Going Dark In Order To See The Light: A Book Review By Carolyn Baker

Going Dark In Order To See The Light: A Book Review By Carolyn Baker


On page 53 of Guy McPherson’s new book Going Dark, he asks: “Is it possible for a scientist to die from a broken heart?” I can’t answer that question, but I do know that it is possible for a scientist, or any of us, to live wholeheartedly and to discover an unprecedented depth of meaning and connectedness as a result of allowing our hearts to be broken—over and over again. My friend Andrew Harvey says that the only heart worth having is a broken one.

Radical Passion: An Antidote To Fear And Despair, By Carolyn Baker

Radical Passion: An Antidote To Fear And Despair, By Carolyn Baker

Since the Enlightenment, mystical knowledge has been minimized, even demeaned in the West as “unscientific.” Only knowledge gained intellectually through the scientific method was deemed valid by Enlightenment thinkers. However, Andrew Harvey argues that one likely outcome of the current collapse of industrial civilization and its glorification of the intellect is that yet another marriage, that of the rational with the sacred, is in process. Mystics and scientists need one another, he asserts, declaring that “It is time that Westerners realize that mystics are scientists of their domain.”