Twilight of the Clockwork God: Conversations on Science and Spirituality at the End of an Age - Hardcover

Ebert, John David; Swimme, Brian; Sheldrake, Rupert; Abraham, Ralph; Margulis, Lynn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1571780793 ISBN 13: 9781571780799

Publisher: Council Oak Books, 1999

Synopsis

Brian Swimme, Ralph Abraham, Stanislav Grof, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Lynn Margulis, Terence McKenna, and William Irwin Thompson present their ideas concerning the evolution of consciousness.

About this title

About the Author

John David Ebert has been an editor with the Joseph Campbell Foundation for six years. A graduate of Arizona State University, he is a recognized authority on the relevance of mythology to contemporary society, especially that of myth to science. He has written and spoken extensively on these subjects in national journals, reviews, and public speaking tours. Ebert has appeared as the expert on mythology three times on A&E Channel's Ancient Mysteries.

Reviews

From The Tao of Physics to At Home in the Universe, most successful books on science and spirituality have come from scientists whose research led them to embrace previously marginalized religious views or to develop a new understanding of the divine. So Ebert's argument that "the worldview of materialism is currently undergoing transubstantiation into a more spiritually-informed way of regarding the cosmos" is surely tenable. But his call to overthrow a Clockwork God is outdated, for most scientific theories have already moved beyond Newton's mechanistic vision of the universe. Ebert has assembled some important or influential thinkers for this book of interviews, however, including evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, Deepak Chopra, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, chaos theoretician Ralph Abraham and mythologist William Irwin Thompson. Ebert seems inordinately enamored of LSD and other hallucinogens, so his discussions with Stanislav Grof and Terence McKenna, for example, focus on this topic to the detriment of other subjects. Throughout, Ebert remains a sensitive interviewer, willing to stay in the background while his subjects expound. Anyone interested in the confluence of spirituality and science will find material to engage and challenge in this congenial introduction to some of the most exciting and daring scientists of our era.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The clockwork god is the deity who, in Isaac Newton's universe, set the great celestial clock in motion and then walked away to let natural law take over daily regulation of the spheres. According to this neat but limited understanding, religion worshiped the clockmaker god, whereas science examined the clock. The universe, twentieth-century science has found, is much more mysterious than a clock, and science is not as divorced from spirituality as Newton and his heirs thought. In this excellent collection of interviews with those working at the interface of science and spirituality, Ebert looks at such fascinating fields as chaos theory, the Gaia hypothesis, and nonlocal reality. The stellar cast of interviewees includes popular authors like Deepak Chopra and Terence McKenna and less well known but significant thinkers, such as Rupert Sheldrake and Brian Swimme. A woeful inattention to women in these burgeoning fields is the only real shortcoming of a book that is full of clear, accessible descriptions of the complex science behind theories. Patricia Monaghan

Ebert, a scholar of mythology and contemporary culture, here interviews nine unorthodox thinkers. His main thesis is that our concept of the universe is shifting from that of a machine to that of a living organism and that scientists therefore need to find more organic images that will help link them to the universe instead of making them external observers. After presenting a basic historical context and discussing the importance of mythological symbols, Ebert presents his interviews in question-and-answer form. His experts come from many different fields, including anthropology, ecology, medicine, psychology, and philosophy. Though they do not always agree with one another, they all have strong qualifications and new ways of approaching old questions that are fascinating and thought-provoking. The interview style helps keep the reader from becoming lost in unfamiliar and often complex ideas. The book also has an excellent annotated bibliography for further reading. Recommended for public libraries.C. Robert Nixon, MLS, Lafayette, IN
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It is my contention that a new generation of scientists is emerging, one for which magic, myth and science are part of the same spectrum of human cultural activity. It is not the end of Western civilization that is signified by the appearance of a new species of scientist who takes myth seriously, but rather the end of an epoch in which the cultural canon that has shaped the imagination of the West for five centuries is disintegrating. . . .

The appearance of such new constellations is precisely what this book is about, for in contradistinction to the mechanistic universe, its chapters are filled with visions of a cosmos that is alive and sentient, capable of remembering the past and interacting with our lives on the most intimate level. . . .

And so, this book announces an apocalypse, of sorts, the twilight of the mechanical world-view. That world is most emphatically coming to an end, and the new one that is rising from out of its ruins is the one that will shape the imagination of the twenty-first century. I have been privileged to be living at a moment in the history of our culture when the mutation of a new species of scientist is beginning to proliferate. Yet, mechanists remain in abundance, and this book is about how their magnificent ship has not only hit its iceberg, but is sinking. Slowly.

Edition details

• Publisher: Council Oak Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571780793
• ISBN 13: 9781571780799
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240