The Wall

Friends often ask, how is your new book doing? They're asking about sales, as though there's a magical courier that whispers hourly updates in my ear. I don't believe in magic of the supernatural type (psi is not that sort of magic), but we do have a modern version of a quasi-magical courier -- the sales ratings on Amazon.com.

On that front I see a nice trend developing. I requested that Entangled Minds be cross-listed as both a Science book and as a Religion-Spirituality book. The first category is appropriate because this book is ultimately about science. The second category is necessary because topics like psi are historically associated with the occult, so in existing book categories there's nowhere else to place it.

Within these two categories, as of this posting the book is rated #2 among Science/General books, and #2 in Religion-Spirituality/Occult. I'm pleased to see this, because the wall between science and the occult is a vestige of old prejudices that, like the Berlin Wall, has prevented meaningful communication between two ways of viewing the world, and as such it's a barrier that's ripe for demolition. So perhaps this is a good sign.

(From a more mundane perspective, the correlated ratings are partially driven by cross-listing, although there aren't many books in these two categories that are cross-listed.)

Comments

Anonymous said…
I couldn't agree with you more, that we need to demolish the conceptual Berlin Wall that places science/religion in two separate and distinct catagories.

I think we ARE finally moving in this direction, and a more inclusive, consciousness-based form of spirituality is just over the horizon. Back in the middle of the last century, the jesuit priest/paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin seems to have intuited this future trend, and my website www.planetization.com elaborates further on this topic. Planetization unites not only many of the cutting edge findings in various frontier sciences such as Consciousness Studies, and research into Intercessory Prayer and Healing at a Distance - but also unites the spiritual, ecological and political in one in one unified conceptual framework and form of activism where consciousness plays a crucial role..I would love to discuss this further with any interested parties up here..I'm new to the blogsphere, and not sure how this works, but I'll keep checking back here to see if there's a response..There's also a Contact Page up on my website if anyone wants to reach me through it.
Dean Radin said…
The ideas of Teilhard de Chardin (sometimes called the patron saint of the internet) seem to be rising to the fore again on many fronts. I'm working on a large-scale experiment to explore some of his ideas. It's related to the Global Consciousness Project (http://noosphere.princeton.edu), but will be separate from that.

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