Books That Changed My LifeBy Christian de Quincey“Changed my life”? Well, that narrowed the field. Looking at my bookshelves with many hundreds of titles, it was difficult to pick just thirty. But reflecting only on those that marked turning points in my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development, the task became much easier. I decided to select books that opened new vistas for me in science, philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness. And it has been both a curious and a revealing experience. One thing I noticed is that some of the books remain old favorites in the sense that I feel myself, even today, nodding in agreement with what they say; but others were stepping stones in my development, and though they set me on a course of exploration, I may no longer support the worldview they espouse. Nevertheless, I include them because they did influence the unfolding of my inner life, even if I later swerved in a different direction. —Christian de Quincey, Managing Editor of Shift Ten Books That Influenced Me Most
The Ghost in the Machine Scanning my list, I wondered if the name “Arthur” was some kind of strange attractor for me—a disproportionate number of these authors share that first name. Koestler stands tall in my pantheon of writers because his books seduced me into a lifelong passion for exploring both the possibilities and limits of science. A Nobel-winning novelist, he wrote about science with rare flair. Along with Ghost, I could easily have selected The Act of Creation, The Sleepwalkers, and The Roots of Coincidence. In this book, Koestler took on the establishment view of the mind rooted, at that time, in behaviorism and reductionism. He was the first to impress upon me the new worldview of holism (he coined the term “holon”), and the idea that consciousness could not be reduced to the brain. The I Ching or Book of Changes Quite a number of these selections reveal my roots in the consciousness explosion of the Sixties. The I Ching is a good example. Like countless thousands of my contemporaries, I was drawn to the wisdom traditions of the East—in my case, particularly to Taoism and Neo- Confucianism—as a counterpoint to the dominance of Western science. Besides the ancient wisdom encoded in the hexagrams, Carl Jung’s masterly introduction opened me up to the intellectual coherence of synchronicity: Not everything happens by cause and effect or by chance—some events are linked by meaning. Science and Civilization in China (Vol. 2) This seven-volume masterpiece—especially volume 2—introduced me not only to the scientific and technological genius of ancient China, and to the wisdom of Neo-Confucianism, it also brought the genius of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy onto my radar screen for the first time. Here I discovered one of my first clues to the mysterious relationship between matter and mind, and the Chinese complementarity of ch’i and li—the idea that matter/energy has its own “intelligence” or self-organizing dynamic “all the way down.” The world, I learned, is not made up of “things” but of ever-changing “events” or processes. The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern Proposals The year: 1992. I had just joined IONS, and this was one of the first books I borrowed from our library. I vividly remember stopping off at a restaurant in Sausalito one evening on my way home and opening up Griffin’s collection of essays. His introduction hit me like a lightning bolt, and from that moment I knew I had my PhD dissertation. I had almost forgotten how Whitehead’s process philosophy had impressed me a couple of decades earlier. But now I had a clear “eureka!” and was able to connect the many “dots” in the puzzle of how consciousness fits into the physical world. Science and the Modern World This was it. This was the book that convinced me to follow the path of philosophy and science, and to trust that, given time, Western knowledge could one day crack the “hard problem” of how mind and matter are related. Whitehead’s philosophy could lead us to the bridge connecting the worlds of energy and spirit. More than any other Western philosopher, he drew on the best of science and philosophy to show us that if we want to understand the world, we need to stop asking, “What is it made of?” and ask instead, “What is it doing?” Process, not substance, is the deepest nature of reality. And process always involves a dance of matter and mind. The Tao of Physics I wrote this book . . . Well, it felt like it at the time. I had just spent five years writing my own exploration of the complementarity of Western science and Eastern wisdom. And one day, a few weeks from completing my book, I was walking past a favorite bookstore in Piccadilly Circus. There, in the window display, Capra’s landmark book taunted me. Of course, I had to check it out. And as I skimmed through the pages, I saw that he had written the book I was working on. A dramatic lesson in recognizing “an idea whose time has come.” This volume opened the floodgates to a seemingly never-ending torrent of books on quantum science and consciousness. The Continuum Concept I found this thin volume in the little bookstore at Esalen, and it touched my soul. I was ripe: Just coming through the emotional trauma of divorce, I ached to know why I felt so lost and incomplete. Liedloff’s book revealed the void that lurks in all of us—a deep sense of something missing. We were born with the innate expectation of being held in arms for the first year or two of life, but modern reason-based education broke this covenant with evolution. Comparing Western and indigenous child-rearing practices, Liedloff makes one of the strongest cases for trusting instinct and intuition. Ishmael One of a couple of novels on my list: In a moving story, with an intelligent gorilla as a main character, Quinn uses his narrative skill to take us back to a critical turning point in human evolution. Simultaneously a tale of woe and wisdom, it reveals the folly of the dominant “story”—enshrined in both science and religion—that humans have a god-given right to dominate the rest of nature. This book showed me how narrative and simplicity in language can capture the complexities of science and philosophy, and point us in a new direction: We need to change our guiding story of how humans fit into the natural world. The Acentric Labyrinth: Giordano Bruno's Prelude to Contemporary Cosmology For a long time I had been intrigued by the character and ideas of Giordano Bruno—a renegade philosopher who was burned alive at the stake by the Inquisition. And when I read Mendoza’s book, Bruno quickly became one of my heroes. A genius far ahead of his time, Bruno proposed the “outrageous” notion that the universe is both without beginning and without end in either space or time. There was no creation! He further evoked the ire of the Church by declaring that soul or consciousness is not unique to humans—all matter, he said, is intelligent and ensouled. Bruno anticipated by many centuries key ideas in modern cosmology and quantum theory. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution If I were to choose one book for desert-island reading (and if I wanted to spend my time in paradise in my head)—a book to represent the “new” paradigm in philosophy, science, and spirituality—Wilber’s magnum opus would be it. He applies his wide-ranging knowledge to expose the limitations, on the one hand, of “flatland” materialistic science and, on the other, of much ungrounded and uncritical “New Age” mysticism. Acknowledging the real contributions of science and spirituality, he weaves a scholarly and compelling integration of both, showing that the common factor (even if only implicit in science) is the ubiquity of Spirit. |