Don’t get me wrong — I think that a correlation of the I Ching with the genetic code is a vital step in expanding our search for illuminating metaphors. And Walter has certainly made a valiant effort. Yet I couldn’t help being somewhat distracted by the author’s style. Her real agenda seems to be selling us on the integration of Eastern and Western worldviews — an admirable aspiration, to be sure, but how many times do we need to hear breathless rhapsodies about “paired period 3 windows creating co-chaos!”? She makes her point, and then keeps making it, over and over, caught up in her own capacity for language, overeager to convey the awesome pattern she senses around her. Maybe it’s just my Western linear worldview, but I would have preferred higher signal-to-noise ratio here. Sorry. [Element]

Yeah, the movie sucked, but luckily I read the book first. This was the first I’d read of Robbins. But it had the sprawling playfulness of the Illuminatus! trilogy, and the relentless ruminations on the squirtin’ universe that I learned to love in Burroughs. It’s weird and irreverent, and matches my personal outlook on Stuff so closely I almost forgot which came first. But if you’ve made assumptions about this book based on the title alone, I’ll spill a bean and tell you it refers to women masturbating in the open prarie. At least, that’s what my psychiatrist told me. Get thee to a nunnery! [Bantam]

Not much to say about this classic tale. Except that you should never rely on other people’s descriptions, or the movie version, of a ‘classic tale’. Read it. Read it! [New York: Penguin 60’s Classics]

IBM and Apple had a baby, and Motorola delivered it. Fanatical Christians and zealous feminists unite against pornography. A sheep has been cloned. Against such features of our increasingly-psychedelic cultural landscape, it should come as no surprise that the fires of the War on Drugs would burn both ends of the political candle. The stereotype of drug-decriminalization advocates is that they are irresponsible and stinky hedonists, or ponytailed socialist intellectuals. Here, however, we have two free-market libertarians — one an economist under the Reagan administration — laying down elaborate and unequivocal arguments for legalization.

Friedman is an economic theorist, and an advocate of limited government. He argues that drug prohibition is economically unsound, and represents a blatant abuse of the government’s assigned role as ‘servant of the people,’ as a protector of individuals from other individuals. Szasz, the ‘maverick psychiatrist’, positions himself against the ‘therapeutic state’. He suggests that the medical-legal system has placed health above freedom as a social virtue, and that we have become acclimated to an increasingly paternalistic system, which ‘protects’ us from ourselves.

The arguments against Prohibition are rousing enough, but the authors surely ruffle some feathers with their hard-hitting libertarian solutions. Friedman goes so far as to suggest that the FDA should be eliminated. Generally, the idea is legalization for adults, treating currently ‘illicit’ ‘drugs’ the same way we treat alcohol and tobacco: as commodities subject to market competition. Food — and perhaps drugs — for thought. [The Drug Policy Foundation Press]

Krishna’s teachings to Arjuna on the eve of the great battle. This ancient poem teaches the yoga by which a human can overcome the bonds of desire and achieve immortality. “All that he does / Is offered before me / In utter surrender: / My grace is upon him, / He finds the eternal, / The place unchanging.” [New York: Mentor]

A series of lectures given in 1840 addresses the role of individuals in history, the various forms they can take, and certain unifying characteristics of this class of “Great Men”. At points Carlyle passes from scientific inquiry into rhapsody, and occasionally from there into fawning effluence, and his British provincialism emerges in the discussion of Napoleon. But beneath all this is an eloquent, if brief, glimpse into the intellectual thought of Post-Enlightenment Europe. [New York: Penguin 60’s Classics]

The startling thesis of this book is that, until the second millennium B.C., human beings had no subjective consciousness, but acted on the basis of hallucinated voices. These voices were attributed to the king or the gods; Jaynes hypothesizes that they originated in the right brain hemisphere. His extensive evidence is literary, archaeological, and neurological, and comprises a compelling 475-page argument. It is proposed that bicamerality — the condition of acting on the command of hallucinated ‘divine’ voices — represents a specific stage in the evolution of human civilization, that in fact the ancient ziggurat-building civilizations of the Middle East (and later the Americas) were ‘bicameral civilizations.’ Such civilizations were rigidly hierarchical, centralized around the ‘god-king’, whose voice was heard by the citizenry to keep them performing their ordained roles in the absence of conscious volition. The central pyramidal structures, then, served as hallucinatory catalysts for such social control.

Of especial value in this book is the discussion of what consciousness is. Jaynes proposes that it is specifically the projection of an analog self, the “I”, into an imagined mental ‘space’. This is what bicameral man lacked: the ability to narratize his existence, to envision himself acting in a remembered past or in a hypothetical future. Jaynes further argues that this inner ‘space’ is a linguistic creation, developed in response to the breakdown of bicamerality following massive social upheaval. I especially enjoyed the analysis of ancient Sumerian, Assyrian, and Greek texts, which reveals an almost complete lack of consciousness-related language. If you find all of this terribly absurd, it is because it is impossible to do such a thesis justice in a space like this. I highly recommend this book — not to ‘convince’, but to stir up the imagination. It is all the best of books can hope for. [Houghton Mifflin]

Best to avoid war, of course, but when commanded by the sovereign, or otherwise faced with conflict, ya might as well win. The main message of the book, taken at face value, is: “Be opportunistic, and be smart — the stakes of war are too high to be won or lost on impulse.” The Tao flows through all things, and war is one of its faces; but how far can one generalize from the principles outlined here, before all life appears as one an unceasing battle? [Dove Books]

A brief but sympathetic survey of gnosticism, the Christian heresy which rivalled the Church for centuries. Though the term ‘gnostic’ applies to many different movements, the core belief — and the supreme heresy — was that salvation is achieved only through divine gnosis, or knowledge. The dogma and rituals of the priesthood were thus irrelevant and restrictive. Holroyd traces the persecution and influence of various gnostic and related groups throughout history, with satisfying tangents into hermeticism, William Blake, and Carl Jung. [Element]