Thought after watching yet another End of the World movie

If we absolutely knew that the world would end tomorrow, that our country, our society, our planet and everything we know would be gone and all vestiges of our lives forever blotted from the pages of history, how petty and unimportant would seem the hurts, the wrongs, the ill will and prejudices we all hold against each other?  We all would embrace each other in our common humanity and our common destiny and feel, perhaps for the first time in human history, that we were all connected, all sharing the same fate, all One.  That thought, that feeling, would be a supreme gift in the face of disaster.

In fact, we can receive that gift each night when we go to sleep and each day when we arise.  Every day, we have the opportunity, by a conscious decision of the will, to sweep away all of the accumulated years of negativity, to let go of all of the myriad things that separate us from each other and cause pain and disassociation in our lives.  For that single day, we have the chance to live as though we were all connected, all One.  It is up to each of us, every single day, to decide whether or not we will make that decision and take that opportunity. 

Epi-Genesis

What if the Old Testament creation story of Genesis were being written today?  What if it eschewed superstition and folklore and took into account what we now know about the universe and its creation and the laws that govern it?  What might that story look like?  Here is a possibility...

Epi-Genesis

Listen all to these words of Truth and learn them well.  So it has been from the Beginning, and so it shall be until the End.

Before the Beginning, there was Nothing.  Nothing was the Supreme Unity, the Universal Mystery.

Substance did not exist.  Space and Time did not exist.  Spirit did not exist.  The only thing that did exist was Potentiality.

Then, by the creative Power of the Universal Mystery, it Began, and Space and Time were born.

Space and Time were empty, yet there was one Sacred Power at work, and that was the Power of Change.

In that emptiness of Space and Time, Change created One Thing, and Substance was born and the Universe was empty no longer.

Since the One Thing, subject to the Power of Change, could not remain One, it became Two.

Then Change worked on the Two, and the Two became Four.  Then there were many things, and all of them changed.

With the creation of the Two, the second Sacred Power was born, the Power of Opposites.

Where there was Substance, this Power created Emptiness.  Where there was Light, this Power created Dark.  Where there was a Positive, this Power created a Negative.  Where there was one quality, this Power of necessity created its opposite.

Now there were many things, of which everything had its opposite, and they all moved and changed according to the Divine Plan, which was just the unfolding of the Potentiality that existed from the Beginning.

Yet, in the unsettled chaos of the Many and in the whirlwind of Change, there were echoes of the original Emptiness, the Void, and the original Unity, the One Thing. 

And these echoes shall never perish and shall never be constrained, because they are not bound by Time or Space.  Together, they are the Song that binds the Universe together and Creation forever sings their Harmony.

The Power of Change and the Power of Opposites, working within the Universe, produced the third Sacred Power, the Power of Evolution.  This Power shows Change the way, and works within the Power of Opposites.

These then are the Three Sacred Powers of the Universe and through them, all is created, all is destroyed, and all will someday be re-created.

But that creation and destruction, that birth and death, is not just a random collection of events—there is a Direction and there is a Universal Cycle.

The Universe was born in a breath when the Universal Mystery first breathed outward and created all things.  In a time long to come, the breath will turn inward again and all will begin to return to the Supreme Unity, the One Thing.  That is the Life of the Universe, and the Great Cycle of its Eternal Breath. 

So it has been from the Beginning, and so it shall be until the End.

The Most Important Books Ever Written

The Most Important Books Ever Written

“The book is the highest form of art when it is wisdom wrapped in beauty.”

Veering a bit from the previous course of this blog, I wish to offer for your consideration my list of the most important books ever published.  In their highest form, books are something that can change the world.  Yes, reading fiction for relaxation is often a good way to pass the time, but reading an important work of non-fiction and then having an intellectual (and perhaps emotional) reaction to it and using that reaction to effect change is what has moved the world time and time again.  The following books are thus the tracks of humanity, marking the historical moments when we evolved, changed, or decided to go in a different direction.  While other books may be considered to be as important, no one can dispute that these particular books belong on this list.  And when you combine an important work with a beautiful, artistic presentation and cloth it in a gorgeous leather binding, you have something extremely special, worthy of enjoying, protecting and passing down to future ages! 

So how did I come to choose the below books?  My idea was to include mainly non-fiction works that have changed the course of human history, culture, or thought in some very significant way, or documented some significant event or change.  Besides that, criteria for inclusion are that a version be available in English and an affordable antiquarian edition be available.  Everyone will have their own list, of course, but given those criteria, the above books would have to form the core of any serious effort to catalog the entire scope of human intellectual history.  Works from the western cannon are given precedence not because there are not many worthy works in the eastern literature, but because that civilization happens to be the primary one that is shaping the direction of human society today.  

Why mainly non-fiction?  While works of fiction can and often do thoughtfully portray the people and the life and times in which they are written and communicate many important thoughts, emotions, and themes, it is my belief that they, less often that non-fiction, present those ideas and concepts that change the course of society or the world.  I’m sure writers of fiction would disagree, but the driving force of much of the change in western civilization has been the philosophers, historians, political writers, and lately the scientists.  They are the ones producing the works that are transforming our understanding of us, our world, and everything in it, and so it is to them that I give preference in my list.  Comments or suggestions on my choices are always welcome.  Enjoy!

[Note - Titles and authors are hyperlinked to their respective Wikipedia entries if more information is desired.]

Author or source	Title	First Publication
Vyasa	Bhagavad Gita	30th century BC
Unknown	Epic of Gilgamesh	18th -17th cent. BC
Moses	Torah	13th cent. BC
Homer	Iliad, Odyssey	8th – early 7th cent. BC
Hindu scripture	Upanishads	9th – 6th cent. BC
Confucius	Analects	5th–4th century BC
Aesop	Aesop's Fables	600 BC
Thucydides	History of the Peloponnesian War	5th century BC
Herodotus	Histories	5th century BC
Sophocles	Oedipus the King	430 BC
Euripides	Plays	5th century BC
Aeschylus	Plays	5th century BC
Xenophon	Anabasis	4th century BC
Hippocrates	Works	400 BC
Aristotle	Works	4th century BC
Plato	Dialogues, The Republic	380 BC
Euclid	Elements	280 BC
Theravada Buddhism	Dhammapada (Path of the Dharma)	252 BC
Lao Tsu	Tao Te Ching	3rd century BC
Cicero	Writings	100 BC
Julius Caesar	Commentaries on the Gallic War	1st century BC
Virgil	Aeneid	19 BC
Flavius Josephus	The Antiquities of the Jews, The Jewish War	94 AD, 75 AD
Ovid	Metamorphoses	1st century AD
Lucretius	De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)	55 BC
Epictetus	Enchiridion	1st century AD
Plutarch	Parallel Lives	120 AD
Cornelius Tacitus	Annals, From the Death of the Divine	120 AD
Marcus Aurelius	Meditations	167 AD
Plotinus	Enneads	3rd century
Augustine of Hippo	Confessions	400 AD
Boethius	Consolation of Philosophy	524
Muslim scripture	Quran (Koran)	7th century
Unknown	One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights)	8th century
Unknown	Beowolf	700-1000
Thomas Aquinas	Summa Theologiae	1266–1273
Marco Polo	Travels of Marco Polo	1300
Dante Alighieri	The Divine Comedy	1321
Giovanni Boccaccio	The Decameron	1349–1353
Geoffry Chaucer	Canterbury Tales	1390s
Thomas a Kempis	Imitation of Christ	1418-1427
Desiderius Erasmus	In Praise of Folly	1509
Thomas More	Utopia	1516
Leonardo Da Vinci	Notebooks	1480-1519
Niccolò Machiavelli	The Prince	1532
Nicolaus Copernicus	On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres	1543
Benvenuto Cellini	Autobiography	1563
Michael de Montaigne	Essays	1580
Miguel de Cervantes	Don Quixote	1605 & 1615
Various	King James Bible	1611
Francis Bacon	Essays, The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum	1620
Robert Burton	Anatomy of Melancholy	1621
William Shakespeare	First Folio, Works	1623
Hugo Grotius	On the Law of War and Peace	1625
Galileo Galilei	Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems	1632
René Descartes	Discourse on Method; Meditations on First Philosophy	1637
Sir Thomas Browne	Religio Medici	1643
Thomas Hobbes	Leviathan	1651
Robert Boyle	The Skeptical Chemist	1661
Various	Book of Common Prayer	1662
John Milton	Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained	1667, 1671
Blaise Pascal	Pensées	1670
Benedict de Spinoza	Ethics	1677
John Bunyan	Pilgrim's Progress	1678–1684
Isaac Newton	Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy	1687
John Locke	Essay Concerning Human Understanding	1689
Samuel Johnson	A Dictionary of the English Language	1755
François-Marie de Voltaire	Candide	1759
Thomas Paine	Common Sense, Rights of Man	1776, 1791
Adam Smith	The Wealth of Nations	1776
Edward Gibbon	The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire	1776–1787
Immanuel Kant	Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason	1781, 1788
Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Confessions, On the Social Contract	1781, 1762
Various	Federalist Papers	1788
Edmund Burke	Reflections on the Revolution in France	1790
James Boswell	Life of Samuel Johnson	1791
Benjamin Franklin	Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin	1791
Mary Wollstonecraft	Vindication of the Rights of Woman	1792
Thomas Robert Malthus	An Essay on the Principle of Population	1798
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	Faust	1806
George W. F. Hegel	Phenomenology of Spirit	1807
Brothers Grimm	Grimm’s Fairy Tales	1822
Alexis de Tocqueville	Democracy in America	1832
Thomas Carlyle	History of the French Revolution	1837
Ralph Waldo Emerson	Essays	1844
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels	Communist Manifesto	1848
Henry David Thoreau	Civil Disobedience, Walden	1849
Charles Dickens	Works	1830s-50s
Herman Melville	Moby-Dick	1851
Edward FitzGerald (trans.)	Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám	1859
Charles Darwin	The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man	1859, 1871
John Stuart Mill	On Liberty	1859
Herbert Spencer	First Principles	1862
Leo Tolstoy	War and Peace	1868–1869
Friedrich Nietzsche	Thus Spoke Zarathustra	1883–1885
Mark Twain	Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn	1876, 1885
William James	Varieties of Religious Experience	1902
Albert Einstein	Relativity	1916
James Joyce	Ulysses	1922
Mao Tse-tung	Little Red Book	1964
Rachel Carson	Silent Spring	1962
Thomas Kuhn	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions	1962
James Watson	Double Helix	1968
Armstrong, Aldrin, et al.	First on the Moon	1970