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Living With a Wild God: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth about Everything Kindle Edition
by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.7 out of 5 stars 322 ratings
Editors' pickBest Biographies & Memoirs
As a teenager Barbara Ehrenreich was an atheist and a rationalist, determined to understand the meaning of life. During this time she would regularly have minor experiences of dissociation, of seeing the world in a strange light. Then when she was 17, while on a skiing trip, she had an overwhelming, cataclysmic 'mystical' experience, far more rapturous and ecstatic than anything she had had before. The rapture would return later in life, but never with the same intensity.These episodes, and the rational Ehrenreich's ongoing argument with them, are at the core of this unique book. To try to understand the experience of some sort of force, 'out there', trying to communicate with her, Ehrenreich, a renowned investigative writer and self-described myth-buster, reads neurology, theology, philosophy, and accounts of other people's mystical experiences. Interwoven with her research is the story of the precocious adolescent that she once was, and a moving memoir of the life that shaped her.
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Review
"[Ehrenreich] resolutely avoids rhetoric in that 'blubbery vein'--which is why her book is such a rare feat...She struggles to make sense of the epiphany without recourse to the 'verbal hand-wavings about mystery and transcendence' that go with the territory... Ehrenreich has no interest in conversion...She wants, and inspires, open minds."―The Atlantic
"The questions in the world may be infinite, but perhaps the answers are few. And however we define that mystery, there's no escaping our essential obligation to it, for it may, as Ehrenreich writes, 'be seeking us out.'"―New York Times Book Review
"Ehrenreich has always been an intellectual and a journalistic badass... [She] ultimately arrives at a truce with the idea of God. You'll admire her journey."
―Entertainment Weekly
"The factor that makes each of [Barbara's] books so completely unique in American intellectual life is her persistent sensitivity to matters of social class. She can always see through the smokescreen, the cloud of fibs we generate to make ourselves feel better about a world where the work of the many subsidizes the opulent lifestyles of the few. That, plus the fact that she writes damned well. Better than almost anyone out there, in fact."―Salon
"As personal a piece of writing as she has ever done... A surprising turn for Ehrenreich, who for more than 40 years has been one of our most accomplished and outspoken advocacy journalists and activists."―The Los Angeles Times
"Until reading LIVING WITH A WILD GOD I counted the Mary Karr memoir trilogy as my favorite from a contemporary literary figure. Now, Ehrenreich's memoir is tied for first place with Karr's books... Thank goodness [this book] exists. It is quite likely to rock the minds of readers who dare open to the first page."―Houston Chronicle
"A smart and enjoyable read... Ehrenreich maintains a grip on a sensible skepticism about religious matters - and a positive hostility toward the idea of unthinking faith - while avoiding the narrow-minded excesses that more zealous atheists sometimes fall victim to."―The Chicago Tribune --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of over a dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. Winner of the 2018 Erasmus Prize for her work as an investigative journalist, she has a PhD in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University and writes frequently about health care and medical science, among many other subjects. She lives in Virginia.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Product details
ASIN : B00GPDN5GC
Publisher : Granta Books (April 3, 2014)
Publication date : April 3, 2014
Language : English
File size : 611 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
From the United States
StrangePegs
4.0 out of 5 stars Not an Easy ReadReviewed in the United States on March 2, 2015
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So a bit of preamble about this one:
1. This is not a religious book, not in the traditional sense. The "God" Ehrenreich is talking about is not the Christian god nor any kind of monotheistic god. It is not god in any sense that we generally think about "God."
2. I've previously read a couple other of Ehrenreich's books (Nickel and Dimed and Bright-sided) and really enjoyed them. She approaches her topics with dogged determination and doesn't let go till she gets to the truth of the matter. I've never, however, taken the time to learn anything about her other than that she was a journalist who eased into books. As it turns out, her background is in science and she, in fact, has a PhD in... well, I forget in what, because she shifted what she was studying numerous times, and I forget what the doctorate finally ended up being in (and I don't feel like trying to find it, now). Something to do with immunology, though, I think. The science background explains why her investigative work has always been so thorough, though.
Speaking of science, this book contains a lot of hard science, descriptions and explanations, things I found fascinating (especially her experience with the silicon oscillations), but I can understand this being a barrier to many (maybe most?) readers. In fact, I scanned through some of the negative reviews of the book and many of them had to do with "too much science" or "I couldn't understand all the science." This book is definitely not written to be easily accessible to a large audience as her other books are. This book is personal, so all of the science, which is intensely personal to her, is left in. I'm not sure the book can even get to where it's trying to go without the science.
The other thing that can be an issue with the book is that it takes Ehrenreich a long time to get where she's going. She mentions in the foreword that there was an "event," a mystical experience, that happened to her when she was a teenager and that figuring out exactly what that was was part of the impetus for Living with a Wild God, so you start reading and expect to find out about this event and her quest, but... what you get is her childhood. And it was a horrible childhood, not that it seems she saw it that way at the time. When you grow up in that, though, you think it's normal.
It takes a long time to get to the event and, the whole time I was reading, I kept wondering what the point was of all the stuff she was telling me. Why did I want or need to know about her childhood and, well, everything else? But I trusted her, based on my prior reading experience with her (and the story she was telling really was interesting even though it seemed as if it had nothing to do with what the book was supposed to be about), to be going somewhere, so I kept reading. Then, eventually, we do get to the event, and it all made sense. I mean, without all of the background (and I do mean all of the background), I don't think you can really understand the significance of what happened and what happened after.
So I'm going to go back and say that this is not a religious book. This is not a book about how some atheist went out searching for the Truth and had a conversion experience (as in The Case for Christ). This is a book about an atheist who went out searching for the Truth and found... something. Something unexplainable. Something that isn't the "good and loving" god that Christians so often hold up as a happiness dispenser. What she found was something... primal. Chaotic. Only "good" in the sense that a storm can be good or a forest fire can be good.
This is not a book for people who already think they know it all and who think they have all the answers, especially about who and what god is. This is a book for those, like in Wizard of Oz, who are willing to look behind the curtain. Don't plan on an easy read.
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S. Magliocco
4.0 out of 5 stars Memoir of an Extraordinary Spiritual ExperienceReviewed in the United States on May 17, 2016
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Part memoir, part inquiry into extraordinary experience, Barbara Ehrenreich's _Living With a Wild God_ offers stirring insights into the life of this important feminist author and cultural critic. Spurred by the rediscovery of a diary from her teen years, the author explores aspects of her family background, upbringing, and youth that led her to have an extraordinary spiritual experience just before she went to college. Because of her family's ideology and the general social taboo against speaking of these kinds of experiences, as well as their ineffable quality, Ehrenreich buried her experience and never spoke of it. But this silence ultimately took its toll on her life, until the need to rediscover and explore it in full made itself known to her in late middle age.
As a scholar who has spent a lifetime studying extraordinary experiences across cultures, I was very familiar with the kind of experience she described; it is, perhaps, not so extraordinary, but part of the register of human experiences that lead to the development of spiritual beliefs. What fascinated me more were the details of childhood and young adulthood the author reveals, and the transformation that made her care passionately about the world we inhabit and want to make it a better place. That story gets relatively short shrift in this memoir, but it's the one that really captivated me as I read it.
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kb from la
4.0 out of 5 stars At first disappointing, but then...Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2014
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Barbara Ehrenreich is an author whose books were important influences on my generation of feminist/socialists. Hearts of Men and Nickle and Dimed are classics. So when I saw that, now in her 70s, she’s produced a book on spirituality I was eager to read it.
Living with a Wild God focuses on a set of dissociative moments experienced by Ehrenreich during her childhood and teen years. Uncanny insights into the nature of being? Encounters with the divine? Brain freeze explosions? An atheist, Ehrenreich refuses to give a conventional religious interpretation to what happened. In fact she doesn’t want to corrupt the purity of experience by interpreting or defining these moments at all. Okay, but then why write a book that keeps circling back to these incidents only to back away from explaining why they feel so crucial to her life story?
What results from all this is a weirdly unsatisfying memoir. We get the story of a brainly misfit growing up in a dysfunctional household headed by an alcoholic father and miserably unhappy, abusive mother. Ehrenreich’s enjoyably snarky voice, which works so well in most of her writing, falls flat here. Other than a nicely mean account of her adolesence in LA (like the Kerouac of Big Sur, she hates the California sun) the author skates along the surface of her life story, meting out a kind of impersonal contempt to everyone including her solipsistic youthful self. High school, college, grad school, marriage, motherhood, the anti-war movement… blah, blah.
I was now, according to my kindle, 80% of the way through the book. Suddenly, bam! A whole new kind of writing starts happening. In a deeply personal tone, Ehrenreich tells us why she wrote Living with a Wild God. Middle aged, with her second marriage crumbling and progressive politics rapidly diminishing as a force in American political life, she sank into depression. (How many of us followed that trajectory?) Returning to investigate her youthful dips into the twilight zone offered itself as a strategy to beat back the pain and sadness. In turn, engaging new sources of knowledge outside of what might be called the rationalist paradigm seems to have given Ehrenreich the healing energy to do ever more good work.
I’m still of two minds about her book. Why the choice of such a dispassionate, skeptical mode of address to narrate the story of her early life? But on balance, whatever Barbara Ehrenreich cares to say, I’m glad to listen.
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k
5.0 out of 5 stars I was a CCD teacher for years and still teach in a Catholic school and would love to assign this book to my students -- althoughReviewed in the United States on March 6, 2016
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Ehrenreich is a cynical observer of American life and she finds it hypocritical and full of artifice. She is dead-on! Now, I was a CCD teacher for years and still teach in a Catholic school and would love to assign this book to my students -- although I'd be fired in a nonce!
Ms E was raised an atheist, claims she still is one (sort-of) and has an impressive scientific background (PhD cellular biology.) Her greatest fear in life, or at least one of them, is to be taken as a fool. At the same time, she has an integrity that many lack: she does not privilege one aspect of reality over any others and this quality is absolutely bedrock for sound thinking. Part of HER reality has been a series of extraordinary experiences that even she, the original Show-Me Gal, describes as mystical.
Toward the end of this book Ms E asserts that those who have emptied themselves of ego and made "room" for "Whatever" they "encounter" (Ms E stresses this word) are more likely to have this type of mystical experience. Her own testimony, however, belies this. No one has a stronger ego than the cynical Ms E and her account of her own life indicates she never, even as a child, made room for anything other than her own priorities. And, still . . . "it" happened to her all the same.
That is not unusual. For example, the great 19th century revivalist, Charles Grandison Finney, was a mundane lawyer and a bit of a skeptic to boot when one evening, entirely unbidden, "it" descended upon him. What Christians call the "Holy Spirit,", a Presence that "like the wind, listeth where it will" -- and, in fact, that quote is from the Bible in reference to this phenomenon -- hit him with gale force,
These various personal encounters have in common features which make nonsense of conventional religiosity. The "God" who reveals himself is not the Deity of the Sunday Schools anymore than it is the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Mr E calls it a "Wild God" and that accords with the testimony of others. What reveals Itself has variously been described as "savage" and even "primitive." "It" is simply not like anything in "our" world -- rather, it is something utterly alien.
These encounters usually fill the recipient with an ecstatic joy so excessive that it is frightening and potentially destructive. Finney recalled that as wave after wave of love washed over him he pleaded with God to relent lest he, Finney, be destroyed. Muhammed, we are told, was near-suicidal after his "encounter." If we call this experience "God," then He is "beyond good and evil" (paradoxically, a quote from the same philosopher who proclaimed that "God is dead.) Some who have had this experience found it terrifying because they experienced God as absolutely void of all qualities -- an eternal, vast emptiness. (In fact, this makes a sort of sense -- for, if God has a quality, by human definition, then He is limited since that precludes his possessing all other qualities. Thus, He is, like "white light" -- impossible to see but possessing all colors.)
The sort of terrifying encounter Ms E describes makes a mockery of all morality, custom, conventions and, most especially, theology. What is encountered is so far beyond human ken that the mind jumps at once to the Biblical warning, "My ways are not your ways." The one who experiences this epiphany is usually left drained -- in some cases his or her personality is temporarily shattered.
There are many who ascribe these experiences to mental illness or something-or-other firing in some-way-or-another in the synapses of the brain. That is as it may be. The experience itself, however, is most remarkable for the insistence of nearly all who have undergone it that what is encountered is utterly alien to humanity. "It" is the temporary presence of a Being, if that is the right word (Ms E, like all others who have gone through this, describe it as a living presence), that is unlike any fact, theory or extrapolation from theory that humankind can muster. It can be experienced but not known. It can be (somewhat) remembered but never, even in the least, understood. It is at once joyful and savage, loving and terrifying. It is wholly "Other."
How one regards Ms E's experience is up to the reader. But, her account seems honest and as descriptive as she can manage by way of liming what can not be described. "It" makes nonsense of all our assumptions about "God" and even "reality."
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Barry J.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, quite a woman, and quite a tale - great storytelling, and lots of insight.Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2018
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As an atheist ex altar boy, I have a certain sensitivity for book titles that sound like they might be preaching to the agnostic or atheist choir, or at least to me. This was one of those that appeared in a list of her previous work, ALL of which I wanted to read, based only on the title. I resolved to start with a single book and see what I thought about her and the subject matter and I didn't know what else. Given the aformentioned sensitiviity, this was the one I chose, and spent a totally involved, smiling, enthralled number of hours, spread over perhaps 2 weeks reading and going back over, and reading further, and smiling a bit more. I haven't had this much fun or enlightenment out of a book since Catch 22.
I could go on, but I won't. Do yourself a favor and read this book, you'll be a better person for it. And just so we're clear, you'll be a better person even if you're NOT an atheist.
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Judith Kelsey-Powell
5.0 out of 5 stars Genius and courageReviewed in the United States on January 26, 2015
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In this extraordinary memoir, the stepping of point is the revisiting adolescent musings about the nature and meaning of life addressed to an older self. There is something special about someone who would first trust herself to keep those pages and then years later treat them seriously. She suggests that perhaps if she had a family religious tradition she might have a framework within which to understand an experience she can only describe as mystic, but as a third generation atheist, she was left with psychiatric explanations that seemed inadequate.
This is a work that deserves to take its place next to Henry James and Rudolf Otto, not because it finds answers to the basic questions of human existence, but precisely because it does not. It makes the quest itself central and is willing to posit the notion that we may in fact know far less about the universe than we might like or even need to believe (the concept of belief itself being problematic). Most importantly for me, there is a recognition that experiencing the Other does not frequently reveal transcendent benevolence. This is truly the wild God of the title, not the domesticated Being commonly understood by contemporary adherents of religion.
This is a compelling work worthy of revisiting by the reader and perhaps by the writer. This is a quest that is not readily concluded.
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4.0 out of 5 stars FascinatingReviewed in the United States on May 14, 2017
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I was intrigued by her story. Relentless self-critical and observant, as well as extremely smart, she seemed at first to be the ultimate introvert, forever trying to find an explanation for everything. (Of course as she matured she mostly gave up that goal and succumbed the middle-class life that captures almost everyone.) She had a life-changing experience at age 17, which I wish she had explained more fully. I also wish she had taken psychedelic drugs and reported on her experience and compared it to the "world on fire" that she saw internally. It's odd that the best description in her book of such an experience was by Daniel Quinn on p. 216: "Everything was on fire...Every blade of grass, every single tree was radiant, was blazing - incandescent with a raging power that was unmistakably divine...But there was no violence or hatred in this rage. This was a rage of joy, of exuberance. This was creation's everlasting, silent hallelujah." Sounds a lot like my first mushroom trip. Barbara is one of a kind.
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Athena
3.0 out of 5 stars A smart mind struggling with an experienceReviewed in the United States on July 13, 2016
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Very interesting discussion of an experience of the world that could be considered religious or mystical. The author is a non-believer who seems to feel that there must be something to believe about the world. But what? Her experience of the world seems to suggest more to the world than the insignificant bits of energy that "accidentally" created it. But the author does not discuss the philosophy of science to any degree. Instead, she discusses the experience of life itself that kept recurring throughout her life, and shows it as a challenge and mystery to her. She attempts to reduce it to psychological states. I found it a very interesting look into an intelligent mind.
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Pagan Tart
3.0 out of 5 stars Ehrenreich held backReviewed in the United States on May 7, 2014
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Erenreich had a moment when she was 17 when the world around her seemed to burst into flames. It seemed, at least to her, it was almost a holy or mystical experience or a brain malfunction. After she writes about this and her description is excellent, the book wanders off to a telling of her life. Enrenreich has led an interesting life, but i wanted to know more about this world of flame experience she had. It is not until the last few page she gets around to this by explaining what exists in the universe and the energy and playfulness the universe seems to display and it is not until the last line where she writes, "it seems to be seeking us." Well, for me, i wanted a bit more and i had hoped the book would go into more about this experience sooner. I felt she was holding back and did not want to admit the universe may have a purpose. She can write only one sentence at the very end of the book that maybe there's something going on that perhaps could lead to a fuller understanding of the Cosmos and its mysteries?
I wanted to say, c'mon Ehrenreich, you're an excellent writer, scientist, journalist, don't hold back. What are you afraid of?
Pat Mckeage
I would like to add more. It has been a month or more since i read her book and have loaned it to a friend. After thinking it over in the past hour she as said more than i previously thought. My husband of 56 years recently died and i was too impatient for an answer and yes, i did want a more clear, positive answer that "there's something out there." While i do not take back entirely my previous thoughts, her book i now realize is almost pure genius.
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Jean E. Peterson
3.0 out of 5 stars Living with a Wild God.Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2014
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I found the title amusing as the author doesn't like to use that word or anything spiritual or meta-physical. It was a hard book for me to read.How she had to dis-associate from the mixed messages she received, from her father to" question everything" and her mother who said she " wasn't special". Her mother seemed the more abusive,slapping her,etc.But the parents nightly alcohol- fused fights left no safe place for her, but science which became her God. She is extremely bright, a fact she likes to remind the reader of with her technical logic and expressions. Besides knowledge I didn't get a sense of what she loved, no mention of marriages or parental feelings. The last of the book in her response to nature I think she finally felt at home. Her being an atheist seemed beside the point. How she survived as well as she did is the what I find valuable in her life story.
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Living With a Wild God: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth about Everything Kindle Edition
by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.7 out of 5 stars 322 ratings
Editors' pickBest Biographies & Memoirs
As a teenager Barbara Ehrenreich was an atheist and a rationalist, determined to understand the meaning of life. During this time she would regularly have minor experiences of dissociation, of seeing the world in a strange light. Then when she was 17, while on a skiing trip, she had an overwhelming, cataclysmic 'mystical' experience, far more rapturous and ecstatic than anything she had had before. The rapture would return later in life, but never with the same intensity.These episodes, and the rational Ehrenreich's ongoing argument with them, are at the core of this unique book. To try to understand the experience of some sort of force, 'out there', trying to communicate with her, Ehrenreich, a renowned investigative writer and self-described myth-buster, reads neurology, theology, philosophy, and accounts of other people's mystical experiences. Interwoven with her research is the story of the precocious adolescent that she once was, and a moving memoir of the life that shaped her.
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Review
"[Ehrenreich] resolutely avoids rhetoric in that 'blubbery vein'--which is why her book is such a rare feat...She struggles to make sense of the epiphany without recourse to the 'verbal hand-wavings about mystery and transcendence' that go with the territory... Ehrenreich has no interest in conversion...She wants, and inspires, open minds."―The Atlantic
"The questions in the world may be infinite, but perhaps the answers are few. And however we define that mystery, there's no escaping our essential obligation to it, for it may, as Ehrenreich writes, 'be seeking us out.'"―New York Times Book Review
"Ehrenreich has always been an intellectual and a journalistic badass... [She] ultimately arrives at a truce with the idea of God. You'll admire her journey."
―Entertainment Weekly
"The factor that makes each of [Barbara's] books so completely unique in American intellectual life is her persistent sensitivity to matters of social class. She can always see through the smokescreen, the cloud of fibs we generate to make ourselves feel better about a world where the work of the many subsidizes the opulent lifestyles of the few. That, plus the fact that she writes damned well. Better than almost anyone out there, in fact."―Salon
"As personal a piece of writing as she has ever done... A surprising turn for Ehrenreich, who for more than 40 years has been one of our most accomplished and outspoken advocacy journalists and activists."―The Los Angeles Times
"Until reading LIVING WITH A WILD GOD I counted the Mary Karr memoir trilogy as my favorite from a contemporary literary figure. Now, Ehrenreich's memoir is tied for first place with Karr's books... Thank goodness [this book] exists. It is quite likely to rock the minds of readers who dare open to the first page."―Houston Chronicle
"A smart and enjoyable read... Ehrenreich maintains a grip on a sensible skepticism about religious matters - and a positive hostility toward the idea of unthinking faith - while avoiding the narrow-minded excesses that more zealous atheists sometimes fall victim to."―The Chicago Tribune --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of over a dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. Winner of the 2018 Erasmus Prize for her work as an investigative journalist, she has a PhD in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University and writes frequently about health care and medical science, among many other subjects. She lives in Virginia.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Product details
ASIN : B00GPDN5GC
Publisher : Granta Books (April 3, 2014)
Publication date : April 3, 2014
Language : English
File size : 611 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
From the United States
StrangePegs
4.0 out of 5 stars Not an Easy ReadReviewed in the United States on March 2, 2015
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So a bit of preamble about this one:
1. This is not a religious book, not in the traditional sense. The "God" Ehrenreich is talking about is not the Christian god nor any kind of monotheistic god. It is not god in any sense that we generally think about "God."
2. I've previously read a couple other of Ehrenreich's books (Nickel and Dimed and Bright-sided) and really enjoyed them. She approaches her topics with dogged determination and doesn't let go till she gets to the truth of the matter. I've never, however, taken the time to learn anything about her other than that she was a journalist who eased into books. As it turns out, her background is in science and she, in fact, has a PhD in... well, I forget in what, because she shifted what she was studying numerous times, and I forget what the doctorate finally ended up being in (and I don't feel like trying to find it, now). Something to do with immunology, though, I think. The science background explains why her investigative work has always been so thorough, though.
Speaking of science, this book contains a lot of hard science, descriptions and explanations, things I found fascinating (especially her experience with the silicon oscillations), but I can understand this being a barrier to many (maybe most?) readers. In fact, I scanned through some of the negative reviews of the book and many of them had to do with "too much science" or "I couldn't understand all the science." This book is definitely not written to be easily accessible to a large audience as her other books are. This book is personal, so all of the science, which is intensely personal to her, is left in. I'm not sure the book can even get to where it's trying to go without the science.
The other thing that can be an issue with the book is that it takes Ehrenreich a long time to get where she's going. She mentions in the foreword that there was an "event," a mystical experience, that happened to her when she was a teenager and that figuring out exactly what that was was part of the impetus for Living with a Wild God, so you start reading and expect to find out about this event and her quest, but... what you get is her childhood. And it was a horrible childhood, not that it seems she saw it that way at the time. When you grow up in that, though, you think it's normal.
It takes a long time to get to the event and, the whole time I was reading, I kept wondering what the point was of all the stuff she was telling me. Why did I want or need to know about her childhood and, well, everything else? But I trusted her, based on my prior reading experience with her (and the story she was telling really was interesting even though it seemed as if it had nothing to do with what the book was supposed to be about), to be going somewhere, so I kept reading. Then, eventually, we do get to the event, and it all made sense. I mean, without all of the background (and I do mean all of the background), I don't think you can really understand the significance of what happened and what happened after.
So I'm going to go back and say that this is not a religious book. This is not a book about how some atheist went out searching for the Truth and had a conversion experience (as in The Case for Christ). This is a book about an atheist who went out searching for the Truth and found... something. Something unexplainable. Something that isn't the "good and loving" god that Christians so often hold up as a happiness dispenser. What she found was something... primal. Chaotic. Only "good" in the sense that a storm can be good or a forest fire can be good.
This is not a book for people who already think they know it all and who think they have all the answers, especially about who and what god is. This is a book for those, like in Wizard of Oz, who are willing to look behind the curtain. Don't plan on an easy read.
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S. Magliocco
4.0 out of 5 stars Memoir of an Extraordinary Spiritual ExperienceReviewed in the United States on May 17, 2016
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Part memoir, part inquiry into extraordinary experience, Barbara Ehrenreich's _Living With a Wild God_ offers stirring insights into the life of this important feminist author and cultural critic. Spurred by the rediscovery of a diary from her teen years, the author explores aspects of her family background, upbringing, and youth that led her to have an extraordinary spiritual experience just before she went to college. Because of her family's ideology and the general social taboo against speaking of these kinds of experiences, as well as their ineffable quality, Ehrenreich buried her experience and never spoke of it. But this silence ultimately took its toll on her life, until the need to rediscover and explore it in full made itself known to her in late middle age.
As a scholar who has spent a lifetime studying extraordinary experiences across cultures, I was very familiar with the kind of experience she described; it is, perhaps, not so extraordinary, but part of the register of human experiences that lead to the development of spiritual beliefs. What fascinated me more were the details of childhood and young adulthood the author reveals, and the transformation that made her care passionately about the world we inhabit and want to make it a better place. That story gets relatively short shrift in this memoir, but it's the one that really captivated me as I read it.
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kb from la
4.0 out of 5 stars At first disappointing, but then...Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2014
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Barbara Ehrenreich is an author whose books were important influences on my generation of feminist/socialists. Hearts of Men and Nickle and Dimed are classics. So when I saw that, now in her 70s, she’s produced a book on spirituality I was eager to read it.
Living with a Wild God focuses on a set of dissociative moments experienced by Ehrenreich during her childhood and teen years. Uncanny insights into the nature of being? Encounters with the divine? Brain freeze explosions? An atheist, Ehrenreich refuses to give a conventional religious interpretation to what happened. In fact she doesn’t want to corrupt the purity of experience by interpreting or defining these moments at all. Okay, but then why write a book that keeps circling back to these incidents only to back away from explaining why they feel so crucial to her life story?
What results from all this is a weirdly unsatisfying memoir. We get the story of a brainly misfit growing up in a dysfunctional household headed by an alcoholic father and miserably unhappy, abusive mother. Ehrenreich’s enjoyably snarky voice, which works so well in most of her writing, falls flat here. Other than a nicely mean account of her adolesence in LA (like the Kerouac of Big Sur, she hates the California sun) the author skates along the surface of her life story, meting out a kind of impersonal contempt to everyone including her solipsistic youthful self. High school, college, grad school, marriage, motherhood, the anti-war movement… blah, blah.
I was now, according to my kindle, 80% of the way through the book. Suddenly, bam! A whole new kind of writing starts happening. In a deeply personal tone, Ehrenreich tells us why she wrote Living with a Wild God. Middle aged, with her second marriage crumbling and progressive politics rapidly diminishing as a force in American political life, she sank into depression. (How many of us followed that trajectory?) Returning to investigate her youthful dips into the twilight zone offered itself as a strategy to beat back the pain and sadness. In turn, engaging new sources of knowledge outside of what might be called the rationalist paradigm seems to have given Ehrenreich the healing energy to do ever more good work.
I’m still of two minds about her book. Why the choice of such a dispassionate, skeptical mode of address to narrate the story of her early life? But on balance, whatever Barbara Ehrenreich cares to say, I’m glad to listen.
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k
5.0 out of 5 stars I was a CCD teacher for years and still teach in a Catholic school and would love to assign this book to my students -- althoughReviewed in the United States on March 6, 2016
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Ehrenreich is a cynical observer of American life and she finds it hypocritical and full of artifice. She is dead-on! Now, I was a CCD teacher for years and still teach in a Catholic school and would love to assign this book to my students -- although I'd be fired in a nonce!
Ms E was raised an atheist, claims she still is one (sort-of) and has an impressive scientific background (PhD cellular biology.) Her greatest fear in life, or at least one of them, is to be taken as a fool. At the same time, she has an integrity that many lack: she does not privilege one aspect of reality over any others and this quality is absolutely bedrock for sound thinking. Part of HER reality has been a series of extraordinary experiences that even she, the original Show-Me Gal, describes as mystical.
Toward the end of this book Ms E asserts that those who have emptied themselves of ego and made "room" for "Whatever" they "encounter" (Ms E stresses this word) are more likely to have this type of mystical experience. Her own testimony, however, belies this. No one has a stronger ego than the cynical Ms E and her account of her own life indicates she never, even as a child, made room for anything other than her own priorities. And, still . . . "it" happened to her all the same.
That is not unusual. For example, the great 19th century revivalist, Charles Grandison Finney, was a mundane lawyer and a bit of a skeptic to boot when one evening, entirely unbidden, "it" descended upon him. What Christians call the "Holy Spirit,", a Presence that "like the wind, listeth where it will" -- and, in fact, that quote is from the Bible in reference to this phenomenon -- hit him with gale force,
These various personal encounters have in common features which make nonsense of conventional religiosity. The "God" who reveals himself is not the Deity of the Sunday Schools anymore than it is the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Mr E calls it a "Wild God" and that accords with the testimony of others. What reveals Itself has variously been described as "savage" and even "primitive." "It" is simply not like anything in "our" world -- rather, it is something utterly alien.
These encounters usually fill the recipient with an ecstatic joy so excessive that it is frightening and potentially destructive. Finney recalled that as wave after wave of love washed over him he pleaded with God to relent lest he, Finney, be destroyed. Muhammed, we are told, was near-suicidal after his "encounter." If we call this experience "God," then He is "beyond good and evil" (paradoxically, a quote from the same philosopher who proclaimed that "God is dead.) Some who have had this experience found it terrifying because they experienced God as absolutely void of all qualities -- an eternal, vast emptiness. (In fact, this makes a sort of sense -- for, if God has a quality, by human definition, then He is limited since that precludes his possessing all other qualities. Thus, He is, like "white light" -- impossible to see but possessing all colors.)
The sort of terrifying encounter Ms E describes makes a mockery of all morality, custom, conventions and, most especially, theology. What is encountered is so far beyond human ken that the mind jumps at once to the Biblical warning, "My ways are not your ways." The one who experiences this epiphany is usually left drained -- in some cases his or her personality is temporarily shattered.
There are many who ascribe these experiences to mental illness or something-or-other firing in some-way-or-another in the synapses of the brain. That is as it may be. The experience itself, however, is most remarkable for the insistence of nearly all who have undergone it that what is encountered is utterly alien to humanity. "It" is the temporary presence of a Being, if that is the right word (Ms E, like all others who have gone through this, describe it as a living presence), that is unlike any fact, theory or extrapolation from theory that humankind can muster. It can be experienced but not known. It can be (somewhat) remembered but never, even in the least, understood. It is at once joyful and savage, loving and terrifying. It is wholly "Other."
How one regards Ms E's experience is up to the reader. But, her account seems honest and as descriptive as she can manage by way of liming what can not be described. "It" makes nonsense of all our assumptions about "God" and even "reality."
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Barry J.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, quite a woman, and quite a tale - great storytelling, and lots of insight.Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2018
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As an atheist ex altar boy, I have a certain sensitivity for book titles that sound like they might be preaching to the agnostic or atheist choir, or at least to me. This was one of those that appeared in a list of her previous work, ALL of which I wanted to read, based only on the title. I resolved to start with a single book and see what I thought about her and the subject matter and I didn't know what else. Given the aformentioned sensitiviity, this was the one I chose, and spent a totally involved, smiling, enthralled number of hours, spread over perhaps 2 weeks reading and going back over, and reading further, and smiling a bit more. I haven't had this much fun or enlightenment out of a book since Catch 22.
I could go on, but I won't. Do yourself a favor and read this book, you'll be a better person for it. And just so we're clear, you'll be a better person even if you're NOT an atheist.
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Judith Kelsey-Powell
5.0 out of 5 stars Genius and courageReviewed in the United States on January 26, 2015
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In this extraordinary memoir, the stepping of point is the revisiting adolescent musings about the nature and meaning of life addressed to an older self. There is something special about someone who would first trust herself to keep those pages and then years later treat them seriously. She suggests that perhaps if she had a family religious tradition she might have a framework within which to understand an experience she can only describe as mystic, but as a third generation atheist, she was left with psychiatric explanations that seemed inadequate.
This is a work that deserves to take its place next to Henry James and Rudolf Otto, not because it finds answers to the basic questions of human existence, but precisely because it does not. It makes the quest itself central and is willing to posit the notion that we may in fact know far less about the universe than we might like or even need to believe (the concept of belief itself being problematic). Most importantly for me, there is a recognition that experiencing the Other does not frequently reveal transcendent benevolence. This is truly the wild God of the title, not the domesticated Being commonly understood by contemporary adherents of religion.
This is a compelling work worthy of revisiting by the reader and perhaps by the writer. This is a quest that is not readily concluded.
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars FascinatingReviewed in the United States on May 14, 2017
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I was intrigued by her story. Relentless self-critical and observant, as well as extremely smart, she seemed at first to be the ultimate introvert, forever trying to find an explanation for everything. (Of course as she matured she mostly gave up that goal and succumbed the middle-class life that captures almost everyone.) She had a life-changing experience at age 17, which I wish she had explained more fully. I also wish she had taken psychedelic drugs and reported on her experience and compared it to the "world on fire" that she saw internally. It's odd that the best description in her book of such an experience was by Daniel Quinn on p. 216: "Everything was on fire...Every blade of grass, every single tree was radiant, was blazing - incandescent with a raging power that was unmistakably divine...But there was no violence or hatred in this rage. This was a rage of joy, of exuberance. This was creation's everlasting, silent hallelujah." Sounds a lot like my first mushroom trip. Barbara is one of a kind.
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Athena
3.0 out of 5 stars A smart mind struggling with an experienceReviewed in the United States on July 13, 2016
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Very interesting discussion of an experience of the world that could be considered religious or mystical. The author is a non-believer who seems to feel that there must be something to believe about the world. But what? Her experience of the world seems to suggest more to the world than the insignificant bits of energy that "accidentally" created it. But the author does not discuss the philosophy of science to any degree. Instead, she discusses the experience of life itself that kept recurring throughout her life, and shows it as a challenge and mystery to her. She attempts to reduce it to psychological states. I found it a very interesting look into an intelligent mind.
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Pagan Tart
3.0 out of 5 stars Ehrenreich held backReviewed in the United States on May 7, 2014
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Erenreich had a moment when she was 17 when the world around her seemed to burst into flames. It seemed, at least to her, it was almost a holy or mystical experience or a brain malfunction. After she writes about this and her description is excellent, the book wanders off to a telling of her life. Enrenreich has led an interesting life, but i wanted to know more about this world of flame experience she had. It is not until the last few page she gets around to this by explaining what exists in the universe and the energy and playfulness the universe seems to display and it is not until the last line where she writes, "it seems to be seeking us." Well, for me, i wanted a bit more and i had hoped the book would go into more about this experience sooner. I felt she was holding back and did not want to admit the universe may have a purpose. She can write only one sentence at the very end of the book that maybe there's something going on that perhaps could lead to a fuller understanding of the Cosmos and its mysteries?
I wanted to say, c'mon Ehrenreich, you're an excellent writer, scientist, journalist, don't hold back. What are you afraid of?
Pat Mckeage
I would like to add more. It has been a month or more since i read her book and have loaned it to a friend. After thinking it over in the past hour she as said more than i previously thought. My husband of 56 years recently died and i was too impatient for an answer and yes, i did want a more clear, positive answer that "there's something out there." While i do not take back entirely my previous thoughts, her book i now realize is almost pure genius.
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Jean E. Peterson
3.0 out of 5 stars Living with a Wild God.Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2014
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I found the title amusing as the author doesn't like to use that word or anything spiritual or meta-physical. It was a hard book for me to read.How she had to dis-associate from the mixed messages she received, from her father to" question everything" and her mother who said she " wasn't special". Her mother seemed the more abusive,slapping her,etc.But the parents nightly alcohol- fused fights left no safe place for her, but science which became her God. She is extremely bright, a fact she likes to remind the reader of with her technical logic and expressions. Besides knowledge I didn't get a sense of what she loved, no mention of marriages or parental feelings. The last of the book in her response to nature I think she finally felt at home. Her being an atheist seemed beside the point. How she survived as well as she did is the what I find valuable in her life story.
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===
Insights on Barbara Ehrenreich's Living with a Wild God
Contents
Insights from Chapter 1
Insights from Chapter 2
Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 7
Insights from Chapter 8
Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 10
Insights from Chapter 11
Insights from Chapter 12
===
1
Insights from Chapter 1
#1
I set my goal for life, which was to find out why we are here. I read everything I could get my hands on, from popularized science to the Romantic poets, and
looked for patterns everywhere. I never thought to look at religion.
#2
I was raised in a atheist family, and I never had any doubts about my belief. It was not easy being an atheist in the great Cold War, but I never gave up because I
knew there had to be a reason for everything.
#3
My family moved a lot, and I went to eleven different schools by the time I graduated from high school. Butte, Montana, was our mythical touchstone and stan-
dard of authenticity. We didn’t take crap from anyone, and we never will.
#4
Butte, Montana, was the home of the Big Sky, and it was here that men went to escape from the sky. They dug mines that ran a mile deep into the earth, and
then built the smelters to blur the sky with toxic smoke.
#5
I grew up in a world engaged in a war against children. We were the intruders, and we could do nothing right. We were subject to constant rebuke at home and
in school.
#6
I had many childhood memories of my mother being angry and cursing, and my father being absent. I wanted to understand and predict their behavior.
#7
I hated school, and would often vomit in the morning before going to it. I was a child, and my parents were driving me crazy with their ambition and drive. I
respected them, even as I rebelled against them.
#8
I was always driven to explore, to get outdoors and see new places. I didn’t require answers, just a hill to climb, a corner to turn, a shore to run along.
#9
I came to hate the built environment, both for its dullness and the way it shut me out. I was an outdoorsy kid, and I enjoyed exploring both the physical world
and books. I had no limits on my outdoor life, especially after my father taught me to ride a bike.
#10
I had no idea there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, until much later in life. I had no control over the future, so I didn’t
think about it.
#11
The fact of death was not explained to me, and I had no evidence to support the continuation of the world without me. So if death stalked the world, cutting
down kittens and heroes alike, there was still no reason to think it would come for me.
#12
I was 13 years old when I realized that I was going to die. I didn’t want to grow up, which was seen as a defection to the enemy side. I was being recruited into
the great death march of biology: be born, reproduce, and die.
==
2
Insights from Chapter 2
#1
I began my journal as typing practice, but I soon realized that I was actually writing about my thoughts and experiences. I was desultory about my summer in
Lowell, but I loved reading in the library.
#2
I discovered that writing was a powerful aid to thinking. I could think without writing, but if I could condense today’s thought into a few symbols preserved on
a surface of some kind, I didn’t have to rethink it tomorrow.
#3
My father was a scientist, and he was able to save himself from the mines by attending the Butte School of Mines. He was interested in the crystal structure of
minerals, and he wanted to know what he was up against in the mines.
#4
I had a rule that I always thought in complete sentences. This was a way to keep me from going under when the waters were rising, for example, on one of
those pale winter Sunday afternoons when my father spent time drinking on the couch.
#5
I had to figure out the bare minimum of incontestable facts that any philosophical inquiry should start with, and this led me to confront the problem of the
reliability of other people. I began to realize that the real sign of mental deterioration was that I had allowed myself to be dismayed by the news that my IQ had
taken a dive.
#6
I wanted to believe that my parents were trustworthy sources, but they were also constantly arguing with each other and pointing out the flaws in the people
around us. They would never offer me up to God.
#7
I had once trusted my mother to help me with my quest, but she had soon after insulted me by asking why I had nothing to do. It was many years before I real-
ized that the question had been a grave personal insult.
#8
My mother’s worst crime was to accuse me of having incestuous designs on my father. She didn’t provide any evidence, but she announced as a scientific fact
that girls are sexually attracted to their fathers. I didn’t write about this in my journal, because it was a private matter.
#9
I stopped listening to my mother when she began to warn me that I was unattractive to men because I was cold and withdrawn. I understood that no one could
have thrown such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
#10
If you can’t trust your parents, who are intelligent and au courant, then you can't trust much of anything. This includes science. You are completely dependent
on scientists for your information about electrons, planets, and genes, and you must assume that they are telling the truth about their observations and infer-
ences.
#11
I spent a weekend at a Baptist summer camp, and while I was there, I wrote in my journal that I was surprised by how nice the campers were. But then I wrote
that they were also super religious, and that I didn’t like that.
#12
I began to question the entire logical enterprise of reaching the outside world from within the limits of I. I tried to escape the straitjacket of I with a more imper-
sonal formulation: There is Something, and there is Nothing, where Something included both the perceiver and the perceived.
#13
I was a failure at the one task I had been given: to exist. I existed, but only as a condition of constant desiring and yearning. I knew nothing, and I existed only to
seek knowledge.
#14
I had always been fascinated by religion, and when I was 14 and 15, I converted to Christianity. But when I was in high school, I realized that I didn’t believe in
any of it. I was trying to blend in at a CYO Friday night dance, when I decided to formally renounce Christianity.
#15
I tried to practice my newfound religion in secrecy, but I couldn’t resist the allure of hamburgers. I was also hungry for books and information, and I couldn’t
stop asking why.
#16
I had glimpsed the vast, glassy-calm, blood-warm sea of Brahman and refused to submerge myself in it. I knew I was a part of this universe, but I was also
apart from it. I didn’t fully trust the Brahman any more than I did Descartes’s perfect God.
==
3
Insights from Chapter 3
#1
I didn’t write about the incommunicable events I was experiencing, because I was afraid of how they would be interpreted. I was trying to reserve the journal for
mini-essays on topics like chance and determinism, the appeal of religion, and whether the passage of time is an illusion.
#2
I had a experience as a child where I lost my sense of language, and it was terrifying. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, I would have said I was
looking at a tree, but the word tree was gone.
#3
I decided that whatever I had experienced at the horse show was an aberration, like the retinal floaters that sometimes intrude on your vision after being in the
car too long on a hot bright day. I was a chronic insomniac since grade school, and I often read at night until my eyes were too tired to read anymore.
#4
I struggled to identify the precipitating factors of my hallucinations, if not physiological then atmospheric. I came up with my own explanation: the most rou-
tine perception requires an impressive creative effort. Photons don’t just stamp a little image on the visual cortex.
#5
I was an empiricist, and I believed that I had gained a glimpse into another universe. I was not ready to abandon the idea that I had gained a privileged view into
some alternative realm. I was adamantly disinclined to anything that smacked of mysticism.
#6
I experienced episodes of dissociation, which are described in the psychiatric literature as feeling unreal. These episodes happened often enough that they be-
came a disease.
#7
I was always concerned about committing treason where my family was concerned. I was expected to contribute to the real world as a scientist when I grew up,
but I didn’t want to fall off the planet into a personal orbit of my own.
#8
I had debates with Bernice about God, and I tried to explain to her that belief takes effort, and that she was making an unnatural demand by asking me to be-
lieve in her God. She retorted that atheists were immoral.
#9
I was not going to share my intraspecies communication with anyone, including my atheistic, Latin-loving rationalism. I was convinced that humans can only
experience things that have already been named, alphabetized, and stored in a single volume.
#10
The experience of dissociation is often described as a symptom of a disorder, but for me it was simply a symptom of my atheism. It was difficult for me to be-
lieve in the existence of other people, let alone God.
#11
I was not unhappy, and I did not write about it because I was too busy discovering and absorbing the world around me. I was an answer-seeking machine, in
love with what I called the truth.
==
4
Insights from Chapter 4
#1
I understood that the concept of home was badly in need of updating before it expired altogether when I reached 18, which was when I would age out like a fos-
ter child and be released to the streets or, should I qualify, to college.
#2
I moved to Los Angeles with my shoulders hunched against the threat of corruption. I was initially excited about the modernity of the city, but after experi-
encing the Church of All Religions, I realized how strange and different it was from anything I had ever seen before.
#3
I loved the city’s sprawl, which testified to an excess of space. I was right to be on guard, though, as I quickly learned that there were no dark interstitial spaces
in which to get trapped in Lowell.
#4
I had come to believe that it was up to me to decide how much to be involved with the growing category of other people. I had chided myself for my aloofness,
and promised to change it someday when the opportunity arose. But now the personality test raised the possibility that I might not belong here.
#5
I began to think of myself as a rebel, and no one should judge me based on my conservative political beliefs, because at least I was trying to connect with other
people.
#6
I made a few friends at school, and I lived not far from David, who would have been my boyfriend if such a concept had ever arisen between us. But mostly, I
spent time with Marina, who introduced me to the bohemian scene in Los Angeles.
#7
I admired Marina, more so than any of my previous friends, because I knew that of the two of us she was the true Nietzschean. She understood better than I
did that hilarity is the best response to absurdity.
#8
I wanted people to respond to me and each other demonstratively. I wanted them to rush up to me and say, What is this. What is happening here.
#9
When someone wanders so far from the flock, people tend to blame the flock. They say that the wanderer was actively pushed away by family dysfunction, so-
cial disappointment, or sexual rejection. Or maybe it was the wanderer’s fault, and she lost her way because she failed to cultivate the appropriate intraspecies
bonds.
#10
I was a product of my family’s peculiar dynamics and the fact that we moved so often. I had no interest in playing out the family drama, however, because the
environment in Los Angeles was so hostile.
#11
I had thought of the dissociative experience as a place, but since I had no control over my access to it, there was a possibility that something else was respon-
sible for taking me there. But since there were no candidates for such a role, I figured that science could explain everything.
#12
I was attracted to chemistry because it was a world full of drama and intrigue. Physics wanted to squeeze the life out of nature, but chemistry revealed that
underneath the calm surface of things, there exists a realm exempt from brute gravity where atoms and molecules are in constant motion.
#13
I was forced to study science, and I hated it. It was a waste of my time, and I felt like it was turning me into someone who could only think about science. I
didn’t want to be like my mother, who was driven crazy by the pressure of unchanneled energy.
#14
The question of why there is anything at all became more urgent as science discovered that amoebae could have intentions. If everything else was already dead
or determined, how to explain this tiny perturbation that was human life.
==
5
Insights from Chapter 5
#1
I had a fantasy that I was the only person left alive on earth. I woke up one morning and rushed to my car to get somewhere I was afraid of being late to. The
streets were empty and the traffic lights were dead.
#2
I realize that I need to establish a base. It should be a house with a swimming pool to serve as a cistern, and definitely with a wall around it to keep out the
dogs, which have clawed their way out of their homes.
#3
I had to become self-entertaining when I was in high school. I would read books that were banned, and I would conceal them inside useless civics textbooks. I
would not listen to the adults around me, and I would imagine that other people were like me.
#4
I was contemptuous of Nietzsche, who looked down on his fellow humans, and I even doubted the reality of the physical world and the dead objects that filled
it. I didn’t need other people, and I didn’t believe they needed anything from me.
#5
If I hadn’t killed my mother, this would have been her chance to prove that I always thought I was above it all, but how useless I had turned out to be. I had
never fully noticed the huge human mobilization that was required to keep me alive day after day.
#6
I had a blind spot when it came to recognizing the importance of what kept my mind alive. I failed to acknowledge or account for what kept my mind alive, and
I was completely dependent on novels, philosophy, science updates, and random shreds of information.
#7
I was reading a lot of fiction and philosophy, and I was also reading science. I was beginning to see that the world I had lived in all my life was changing, and
that the material world was nothing more than a collection of objectively verifiable particles.
#8
I couldn’t picture an electron, so I couldn’t picture its location. I didn’t take this as a putdown, but rather as a lesson that science is not about imagining things
or trying to picture them in your head. It is about making measurements, which can then be fed into equations.
#9
I knew that my father loved science, and I knew that he would not believe in the quirkiness of quantum mechanics. I was offended by the implication that quan-
tum mechanics was some soft-minded adolescent reverie.
#10
The new physics was a mockery of the whole Cartesian, Newtonian edifice of knowledge, in which one thing leads to another and nothing is going to leap out
and poke you in the eye.
#11
The fantasy of a world without humans turned darker as I got older. I could not figure out how to drain the pool I intended to capture rainwater in, and I be-
came grubbier, skinnier, and crustier.
==
6
Insights from Chapter 6
#1
My family had a history of skiing, and I had learned to ski when I was twelve. We went skiing in Mammoth Mountain in Northern California, and spent the night
in Lee Vining near Mono Lake. But the next day, we drove east into Death Valley.
#2
The trip went wrong when Dick, my friend, became angry and hostile. I was shocked by his anger, and didn’t know how to respond. I had never been close with
him, and we hadn’t even talked alone before.
#3
I began to realize that the pleasure of human company had been exaggerated. I was looking at the challenge of condensing the universe into a form compact
enough to fit in my head, while leaving nothing out. The desert was too big to be compacted down into anything manageable.
#4
The dream was a single image: the human brain, projected onto a screen in what appeared to be a classroom. I was shocked by the sac of tissue enclosed in
membrane, a thing like anything else. I was impaled to the floor by the residue of the dream.
#5
If we had driven straight on to L. A. , I would have ended the night in my bed and none of the rest might have happened. I would have gone back to being a nor-
mal geeky, alienated adolescent.
#6
I had a difficult time tracking down Dick, the old man I had met in 1959. His mother had been a published writer, and his father had been a police officer, and
his family had moved a lot. I eventually found him through the Internet, and he denied any car trouble. He insisted that there was nothing odd about sleeping in a
car on the side of the road.
#7
I had no inner nurse practitioner to tell me it was time for some food and a rest. I simply walked east to where the sky was lightest. The street I was on held a
few grudging concessions to commercialism, but nothing was open.
#8
The experience was not a passive beatific merger with the All. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at
once. I stopped at some point in front of a secondhand store, transfixed by the blinding glow of the most mundane objects.
#9
I had the sense that the story ended there, or at least that was how I felt for years. I couldn’t speak of it because I didn’t have the words, and I couldn’t recapture
the experience. Something had happened to me, but it seemed to have happened to me rather than for me or for my benefit.
#10
I had imagined that I was the consummate teenage solipsist, capable of deleting people at will from my field of consciousness, but Dick had apparently had no
qualms about actually killing them if they happened to be in the way.
#11
The author’s conversation with Dick showed him to be extremely defensive and psycho analyze-able, which the author did not appreciate. He was also ex-
tremely angry and blew up when the author tried to talk to him about being self-destructive.
==
7
Insights from Chapter 7
#1
I have lost my youth. The universe has no purpose. Life is a joke in poor taste. I have suffered. I have crossed the shadow line. Now I am writing this on pur-
pose so it will look silly to me and not be true.
#2
I had a very different interpretation of what happened in the mountains than what was reported in the media. I did not lose something, but found something
that now I could no longer recapture. I had never been able to experience peace or comfort after that.
#3
When people run up against something inexplicable, transcendent, and ineffable, they often call it God as if that were some sort of explanation. But I knew that
this was not about enlightenment but about chemistry.
#4
The experience of epiphany is best understood as an explosion, a calamitous natural process like an earthquake or storm, leaving behind what is known in sci-
ence fiction as a rent in the fabric of space-time. Something is broken. Things no longer cohere.
#5
I had developed a hostility towards Frank, the guitar player, after he tried to sexually assault me. I hated him, not because he had done anything to me, but be-
cause he was a low-tipping customer who knew everything about everything and was virtuous at the top of his voice.
#6
I was a 110-pound girl who had developed new powers. I could go all day without eating anything more than a few cookies. I could put out cigarettes in the
palm of my hand. I was determined to put the broken world back together.
#7
I had to figure out what the raw materials were and whether there was some pattern or arrangement they needed to achieve. I could not figure out what the pat-
tern was, and I was a failure. I could not fulfill my assigned task and hold the world together.
#8
I had a friend who had a miscarriage. I was shocked at how low she could feel, and I wanted to avoid being involved in any way. I couldn’t remember how the
evening ended, but this was not good behavior.
#9
I knew something was wrong, as I used the word madness to describe my episodes of self-dissolution. I realized that my symptoms could be subsumed under
schizophrenia, which was a ticket to a lifetime in a locked ward.
#10
I did not have schizophrenia, if schizophrenia is even a single meaningful disorder. I did not have a religion, and I believe that would have helped me during
my post-epiphany crack-up.
#11
I was leaving my family, which had always traveled as a unit before. I had failed in my five-year-long quest for the truth, but I knew something that I hadn’t
known before. Everything was over, and everything was just beginning.
==
8
Insights from Chapter 8
#1
I was saved by institutionalization, medevaced out of the family home and delivered from my solitary fugue into a crush of new people. I had a choice between
Stanford and Reed, the two leading eastern schools, and chose Reed for its bohemian reputation and its proximity to Mount Hood, where I imagined I would
spend all my weekends skiing.
#2
I was initially planning on studying everything in Portland, from philosophy to science. But after reading the frivolity of Plato’s Symposium, I transferred into
glassblowing instead.
#3
I graduated college during the great surge of scientific reductionism, which believed that big, visible things were the result of tiny, invisible things. The hier-
archy of the intellectual edifice was that the social sciences were ultimately reducible to biology, which was in turn reducible to chemistry.
#4
I had always thought that science was a remote and improbable adventure, but as I began to study it, I realized that it involved working in laboratories. I was no
klutz, but I had never disassembled a machine or traced the flow of kinetics through an automobile engine.
#5
I was not a fan of lab work, and I lacked the patience required for it. I was also not a fan of organic chemistry, and I would often cheat on the tests by going
through the chemical supply room and sniffing everything until I found an olfactory match for my mystery substance.
#6
I was in love with Steve, and I did not care what he thought about it. I loved him, and I did not care what he thought about it. I was a self-proclaimed logical
positivist who disdained all nonquantitative observations.
#7
When Steve asked me to marry him and transfer to the University of Oregon, I said yes, although it was months before we dared reveal this plan to our families.
I introduced Steve to my parents during the Christmas break of my second year in college, to startling effect.
#8
I had no idea that Jews never married out of their race. I knew that Steve was Jewish, and had even heard his mother refer to me as the shiksa, as if unaware that
I had access to a translator. I was ashamed of my father for the first time in my life.
#9
I married Steve, but for reasons that had nothing to do with our ancestral religions. We had a very undefined vision of married life. We would have to find a way
to make money, and where would we live.
#10
The impact of phages on twentieth-century biology can be compared to the impact of animal domestication on Neolithic humans. Phages are viruses that prey
on bacteria, and their impact on twentieth-century biology was far more elegant and minimal than that of animal domestication.
#11
I was awarded a degree in chemical physics, and was set to work on my senior thesis project with the classical mechanics professor Jean Delord. I couldn’t get
just one value to record, and the electrode potential of p-type silicon never attained a steady value.
#12
In a laboratory, the objects of interest are supposed to be dead, as they are in a morgue or at least very near death at the time of their arrival. If you want to
study cells, you have to kill them first.
#13
I was in charge of only one thing: the switch that supplied the power that set the whole ungovernable chain of events into action. When I decided to bike home
at the end of the evening, through the rain and fog of a Portland night, the party was over.
#14
I had been up against a living antagonist, a low-level demiurge, that was trying to protect the surface of semiconductors from the etchings and other torments
inflicted by humans. I had encountered something higher up in the chain of command than a normal demiurge.
#15
I had found waves in my thesis, but the physics faculty said that it was impossible to report something completely anomalous that had never been observed
before. The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools.
#16
I had found a way to bypass the tedium of math and science, and I used it to find a way to finish college early. I had accumulated a number of articles on the
odd behavior of silicon electrodes, and I had read in most cases at least the abstract, discussion, and conclusion.
#17
The old science, which was based on the idea that tiny hard particles interact and collide to produce, through a series of ineluctable, irreversible steps, the
macroscopic world as we know it, has been abandoned.
==
9
Insights from Chapter 9
#1
I was horrified by my mother’s sister Jean’s accusation that I was selfish and mean. She assumed that I would have dissuaded my mother from trying to kill
herself, but anyone could see that she was spiraling toward ruin.
#2
In 1964, my mother moved to Ames, Iowa, with my siblings to be closer to her sister and mother. She began drinking excessively, and would spend hours talk-
ing nonstop into the evening. I was expected to participate in the new ritual she had developed since her divorce.
#3
I had spent the last few weeks of the summer in Istanbul, attending an international summer school in quantum chemistry, with no regular access to a phone.
My mother couldn’t reach me when she was on the verge of suicide, because I had no phone access.
#4
I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics, but I soon realized that I would have to switch courses and
focus on biology. The organization of lab work was feudal, with each scientist having a fiefdom of students.
#5
I had been assigned to a machine-tender position at a laboratory, and when I saw an announcement for the quantum chemistry summer school in Istanbul, I
couldn’t resist. I was probably not actually at a lecture on quantum chemistry, but I was still exploring new places.
#6
I had forgotten that my mother had come to visit me for a week or so in New York before going on to the Democratic convention. I had never taken the time to
bond with her, and I didn’t want to drink with her.
#7
I had lost my way as a student and a daughter, and I didn’t have a quest anymore. I had a job, and what it was all leading to was a lifetime of jobs.
#8
I knew that my father was going to die soon after the Thanksgiving when he went home to his parents for the holiday without inviting me or even giving me an
excuse like family insanity. He may have been disfigured in the accident, or having depression, or both.
#9
My father, who had been a truck driver, survived the accident but was left with no mobility and no interest in life. He was left with only boredom to cope with. I
realized that the world can be too stale to generate new situations, and that is when you are left with reruns of what you’ve already experienced.
#10
I began to dissociate, hoping that the pastel smoothness of the L. A. suburbs could get me there. But no luck. That does not happen easily. It happens or it
doesn’t; you cannot force it.
==
10
Insights from Chapter 10
#1
In about 1965, I began to pay attention to news. I didn’t have a television or radio, and I didn’t read any print news except for the headlines I occasionally
scanned at newsstands. I didn’t have a shared now with other people.
#2
I saw Jack, pale, large-eared, and good-natured, lifted out of the lab and crouching in a jungle, dodging fire from invisible enemies of his government. I did not
have a secure notion of where Vietnam was, other than across the Pacific, but now I could imagine a chain connecting us to this little-known place.
#3
I had to go from lab to lab, signing people up to my letter, and collecting signatures. I eventually formed a committee and began to plot our next steps.
#4
I had begun to lose the protective armor of solipsism, and as a result, I began to hear the sounds of boots against flesh and the groans of pain that were once
only audible to me.
#5
I was able to sense the power of people acting and speaking together, and I was excited to be a part of it. I didn’t get nicer, I just began to understand the power
of sociality and solidarity.
#6
We used parties as a means of organizing, because we weren’t just trying to end the war, we were also trying to start a new and freer and more generous way of
life. We had to become warriors ourselves.
#7
My problems with my father were the source of my problem with authority. Edelman said that I was dependent on him, and that if I didn’t shape up, my career
would be over.
#8
The threat wasn’t empty, just uninteresting. I’d been in Rockefeller’s atmosphere of boiling ambition long enough to see what was actually meant by a career. It
was a wind-up toy, a little drummer in uniform, marching ahead, leading you on, and making announcements like Nobel-worthy research on gamma globulin.
#9
I had always been anti-authoritarian, and my father had passed that down to me. I had left Edelman’s office, and walking became my main activity for the next
decade. I marched with thousands of other antiwar students in the spring of 1966, and later with women who had been selected for sacrifice.
#10
I became a parent and a breadwinner in the early seventies, which meant I was completely embedded in the affairs of my species. I was a committed socialist
and feminist, and I helped build up a coherent world from the scraps of data that present themselves.
#11
I was a political activist and responsible human being, and I did not want to be distracted by my perceptual wanderings, which I believed were a distraction
from my mission. I was convinced that my new life-among-people was a dodge and betrayal of the earlier mission.
#12
I understood that by stepping out into the world of other people, I had betrayed my child-self. But a few seconds later, I was accusing this younger self of drag-
ging me down with her solipsistic madness. I knew what I had to do.
==
11
Insights from Chapter 11
#1
I was a soldier for the left, but the movement was crumbling beneath me. I was spending more and more time working on feminist issues, but the meetings
were becoming more and more irrelevant. I was depressed because my father was dying or already dead, depending on how you look at things.
#2
I had been married to my second husband, who was the love of my life, for nearly ten years when I began to experience depression. I had been diagnosed with
depression, and I went along with the diagnosis and therapy.
#3
I had always been an atheist, and I had published an essay-length history of American atheism that unearthed the stream of working-class atheism from which I
was descended. I had always believed that there was no God, and that morality originated in atheism and the realization that no higher power was coming along to
feed the hungry or lift the fallen.
#4
I was an activist, and I was constantly challenging people’s beliefs. I was intolerant of others’ beliefs, and I was sure that none of their beliefs were true. I hated
all the misery that God allowed or instigated.
#5
I had been diagnosed with depression, and I had spent years clinging to a piece of flotsam or wreckage. Then I was rescued by a passing lifeboat packed with
people who gave me food and water. But just as I was rejoicing in the human company, I began to notice something not quite right about my new community.
#6
I began my study of war and human violence with what I thought was a manageable hypothesis, based on many months of reading. But then I came across the
book The Hunters or the Hunted. , which explained that humans were the prey of more skilled and better armed nonhuman predators.
#7
I began to think of animals as conscious, autonomous beings. I had never spent much time thinking of animals in any context, whether as pets or as objects of
pity. But as I got into my late forties and fifties, improving finances made it possible for me to go on vacation in rural and fauna-rich locations.
#8
I became interested in the group behavior of ibises in Florida. They flock to a nearby mangrove island to roost for the night, and at sunrise they take off again
for their feeding grounds. But the morning liftoff can occur before or at sunrise, and it can be either messy and anarchic or a single, coordinated action.
#9
Theism is not only monotheism, or the particular version of it represented by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, in which the one God is not only singular but
perfect. The God of monotheism is a projection based on the child’s perception of reliably nurturing and powerful parents.
#10
The rise of monotheism, and the dead world of Newton’s physics that came with it, paved the way for Descartes and the dead world of modern day science.
#11
I had denied or repressed what I had seen in the mountains and desert as unverifiable and possibly psychotic. But thanks to my years of research into history,
prehistory, and theology, I was intellectually prepared to acknowledge the possible existence of conscious beings that normally elude our senses.
==
12
Insights from Chapter 12
#1
The category of mystical experience is widespread in America. It is difficult to find words to describe such experiences, and they are often attributed to mental
illness or opportunism.
#2
The most useful work on mystical states is the psychologist William James’s chapter on Mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience, which was pub-
lished in 1902. It features a dozen personal accounts of cosmic consciousness, the ineffable, and even a consuming fire.
#3
I had a midlife crisis and moved to the Keys. I fell in love with a local and decided to settle down. I had the house cleaned out and painted, and moved in with a
pile of used furniture from a store in Key West.
#4
I began to see the ocean as a sort of Presence that gathered itself together out of all the bits and pieces that it collected - the birds and cloudscapes and glit-
tering Milky Way. It was not benevolent, but it was uplifting.
#5
The cognitive scientists argue that our brains are afflicted with a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device that predisposes us to imagine gods, faces in clouds,
and divine beings in rocks. But there were also lions in the night, bears in the forest, and snakes in the grass.
#6
The Other that appears in mystical experiences is often described as being alive, or living God. But is the Other alive in any biological sense. Does it eat or
metabolize. Does it reproduce.
#7
The Other in mystical experiences is not benevolent. It is more like a consuming fire that is gravely disturbing to those who recognize nothing divine about it
but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy.
#8
The Other as perceived by mystics is not benevolent, and neither is it necessarily malevolent. It is simply another form of life that has its own agenda, which is
sometimes working towards us and sometimes against us.
#9
Science fiction has long speculated about the existence of an über-being that feeds off of human consciousness. We are not talking about God, but rather
about a being that is not visible to us, and that roams the universe searching for minds open enough for it to enter or otherwise contact them.
#10
The idea that there is some supernatural being that is separate from, and superior to, humans is not realistic. The fact that this being is so far undetectable to
us and our instruments does not mean that it is made out of some supernatural mind-stuff unlike familiar matter and energy.
#11
The worst possible relationship between humans and some mystically potent being or beings would be not symbiosis but parasitism. Parasites modify the
behavior and possibly the thoughts and feelings of their hosts. I do not believe in the existence of vampire-spirit-creatures capable of digging deep into our limbic
systems while simultaneously messing with our cognitive faculties, but experience requires me to keep an open mind.
#12
The modern scientific worldview is one in which there exists no consciousness or agency other than our own. Nonhuman animals are dumb mechanisms driv-
en by instinct, and all other deities and spirits have been eliminated in favor of the unapproachable God of monotheism.
#13
I was not prepared to let go of my younger self, so I saved my journal from permanent incarceration in a library basement. When I traveled down to survey the
damage after Hurricane Wilma, I discovered that most of the evidence of my existence had been swept away.
#14
We must ask why, because asking why is asking for a motive or a purpose, and a motive requires a mind. The universe does not have motives or desires, but it
does contain uncountable algorithms that act out of what almost seems to be an unquenchable playfulness.
End of Insights. Thank you for reading.
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