Book Reviews

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

Brian Greene
New York: Knopf, 2020; 428 pp., cloth, $30.

Reading H.P. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine opened up for me the worlds of science and Eastern philosophies. That led to my studies of quantum science, in addition to those of Hinduism and Buddhism, over the past twenty years. Many times while reading the latest book by Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, I was reminded of The Secret Doctrine, especially as he traced the history of the universe from the Big Bang to—well, whatever would come next.

I knew from the outset that this was going to be different from Greene’s previous books, The Elegant Universe (1999), The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), and The Hidden Reality (2011).All of these take us deep into the cosmos and the laws of the universe,which provide order, symmetry, and pattern (something we humans like) as well as exploring new ideas such as string theory and the multiple universe (multiverse) theory.

Until the End of Time however, sets a different tone. It addresses ideas that Greene did not address (or mentioned briefly) in his previous books, such as mind and thought, philosophy, and the big questions, including why we seek immortality, meaning, and purpose in life. I was introduced to a different Brian Greene—one who is now twenty years older than when he wrote his first book, and who may himself be pondering the big questions of life, including Gottfried von Leibnitz’s question: why is there something rather than nothing? We can answer these questions only by going beyond in our search for meaning.

I am reminded of Bill Moyers’ PBS interviews of Joseph Campbell. At one point Moyers asked Campbell, “What is the meaning of life?” Campbell gave an answer that I’ve never forgotten: “Life has no inherent meaning. We bring meaning to it.” Greene also quotes from Campbell: “We are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.” It is your experience of life and my experience of life that give meaning to each of us.

Greene speaks of his feelings, writing that there are times when he rises above his “own identity,” which has been “subsumed by what I can only describe as a feeling of gratitude for the gift of experience.”

Greene opens his book looking at man’s search for immortality. He quotes Jean-Paul Sartre: “Life itself is drained of meaning ‘when you have lost the illusion of being eternal,’” hinting that this comment may hold some meaning for Greene himself.

Greene injects some stories from his life into his book. One significant story was of the time in the 1960s when he and his father went on a walk through Central Park in New York.A group of Hare Krishna devotees with shaved heads were drumming, chanting, and dancing. Seeing that one of the drummers looked familiar, Greene saw that it was his brother. Greene, who was raised Jewish, at that moment learned of the divergent paths he and his brother had taken. Greene notes that both “Hinduism and Buddhism seek a reality beyond the illusions of everyday perception, a characterization that also describes many of the most surprising scientific advances of the last hundred years.”

If science and spiritual traditions had once been light-years apart, the twentieth-century’s foray into the quantum world, far beyond the materialist’s sensible realm, along with the introduction of Eastern philosophies to the West, brought the two together in remarkable ways. Greene tells of the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in an epilogue to his What Is Life? “raised some eyebrows (and lost his first publisher) when he invoked the Hindu Upanishads to suggest that we are all part of an ‘omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self.’”

Greene reminds us often that we are all merely “an enormous number of particulate constituents”infused with consciousness, called by some atman, anima, or immortal soul. These names all imply “the belief that the conscious self taps into something that outlasts the physical form, something that transcends traditional mechanistic science.” This is a clue, he says, “to why the hard sciences have long resisted all things [related to] consciousness.”

How will it end? We don’t know, but Greene assures us that all is impermanent. Ultimately, the particles—“star stuff,” as astrophysicist Michio Kaku calls it—from which the phenomenal universe is made disintegrates, and all things die. Stars die. The sun will die. We will die. “The examined life examines death,” says Greene. 

You can read Greene’s other books and learn about the formation of the cosmos through the Big Bang; the continual expansion of the universe into the far reaches of space; and string theory, matter, and reality. In this latest book, however, you will get to know Brian Greene and learn of the experiences that have shaped his life and given it meaning and purpose. While he may never find the physicists’ Holy Grail—the theory of everything—I think he is well on his way to solving the mystery of Brian Greene.

Clare Goldsberry 

Clare Goldsberry has been a member of the Theosophical Society for twenty years. Her newest book, on death and dying, will be out this year from Monkfish Book Publishing.

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Awaken the Power Within: In Defense of Self-Help

Albert Amao
New York: TarcherPerigee, 2018. 287 pp., paper, $11.99.

Finally someone arises to call out the hucksters and frauds who promise to make you rich, make you wise, make you whole, and make you over. Albert Amao, PhD, is just that man. He is a sociologist, author, and national lecturer for the Theosophical Society in America. His recent book casts a shadow over false saviors while examining some of the most effective elements of self-help practice from traditional esoteric thought.

Hucksters in self-improvement are nothing new, Amao complains, but they continue to pop out of nowhere with promises to take away our pain, worries, and confusion, announcing themselves as New Age messiahs. Typically they disguise themselves as authors, workshop leaders, teachers, or life coaches who offer self-help to misguided souls.

Amao’s book suggests how many teachers and healers in the so-called self-improvement arena will simply dumb down ancient insights and attempt to repackage them in a diluted form for mass marketing.

 Amao debunks many of these attempts, outlining what has worked and not worked in the history of self-help. He distinguishes modern self-help culture from earlier mystical and occult movements and shows how we got to the current interest in the power of positive thinking.

Real growth, understanding, and transformation, Amao argues, come only from deep within you. The Indian sage J. Krishnamurti famously said that truth is a pathless land that everyone must negotiate personally. That is the hero’s journey of self-discovery.

Amao’s earlier work, Healing without Medicine, published by Quest Books in 2014, offered a similar message. Real healing comes from within you. Spiritual unfolding is uncomfortable, like peeling away layers of skin, but only you can do it. The answers are all inside you. The truth is there too. And you will find your true inner self along the way.

As Amao sees it, you won’t typically hear any of that from the snake-oil sales agents who offer to make your transformation easy, bring you instantly to self-realization, and grant you enlightenment in a few easy lessons.

Yet this popular self-help culture has become a pervasive social system worldwide and a staggering $12 billion industry in the United States alone. There are more than 300,000 self-help books available on Amazon.

The hidden harm Amao sees in this market is the blind faith people often place in seminars, books, and tapes. Self-help gurus tell them that redemption comes by empowering themselves with a new life script, as provided in the books, CDs, DVDs, and workshops they sell. Discouraged customers blame themselves when the material doesn’t deliver promised benefits. Thus the effects can be detrimental, and the self-help program can do much more harm than good.

Amao believes that a pattern of powerlessness plagues many people. From early childhood, they have been disempowered and indoctrinated with false ideas about their true nature by parents, mass media, and conventional wisdom. Over time, these acquired ideas of disempowerment become part of a personal belief system, and they subconsciously create a wrong self-image. Moreover, Amao says, some religious organizations create a sense of guilt in people.

Amao counters that quantum physics and metaphysics demonstrate how humans are creators of their own reality and destiny. As William James wrote, “Man alone, of all the creatures on Earth, can change his own pattern. Man alone is architect of his own destiny.”

People are responsible for creating their own reality with their thoughts and beliefs, Amao argues, and they are the only ones who can take back their power and correct whatever isn’t working for them. With that in mind, Amao’s book offers a deeper perspective on the culture of self-help and self-improvement. It empowers individuals to rely on their own inner voices for authentic self-empowerment and self-reliance.

In Defense of Self-Help is well worth exploring for anyone serious about self-empowerment and would be a welcome addition to professional libraries as well.

Von Braschler 

Von Braschler is a Life Member of the Theosophical Society and author of several books on consciousness, including two forthcoming works on conscious thought forms.

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Written and produced by Richard Deland
Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation: https://philos-sophia.org/about-the-film/#trailer. DVD, 1 hour, 26 minutes, $17.

You hold a red apple in your hand and see it as a red apple. Yet another view says that it is a collection of particles. The corporeal view of a red apple gives way to the physical view, yet they both occupy the same space. Which is real, then? The world of measurements is free of qualities such as red. Then there is the world of potentialities, which, according to quantum theory, can only become actualities in the presence of measurements.

Questions such as these have occupied great intellects such as Descartes, Heisenberg, Planck, and Einstein. Wolfgang Smith joins them as a pioneer. Born in 1930, Smith is a mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, metaphysician, Roman Catholic, and member of the Traditionalist school of philosophy.

For a common man, questions posed by the quantum enigma are daunting. Early in the twentieth century, physicist Niels Bohr proclaimed that there is no quantum reality, only quantum description. In 1925, as we learn in this film, Werner Heisenberg “postulated that what exists in general, prior to measurement, are not actual values of an observable, but only their probabilities.”

This thesis led to the less than satisfying confusion that classical reality, with its external objects, does not exist. There are no particles as such in the quantum world: they only come into existence with the act of observation. The obvious question: what is there before measurement? The answer: not a thing!

By the time the quantum reality debate had passed the half-century mark without a resolution in sight, Smith became interested in the subject. When he applied to Cornell at the age of fifteen, as he says in the film, “We were asked what we wanted to major in, and I said, ‘Physics,’ and then the question was, ‘Why? Why did you choose that major?’ And I remember to this day my response. I wrote down, ‘I want to study physics because I believe that physics is the key to the understanding of the universe.’

“Needless to say,” he adds, “I have changed my mind in the interim.” Smith realized that there were ways of entering into higher, spiritual realms, which were far more profound than the world revealed by our five senses. He was deeply influenced by the works of the revered Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.

Later Smith was accepted as a fellow in philosophy at Cornell, but he gave it up immediately. Philosophy—philo-sophia—means love of wisdom, but Smith found that in academic philosophy, “people were not interested in sophia (wisdom); nor there was any philos (love). Everything was dry.” Something fundamentally sacred was missing.

Smith traveled to India and met many great saints and sadhus. He returned a changed man, yet a certain nagging dissatisfaction remained, indicating that he still didn’t have the answer.

Smith then met his wife-to-be, Thea, who was deeply rooted in her Catholic faith. He studied Augustine’s commentary on the Gospel of St. John and the biography of Catherine of Siena. Here he found the answer: “God became man so that man could become God.” The link to what happens to human nature after enlightenment was now clear to him. Smith started writing, inspired by his wife and his newfound Catholic faith.

“Such was Smith’s background when he approached the quantum reality quandary some twenty years ago,” the film says. “From his study of Platonism and the metaphysical traditions of the world,” Smith realized “that the universe comprises not just quantities but qualities as well and . . . moreover, that qualities have primacy—that, in fact, they resemble a light from higher spheres shining into this world.” The implication of this revelation is stunning.

The film introduces us to the Islamic Traditionalist philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a great champion of Smith’s work. We also meet Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian thinker who has introduced Smith’s work to circles of physics professors and students interested in resolving the quantum enigma.

The Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation, launched by this film’s producer, Richard DeLano, has drawn thousands (see the website: https://philos-sophia.org/). DeLano shares how Smith has changed his life: “My friend Wolfgang Smith has taught me to never, ever forget that the cosmos and everything in it, at every second, is being both brought into existence by something incomparably higher than those aspects of reality which can be reduced to an equation. I love Professor Smith.” We can agree with DeLano when he says that only one or two men like Wolfgang Smith can be found in a century.

DeLano has produced a masterful work, which captures the dilemmas, breakthroughs, and gateways to answers in this perplexing field. It is a beautiful movie. See it as many times as you can.

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. He reviews regularly for Quest and works as a volunteer in the archives department of the TSA.

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Conspiracy Theories

Quassim Cassam
Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2019. 136 pp., paper, 12.95

An obsessive interest in conspiracy theories may or may not be a sign of a certain mental instability, but a wholesale belief in them seems to be a pretty good indication. And yet in this interesting and informative book, Quassim Cassam indicates that the role of conspiracy theories is deeper, and their adherents more knowing, than we hapless self-styled rationalists have been led to believe.

 “A Conspiracy Theorist,” Cassam writes, “with a capital C and a capital T, is a person who is ‘into’ Conspiracy Theories, that is, unusually fascinated by them and more willing than most to believe them. We are all conspiracy theorists—we all believe that people sometimes get together in secret to do bad things—but we aren’t all Conspiracy Theorists.”

It is often frustrating to argue with diehards of any stripe, but Conspiracy Theorists are particularly prone to turn your most rational arguments against you. If you suggest that throughout history, the sinister forces seem to have been far too inept to keep any big secret at all, Conspiracy Theorists will turn around and darkly mutter, “That’s what they want you to think.”

 Cassam observes that Conspiracy Theorists aren’t so much ignorant as all too knowing. They may not have the time, patience, or—dare I say it?—the intellect to master, say, forensic anthropology, but they know a fellow who knows a fellow named Bob, who allegedly “was there.” Hey, besides, experts are overrated. (I think this has something to do with some instinctive American aversion for those deemed “elitists”—people who happen to have credentials.)

Capital-letter Conspiracy Theorists are no longer merely querulous editorial-page dotards with a dull ax to grind, or zany kooks obsessed with flogging a dead bête noire, nor even lonesome codgers holed up in a basement murmuring imprecations against highfalutin whippersnappers and their newfangled notions. Cassam argues that Conspiracy Theorists are far more insidious. They are often committed to undermining scientific consensus thinking, so that ultimately they throw rationality itself under the bus, along with prudence and morality.

Therefore Conspiracy Theorists see themselves as daring mavericks and wild free spirits, unafraid to combat the misapprehensions of blind “sheeple.” But they’re actually spreading ideologically motivated falsehoods. Cassam seems to think he can’t stress this point enough, and maybe he’s right. It’s one of the best takeaways from this slender volume.

Conspiracy Theories, the author notes, are “implausible by design.” They are not rooted in fact but are merely speculative, which is to say “already disproved.” Your standard-grade conspiracy theories might simply be the result of wishful thinking (Elvis lives!); on a more elevated plane, they might constitute a type of fabulism: modern-day versions of ancient myths designed by hierophants to explain how things came to be.

But Cassam is a philosopher by trade, and offers up a far more intricate explanation. The success of Conspiracy Theories is that they “tell stories that people want to hear.” This points to a question: why do people want to hear them? Cassam addresses scientific explanations. Some psychologists posit that conspiracy thinking may stem from built-in cognitive biases in the way we think and might also be explained in terms of personality. Cassam refutes these generalizations but concedes that there is such a thing as a “conspiracy mindset” and asserts that conspiracism is “an ideology rather than a personality trait.” Not all extremists are conspiracists, he concludes, but “conspiracism is integral to [such] ideologies” among both the successful and the marginalized.

Cassam also mentions, more than once, that Conspiracy Theorists only listen to experts who are themselves Conspiracy Theorists, because they exist in a “self-sealing” bubble of “crippled epistemology.” If they are against some recent development, they tend to mutter darkly about government conspiracies and the “deep state.” But if they’re in favor of some quack theory, then a single study, later debunked, stating that kiddie vaccines cause autism is good enough for them.

Cassam goes on to argue that conspiracy apologists, who often are in it for the money, might be labeled “Conspiracy Entrepreneurs.” He doesn’t go so far as to call them enablers, but apparently that is exactly what they are.

Conspiracy Theories, then, are far from harmless. Such wrongheaded thinking can be pernicious, and ultimately downright destructive. Cassam runs down a list: antivaxxers; anticredentialism in general; “the death of expertise”; Brexit; anti-Semitism on both the left and the right. Therefore Conspiracy Theories promote symbols and beliefs that have consequences unforeseen by moderates. Furthermore, they “diminish the credibility of legitimate criticisms and are also a “distraction from big-picture social issues.”

In his final chapter, the author recommends the best way to respond to Conspiracy Theorists: through careful, well-documented factual rebuttals; education of the young in the crucial skills of critical thinking and morality; and outing the usually amoral hardcore conspiracists as merely camouflaged propagandists.

Cassam concedes that the committed may be beyond convincing, and instead recommends reaching out to those who are still on the fence: the susceptible but not yet thoroughly indoctrinated. It’s not enough to say to them, “That’s ridiculous” or “You’re crazy”—you have to engage with the conspiracy narrative and refute it with facts and logic. No easy task. But this valuable book shows the way.

Francis DiMenno

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