The author had the ability to write the story of the development of understanding our place in the universe and how we fit in it as if he were writing a novel. The narrative flows that well. He's a very good writer.

The author steps the reader through the development of how we think about knowledge. The heavens above, the home of the Gods, are first thought of as perfect: universal, necessary, and certain. Overtime, through rational thought and coupling with experience we start to understand the world around us antithetically namely as particular to the data, contingent to our current understanding and never certain but probable.

I would recommend this book to anyone. Unfortunately, in that recommendation I would have to give a couple of caveats. He gives this bizarre extra place in our understanding of the world to Freud and Jung and he sprinkles it throught the whole text. It amazes me that we ever really got out of the 80s (yes, the book was published in 1993, but he thinks in 80s paradigms) with its non refutable pyshoanalytical thought and its archetypal forms ("I know your repressed because you deny your own repression").

If the reader ignores the author's obvious bias towards pyschobabble, the reader will have one of the best written surveys of human thought and progression they'll ever read within one book.

All is immaterial and the material is not real, he says. He'll quote Bishop Barkley at length and slightly change Barkley's conclusion that everything resides in the mind of God, and he hypothesizes a spirit (or a soul) of some kind instead. He'll further tie that with a version of the Copenhagen Interruption that says matter only exist when it is observed with a consciousness. His thesis is not as absurd as it might sound, and he steps the listener through it by clearly explaining the measurement problem within physics and provides an explanation. He mostly is trying to justify how our consciousness exist everywhere and we only experience from ourselves by looking outside of ourselves because of our senses.

My perspective is radically different from the author. I think consciousness and the world are best explained by the material. There are no truths but only perspectives. The author takes matter out of the world. The way we perceive the world is with our five senses and they correspond with the three space dimensions, time and mass (space-time/time), he says. He'll even say that consciousness doesn't reside in our skull, but our skull resides in consciousness and we are mostly limited by thinking else-wise because of the Western way of considering our being (he definitely has an Eastern approach).

I once listened to a lecture (on a Great Course lecture on Great Minds of the Western Tradition) which explained Barkley and his beliefs and pointed out that nobody has really refuted Barkley because he is totally coherent within his belief system. I can say the same for this author. I liked Avery's presentation so much I went back and re-listened to the first half of this book to make senses of what he had to say. I never do that and especially not for a book that I rated so low.

The author makes some good points about how scientific theories aren't shown to be necessary. He'll even talk about Copernicus and point out that the sun being the center of the universe is not necessary to explain the Solar System (though by no means is the author a Geo-centrist). We adopted it because it is more convenient and easier to deal with. I won't say this authors thesis is less correct than the more standard explanations for consciousness, but until I'm convinced otherwise I will just ignore his thesis.

He does explain his theory quite well and explains physics and the nature of space better than most. In addition, he has a great way of how we should think about the future and deal with the merging of humans with our digital world and how we need to use this to do something about global warming. I liked the author's take enough to listen to the whole book and the first half twice, but I'm not a bio-centrist and think my time is best spent looking elsewhere.

The third time I've read this book. Each time, I've gained more insight and grown a little bit deeper. Easily accessible while dealing with profund spiritual and psyhcological matters, Anodea Judith's revised edition is still a life changer. You can use this book to help you face some pretty dark and scary shadows in your unconscious. After the journey, the insights gained are rewarding.

I really can’t remember how this book ended up on my to-read shelf. As I recently wanted to read a book on the history of thought like that of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I picked this up since it is relatively recent and thus it would give an idea of some modern schools of thought like those of Postmodernism and Deconstructionism, something Russell’s book lacked since it is written in 1945.

As a history of western thought, this book is excellent. I would highly recommend it if you are seeking to understand how the modern mind developed from the Greeks all the way to the present era. It is erudite and beautifully written. The author is extremely intelligent and observant (up to a point anyway) that I was aghast at the thought trajectories he cleverly traced and by which he connected thinkers from diverse periods and contexts with one another.

However, as the book drew to its end, I became more and more surprised by the claims Tarnas started making. What these boil down to is that it is inconceivable that the world we live in is materialistic and without meaning. Why it is inconceivable we are unfortunately not told. Also, he believes that our mere understanding of the world implies that there is meaning in it and the subject-object duality (separation between us as observers and the world) is an illusion. That how someone who wrote a history of western thought (including empiricism) that is so eloquent and perceptive is making such insupportable claims is really beyond me. Consider for example the following excerpt:


"Why do these myths ever work? If the human mind has no access to a priori certain truth, and if all observations are always already saturated by uncertified assumptions about the world, how could this mind possibly conceive a genuinely successful theory? Popper answered this question by saying that, in the end, it is “luck”—but this answer has never satisfied. For why should the imagination of a stranger ever be able to conceive merely from within itself a myth that works so splendidly in the empirical world that whole civilizations can be built on it (as with Newton)? How can something come from nothing?

I believe there is only one plausible answer to this riddle, and it is an answer suggested by the participatory epistemological framework outlined above: namely, that the bold conjectures and myths that the human mind produces in its quest for knowledge ultimately come from something far deeper than a purely human source."


This is certainly amazing, especially if you read what he had to say about Galileo, Kepler and Newton in his rendering of some of their mistakes resulting from their flawed assumptions and worldviews, let alone Popper's notion that whenever a theory is non-falsifiable it is outside the purview of science. This certainly is the most peculiar author I came across. I read in incredulity the extraordinary claim he made that the modern materialist scientific worldview (which supposes that humanity may very well be an accident that is very likely not to occur if we rewind and replay the tape) is, wait for it, anthropomorphic since it presupposes that the human mind can understand the Cosmos in a mechanistic framework, whereas the participatory epistemological framework (outlined in the excerpt agove) is not anthropomorphic at all (!!!). I really, really kid you not.

Have your read the novels of Ivan Doig – those, such as The Whistling Season and/or Dancing at the Rascal Fair? If you have and enjoyed his writing, then I believe you will enjoy this too. I would recommend reading the novels first. These novels are really not novels! One comes to understand as one reads about Doig’s and his father’s and his maternal grandmother’s life, as they are presented in this biography, that his fiction talks of his own true life experiences. In his novels you get a tightly woven plot line with the extraneous information removed. You get a good story. Here in the biography you get all the details that lie behind the scenes that you remember from the stories. Many of the places and events and prime forces (weather, park authorities and ranchers) are common to both. The setting of the novels feels so genuine since it is anchored to real life events.

This book goes one step deeper. It is primarily about three people and their relationships with each other: the author, his father and his maternal grandmother. His mother died when he was very young; the role his maternal grandmother played is unusual. The feelings these three people harbored is perceptively and honestly portrayed. Again, real life is often more strange than fiction. I found the relationship between his father and his maternal grandmother ….well, you have to read the book to understand it!

Warning: if you do not enjoy Ivan Doig’s novels, you will not enjoy this book. For me, Doig’s portrayal of teachers is the high point of his writing skills, probably because he himself is no rancher, no homesteader, no sheep herder. He was a man of books.

I listened to the audio book. The narration was fine. Not exceptional, not bad, just fine. The vocabulary used is that of Montana ranchers. I didn’t understand every word, but certainly got the gist of it just fine.