Themes in Books

I’ve been wanting to write to you folks for some time now, and finally have arranged some time to do so.
I’m copying the titles of the books that folks have agreed to summarize. Some drafts are already arriving. I wanted to share with you some of the excitement as the patterns are beginning to emerge. I’d also like to invite those of you who are not doing book summaries to join us in our collaborative effort. Soon this discussion will shift over to the smaller list of those who are working on book summaries. This larger list will become mainly a place to announce additions to the henryreed.com/indiana website (Indiana is not capitalized in this web address regardless of what Microsoft Word wants to do with it).
With regards to updates to the website, there are two more links added:
The first one is an essay I wrote some time ago about a very interesting book called “Reality isn’t what it used to be.”
The second is compliments of one of our list members, an essay from Psychology Today on the loss of the private self.
Both are interesting reading.
Now onto what I’ve been wanting to share with you. Some patterns in the books being summarized. First, here is the current list of books being worked on. There are a few others, done from the past, which will be included, also.
2012 Adrian
T. de Chardin, Future of Man
Return of the Goddess
Mayan Calandar and Transformation of consciousness
Mayan Code
Primary perception
Possible Human by J Houston
Lucid Waking
New Earth by Tolle
Unanswered Questions
love w/o end
Otherwhere
Pinchbeck 2012
Radical Knowing
Cosmos and Psyche
Mack: Passport to Cosmos
Values for a New Millenium
Sacred Mirror

Here’s something of what I’m seeing. First of all, de Chardin was one of the first to speculate about the future of consciousness, hypothesizing the “noosphere,” a dimension surrounding the planet where all our thoughts would reside. This idea is of course taken up in the idea of the internet and the development of virtual reality. Both de Chardin and Terrance McKenna foresaw us living with a reversed focus, less on the physical, more on consciousness itself. The other day in the news it was reported that women in Iraq are tired of not being able to watch TV because of all the atrocities shown on the screen. So they formed together to see to it that an alternate channel be broadcast, with positive things. They say that although they know it is largely false, they prefer to stay at home and watch this new channel and pretend that all is OK. Is this a foreshadowing of a time when the earth would not be inhabitable, but we’d be in bubbles living an imaginary life? Another theme is that there is an end coming to the awareness of duality. For example, we distinguish our thoughts from real things. That will end as thoughts become real and things become mere thoughts. As part of this breakdown in boundaries between real and imaginary, the world of consciousness will no longer be shrouded in a veil. There are several books on life in the mind, as in out of body travel, for example (“Otherwhere” is a book about that, and “Unanswered Questions” also delves into what is it like in the world of consciousness? The closest we have to a book on the psychedelic answer is the 2012 book by Pinchbeck, that discusses psychedelic research. We have both Jung to describe the denizens of the unconscious, and then the psychedelic research goes beyond the boundaries of Jung to describe “entities,” both friendly and not. Mack’s “Passport to the Cosmos,” about alien contacts comes up with a similar notion of there being “beings out there” who are aiding in our development, preparing us for the times ahead. The times ahead have a fork in the road. On the one hand, we see material that projects from current consciousness forward, as in a steady evolution, and then there are those who speak of “an event” that will divide the population into those who survive and those who don’t, or as David Birr called it, “the survival of the wisest.” This first theme seems to have a lot to do with the reversal, from physical to the imaginal. Some of the 2012 writings speak about this. Hand Clow’s Mayan Code also gives details about what is going on with us as this change comes about. A related book, on astrology, Cosmos and Psyche presents a new paradigm for astrology and also looks at the cycles of history and what lies ahead.
Another major theme has to do with the “be here now” philosophy, which also ties into the “non dual awareness” theme, because what you find in the here and now is the non-dual background of being. Tolle’s New Earth and Sacred Mirror are two books related to this theme. Non dual awareness has been around a long time, but seems to be on the upswing. I read in Sacred Mirror how Ken Wilber explained non-dual awareness as the pinnacle of self-realilzation, the highest you can get, so it would be rare, but now in recent years, there have appeared many books by folks who have experienced it enough to write about it, and there is a web site devoted to it. Behind the door of “be here now,” lies an amazing experience in the reality of awareness. I’ve experienced it myself in bits and pieces and we’ll try at our Indiana get together many ways of putting ourselves in the path of this realization.
There’s another theme, and that has to do with, on the one hand, the psychic, our increasing telepathy, but also about the interconnectedness of the mind, and thus to the possibility of multi-individual consciousness. I’ve experienced this mainly in dreamwork in groups, and have taken it also into the realm of the imagination. It has to do with a topic being explored by many minds, and the new consciousness being that ability to experience something in a complex manner, as if integrating information, or awareness, from many sources, as if you could be aware of a hundred mind’s processing of that stimulus. Sometimes its called “diversity.” Sometimes it’s called “Christ Consciousness,” sometimes it’s called “crop circles” and sometimes its called “The Divine Matrix,” which is the title of a book by the author of the God Code, that could be added to our list. There is one book, “Radical Knowing,” that proposes something that I’ve explored experimentally, something that is very hard to get our minds around. It has to do with the idea that consciousness exists at the boundaries, that there is something about a relationship between two people that creates consciousness at the intersection. The “space in between” two people’s being aware of each other is a place that is creative and full of potential. There are several ways of attempting to get our perception of consciousness to move, so that we perceive consciousness as “out there” and not something stuck inside our heads.
There are probably other ways to point out some common themes. I’ll continue to work on this project as I have more time to read each of the books and get more info from our book summarizers. I invite more of you to join our collaborative effort. There are many other good books out there that I’d like to see worked on:
Richard Moss, The Mandala of Being
Robert Moore, The Reinchantment of Everyday Life
Walter Anderson: The Future of the Self
Nathan Schwartz-Salant: The Mystery of Human Relationship (alchemy of consciousness)

Hope you all are well.

Henry