This writer has submitted a work as
substantial as any that would generate 190 pages (though all the diagrams and
blank areas probably make it fewer than 150).  Nevertheless, it is as if, no
matter how many be the drafts, he didn’t care enough to sweep it for the basic
land mines of mechanics before "turning it in to the teacher."  This
makes me wonder how much he esteems us as his audience, much less himself. 
Examples of his carelessness, including insufficient conceptual control of the
English sentence, follow:  his "Bibliography," better described as
Endnotes or References, almost always wastefully repeats author and work, but
not publication information, even when the page doesn’t change (in lieu of a
list chiseled in stone with varying in-text references to author and page); he
finally remembers to use "ibid." a few times and once even the
nonexistent "ibis," no doubt the mythological feathered valkyrie of
citations; the back-page blurb shows "mode!" when no sentence
terminus has been reached and "unus mund[a]s" as his tribute to
Latin; he has not mastered the most fundamental use of the comma; one chapter
is entitled "Hiearchy"; Planck is spelled without the terminal "k"
([p.] 6), and we find "existance" ( 34) and "consanants"
(58) as well; we "illude" (70) ourselves–actually not a bad verb
suggestion; finally, though I can’t find it now, I recall at least one extended
complex of subordinate clause and phrases lacking a main clause that sought to
pass itself off as a sentence.

He trots over a vast range of
concepts from chemistry and physics, regarding which I claim no more ability to
evaluate than the average undergraduate, to kabala, numerology, and other forms
of ingrown "scholasticism" that seek special meaning in mere alphabet
letters and ciphers (although the Tinker Toy stick-and-knob representations of
the "molecular" "tree of life"/sephiroth makes me wonder if
organic compounds had once been intuitively anticipated), to the world "religions,"
Jung, quantum theory, and finally to the metaphysical counseling and hypnosis
his associated PhD prepared him for. His book just trails off, going "out
with a whimper" rather than with a synthetic bang.  I find his interests "hyper-religified"
and too "scrunched together," as in the section title stew (126) "quantum
waves, kundalini, and the holy ghost."

Regarding the few dozen diagrams he
generates, they begin to approach the suggestiveness of those of Ken Wilbur
whose own, however, represent high nominalist categories that may nonetheless
lose you in their abstractness, as those of Talcott Parsons have done "for"
sociology.  The hopelessly abstract, vague terms he uses fail to further explanation
and his sensed (by him at least) brilliant insights never draw out meaningful
implications.

He apparently had a "mystical"
experience in the form of a Castañedian self-as-dispersion-and-re-aggregation,
out-of-body dream (x):  "I as non-physical awareness was in a plane where
everything to be known was known in an undivided, unbroken wholeness of which I
as awareness was centered."  While on the subject of mysticism, which he
explicitly picks up again later (63), I don’t come any closer to him in his wildly
varied and discursive tract than when he says, "The force fields within
the psyche are similar to the force/energy fields in physics and chemistry in
the sense that they all form a continuum for interaction." Beyond the
realist-nominalist issues in the terminology as opposed to the "realities"
to which they hope to refer and his vague use of "psyche" that I
would have made concretely to refer to the meditatively breathing body, I think
"force field" may make some sense.  The vague terms of physics, usually
undefined except as abstract elements of formulae, like "electromagnetic,"
have at least "metaphoric" parallels in the ways in which, for
example, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems may support
a kind of neurotransmitter "communication" beyond the "envelope"
of the body through those related dump sites inaccurately called "glands,"
adrenals or, more graphically in England, "suprarenals" [1].

There is no question that the
author is intoxicated by what he must consider a breathtaking synthesis rather
than the overextended and ill-defined hodgepodge I found.

__________

1.  Compare the "Zen-brain" work of John Austin,
M.D., and University of Pennsylvania "school" of the late Dr. d’Aquili.

© 2006 A. P. Bober 

A. P. Bober has studied a
psychology spanning Skinner and a humanistic-clinical view based on existential
phenomenology and had been a PhD candidate in a substantive yet philosophic European-based
sociology including the "critical" view.  His teaching augmented
courses in group theory/"small-group developmental dynamics" (lab)
while introducing "sociology of knowledge" and "issues in
biological anthropology," with publications in the first two fields. 
Currently he is writing a book on mystical experience as metaphorically tied to
neurophysiology.

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