Organization (It Has Been Four Weeks and I've Already Forgotten My Blogger Password)

Thom Hartmann's writing metaphor is spot on; carrying around his writing ideas as if he were pregnant with something. I'll have to steal this metaphor, and use it on my friends while we're sitting on my porch getting mouthy with wine. Joshua Ferris, a new fiction writer, who wrote Then We Came to the End, spoke about his frustrations with trying to write this book. He tried many approaches until he opted to carry the idea around with him for a few years. Suddenly, one day he decided to write the book in first person-plural (using "we" instead of "I"), and he claims that upon submitting his book to publishers, his book required very little editing. He's the new man of the literary world grabbing every book award available. If you don't like reading, just wait for the movie.

Thom Hartmann also mentions that reading The Crack in the Cosmic Egg requires time, and we're burning through books in this class. This will be on my holiday reading list at the semester's conclusion.

The most captivating characteristic of this book to me is that Pearce writes with a poetic voice. There is just as much emotion to his writing as there is science. Perhaps the success of this book depends on this emotion.

Not only were the first few chapters engrossing, but I found certain concepts in the text were a bit frustrating. Pearce mentions frequently that new ideas or completely different realms are hard (impossible?) to achieve because our senses and language act as barriers. How can we describe the unseen without the language with which to describe it? I don't know, and just trying to think of something completely new to my senses makes me feel like there is a small person who panics inside my chest, pulling its hair, and throwing its body into my sternum.

To further drive my "senses and language barrier" thought, I'll mention this fun word, guaranteed to make the small person inside of you run around screaming. "Asymptotic." From what I recall its a math term that explains a concept of moving forward one-half the distance between two points with patient tenacity over and over until you never quite span the divide. This concept of continuous movement forward without ever reaching the destination best describes part of my frustration with Pearce was explaining.

"... potential is always limited to the sum total of the images that can be conjured up by the mind, and this ties us down immediately to syntheses of things already realized..."

This book was published in 1971, and mentions the word autistic throughout.

"Infant thinking is probably autistic, gradually structuring into reality thinking, but even autistic thinking cannot gradually arise from a vacuum."

Pearce's thoughts on autistic thinking were years ahead of time, and he really shines with intellect on this topic. Just recently, doctors found evidence to Pearce's words when they discovered that certain strands of DNA in children diagnosed with autism were (are) simply not turned on.

The last think I would like to mention that loosely regards this material is the years of suffering I went through in school listening to my peers question if what they were learning in any given subject was necessary for real life. Our teachers would shrug their shoulders and say something like, "Sorry guys, I'm required to cover this." What I wish the teachers would have said was,

"Who are you to say what you learn may or may not be necessary in the future? If we only spent our time concerning ourselves with what we think we should know we'd be a bunch of intellectually lazy jerks. Now stop complaining.?"

I really wish I had a quote from the text to back up this last little rant because many times I kept finding myself thinking this. I guess it's in regards to people's creative thought and sensory deprivation. I guess by having senses we're still deprived. We rely on them heavily, taking a lot of things within us for granted, especially our brains.