The Loom of Time: On the Recursive Nature of Reality

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Mind’s Evolution. 3. Impressions in Recursion. 4. Names of God. 5. Mimic Worlds. 6. Masks of Power. 7. Worship of Many Gods. 8. Prison Suffering. 9. Modernity and Tradition. 10. Endangered Future. 11. Colonizing Body and Mind. 12. The Fight over Water. 13. Asia's Two Butterfly Syndromes. 14. Taiping to Tiananmen. 15. Chinese Whispers. 16. Thanks, But no Thanks, to the Empire. 17. The Revenge of Media. 18. Biology and the Past. 19. El and Yahweh. 0. America's Angst. 21. Globalization East and West. 22. Paris Burning. 23. Pie in the sky. 24. Non-Western Cosmology. 25. Three Kinds of Reality. 26. The Age of Machines. 27. The Future of Living Sanskrit. 28. In Praise of the Yazidis. 29. The Fourth Way. 30. Freedom and Harmony. Index. The Loom of Time shows how reality is generated in a recursive fashion and uses this insight to illuminate many puzzles of history and culture. Recursion is at basis of mimicry in nature and germination and development of biological organisms; it also provides structure to mental images of physical systems and human behavior. It helps us make sense of the repeating patterns across cultures and nations, understand the manner in which technology is impacting society and see the reasons behind the crises of the contemporary world. The topics covered in this book include philosophical bases of recursion, cosmologies old and new, religion and modernity, globalization and bureaucratic control, loss of meaning and freedom, spirituality, narcissism leading to despair and limits of medicine. It deals with problems of employment and questions of meaning of life when robots and other machines become more numerous than humans. The book straddles history and science, aesthetics and religion and politics and power, by juxtaposing material in ways that provide surprising new insights.…