September 2007 Books
Punk Science, Inside the Mind of God; Big Mind • Big Heart, Finding Your Way
Punk Science
Inside the Mind of GodWhen was the last time you sat under a tree and let your mind go, marveling at the wonder of it all? Punk Science was born of such an experience, in which the author sat in an oak tree and attempted to feel the rotation of the earth.
“Suddenly,” he says, “I was thrust into an infinity of spinning orbs. In a moment that seemed to transcend space and time,“… I understood what I now call the Black Hole Principle. All the pieces of information I had been studying suddenly fitted together into a framework that is elegant and simple, but also allows for infinite, emergent complexity. This vision has formed the basis for this book and is nothing less than a new view of the cosmos.”
Pretty powerful claim, that. And all this from a medical doctor with a passion for putting his vision to work to offer physicists a framework big enough to hold the all-too-familiar details they wrestle with on a daily basis.
The early pages launch the conversation on which the book hinges: is consciousness a result of chemical (and perhaps other) processes, or is it the other way around? Moving right into string theory and M-theory, he lays a layman-friendly foundation for seeing things in the latter light.
“We have gone as far as we can with the material paradigm,” he asserts. And then he asks, “Is anybody making those giant leaps of consciousness that have always taken us forward in science? … We need people who firmly understand that consciousness is fundamental to the universe: people who know that the universe is intelligent, because they experience it as such. Like Pythagoras, Newton and Faraday, they have the skill of merging their consciousness with the universe in order to gain insights into its workings.”
Let me not give the impression he favors throwing the scientific method overboard. No, it has its place. But that place, he argues, is after-the-fact—once we have the vision, we must, as Einstein and others did, use mathematics and experimentation to support or disprove it.
I found the book an enjoyable and stimulating read. Of course, it probably helped that I agreed with him from the outset. I learned a few wonderful things and found that the book left me more able to converse about what's going on in physics, which in turn brought its own share of enjoyment. If you like to feel'“in the know” without having to puzzle things out too much, you may enjoy it too.
—Chiwah
Big Mind • Big Heart
Finding Your WayIt has always seemed to me that the reason we're here is to delve into ourselves to find… well, whatever there is to find. After all these centuries exploring the outer world, the one big frontier remains the world within. And we each have to pioneer that wilderness for ourselves. We can't leave the adventure to someone else.
But those who have already undertaken the journey for themselves can be helpful guides. In Big Mind • Big Heart, Merzel undertakes not to teach us what he has learned in his many years on his path, but to provide a framework that facilitates self-exploration. Merging Eastern and Western approaches to the mind, he presents a process that is graceful and easily accessible to any seeker of self-liberation.
The process is Western in that it is active, but Eastern in that mind is quiet during the exploration to allow the many sub-voices buried within to come forth and reveal their reason for being.
Key to the approach is the concept of a universal Big Mind and Big Heart, to which every human being has access. Merzel explains that while these can take years to access via meditation, the process presented here gives us rapid access. This is beautifully demonstrated on the accompanying CD, in which he talks a woman through her own discovery of Oneness with all things, on a heart and mind level, in only a few short minutes.
There are options here. One might simply read the book, which is filled with dialogues with the many internal parts of self, and thereby access to a high degree the clarity lying latent within each of us. A more adventurous soul, on the other hand, might listen to the CD and learn the breathing process and go within and find his or her own answers before reading the answers provided in the book.
I find this an exemplary work, a priceless set of tools for the task of pioneering consciousness.
—Chiwah
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