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)

My favorite metaphysics book. I've read a lot of drug trip reports, and few have anything that isn't done better here. In simple and precise language, with a patient and friendly attitude, and in only 80 pages, Golas covers everything from what is real, to self-improvement, to how to feel good (but in the opposite order). 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 great 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." All our attempts to make sense of the world only seem true by excluding things that don't fit, like drawing lines around waves in the ocean. We can keep updating our models to fit new observations, but there is no end to this process. Thomas Kuhn later popularized this idea as the paradigm shift, but in order to not be excluded by the academy, Kuhn barely hinted at how radical these shifts can be.

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, variation that makes sense if you understand Owen Barfield. For more on astronomy, see the fringe science section below. Fort's third book, Lo!, is a lot like his first, and his fourth, Wild Talents, is about humans with strange powers. Here's another source of Fort online.

Beatrice Bruteau - The Psychic Grid (1979)

This is a difficult book, and long out of print. I've transcribed the key chapter, What is Real? Through careful reasoning, Bruteau determines that what is real is "the infinite intercommunicating universe", which is too complex for us to understand without building various psychic grids to filter it down.

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, only perception. The true reality, he says, is incomprehensible, so 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 pure 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 lightly covers older representations. Two great books that go deeper into indigenous metaphyics 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 that it is 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 pure consciousness. 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 how truth is not "out there", but emerges in many forms through active engagement with the incomprehensible universal, the "paranormal" makes a lot more more sense, and these are some good books:

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 very nature of these phenomena to only exist on the fringes. Real paranormal phenomena and hoaxes are not opposites, but blend together. How can this work? Hansen is not a philosopher, and never says straight out that the phenomena know who's watching. But this is exactly what you would expect if you understand that reality is first person, and that the more perspectives who are sharing a manifestation, the more the results default to physicalism.

John Keel - anything

A more respectable paranormal author is Jacques Vallee, whose most important book is probably Passport to Magonia (1969). Keel is a lot more fun, and comes to the same conclusion: all the weird sightings, from UFOs to fairies to bigfoot, are manifestations of the same 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. After that, he developed health problems and only lived a few more years.

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

If we take Barfield seriously, this can happen: while filtering down the universal, a child keeps a channel open, and develops a set of benign representations, which can coexist with the representations of the dominant culture. 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.

Barbara O'Brien - Operators and Things (1958)

Similar to the above, but weirder, this is the fascinating memoir of a high-functioning schizophrenic, who had adventures and gained practical value from her ability to tune into the collective subconscious.

Roger Zelazny - Nine Princes in Amber (1970)

The first novel of the Chronicles of Amber establishes the basic metaphysics, which are revolutionary.

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, the idea that magic has gone out of the world. 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 ___. Berman goes strangely deeply into alchemy, and how alchemists were not trying to "create gold" in either a strictly physical nor a strictly metaphorical sense. The following chapter has my favorite bit, a series of portraits of Isaac Newton, looking more and more wicked as he goes deeper into mechanistic philosophy.

Ivan Illich - Tools for Conviviality

Ivan Illich was so smart, and wrote so clearly, that reading him is like looking at the sun. Tools For Conviviality was the first book of his that I read, and still my favorite, but all his stuff is thoughtful and fresh. 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 shitty systems they were living under. He has good evidence that the conquistadors only succeeded against the Incas because locals were 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.

Derrick Jensen - A Language Older Than Words

Jensen is an amazing writer, and this book pulled me straight into the anti-civilization movement in the 90s. I saw him speak twice, and both times he boasted of his fatal mistake: on a radio show, a caller challenged him to define "civilization", the word at the foundation of his life's work, and he answered with the first thing that popped into his head: cities, and then just stuck with that answer.

Tactically it makes sense, if you want to build a movement, to not define your key word as something a nerd would say, like "a self-reinforcing relationship between technological complexity and social domination," but as something Travis Bickle would say. "Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets." From this decision, it was only a matter of time before the anti-civ mantle would be taken up by socially repressive rural people, against more cooperative urbanites.

David Graeber and David Wengrow - The Dawn Of Everything

There's lots of stuff in this thick book, but the main idea is that the repressiveness of human systems is not related to their scale. He doesn't say it straight out, but he lays down all the pieces for this story: that the first cities were peaceful and egalitarian, and they only became repressive after conquest by hill tribes, who merged their violent 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? I covered it in The Animal in the Dark Tower, and here's Dan Bartlett's summary of Livingston. If you think humans took a wrong turn somewhere, He challenges the primitivist orthodoxy by putting the key mistake not at the invention of agriculture, but the invention of fire!

Fringe Science

William Corliss is an heir to Charles Fort in that he collects anomalies from respected sources. He doesn't comment on them but reprints them in many books, which you can browse or buy at Science Frontiers.

My favorite hard scientist is the astronomer Halton Arp. His books are Seeing Red and Quasars, Reshifts, and Controversies. Arp has spent his career gathering evidence that redshifts are mostly caused by something other than recession velocity (which could 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 has been forced to use the discarded and suppressed evidence of his enemies.

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.

Some of the most exciting fringe science is done by single researchers who consistently get extraordinary results, and then when other scientists try to duplicate the experiments, the results fade away into randomness. This is called the decline effect and that link goes to a great article about it. This is exactly what would be predicted by a larger metaphysics that views reality as a consensus that emerges out of a struggle among many perspectives that want to share the same world.

So when Wilhelm Reich 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!

Other Non-Fiction

I once heard about a book called Play as if Your Life Depends on It by Frank Forencich. It's a fitness book based on moving like natural humans, doing exercise so it's functional instead of repetitive, play instead of work. I should have bought a copy because now it's out of print and worth a hundred dollars. But he has other books, and Paleo Fitness by Darryl Edwards is probably similar.

Alice Miller's For Your Own Good is an important book about the hidden child abuse in the first two years that we often think of as normal child-rearing, and how it ruins society. By the way, Alice Miller did not take her own advice with her own son, Martin Miller Another good book on the same subject is The Continuum Concept. John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education is a massive, angry book about how American schools have been turned into mind-killing factories to churn out docile, unquestioning citizens and workers... not by accident or negligence but by the explicit planning and interference of the elite beginning in the mid-1800's.

My favorite history book is A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. I expect the 21st century to be similar to the 14th century: lots of poverty and general nastiness, but the big systems will muddle through and technology will thrive.

Fiction

Philip K. Dick wrote more than 40 novels and basically invented trippy-reality sci-fi. 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. 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 The Man in the High Castle 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.

In what I call the "No Exit" scenario, civilizations continue to rise and fall with no release through either utopia or extinction. The best fiction about this is Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series, starting with 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.

Philip Pullman - The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights). The first of a trilogy, this book has been filmed twice, but not that well. The books are set in a steampunky world combining old technologies with super-advanced ones, and there are parallel worlds and gateways. Metaphysically the story is radical, with the idea that God himself has become corrupted by power. The first book is great, and the second, The Subtle Knife, is darker and even better. The third book is a disappointing failure of imagination, with a feeble ending in which the effect of an epic upheaval in reality itself is that nothing changes.
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!

Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian. McCarthy is too bleak for me, but he's an incredible stylist. This is his masterpiece, and it will never be made into an adequate movie because no real person can play the Judge, the scariest villain of all time.

In theory I should like "magic realism" except that I don't like Latin American authors. But John Crowley's Little, Big blew me away with its beautiful language and otherworldly aura. It's like a whole other direction that fantasy could have gone. I wish there were hundreds of books imitating Little, Big, instead of hundreds of books imitating Tolkien.