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.
I wrote...
F-Day: The Second Dawn Of Man
By
Colin R. Turner
What is my book about?
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across four continents, against the mighty machine of politics, media, and dark forces to found a society that has superseded money in the unlikeliest of places: Iceland.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...
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The Books I Picked & Why
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
By
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Why this book?
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.
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The God Delusion
By
Richard Dawkins
Why this book?
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.
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Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil
By
Paul Levy
Why this book?
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.
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The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
By
Charles Eisenstein
Why this book?
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.
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The Secret
By
Rhonda Byrne
Why this book?
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.
