are non-dual. Anyone who puts all of their faith in one or the other will - at best - be half-right.

For a long time I've thought of the universe as not a place or a thing, but an event. We normally think of events as things that happen inside space and time (in fact, it usually requires both space and time), but I prefer to think of things as events. Believe it or not, there is a scientific basis for this.

Imagine, if you will, throwing a rock into an otherwise calm pool of water. We all know what will happen here: the rock will cause waves in the water. You could even say that these waves were brought into existence by the force of the rock. Now imagine a force that breaks through an otherwise calm nothingness that makes a lot of waves... and I mean a lot!

Now, as we all know, there are constructive waves and destructive waves. Constructive waves are those waves that, when more than one exist in the same medium ("place") and are the same frequency, they amplify each other. Conversely, if the same two waves arrive at the same place at a slightly different time, then they can actually destroy each other. In other words, a particular waves perfect opposite actually cancels out that wave.

So, continuing with this line, we also know that strings, from String Theory, behave like waves (or they are waves, even). Imagine, then, that a huge imaginary rock has crashed into the calm pond of the universe, creating a countless number of vibrating strings and - here's the fun part - these strings are created in an equal number of opposite vibrations that go in different directions. Basically, because two strings that cancel each other out (call this matter and anti-matter, if you want) have gone in different directions, they both exist long enough to interact with other strings and begin forming the Universe! We've even discovered mathematically that this happens on a very small scale. When two strings meet up in space, they bump into each other and create (yes, I said "create") a string/anti-string pair by "borrowing" energy from the universe. This is a very short-term loan, though because this string/anti-string pair is expected, rather quickly to pay back this energy loan by destroying each other and emitting the same two original strings. (See this page on Perturbation of Strings for a better description of this.) So we see that this concept does work on a small scale, at least.

As Brian Greene likes to do, imagine rewinding the video tape of the universe backwards. We'd see that, as the vibrating strings get closer and closer, they will eventually occupy the same space and cancel each other out leaving.... nothing!

This doesn't solve the question of who threw the rock, but - as you may have noticed from some of my other posts here - I don't think we'll ever find that out.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's installment (if not tomorrow, then soon) when I tie this idea into a new idea I had for the soul (or spirit, or life itself, whatever) while on the subway this afternoon. That idea is only about an hour old, so give me a little time to develop it.

By the way, it looks like you can download Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe in it's entirety from this page. Please note, however, that I feel somewhat confident that this is a copyright infringement.

Book Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

This hefty book - suggested to me by my sister-in-law - begins with a discussion of the current theory of the beginning of the universe, continues through the formative years of the solar system, the nuclear age (Somewhat out of chronological order, but it fits in context), a long discussion of the origins of life, and finally the path to humans and the way in which we're destroying the things around us.

I think I'll spend some more time on that last part. Throughout this book, Bryson leads you to believe that the world could end at any second. If it isn't the instability of atoms, or the probability that a meteor will strike at any moment, it is the delicate balance of the ecosystem, the fact that earthquakes could destroy us at any moment, or the harm that we, as humans and caretakers of the planet, are inflicting upon the world and, ultimately, ourselves.

In general, this was a very good book. Long, but good. Given the breadth indicated by the title, I suppose it should be a lot longer, but this 545-page mammoth of a book is still formidable (I'm including the 65 pages of notes, bibliography, and index since, if you tend to travel with a book as I do, you have to haul all of those pages around, too!). Bryson's writing style is very good. He writes to be understood but still manages to get into some detail. The section near the end about the origins of humans is distractingly technical as he goes into great detail about the difference between all of the homo-this-and-thatus and how it is different from homo-I-don't-careus. It was like reading the "begats" in the Bible. Other than that criticism, however, it was both entertaining and educational, at some times actually made me laugh out loud, and at others take serious stock of my life and the world around me.

In the end, it took me about four weeks to get through this book (About 60 minutes per day, five days per week, or a total of about 20 hours). I really appreciate Bryson's wit and ability to find interesting things about people we always learn about in school. Did you know that Newton was a freaky hermit? Or that Rothschild weighed 300 pounds and still slept in the bed he had as a child in the nursery wing of his mansion? All of these ideas are organized in a very understandable, if not chronologically accurate way. At times I was frustrated that he seemed to bounce back and forth from one century to another and I would lose the chronology of many events. It seems to me that if this is a history of nearly everything, it should be chronological. In the end, however, I must say that I believe the book would have been harder to follow and potentially boring if it was organized by date instead of by concept.

All in all it's a good book if you have some time to spend on it and a strong back.

In order to know what I'm talking about, you'll have to read this article.

I think that we can all agree that this guy has a screw loose. What I find interesting here, though, is that we - with our Scientistic worldview - find what this guy did is totally ludicrous. Many militant atheists would even say that this is proof that there is no God (I won't go into it here, but there is another flaw here and that is that simply saying "If God exists he will give me super powers" is no way to prove or disprove the existence of a diety).

However, consider what we'd think if this man had instead yelled "Science will save me" and then jumped into the lion's den. We might still think he's a looney, but at least we'd believe that it's possible. And this is the point at which I see a problem. You see, God didn't save that man, but neither did science (more specifically medicine), and yet we're far more apt to believe that science could save that man than we are to believe that God could.

Now, it's mostly the logic of this that bothers me. We seem to believe that, just because science has made such huge strides in the relatively recent past, it will continue those great strides and it will have figured everything out. I believe, however, that science will let us down eventually just like religion has let many people down. In fact, I believe science is already letting us down, we're just too in awe that we don't yet see it.

I saw a movie with my wife (I don't remember what it was called, but it was about a Chinese emperor who was chased into hiding by the communists) and in one of the first scenes some mystics analyzed the solid waste of this infant emperor to divine the future. Now, to us this would seem absolutely silly. But when we took our dog to the vet and they asked us for a sample of her poo, I realized that science hasn't really gotten us too far beyond those old mystics. Think about it: How many times have you gone to the doctor and they've stuck you with a needle and drawn blood, or asked you to pee in a cup? Then they take this fluid and analyze it, just like mystics were doing centuries ago. Admittedly, the techniques have changed, but the fact that we must drain a fluid from our bodies in order to determine what's in them is barbaric, really.

"Well," you may be thinking "science just hasn't found a way to determine what our blood is made of without removing it from our bodies yet". OK, and yet we can tell the makeup of a star billions of light years away. I'm not saying that we CAN know what's in blood without drawing it and we CHOOSE not to, I'm just saying that science hasn't taken us as far as we give it credit for.

If you feel the nagging urge to add the word "yet" to any of the following statements, then you may be suffering from a worldview distorted by too much faith in science (i.e. Scientism):

- Science hasn't found a cure for cancer
- Science hasn't found a cure for AIDS
- Science hasn't told us how life began
- Science hasn't told us if other life exists in our universe
- Science hasn't told us how the universe was created

I'm sure there are many more, but you get my point. These are things that we truly feel are discoverable at some point in the future. What I'm saying is that if we excuse science for not answering the questions above because "it's just not there yet" then we're giving science way too much credit. At this point in time, science is no closer to a solution to these problems than religion is, and yet we readily believe that science can find an answer when religion can not. We're effectively running into the lion's den screaming that science will save us.

Maybe science can, but the logic here is flawed. Just because science has been sucessful recently and religion not-so doesn't mean that an answer will be found by science (and I must add that it likely won't be found by religion either, but the point is that faith in science or religion on matters such as these is equally flawed).

I just realized I went off on a bit of a tangent, but to finalize my point, I believe that science will let us down a lot like religion has let many people down. Eventually, when science DOESN'T explain the origin of the universe, or when science DOESN'T find a cure for cancer
(please note I said "cure", not "treatment") we will be truly disappointed. The foundation of our worldview will be shaken and science will have failed us. More to the point, when our wonderful scientific discoveries and inventions (nuclear weapons, CFC's, the ability to over-fish, excess carbon dioxide, lead in gasoline.... hell, gasoline itself) destroy our environment and make our planet uninhabitable, we will cursing science and all the pain and misfortune it has laid upon us.

When that day comes, someone will surely be there to say "Science, where now is thy God?"