I drafted "Art of the Fugue" in my last Eephus draft as the closest artistic representation of how the wikkid mind works and "GE&B" is on the closest bookshelf to this keyboard, beside Search for Meaning, Chaos, EOWilson's Consilience, Origin of Consciousness, All the Strange Hours, my Maslow, Pinker, de Chardin, Koestler, etc. But order only happens in service to the next chaos, the X Factor which brings life to new levels.
That is the process - find the incredible one can and may attain, master it until it is second nature, use that platform to reach beyond one's capacity into the unknown. And live, love, laugh and leave it better than you found it in between. GL to us all -
Significant overlap in our respective libraries.
Just got a few orchestral transcriptions of Bach by the LA Phil and BBC (conducted by Leonard Slatkin).
That was what Jung (and Sting) call a synchronicity, I was thinking of Frankl when noting some of my books, also Norman Cousins (both authors talk about the power of mind, the former to hold a sense of meaning and purpose to defeat existential despair, latter using humor to cure illness). I read Chaos, I admire an author who can take arcane, abstruse subjects and render them understandable to the layperson, a popularization without being oversimplified (Koestler a master at this, in another synchronicity, he also wrote Ghost in the Machine, another Police intersection). If you liked that, I highly recommend Complexity by Waldrop. Much of it was centered on some of the world's leading researchers based in The Santa Fe Institute, visionary, futuristic and cutting edge in '92, but I imagine still ahead of its time a quarter century later. Consilience an awesome book, I read it about the same time as the Astonishing Hypothesis: Scientific Search For The Soul, co-authored by Crick of Nobel laureate, DNA fame. Wilson is no doubt one of the world's greatest living naturalists (I have a massive book on Ants by him, I believe his specialty, though obviously he is a generalist when it comes to his broader science writing). Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Jaynes was fascinating, not sure about the premise, but it forced me to think about the evidence (kind of archeological excavation of the mind drawing inferences from Homer) in new ways - what more could you ask for?
Not familiar with the Eisley book, another naturalist? Maslow a seminal humanistic psychologist (with Rogers), I know more OF him than actually read in the original. Koestler's Act of Creation also a landmark in the early-mid '60's, about parallels in the fields of art, literature, science, invention and discovery and humor. That and The Sleepwalkers (brilliant history of astronomy) are my favorites, also surveys Janus and Bricks to Babel (coincidentally holding Yogi and the Robot to pick up tomorrow). Pinker a thought provoking cognitive scientist, I have a few by him. My favorite survey and overview is The Mind's New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution by Howard Gardner (of Frames of Mind, multiple intelligences fame). de Chardin another I know OF through reputation (I like a paraphrased quote, all things converge as they ascend).
I currently have multiple libraries, but most philosophy oriented lately (thread Roots of Western Thought if interested). By my bed stand I have a stack of a half dozen foundational books for me:
1) Expect the Unexpected by Roger Von Oech (uses Heraclitus in the service of Creativity).
2) Guide For the Perplexed by E.F. Schumacher (very wise man who wrote the counter-culture economics book Small Is Beautiful).
3) Mind And Nature: A Necessary Unity by Gregory Bateson (father coined word *GENE*, married anthropologist Margaret Mead, was in the Macy Cybernetics Conferences of the '50s with Norbert Wiener and John Von Neumann, did mammalian communication research with dolphins, formulated the Double Bind theory of schizophrenia and at the end of his life was attempting a unitary synthesis that bridged the world's of biology and epistemology).
4) Unity of Philosophical Experience by Etienne Gilson (IMO the most lucid, humane and greatest historian of philosophy, incisively reveals how repeatedly throughout history there are cycles where a movement mistakes a part for the whole and ends in scepticism, rinse/repeat).
5) The Idea Of Nature by R.G. Collingwood (thematically similar to The Sleepwalkers by Koestler, one of the generalist/interdisciplinary giants of the 20th century, simultaneously one of the preeminent British philosophers and historians in his specialty of his era).
6) Essay On Man by Ernst Cassirer (another generalist and interdisciplinary thinker, with Bateson, Koestler and Collingwood, in some ways the "last man to know everything", sometimes it helps to look at the big picture, this is a summation of his monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, sections on language, myth/religion, math/logic/science, in which man's various SYMBOL SYSTEMS by which he MEDIATELY makes sense of himself and the universe/creation, unless we are talking about direct mystical intuition, somewhat akin to a Rodin relief in which the characters struggle to free themselves from the underlying matrix or material substratum they are embedded in).
* Also highly recommended (all the below are oversized and profusely illustrated, making great coffee table books)
Man And His Symbols by Carl Jung (my favorite psychologist, no need for the first half of the 20th Century qualifier, his last book, with eminent protégés and one of the best and broadest general intros for the layperson).
A Study Of History - The First Abridged One-Volume Edition Illustrated by Arnold Toynbee (arguably the greatest historian of the 20th Century, looks for patterns and cycles by employing a taxonomy of societies and cultures, living and dead, a distillation of his massive original 12 volume magnum opus).
The Secret Teachings Of All Ages by Manly P. Hall (The Perennial Philosophy by Brave New World author Aldous Huxley probably my favorite work strictly on comparative religion, this a little more breadth and depth on esoteric systems).
** The art of the mystic and visionary Romantic poet William Blake, especially:
Dante's Divine Comedy, The Illuminated Blake, British Retrospective and The Complete Graphic Works.
