four books from around the territory

Four Books

I have completed two books recently and have two going pretty quickly. Depending, of course, upon tastes, I think some of you might enjoy one of these.

1)  Eclipse by Richard North Patterson is a novel set in a fictional African country. It is stimulated by circumstances that took place in Nigeria. In Luandia, there is a brutal president with brutal staff and military leaders under him. The country is rich with oil and there is theft, complex corruption, and almost inconceivable violence from various factions as they siphon off as much oil money as they can in the oil rich delta region. The US oil company is caught in sick relationship with the government. There are rebellious forces vying for freedom and caught in the sickness and violence. There is a massacre. There is a a leader who tried to lead a non-violent protest and ended up imprisoned with likely death sentence. There is an American international lawyer who respects the nonviolent activist but who loves the activist's wife. This novel seems to unwrap for the reader the complicated legal and diplomatic maneuverings that are required to simply defend this man in some approximation of fair hearing. I'd say the emphasis of this book falls into the lower quadrants, particularly the R lower.

2)  I am currently reading a book called The Third Man Factor by John Geiger that looks at a strange phenomenon occurring in numerous cases where people, like explorers, are in extreme conditions. Often people sense a "third presence". Though this is not comprehensive in insight and explanation, it is still quite good. It is evocative of the questions about what is going on - in an AQAL framework, one wonders about individual experience and collective and about interior subjective and exterior objective. One also wonders whether the way that these third presences and associated states manifest (or interpreted, understood, and articulated) has to do with a stage of development. There is plenty more room, too, for AQAL analysis play. This book dances around among the four quadrants, with probably more to say about the left side and especially LU.

3)  I am also reading a novel that a daughter wanted me to read that is becoming somewhat popular in Christian circles - The Shack by William P Young. Here, also, there is plenty of room for AQAL play within it's fairly contemporarily sophisticated philosophy and theology. Here is a quote in dialogue. A man some years before lost a young daughter to a horrible human predation and is currently having an extremely altered state experience. At this juncture Mack is in conversation with one of three of the tender presentations of God:

    She picked up the wooden spoon again, dripping with some sort of batter. "Mackenzie, I am neither male nor female, even though both genders are derived from my nature. If I choose to appear as a man or a woman, it's because i love you. For me to appear to you as a woman and suggest that  you call me Papa is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling so easily back into your religious conditioning."
    She leaned forward as if to share a secret. "To reveal myself to you as a very large, white grandfather figure with flowing beard, like Gandalf, would be to simply reinforce your religious stereotypes, and this weekend is not about reinforcing your religious stereotypes."
    Mack almost laughed out loud and wanted to say, "You think? I'm over here barely believing that I'm not stark raving mad!" . . .
    She stopped talking, but only long enough to put away some seasonings into a spice rack on a ledge by the window and then turned to face him again. She looked at Mack intently. "Hasn't it always been a problem to embrace me as your father? And after what you've been through, you couldn't very well handle a father right now, could you?"  
    He knew she was right, and he realized the kindness and compassion in what she was doing. Somehow the way she had approached him had skirted his resistance to her love. It was strange, and painful, and maybe even a little bit wonderful.
    "But then", he paused, still focused on staying rational, "why is there such an emphasis on you being a Father? I mean, it seems to be the way you most reveal yourself."
    "Well," responded Papa, turning away from him and bustling around the kitchen, "There are many reasons for that, and some of them go very deep. Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken [a prior rendering of the Adam and Eve story], true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don't misunderstand me, both are needed - but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence."
    Mack turned away a bit bewildered, feeling he was already in over his head. As he reflected, he looked through the window at a wild looking garden.
    "You knew I would come, didn't you?" Mack finally spoke quietly.
    "Of course I did." She was busy again, her back to him.
    "Then was I free not to come? Did I not have a choice in the matter."
    Papa turned back to face him, now with flour and dough in her hands. "Good question - how deep would you like to go?" She didn't wait for a response knowing that Mack didn't have one. Instead she asked, "Do you believe you are free to leave?"
    "I suppose I am. Am I?"
    "Of course you are. I'm not interested in prisoners. You're free to walk out that door right now and go home to your empty house. Or, you could go down to The Grind and hang out with Willie. Just because I know you are too curious to go does that reduce your freedom to leave?"
    She paused only briefly and then turned back to her task, talking to him over her shoulder. "Or, if you want to go just a wee bit deeper, we could talk about the nature of freedom itself. Does freedom mean that you are allowed to do whatever you want to do? Or we could talk about all of the limiting influences in your life that actively work against your freedom. Your family genetic heritage, your specific DNA, your metabolic uniqueness, the quantum stuff that is going on at a subatomic level where only I am the ever-present observer. Or the intrusion of your soul's sickness that inhibits and binds you, or the social influences around you, or the habits that have created synaptic bonds and pathways in your brain. Then there's advertising, propaganda, and paradigms. Inside that confluence of multi faceted inhibitors," she sighed, "what is freedom really?"
    Mack just stood there not knowing what to say.
    "Only I can set you free, Mackenzie, but freedom can never be forced."
    "I don't understand," Mack replied. "I don't even understand what you just told me."
    She turned back and smiled. "I know. I didn't tell you so you would understand right now. I told you for later. At this point you don't even comprehend that freedom is an incremental process." Gently reaching out, she took Mack's hands in hers, flour covered and all, and looking him straight in the eyes she continued. . ." (pp. 93-95) [Any mistakes are mine in transcription.]

There seems to be some allusions to complexity and inclusion and even incremental transcendence. Veddy interethting.

4)  My favorite of these four is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is a terse 240 page epic journey moving through the territory of man's shared, archaic first chakra, within the survival vMeme. This post-holocaustic story is of a father and son trying to survive and also trying to maintain some higher levels of morality and contact with the heart and to not forget some of pre-darkened humanity's ways. The road they travel is brutal and resources for satisfying the most basic needs for life's continuation are scarcer than scarce. Dark, dark, dark. How does this frightening beautiful story of modern man, fallen to his roots, end? Check it out. I hear that there is a movie out now. I know that this book is epic and worth reading. There is plenty to consider from each quadrant: culture and the absence and degeneration thereof, as with the collapse of social systems and governance, loss of technological advantages, and the dreadful inner world of individuals. There's also some heart and some tatters of vision, hanging on. The way I am put together, it doesn't seem that we are that far away from such latent realities. As Ken has said - we all have to start from scratch.

Have you read any of these? If not, one of these might catch your fancy. ambo