Scientific Enlightenment: "Switch On" by Nick Seneca Jankel

Is the world meaningful or meaningless? I didn't make up my mind yet. The author thinks it is meaningful and considers it to be a helpful frame of mind. Despite the fact that a lot of the topics here are quite interesting, I found them all too familiar. Strangely though, the book was very easy to read. I learned to speedread paragraphs that I've already heard somewhere else. It's a good book-reminder about possibilities and a bunch of things that are important (maybe). Reminded me of my other recent review, The Art of Possibility. It's a weird book, combining both spirituality and scientific stories (a good weird). All in all, I would still recommend the book, check out a couple of gems-quotes I got out of it below!

My grade of the book: C- (using the American grading system) - check it out.

Gems-quotes

"No problem what problem you pick, if it's causing you to feel at all down - stressed, negative, stuck, moody, or whatever - it has juice within it to power a breakthrough."

"If I were the most pronoid person that has ever lived, optimistic, positive, and trusting, what could this cloud's silver lining be?"

"Inside every story, whether about ourselves or others, is a set of implicit assumptions and beliefs. These act as the girders and support columns of the story. We assume things about human nature, science, God, the economy, our past, our future, the industry we work in - everything - so that we don't have to question our stories. Plato called them 'noble lies' because they are there for a 'good' reason. These assumptions are packaged up into stories, and become hidden away so we no longer notice them. We don't see our stories as being fictional. We see them as truth. We then defend our assumptions vigorously, often arguing for our own lack of power when others believe in us!"

1. "The world is not the way we think it is. Yes, it looks all separate and disconnected, but it is actually joined up in many fathomable and unfathomable ways. The nature of it can be glimpsed in various guises, such as love, truth, and creativity.
2. We are more than we seem. We are not merely our patterns or our pain. We are actually part of this one thing. Experiencing Presence is enlightenment, realization, satori, samadhi, kensho, bliss, or any of the other terms for this ecstasy of emptiness."

"This one thing we are part of is simply everything that is, a totally secular idea that even fits with being an atheist. The science-fiction writer Philip K Dick called it a 'Vast Active Living Intelligence System.'" 

"Galen Strawson, a professional philosopher and leading proponent of panpsychism, has reasoned that if every concrete phenomenon in the universe is definitely physical (i.e. is made up of matter), and that consciousness exists (we all seem to agree that it does), then consciousness must be in matter too. It can't come from nowhere. It has to be somehow in the atoms, molecules, and cells that make up the universe.

This means every physical thing in the Big Universe must have some capacity or potential for consciousness... "To put it crudely, the stuff of the world is mind-stuff", said Arthur Eddington, a world-famous astrophysicist… It's all one thing. Mind and matter are one."

"If you want someone (including yourself) to shift, permanently, it is far more effective to tickle them than push them. Pushing will trigger resistance (as will bribes or demands). Tickle people and they move, laughing while they do it. Healing only occurs through softness, gentleness, and compassion."

"Take your time before you make your move. There is no rush. When you leap, leap fully."

"Leo Tolstoy... warned us a century ago in his essay "On Anarchy": 'There can be only one permanent revolution, a moral one: The regeneration of the inner man.'"

"Personal development is world development. World transformation demands personal transformation!"

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation - what the hell?!

"In one study, a group of test subjects were given an impossible brainteaser, the 'nine-dot problem'. Based on years of research, it would be expected that precisely zero people in the group would solve the problem. That turned out to be true. Then, some underwent a technique called transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS). Basically, the fronts of their brains, where the prefrontal cortex is, were zapped (in a totally safe and non-invasive way, of course). This artificially inhibited their prefrontal cortex. In this state, they were given the nine-dot puzzle again and this time 40 percent of them managed to crack it, and fast!"

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Thanks for sticking till the end! I publish book reviews every Wednesday. Are you curious about what I do in my job as a startup CEO? We coach employees via Teams/Slack to drive agile and digital transformation, change management, learning, sales. Working with Bayer, Posti, Futurice. Winner of DigiEduHack and Sanako EdTech Hackathons. https://panda-training.com