Books

2024: I've barely touched this page for ten years, and now I'm in the process of totally redoing it.

Metaphysics

Thaddeus Golas - The Lazy Man's Guide To Enlightenment (1972)

I've read a lot of deep thoughts from altered states of consciousness, and few say anything that isn't said better here. In simple and precise language, with a patient and friendly attitude, and in only 80 pages, Golas covers everything from how to feel good, to self-improvement, to what is real. The first paragraph: "We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other. The universe is made of one kind of entity: each one is alive, each determines the course of his own existence."

In a metaphysical sense, "there is nobody here but us chickens." Other quotes: "Giving others the freedom to be stupid is one of the most important and hardest steps to take in spiritual progress. Conveniently the opportunity to take that step is all around us every day." And, "Indeed, there is no other way to form an illusion except by using what is real, there is no other material around."

Charles Fort - The Book of the Damned (1919)

Charles Fort was the original paranormal investigator. He spent 27 years in libraries collecting notices of phenomena unexplainable by science, and put them together into four books in the 1920's. His philosophy, laid out in chapter one of book one: "I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, in which and of which all seeming things are only different expressions." And, "Only the Universal can really exist." Fort's epistemology is that we can't know anything. We can only pretend to know by drawing lines around things that are like waves in the ocean. We can keep updating our models to fit new observations, and there is no end to this process. Thomas Kuhn later popularized this idea as the paradigm shift, framing it much less weirdly.

The classic Fortean phenomenon is the rain of frogs, and he has great fun demolishing the conventional explanation that they must have been sucked up in a pond tornado. But in the end these arguments are less interesting than the sheer piling up of anomalies, until the "paranormal" begins to seem normal. The Book Of The Damned is Fort's first and best book. His second book, New Lands, has a lot of stuff about the wide variation of reports in early astronomy, before the sky got nailed down. For more on astronomy, see the fringe science section below. Here's another source of Fort online.

Beatrice Bruteau - The Psychic Grid (1979)

My favorite pure philosophy book, carefully reasoned and full of good ideas. Bruteau never mentions Charles Fort, but here she summarizes later thinkers saying the same thing:

Alan Watts argues that properties of causality and other popular physical categories are superimposed, all of them depending on the notion that reality is divided into separate events. David Bohm, writing on quantum theory, says that the world cannot be analyzed into distinct parts but is an indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as approximations. Objects, he says, do not have intrinsic properties of their own. "Properties" belong to the system, the set of interactions. John Platt makes explicit the process image by urging that the universe should not be regarded as made up of "things" at all, but of a complex hierarchy of lesser and greater flow patterns in which the "things" are invariant features of the flow.

The book is long out of print, and I've transcribed the key chapter, What is Real? Bruteau calls it "the infinite intercommunicating universe", which is too complex for us to understand without building various psychic grids to interface with it. She never mentions Owen Barfield, but he had basically the same idea:

Owen Barfield - Saving The Appearances (1957)

One of the most interesting books of the 20th century. Barfield insists that he's not writing about metaphysics, because the true reality is unknowable. He calls it the unrepresented, and we can't say anything about it, only about our own representations. This is a good fit with Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality. Hoffman argues from evolution, and Barfield more from philosophy, that the world described by science is not literally true, but a convenient user interface, like the dashboard of a car.

Barfield calls the pre-modern mindset "original participation", and goes through history pulling out clues about what it was like. "Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved." He's mainly interested in ancient and medieval thinking, and only briefly covers indigenous metaphysics, which he calls "original participation". Two great books that go deeper into it are The New Science of the Enchanted Universe by Marshall Sahlins, and The Perception of the Environment by Tim Ingold.

Barfield's book is more radical than The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which Juilan Jaynes argues that the ancients lived in a different world inside their heads. Barfield thinks it was also different on the outside. The mind-blowing idea: reality, not hypothetical reality but practical get-your-hands-dirty reality, is not nailed down and passively waiting to be discovered, but correlative to consciousness, and mutable. Other cultures are not driving on our dashboard and seeing it wrong -- they have their own dashboard that can do stuff ours can't.

Roger S. Jones - Physics as Metaphor (1982)

Jones was an actual physicist, and also a follower of Barfield. So he loves science, but he also understands how it's a social construction, and explains in detail how concepts like time and space and matter were built out of nothing but consciousness and relationships. In the strangest chapter, he argues that causality can only be a small part of the general interconnectedness of the universe, a point also made by Beatrice Bruteau.

If you understand that there is no "out there" physical world, only various user interfaces that emerge from different ways of engaging with the incomprehensible universal, then the "paranormal" makes more sense. There's still very little cross-pollination between anthropologists, philosophers, and paranormal investigators, but some is attempted by the next book...

George Hansen - The Trickster and the Paranormal (2001)

A thick, scholarly book that covers the subject from many angles: anthropology, literary theory, shamanism, stage magic, UFO hoaxes, psychic research, and more. The general idea is that it's the nature of these phenomena to only exist on the fringes. How can this work? Why do the results of psychic research get weaker as the studies get more respectable? This is exactly what you would expect if you understand the above books. Reality is correlative to consciousness, so the more perspectives you bring in, as co-creators of reality, the more conventionally reality behaves.

I would add, this even happens in science, where it's called the decline effect. This is a testable statement: Early studies get strong results, but the more studies that are done, the more the results fade into statistical noise.

Another challenging idea in this book is that real paranormal phenomena and hoaxes are not opposites, but that they blend together. For an example of this, I've mirrored an article, Examining Macro Psychokinetic Experiments, in which false table-tilting can jump-start unexplained table-tilting.

John Keel - anything

A classier paranormal author is Jacques Vallee, whose most important book is probably Passport to Magonia (1969). Keel is much more fun and almost as smart, and he comes to the same conclusion: all the different kinds of sightings, from UFOs to fairies to bigfoot, are part of the same big thing that we don't know how to think about. Keel's most famous and serious book is The Mothman Prophecies (1975). At the other extreme, his silliest and widest ranging is Disneyland of the Gods (1988). A good middle ground is The Complete Guide to Mysterious Beings (1970/1994).

Ted Holiday - The Goblin Universe (1986)

A forgotten classic, left unfinished by Holiday and put together after his death by Colin Wilson, whose introduction is a concise lesson in how to think about this stuff. Each chapter is on a different subject, and they vary widely in quality, but the general idea is that we live on an island of stability in a sea of weirdness. In a later chapter, Holiday and a priest attempt to exorcise the Loch Ness monster, which seems to be correlated with some later sightings and Holiday's untimely death.

Barbara O'Brien - Operators and Things (1958)

The fascinating memoir of a high-functioning schizophrenic, who gained helpful advice and deep insights about human psychology from beings that no one else could see.

Dora Van Gelder - The Real World of Fairies (1937/1977)

Much nicer than the above, and easily dismissed as whimsical fiction, this is a masterpiece of first person metaphysics, a field guide to manifestation. I wonder what would have happened if she had started her own tribe.

Social Philosophy

Morris Berman - The Reenchantment Of The World (1981)

Berman is a follower of Barfield, and this is a great starter book on the "disenchantment" narrative. It's hard to explain, to a modern person, what exactly has been lost from ways of thinking that we no longer understand. Another good crack at this subject is Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. Berman goes strangely deeply into alchemy, and how alchemists were not trying to "create gold" in either a strictly physical or a strictly metaphorical sense. The chapter after that has my favorite bit, a series of portraits of Isaac Newton, looking increasingly villainous as he becomes more committed to mechanistic philosophy.

Ivan Illich - Tools for Conviviality (1973)

Ivan Illich was so smart, and wrote so clearly, that reading him is like looking at the sun. This was the first book of his that I read, and still my favorite, but all his stuff is thoughtful and fresh. It's mainly about the hidden social costs of progress, how new techologies make things better in obvious ways, while making things worse in subtle ways. Here's a good source of Ivan Illich writings online.

Fredy Perlman - Against His-story, Against Leviathan (1983)

In a florid and challenging style, Perlman goes through all of history arguing that the main driver of social change is when citizens no longer liked the crappy systems they were living under. For example, the Spaniards were able to defeat the Incas so easily only because everyone was sick of the Incas. The whole text is online at the Anarchist Library and the Noble Savagery blog.

William Kötke - The Final Empire

From an Amazon review: "This is flat-out the best exposition of our socio-ecological troubles and a penetrating exploration of solutions as revealed in biology and indigenous populations who have adapted to achieve harmony in nature." Without even mentioning peak oil, Kötke carefully explains why civilization as we know it is doomed, and what to do about it. Here's a link to the whole text online.

David Graeber and David Wengrow - The Dawn Of Everything

There's lots of good stuff in this thick book, but the main idea is that prehistory was not an inevitable march to how we live now, but that people were trying a lot of different things for a long time, including dense settlements with no sign of inequality or repression. The authors don't say it straight out, but they lay down all the pieces for this story: that the first cities were peaceful and egalitarian, until they were conqered by violent hill tribes, who merged their patriarchal culture with urban bureaucracy.

John Livingston - Rogue Primate (1994)

All of these books have different answers to the question: where did humans go wrong? Livingston puts it farther back than anyone, at the taming of fire! He argues that once humans advertised their presence to predators, they had no choice but to become the most dangerous animal, and since then we have become more and more disconnected from the rest of the world. Here's a great summary of Livingston by Dan Bartlett.

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Fringe Science

William Corliss was the heir to Charles Fort in that he collected anomalies from respected sources. He didn't comment on them but reprinted them in many books, which you can browse at Science Frontiers. The books themselves are now out of print.

My favorite hard scientist is the astronomer Halton Arp. His books are Seeing Red and Quasars, Reshifts, and Controversies. Arp spent his career gathering evidence that redshifts are mostly caused by something other than recession velocity (which would cancel the expanding universe and the big bang), and that quasars are not extremely remote and bright, but are associated with nearby galaxies, shot out to form new galaxies like seeds! When dominant astronomy couldn't counter him fairly, they eliminated his telescope time, and for decades he kept going on the discarded and suppressed evidence of his adversaries.

I like Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist who writes popular books of hypotheses that are scientific in the sense that they are testable, but outside the bounds of present scientific models. Mostly he writes about different kinds of extraordinary perception, and explains them with ideas about non-local consciousness.

Wilhelm Reich is best known as a psychologist, but he was developed physical tools to work with the esoteric energy he called "orgone", or when Royal Rife cured serious diseases with precise frequency generators, or when Louis Kervran found biological creatures transmuting chemical elements (his book is Biological Transmutations), or for that matter, when ordinary people experience UFO abductions or miraculous healings, these are not hoaxes or delusions. They are honest and accurate observations that fail to be integrated into consensus reality... so far!

Fiction

Roger Zelazny

It's getting hard for me to find any fiction I enjoy more than just rereading Zelazny. In Philip Dick, not knowing what's real is deeply troubling. In Zelazny, it's exciting! A follower of Charles Fort, he turned Fort's anything-goes metaphysics into an engine for adventure. My favorite is a short novel called Roadmarks, in which a set of magical highways somehow exist outside time, and if you can find them, you can drive ordinary cars to anywhere in history, including alternate timelines. The first novel of the Chronicles of Amber Nine Princes in Amber (1970) establishes the basic metaphysics, which are revolutionary. To go from one world to another, you don't walk through a portal -- you simply go for a walk while observing differently, and the landscape gradually changes around you. This works because there is one true world, Amber, of which all other worlds are less real "shadows". But Amber itself is a routine high fantasy world. Zelazny was a follower of Charles Fort, but if you take Amber out of the equation, you get Barfield.

Philip K. Dick

A reviewer once remarked that Dick had so many ideas that he would just scatter ideas in the margins that other authors would hang whole books on. The Man in the High Castle is probably his least weird novel I recommend starting with The Game Players Of Titan because it's a fun page-turner with lots of plot twists. Then you'll be ready for stronger stuff in Ubik, and then you might be ready for his scariest and most powerful novel, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch. Also great are Dr. Bloodmoney and A Maze of Death, and almost anything is going to be worth reading -- but I think and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are overrated. Dick himself said that A Scanner Darkly was both his saddest and funniest novel, and I agree. (It was also the first one he didn't write on speed.) The Valis trilogy is for readers more interested in Dick's personal life and beliefs.

Gene Wolfe

The Shadow of the Torturer. The story is set so far in the future that you can dig a hole anywhere and find strange artifacts from forgotten civilizations, and all the coolest Medieval stuff, high tech, and magic are all mixed together.

M.T. Anderson's Feed is the ultimate dystopian extrapolation novel, sadder than A Scanner Darkly, bleaker than The Sheep Look Up, and more readable than either. It's set two or three generations in the future, when the internet has become even more commercial and is beamed straight into everyone's head. Space travel and flying cars have only extended the range of the American nightmare, and almost everyone is stupid and immature. It's like if Lars von Trier had made Idiocracy. Also it has a great first sentence: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

I know three people including myself who have read Orson Scott Card's Treason, and we all think it's his best novel. It's about a planet where a bunch of families were exiled, and over the centuries they all basically developed different super-powers. I wish there were a bunch of sequels!