Going on from what I was saying yesterday about rediscovering a love of learning, I wanted to write about some of the things that inspired me to begin to think like that.
The internet. Number one greatest thing ever. Free knowledge (like all knowledge should be). I’ve spend a lot of time online looking up various subject and political movements. Obviously I’ve written a lot about the zeitgeist movement (which is more of an anti-political movement, but there’s no need to get too technical), but the world socialist movement (this isn’t exactly socialism like you commonly hear about), the direct democracy movement (opposed to the representative bs we have now), and technocratic movements have also caught my attention and imagination, just not to the extent TZM (not TMZ…) has. I love watching the video’s on ted.com, the site’s motto “ideas worth spreading” says it all. I don’t agree with or know everything on the site, but if I did there would be no point in going there. There are hundreds of free (both legally and illegally) documentaries all of the internet as well. I’d list them (like I’m about to do with some books), but there’s way too many. Even this list of books I made up was way longer then I expected.
So yeah, I’ve been reading a lot of books over the last six months, and I wanna… you know, make myself sound smart by listing them all (well, the non-fiction ones anyway):
-”Science and Human Behaviour” by BF Skinner. That one was hard to get through. It’s basically a psychology textbook. Little dry but interesting as hell.
-”The Mindbody Prescription” by Dr. John Sarno. Howard Stern turned me onto that one, and it’s a very interesting look at unconscious thoughts affecting the body, causing back pain and other types of chronic pain that seem to have no real source. Also theoretically applied to mental problems like anxiety and depression as well.
-”Life After Death: The Burden Of Proof” by Deepak Chopra. I read this one mostly because I wanted to see what he had for proof of an afterlife, something I’d love to see. Sadly, while it presented some interesting theories that may very well be true, they were all beyond the reach of any real provability. For now anyway. I have a lot of respect for Deepak, even if I think he’s probably a bit of a dreamer.
-”The Tyranny of Words” by Stuart Chase was the inspiration for all the bitching I do on how our language is too ambiguous for anyone to really effectively communicate with each other. If you ever want to completely dissect semantics and the differences between words like chair, which has a concrete referent, and communism, which can mean hundreds of things depending on who you ask, read this (somehow I get the feeling nobody’s jumping up to go buy this one).
-”Meditations” by Jiddu Krishnamurti. Guy was a brilliant philosopher. I don’t usually go for vague writings about consciousness and awareness and emptying of the mind and all that stuff, but this dude and deepak are two spiritual motherfuckers I can get behind.
-”The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in The Dark” by Carl Sagan is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read. ‘A manifesto for clear thought’ is one of the quotes on the cover, and I couldn’t think of a better description. The book has a ton of interesting history and inspired probably 4 or 5 of my entries on here over the last few months.
-”The New World Order” by HG Wells. He wrote a lot of sci-fi, but this book, written in 1940 in England, mid-war, is a completely logical call for peace and world collectivism. It’s short, to the point, and completely illustrates how we needed this 70 years ago. He thought we were on the brink of destruction then… if he could’ve seen what today’s society is like.
-I just bought Richard Dawkins new book “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence For Evolution”, and I’ve only made it through the intro and first chapter, which basically explained what I wrote about a while ago — that just because evolution is, strictly speaking, a “theory”, doesn’t mean that it isn’t 99% proof positive. All anyone would have to do is find one fossil from the wrong time period, one piece of evidence that contradicts evolution, and the theory would be blown. Instead all we have is more and more evidence to support it. (I like how I write as if there’s some nutjob who doesn’t believe in evolution might be reading this [[well, it's actually about 40% of the american population, but still probably nobody who'd be on this site]])
