Being a musician does funny things to you. It leads you to look for patterns in the beautiful – and not-so-beautiful. To my mind, music is art and logic perfectly combined. I believe this unique combination offers musicians extra insights into the world around us. My desire to discover patterns in the world around me, fused with an underlying sense of injustice, has helped shape the opinions and ideas for a better social model that I write about today. I've founded several online initiatives, written extensively, and given talks around the concept of a post-money, open access economy. I believe this will ultimately prove to be the only viable path for humanity over the next century.
F-Day is the story of a society coming of age. Where one man’s refusal to accept modern life as the best humanity has to offer starts a countdown clock, counting down to a better, post-money world, then embarks on a quest for knowledge, a journey across four continents, against the mighty machine of politics, media, and dark forces to found a society that has superseded money in the unlikeliest of places: Iceland.
After facing down an economic cataclysm, Iceland struggles in its new, fragile post-money prototype, inadvertently becoming the focus of political leaders across the world, deadly curious, daring it to fail. But to everyone’s amazement, Iceland slowly steadies itself and begins to blossom...
This was my bible during my awkward teenage years. Hofstadter takes the reader on a fascinating odyssey through maths, logic, music, and art, recklessly blurring the lines between art and science, describing the emergent patterns that repeat all around us – a fractal universe forever repeating itself at the galactic and molecular level. It’s a heady and intoxicating read, but richly rewarding. I can’t imagine not having read this book.
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Goedel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.
I remain to this day fascinated by religion and the mechanisms on which it flourishes. While I have never been religious and wasted quite a few years entrenched in the atheist camp, these days I’m far more interested in how religion and the god story makes itself attractive, and why such ideas have propagated successfully again and again throughout human history.
I believe by understanding how this mechanism works, we can solve many of the challenges that arise from dogmatic and polarizing belief systems today. It was also this book that Dawkins first challenged my belief of a map's North being ‘up’. I never looked at a map the same way since.
The God Delusion caused a sensation when it was published in 2006. Within weeks it became the most hotly debated topic, with Dawkins himself branded as either saint or sinner for presenting his hard-hitting, impassioned rebuttal of religion of all types.
His argument could hardly be more topical. While Europe is becoming increasingly secularized, the rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in the Middle East or Middle America, is dramatically and dangerously dividing opinion around the world. In America, and elsewhere, a vigorous dispute between 'intelligent design' and Darwinism is seriously undermining and restricting the teaching of science. In many countries…
As someone who campaigns for a better way to operate spaceship Earth, Dispelling Wetiko was the precise slap in the face I needed to break free from the spell that has captured so many would-be change-makers like myself. It’s so easy to look around and point the finger at those who benefit most from the world’s problems as being the cause agents when nothing could be further from the truth.
It is our collective hopes, our weaknesses, and our fears – multiplied in their billions – that create the super-structure that billionaires enjoy. Levy defines this as a collective psychosis of humanity that wreaks havoc on the world around us – a psychosis that we must face down before we can hope to defeat it.
There is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called "wetiko"—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests.
Drawing on insights from Jungian psychology, shamanism, alchemy, spiritual wisdom traditions, and personal experience, author Paul Levy shows us that hidden within the venom of wetiko is its own antidote, which once recognized…
If you haven’t yet read Eisenstein, then I promise you you are intellectually and emotionally impoverished by that lack. Charles Eisenstein has such an extraordinary deep insight into the human condition and interconnectedness, coupled with an astounding level of humility in the wonder of what he doesn’t yet know, that he will leave you feeling at once masterful in your own destiny and humbled by the world and the great possibilities that lie tantalisingly close if we are just a shade braver and reach for it.
A beacon of hope in the face of our current world crises, this uplifting book demonstrates how embracing our interconnectedness is key to world transformation
In a time of social and ecological crisis, what can we as individuals do to make the world a better place? This inspirational and thought-provoking book serves as an empowering antidote to the cynicism, frustration, paralysis, and overwhelm so many of us are feeling, replacing it with a grounding reminder of what’s true: we are all connected, and our small, personal choices bear unsuspected transformational power. By fully…
This may be seen as an odd inclusion by me to this list, but there are lessons in this book that are impossible to ignore. Mostly, how our private thoughts shape the outcomes we receive. It’s easy to dismiss Byrne’s ideas of a universal law of attraction in a hyper-rational world where magic no longer has a place, but, for me, what she describes is not magical at all.
It merely reminds us that the reality we each experience is nothing more and nothing less than our own private interpretation of the universe, based on the sum of our experiences. Life is entirely subjective to the liver, and if we can shape our thoughts towards the kind of life that we want to see, then we can literally (within reason) create that life for ourselves.
The tenth anniversary edition of the book that changed lives in profound ways.
In 2005, a groundbreaking feature-length movie revealed the great mystery of the universe -- The Secret. In 2006, Rhonda Byrne followed with a book that became a worldwide bestseller.
Everything you have ever wanted - unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth - is now at your very fingertips.
The Secret is an enigma that has existed throughout the history of mankind. It has been discovered, coveted, suppressed, hidden, lost, and recovered. It has been hunted down, stolen, and bought for vast sums of money. A number…
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives about adoption, exposing the fallacy that adoption is always good.
In this story, I reckon with the pain and unanswered questions of my own experience and explore broader issues surrounding adoption in the United States, including changing legal policies, sterilization, and compulsory relinquishment programs, forced assimilation of babies of color and Indigenous babies adopted into white families, and other liabilities affecting women, mothers, and children. Now is the moment we must all hear these stories.
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
