How to Change Your Mind

Unfortunately, I can't say that Michael Pollan's attempt to capture the new psychedelic zeitgeist changed mine.  Perhaps this is simply because it is aimed at readers who, like Pollan, start off pyschedelically and philosophically naive.  I didn't need anyone to convince me that it might be interesting to alter my consciousness, nor that it can be done fairly safely with drugs, nor even that such experiences could have a profound and lasting effect on my worldview.  For the already intrepid psychonaut, the book exhibits mainly the endearing, amusing, but also kinda boring, breathlessness with which one (faintly) recalls early experiments.  So yeah dude, this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it's not just, it might not be just such a simple... uh, you know? 

I agree completely. I sympathize with the mind-blowingness of It. All.  I understand how hard it is to convey the ineffability of the experience without ending up in vague platitudes about how all is one (too late).  I'm also frustrated by the fact that Pollan spent 400 pages chronically and neurotically doubting the reality of his own experience.  While I am, again, no stranger to this type of doubting, there's also a pretty obvious spiritual and philosophical retort for it.  All experience is real.  You may experience unreal objects, but the experience itself cannot be unreal.  Perhaps this is more tautology than theory.  Nevertheless, keeping it in mind is inoculation against the dismissive scientific rationalism that aims to separate us from our experience.  

For me, the most interesting part of the book was his history of early psychedelic research.  While it seemed neither insightful nor particularly well told, it nonetheless brought some new shit to light.  It would have made a great magazine article.  

Our Mutual Friend

Since I knew nothing of Dickens beyond A Christmas Carol, I chose my first novel in the old fashioned way -- I read the footnotes.  Specifically, I read footnote 4 of Deleuze's final essay, where he refers to a single chapter in this enormous novel (the one where Rogue Riderhood nearly dies).  The novel contains several great scenes, and this is one of them.  The full list would include the foggy night on the Thames that it opens with, our hilarious initial encounter with the Veneerings, and a couple of the climactic scenes that can't be described for fear of spoiling the surprise for the many loyal readers who will undoubtedly be inspired to plough through all 900 some odd pages of this monster once they read this review.  

Because it was really pretty entertaining.  Yes, admittedly, it is way too long for modern tastes.  Many scenes that seem designed to be read aloud for purely comic effect could be significantly shorter.  But when you consider that the novel was published in installments over the course of 20 months, these diversions make a lot more sense.  And yes, modern taste may also find the ending overly moralistic.  I don't know what it was like in 1865, but these days it strains credulity -- even in fiction -- to see every bad guy either fully reformed or perfectly punished according to his just desserts.  But the story is crafty, the characters exceedingly well drawn and relatable, and the writing shockingly experimental for so popular an author.  Though, if I ever do read another Dickens novel, I'll make sure to do it as the author intended and only cover 50 pages a month.

Radical Acceptance

Someone must have recommended Tara Brach's first book a long time ago, because it had been sitting in my to read list for quite a while.  In the meantime, I've read a couple of other books that belong in the same "IMS dharma" genre as this one.  They're all an easy-reading combination of modern takes on core Buddhist principles, lightened with a mix of personal anecdote and case stories drawn from the author's teaching experience.  While I've enjoyed them all, I found Brach's book the most affecting of the ones I've read.  

She frames the goal of practice as awakening from a "trance of unworthiness", a deep and often subconscious feeling that it is somehow simply not okay to be the way we are.  The idea that nothing is a problem, that everything is okay being the way it is, might sound like a simplistic reiteration of the vapid teachings of Dr. Pangloss.  Once we move beyond the facile misinterpretations to which this idea is prone though, we see that it's not a question of trying (futilely) to avoid acting or changing anything, but a question of becoming intimate with our experience, becoming capable of seeing all of it, excluding none of it.  In other words, the opposite of radical acceptance isn't activity but simply ignorance -- we ignore our experience.  Accordingly, Brach structures her book as a progressive investigation of the things we usually like to ignore.  Our feeling of unworthiness, our body, our desire, our fear -- these are all experiences we thirst to make disappear as quickly as possible because we see them as problems to be solved and states to be avoided.  We just want to make them stop.  If, instead of struggling to alter these feelings, we pause to embrace them, however counterintuitive this may sound, we can gradually find that these states begin to lose some of their reactive power over us.  They may even stop on their own.  Or they may not.  The goal really isn't to control of optimize our experience, but to experience it.  Thus, Brach builds towards the Dzogchen idea that all experience is part of the one thing that can't ignore -- awareness. 

P.S. I cried when her dog died.