And these two books, found at the thrift shop:

So you can see that my reading is taking me off in all sorts of fascinating directions.

The first book I only managed to skim, used it as a prop to stare down Baristas and the Taco waiter and have them deliver my coffee/tacos unbidden, holding the book up, fingers to my temple, nothing in it that I hadn't read a hundred times before, and so dropping it off with some customers at the restaurant so they could "beam" me their orders, well, it's disappeared. Somebody is taking it all a little too seriously...

So on to TNT, which is much the same as everything else in the genre...

It's good, in that you can actually read up on the authors now, this, in the age of the internet, and see how closely their lives paralleled their teachings, I'm forever thinking of a certain notorious diet author of the 70's who wrote countless books on the topic and then died at a desk filled with snickers bars of a massive coronary...

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Now, having finished this, an amusing read, pop-psychology-new-age-jibber-jabber, the Bible contemporized, "Secret Esoteric Teachings" done in the Vernacular; "The Secret", which, of course, is no secret at all, it has been written about for thousands of years - change yourself, change your thinking, and you will change the world...

The entertaining part of this is the authors' "Mental Imagery", or provided "Psycho-Pictographs", stories that he tells, contemporary, that illuminate or illustrate his point.

Now I'm somewhat struck by the fact that he's simply recycling and updating the Bible, the Psalms and Gospels actually illustrate the same points, only they are in need of some contemporizing; few people can nowadays relate to the imagery of a shepherd and their flock.

But an introduction to more obtuse authors along the same theme, for example Richard Maurice Bucke, author of "Cosmic Consciousness", others who I will have to look up later, a curious read, and as I've the idea already, the plot, the theme from a hundred, thousand other authors I'll soon have to find the time to apply all of these abundant teachings...

Wiki on Vernon Howard.

Now, herein lies a problem, that most of what I'm reading in one way or the other reinforces my thinking, and I'm in need of something that rather challenges it...

 

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Started in on Stanley "Out of Darkest Africa", a heavy, thick Volume that is largely concerned with the various English Military campaigns in the Soudan and the Belgian Campaigns in the Congo.

Imperialism at it's finest. But not a book I can carry around, and so I set it aside in favor of this other book I picked up in Creston, which is proving surprisingly good reading and parallels a lot of other "New Thought" or "New Age" books I've come across...

Plus the cover is a hoot:

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Lost Continents - The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature

Now this was an enjoyable read, in which the author, formidably well read with hundreds if not thousands sources, discusses the intent of Platos' Atlantis, and then gives a rundown of all the expeditions that sought to place it on a map, why it can't be placed on a map, arguing not just from history but from geology, geography, literature and myth.

I mean, he's right, but this is an imaginary place used by Plato to advance his theory of a golden age fallen into decline, but - for an imaginary place it's had an outsized influence on history. 

Named in the book are Blavtsky, Manly P Hall, Edgary Cayce, Percy Fawcett, Bulwer Lytton, - amongst countless others, and the argued precursors to Atlantis Mu, Lemuria, Mt Shasta, - Atlantis - for an imaginary place - has a large citizenry and distinguished geological history, which de Camp dryly - and drolly - narrates and explains. This is important, because Atlantis, as a place that exists solely in the unfettered human imagination, is one of the hotbeds of "New Thought", and it becomes an atlas, as it were, of all that new aged flapdoodle and balderdash that people care to deposit there. 

A few of the more interesting things and people I came across:

I could go on. The entire book should be a Wikipedia article, with every named character and place a hyperlink that leads you down another rabbit hole, and de Camp drolly sums up the essential flavour of the characters and places and underlying ideas.

Five Stars.

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  1. AN Experiment with Time - J. W. Dunne
  2. The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales - The Marquis De Sade
  3. The Book of John Mandeville
  4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - The Philosophy of History