Books like The Presence of the Past — picked by fans

This is another unconventional recommendation because it’s not only about grief. Maté is a medical doctor whose work focuses on the damage that unprocessed emotional trauma—including grief—does to the body and how to process emotions in a way that is less likely to lead to physical disease.

I think this book is a necessary complement to books about complicated grief because it provides an understanding of what happens when we do not allow ourselves to fully experience grief in a safe and supported manner, and provides insights into how to do so.  

I learned much from these essays that helped me understand my own spiritual experiences and helped me counsel others. I particularly like the way that transcendental experiences (e.g. near-death experiences, mystical moments, channeling, UFO encounters) are portrayed not as signs of mental disorder but as potentially disturbing moments along the path of personal growth and development—understood through various religious and spiritual traditions.   

I appreciated the essays that offer valuable suggestions for families, support groups, and professional caregivers to assist those in crisis.           

Amongst the books covering the scientific basis of energy healing, Oschman’s Energy Medicine stands out for its accessibility to the general reader. Energy Medicine provides a sound foundation to the subject. Covering the historical development of the subject; the scientific basis for measuring the energy body; the frequencies of its electromagnetic fields; and how this research has allowed the development of techniques and technologies for its measurement and regulation in order to promote healing and restore health.

A whole range of energy modalities are discussed amongst which we find such, by now, standard medical interventions as Pulsed Electromagnetic Field Therapy (PEMF); others, such as acupuncture, are still considered to be ‘alternative’ in the context of mainstream medicine; and still others, such as Rolfing or Structural Integration, fall within the ambit of ‘personal development’. The great value of this information is that it provides the reader with a broad, up-to-date scientific… show more.

Cutting a tangent across the cultural background of most healers, this work is redolent of a worldview that was lost when the great tides of modernity swept away our native awareness of the depth and complexity of nature, natural processes, and how they affect our health and well-being. It is with something approaching joy, therefore, to encounter a tradition that counts its continuous, uninterrupted heritage by the millennia rather than the years! This work, above all others, has done more to help me to re-connect with and relate to nature, natural processes, and their healing potential than any other and served to illuminate a greatly expanded view of the healer’s path. Secure in its ageless worldview, strong on its metaphysics, filled with practical self-development exercises; and yet this work delivers all of this in a clear, easily understandable language. 

This book takes what seems to be an incredibly basic feature of the world—temperature—and shows how a tremendous amount of scientific ingenuity and choices made over two centuries contributed to defining and measuring temperatures.

Showing how concepts taken for granted today emerged over time and could have been different helps reveal how little of what we know comes from direct observation. 

This is a collection of twenty-four essays by thirty-six prominent researchers, demonstrating how important this topic has become for both scientific and philosophical research. In 2016 (after I had published ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE: Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence [2012], where I discuss Paul Humphreys’ view on pp. 231-2), he published EMERGENCE: A Philosophical Account, Oxford University Press, New York.

What I find especially significant in this more recent (and more challenging) work is that, in effect, emergence theory has developed into both a metascience and a metaphilosophy–as is evident in Humphreys’ Chapters 2, “Ontological Emergence” and 5, “Conceptual Emergence,” as well as Chapters 6, “Philosophical Topics Related to Emergence,” and 7, “Scientific Topics Related to Emergence.” This parallels very closely my own perspective on both scientific and philosophical conceptions of emergence.

Polanyi, an eminent Hungarian Jewish chemist who spent his career at the University of Manchester, was the smarter brother of the more famous Karl Polanyi, the socialist economic historian. Michael (Mihály) shows in the book how science depends on ordinary, “personal” knowledge, as for example in riding a bicycle. He was a “liberal” in the European sense, unlike his brother, and saw the scientific community as analogous to a free market, and the free market as analogous to a scientific community.

I first encountered the philosophy of physicist Bohm in another book by the philosopher Renée Weber (Dialogues with Scientists and Sages) in which she, the Dalai Lama, and Bohm (among others) explore, well, everything. But Bohm’s own exploration blends Buddhist concepts with physics. One of the many reasons I am Buddhist myself is its architecture and allowance for new concepts including physics theory and the reality of light itself. His implicate order for the universe explains more about its reality than accepted current theory. I’m no physicist nor towering intellectual, but I am following the Buddha’s advice to figure it out for myself. This book helped immensely. Sadly his work is overlooked by the scientific community.

I regard this book as perhaps the greatest book about the nature of science ever published. In it, Popper spells out his dramatic view that science proceeds by putting forward bold, imaginative guesses, which are then subjected to ferocious attempts at empirical refutation. When these conjectured theories are refuted, scientists are forced to think up a better conjectural theory–and that is how science makes progress.

In this book, Popper shows how this dramatic account of how science proceeds by a process of conjecture and refutation has implications for fields beyond science, such as philosophy, in that it implies that, whatever we are doing, our best hope of success in solving our problems is to consider possible solutions and subject them to ferocious criticism.

In my opinion, Horgan’s book is of great value, and I find it an important reference in considering the subject of “the end of science.”

This book is brave and lucid, with plenty of good ideas on topics related to the limits of knowledge in science. The intuition that the scientific age is declining is prophetic, I guess, but not so the causes Horgan gives. It is possible the limits of knowledge is one of the causes, but there is much more behind the twilight of science, and I think it is more related to being sated with knowledge rather than to the limits of knowledge.

It is more a sociological/anthropological question than a pure debate about whether there remain scientific problems to be solved.