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The second half of the book shift away from Jung (still there in spirit) as Mayes brings the focus on his teaching practice and beliefs that are based upon the archetypal teacher-student dynamic that can go to some shadowy places. Front and centre are his spiritual beliefs, as if Mayes gets the thumbs up from Jung to preach what he practices with enough modesty to know neither he nor Jung should cross the dogma line.

Who were the audience for Dirac’s lectures, and what was going on in their minds as they listened to him speak? I ask this question quite a bit, but I am curious to know if there were a few hold-outs in the crowd thinking variations on “So you say, if curved space was in fact real” or “I cannot accept that there is a new way to calculate Lagrangian.” Doubt is wide-spread but will always move science forward.

It appears that Stephenson was an uncredited screenwriter for 2004’s Academy Award-winning ode to racial profiling, Crash. Hardly a stereotypical stone is left unturned: Italian-American mafia with a pizza empire, South American drug lords, Asians either all-business or just bizarre; no surprise what role the Arab in the taxi will play. Take away the fanciful tech and this tale is just how the West was done.

The second volume of essays has the author emboldened to take his meandering thoughts to more topical places, as if he is taking stock of his life by writing about how to ignore and impoverish descendants by buying books he barely has interest in reading (although he certainly cites enough Ovid and Cicero to say otherwise about his tastes). Yet a part in ‘On Cruelty’ where he discusses reincarnation shows his worth.

It is both a relief and a revelation to read another scholar and educator who can frame the role of the teacher in the context of Jungian archetypes, equating the goal of learning a more holistic process of individualization. Of course, it is a goal not often achieved since a majority of teachers are thinking extrovert-types, and worse yet have a habit of insisting their learners become this way too. So, ten pillars!

Frustrating to have a decent amount of speculative fiction focused on Juanita’s face-mapping and prescient knowledge of an infocalypse, only to be followed by nonsense chapters including a virtual swordfight and the inner thoughts of Rat Thing I’m probably not (hopefully) going to read about in later chapters. When the story gets back to what seems like the plotline, it’s literally a moustache-twirling industrialist.

The “little point” explained by Eckhart and implicated by Suzuki as analogous to satori has been lost on me, as it was hard to picture while reading what either author might have meant. For certain it wasn’t the zero-dimensional non-object lacking any length, width or depth, as it is something one could get behind (or perhaps in front of) and somehow is the nature of God as seen through the not-God Zen lens.

How much of de Montaigne’s work have him recycling tidbits of knowledge from other historical periods, using examples of Alexander, Caesar or Charles V to illustrate not so much the point he is arguing, but rather how well-read he seems to be? It is fascinating to see him forging an academic tradition, plainly laid out in his Democritus and Heraclitus essay, but even with clothing and smells he can’t resist cribbing.

Hard to imagine that, as of the publishing date in 2005, this book was the only scholarly connection between Jungian psychology and pedagogy in the K-12 school system. Much of the earlier chapters take Jung’s side against his predecessor, the assumed father figure Freud but it may just be me transferring my fascination for the former to indifference for the latter. Mayes seems to have a spiritual angle to his advice.

For a novel so admired by techies, I really hope it gets better fast. With all the mixed metaphors recycling hard-boiled noir, ridiculous over-explanations of obvious things (yes Neal, most readers can factor powers of two without you reminding them) and a nasty habit of coining crappy neologisms like “bimbo box” and “MetaCop,” it will take forever to get to the end of what reads like an ninth-grade story assignment.

Wonderful and bittersweet to have the story wrapped up, and only one loose end left open to interpretation. The main theme emerges just before a climatic Dreamspace showdown: an enigmatic quotation attributed to nobody in particular, “If you can’t have change without injustice, then there should be no change” (p. 376) - Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu are strong candidates for the actual quote, but I guess it’s Kiki.

As mystically interconnected Eckhart’s writing was to Suzuki’s study of Zen Buddhism, his books (and this one in particular) found fascinating ideas about time, mind, soul and reality that are rhizomatically linked to other books I happen to be reading at the same time also the big blockbuster I will soon watch: just need to read Eckhart and Suzuki’s ruminations on the nature of space and power for the full gauntlet!

The Good that Laszlo and others with whom he dialogues isn’t a mystery but something I have experienced for a good length of my lifetime, possibly even longer! It’s the same healing technique I learned in Japan and practice at a distance. To make this connection even stronger, I feel the same waves of healing energy as in Japan as I recently did while reading Gibbons and Sági relate very similar experiences for them.

So Foulnap was on the right side, and after a few more roles are reversed and honours bestowed, Charlie becomes the go-to agent of yet another organization involved with dreaming-altering Somnagraphs and freedom of the oppressed nightwalkers. Rather than playing the victim of unruly fortune, he takes matters into his hands (while also giving Laura a leg up) as he comes face-to-face with Aurora and reckless HiberTech.

Somewhat familiar concepts such as the microtubules of Hameroff and Penrose (congrats to the latter for his visit to my university the same day news broke of the first photographed black hole!) are taken up as evidence of the Akashic field. I can accept that what happens within our minds, the process of consciousness, is a holographic projection of the cosmos. What I am curious about is how to live out this paradigm.

Here’s where each set-up gets a bit, umm, wonky as multiple threads receive a quick succession of reversals: HiberTech’s aggressive acquisition, a bewildering blizzard, the calamitous Cambrensis, a deadly deus ex machina... even Charlie is self-aware of everything at once. Much like the long-sought-after Gronk photo, the readers and protagonist will have to wait to see what develops racing to the denouement.

Feeling very left behind, I can only hope all these equations are leading somewhere while Dirac presses on. I’m not even sure what he is trying to measure or prove: particles have a certain velocity or that quantum mechanics in general works? At least someone somewhere from the world’s second biggest landmass got enough of it to publish Dirac’s article in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics that he mentions.

Another stunning feat of set-up and pay-off: Toccata punches Charlie in the eye, twice, for lying yet he comes up with an even bigger lie to cover his tracks over Brigitta’s imminent discovery that circles back to reveal a deeper truth, how each overwinterer has to do these things to help one another. Just like Jonsey and her wonderfully prescient observation: “when you pretend to think you know someone...” (p. 316).

Charlie is not too bright or attractive, hardly heroic and bordering on poverty; and yet can run multiple schemes, have one of the most powerful women claiming to be bundling with him (while another, although technically comatose, professing her love for him), be famed for killing a nasty Villain, and finally, through Active Control, increase his fortune. Sounds like dreams come true, and perhaps that’s all they are.

The deep dimension goes by many names throughout history from Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus to Bruno, Bohr and Bohm, yet still is a mystery. At least in the West whereas India’s timeless belief in Brahman persists, restated as Akasha and its hip, new, scientistic name A-dimension. As Laszlo goes into more descriptive metaphors for the in-formed, I can feel the universe evolving. So what do the Zen Buddhists call it?

Amazing synthesis of two seemingly incompatible religious beliefs when seen from broader brushstrokes, Suzuki examines carefully the finer details of the mystical side of Buddhism and Christianity. First, he explores the often-named but rarely comprehended Meister Eckhart and his connection to Zen, tells occasional tales about monks obtaining satori and ends the chapter with an explication of artists' skill.

Don’t be fooled by the short, pithy essays on the happy life or imagination, de Montaigne goes to town on the topic of educating children with the same fury as anyone who attended one too many parent-teacher conferences. It is also not without irony that he writes so much about how children barely learn by reading rather than doing, as if every family in France could afford a household fluent in Latin as Chez Michel.

Charlie is proving to be less of a fish out of water, more of a shark with laser beam, the last item being his memory inside his head! He is able to take control of the viral dream and find out a few things about the Notable Goodnight that she couldn’t figure out. His waking life, however, is still shrouded in mystery. At least he is a little less trusting of Aurora even when she is offering an in to the den of evil.

For a character marked by the peculiar Dickensian passivity most heroines seem to have, Esther is getting things done in this instalment. Not only is she affianced to the only character of means, but she travels to London to get Richard to repent his waywardness and reunites with former flame Allan, who in turn tracks down Jo for some slangy exposition in the slum part of London affectionately called Tom-all-Alone's.

the first couple chapters of any scientific-minded book (at least the dozen or so that I’ve read) usually have the opening couple of chapters explaining the “normal” view of the world before getting into their quantum uncertainties. Laszlo takes all these strange properties like multiverses and holofield as given before launching into his even more out-there theory, and coins the oxymoron classical quantum mechanics.

I feel a bit torn up to discover these Essays are a collection, kind of a greatest hits of de Montaigne’s extended maxims, but on the other hand may have been overwhelmed to read them in their original format. As much as he sets himself up as a humble and introspective scribe, there is a strong sense of his self-imposed one-upmanship with many of the cherry-picked examples from classical history and stoic philosophy.

There is an uneven balance towards optimism in the final section of the book, modelled on the life of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, where humanity has more reasons to trust progress and technology than to fear the proposed Fourth Age. While the American-made syndicated show at the end of its first season pushes boldly into a utopia, it is also lending us a glimpse of an unfathomable Fifth Age ending with an inner journey.

The divided consciousness of Toccata and Aurora presents an intriguing twist to Charles’ impeccable memory as he now has two sides of her personality to keep straight, each of her has a wildly differing agenda. As gruff and abusive as Toccata has been called for the first half of the novel, she at least seems to know what is right. Aurora, on the other hand, becomes increasingly more suspicious when the cat’s around.

The mystery of the Ten Cow-Herding Pictures, like many other Zen examples in the book, is hard to grasp, purposefully so. Seems fitting that there were originally six stages but those images have been lost to the ages. Connected to Islamic and Christian mysticism in its esoteric instruction, the hunt for enlightenment is best done mindfully and then forgotten moments after it is obtained. When did cows come to Japan?