Quest Magazine

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

By Malcolm Gladwell. New
York: Little Brown, 2005. Hardcover, 277 pages.

When I attended a concert by the Budapest Symphonic Orchestra last week, I was able to appreciate the performance and the female concertmaster even more, because I had read Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Here, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the recent revolution in the classical music world which, until thirty years ago, was a world of white men because auditions supported the "fact" that women lacked the strength, lips, lung capacity, and hands to play like men. Conductors and concertmasters even believed that, with their eyes closed, they could tell the difference between a male or female at an audition. Changes introduced by unionized musicians included the use of screens between the committee and the person auditioning. Thereafter, the number of women musicians hired increased dramatically.

Judging music, like other taste tests, is not that simple. "We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility. Taking our powers of rapid cognition seriously means we have to acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious," Gladwell observes. For example, if you "looked" at a short female horn player before you really "listened" to her, what you saw would contradict any power you would hear in her playing.

A second lesson is that "if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, we can control rapid cognition." In other words, by learning to pay attention to the first two seconds of a situation or activity, we can avoid making mistakes and actually arrive at a more authentic outcome. In this instance, "by fixing the first impression at the heart of the audition-by judging purely on the basis of ability-orchestras now hire better musicians, and better musicians mean better music ... arrived at by paying attention to the first two seconds of the audition."

Applying this suggestion is what the author calls "thin-slicing." This is the artful skill of looking at the smallest amount of information possible, valuable because "decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately."

Blink is filled with other intriguing stories and analyses. Gladwell tells about the ER physician who "thin-sliced" past the information overload of many tests and focused on a few selected factors to determine, correctly, if patients had had a heart attack. He recounts mistakes made by people who kept their best intuitive decisions at bay, either by too much thinking or ingrained prejudices, or strict adherence to doing something "by the book." Gladwell studies the shadow side of cognition where "less" enables style to win over real content, as in the election of Warren G. Harding because he was "a great-looking President."

I agree with the lady reading Blink across from me on the plane. "I'm enjoying it. It is causing me to think about things in a very different way."

-DAVID BISHOP

January/February 2007

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Stephen M. Barr
University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Paperback, $18.00, 312 pages.

Taking liberty with the Three Objects of the Theosophical Society, we could say that this book covers the Second Object completely. Anyone that is scientifically, theologically, and philosophically oriented will find this book to be one of the most rigorous in recent years. Even though it is from the Notre Dame press, a liberal reading allows it to be of any faith, including Theosophy. To establish academic credibility we are told that Dr. Barr is a professor of theoretical particle physics at the Bartol Research Institute of the University of Delaware.

Just as Copernican revolution upset popular thought during the 1500s, the introduction of non-materialistic quantum mechanics in the 1920s transformed the static world of materialistic Newtonian mechanics. Today we are on the verge of finding out if unified field theory and our scientific model are complete, or if there is more to come.

The Standard Model of physics has allowed us to unify three of the four fundamental forces of the universe: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The fourth force, gravity, is currently the "missing link" in the Standard Model. To bring gravity into the fold will require the newest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is located in Switzerland and is scheduled to go on-line in September 2008. Scientists are hoping for constructive data by the end of the year. The LHC will be trying to create the predicted and hoped for Higgs boson. If observed, the Standard Model would be verified and would help to explain gravity's role in unified field theory.

If the elusive Higgs boson is produced, Barr's book will help in understanding the excitement. If no Higgs boson is found and the theory remains incomplete, this book will still provide a more fundamental understanding of what is at stake in future models.

The science, as presented by Barr, is quite complete with the more difficult parts found in the well-written Appendices. Dr. Barr probably comes from the Roman Catholic tradition and his sophisticated understanding of Christian theology is very apparent. I imagine that a few philosophers will take issue with some of his arguments, but they are well-presented and well-defended.
The book is arranged into five parts: "The Conflict between Religion and Materialism"; "In the Beginning"; "Is the Universe Designed?"; "Man's Place in the Cosmos"; and "What is Man?" As you can see, by replacing the word religion with Theosophy, these divisions could also appear in any Theosophical book.

However, I have come up with my own arrangement of the material. I feel that organizing the sections as: "The Big Bang--A Discussion of First Cause"; "How Nature Fine Tuned Its Constants"; "The Failure of Materialism"; "How Gödel Showed That the Mind is Not a Computer"; and "Quantum Physics Requires a Non-physical Observer" more accurately reflect the contents of the book.

In summary, presently, religion (Theosophy) offers a more credible and coherent understanding of the universe than the scientific materialists. As experimental data is reported and analyzed, there may a convergence of the non-materialistic quantum school of thought and the Theosophical. Only time will tell.

Ralph Hannon

The reviewer is a retired Professor of Chemistry at Kishwaukee College, a long time T. S. member, and past co-editor, with the late Dora Kunz, of the Theosophical Research Journal.

Saving Angel

Charlotte Fielden
Toronto, ON: CFM Books, 2007. Softcover, $14.95 (Can), 116 pages.

Saving Angel is a two-act play featuring H. P. Blavatsky, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, and scholar Denis Saurat. The reason for bringing these three historical figures together is to help determine the fate of a young pupil of HPB's, Angel Shiner, whose psychic nature and subsequent unconventional behavior have landed her in a mental asylum. Saurat as impartial judge, and Blavatsky and Yeats as witnesses on Angel's behalf, are to convene with a board of psychiatrists in order to determine young Angel's future—whether she is well enough to be released or whether she should remain at the asylum.

If the above is the straightforward prosaic account of this two-act play, metaphorically we are witness to another drama. In this drama, we have the three psychiatrists of the board representing various developmental stages of the lower mind: a Roman Catholic perceiving the world ultimately through the Church dogma; a Protestant concerned about his scientific standing among his peers; and a secular Jew who seems to be looking for a way forward in his life. Angel then becomes the light of the higher self in all its unpredictable nature and HPB is that power of the heart capable of allowing quick glimpses of that light to come through. However, this play is taking place on the last day of HPB's life, a warning that in every soul's life there comes a time when it must open up to this inner life or have that door close on it for the rest of this incarnation. Yeats becomes the example of what can be accomplished when the full power of the intuition is allowed to flow through as he extemporaneously spouts poetry and thus adds a rich lyrical tapestry to the rhythm of the play. Finally, Saurat is that part of the human mind that must make sense out of our inner experience and provide us with the story that will help us put our experiences into context so that we can move forward, sometimes referred to as the power of discrimination.

From a more theosophical standpoint, the play endows Blavatsky with god-like powers that enable her to grab the mayavi-rupas [mental astral bodies] of people out of time, to separate that body from the not fully developed soul, to clear away the elementals that blind most souls from truly seeing, and all this while life slowly ebbs from her mortal body. Theosophy is always fighting against the idea that grows in people's minds that gods or saviors are going to come and endow on us miraculous powers, or to save us from the messes that we have made. The endowment of these godlike powers to Blavatsky or the Masters has always been the Achilles heel to the Movement as many students have used such fanciful speculations to drift away from reality. That being said, poetic license being a right and proper tool of the playwright, taking such fancy as real is a criticism of the audience member and not of the play itself.

Overall the second act of the play runs more smoothly than the first. The Blavatsky-god was much more powerful in the first act and the terminology, especially with respect to seers and mediums a bit distracting. In the second act, as we begin to see what Ms. Fielden was up to, we are able to sit back and enjoy the ride. At times Angel's seemingly airy flights of fancy threaten to carry the play into a different world, but this tension is offset nicely with the addition of Yeats' poetry which provides an anchor to the emotional undertone of the play. In addition, Saurat's power of discrimination effectively pushes the narrative forward, not allowing us to get bogged down with naming that which cannot be named.

Saving Angel is a wonderful insight into the turbulent workings of the human mind. The play buffets us from one experience to another challenging the reader to find the calm at the center around which all these experiences whirl. It is only at the center that we can lift ourselves above the storm and see reality for what it truly is. It is only from the center that we can save our own higher angel.

Robert Bruce MacDonald

The reviewer is editor of Fohat, a quarterly publication of the Edmonton Theosophical Society. This review first appeared in the Spring 2008 edition (Volume XXII, No. 1).

Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall

Amy Chua
New York: Doubleday, 2007. xxxiv + 396 pages.

This book is about what makes a great society great and what causes a great society to self-destruct. It is clearly intended by its author, a chaired professor of law at Yale, to be a cautionary tale for the United States. However the book's message can be applied to any organized society, not just to nations, and its message resonates strikingly with Theosophy.

In Chua's use, the term "hyperpower" refers to a nation of vast economic and military might whose influence extends widely over its world and affects multitudes of people. Chua's thesis is that historically every such nation has been marked by extraordinary tolerance and pluralism during its rise, and by intolerance, xenophobia, and racial, religious, or ethnic "purity" during its fall. That thesis is what resonates with Theosophy.

The Theosophical Society from its foundation—in both its formal statement of objects and in its actual practice—has espoused an openness to the unexplained, an encouragement of comparativeness, and a dedication to practical fraternity without distinctions of any kind. Theosophy's attitude to "tolerance" is not just forbearance, but respect, sympathy, and adaptation.

Chua's examples of hyperpowers are the Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great; Rome during its golden age of Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius; China's Tang dynasty; the Mongol empire founded by Genghis Khan; the Dutch commercial empire of the seventeenth century; the British empire after the Glorious Revolution of 1688; and American hegemony after World War II. Her examples of potential hyperpowers that fell before they had properly risen include Spain after the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, and twentieth-century imperial Japan.

"Tolerance," Chua emphasizes, is a relative matter. All of the hyperpowers have been intolerant in certain ways and often, especially the Mongols, calculatedly cruel. But all have practiced "strategic tolerance." That is, they have embraced such diversity as was seen to be helpful in achieving their aims, and that generally included religious and racial inclusiveness. There is another kind of tolerance, however, which Theosophy promotes, namely a tolerance advocated by the eighteenth-century European Age of Enlightenment.

The Age of Enlightenment urged reason rather than prejudice as the basis for action and affirmed that all of us have a natural right to live according to our own lights so long as we do not interfere with the same natural right of others. The founders of the United States were advocates of Enlightenment, as testified by the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The Declaration stated the doctrine of natural rights in traditional religious, but nonsectarian, terms. However, it is not clear exactly where or how the "Creator" stated that endowment. The founders simply took it as a given. What modern Theosophy has done is to make it possible to link Enlightenment tolerance as a natural right with the Indic concept of monism. The latter, found in Hinduism, Buddhism, etc., is that only one ultimate reality exists in the universe and that we and all else are expressions of it. If all of us share the same life, then none of us has a right to force others to conform to our expectations. All of us have a natural right to tolerance as respect, sympathy, and adaptation.

The Theosophical Society has been called both a bridge between East and West and (by the Mahachohan) "the corner-stone, the foundation of the future religions of humanity." It is a bridge because it joins the Eastern concept of the unity of all life with, and as the basis for, the Western Enlightenment concept of natural rights. It is the foundation for the future of humanity because the "Day of Empire" is over. An empire is a political unit dominating and controlling many peoples. Such a political unit is incompatible with either the unity of life or natural rights.

A religion or dharma is that which "ties us again" or "holds us firmly together" (the etymological meanings of those two words). The ideals of the unity of life and of natural rights must be the basis of a future global political unit on this planet. Because those two ideals are at the core of the Theosophical Society, that Society—not as an organization, but as an inspiration—is the foundation of humanity's future. Theosophists need to live up to that ideal.

John Algeo

The reviewer is past president of the Theosophical Society in America.