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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For People Who Pause To Wonder,
By Andrea Sharp (Malibu, California United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Transformation: A Guide to the Inevitable Changes in Humankind (Paperback)
This book is about being "wide awake." George Leonard was writing for people who, maybe pausing from the blinding effects of modern life and labor long enough, might be waking up to that something out there that's way beyond the daily grind, and barely, just barely, comprehensible to humans. When you begin the sometimes agonizing, sometimes exhilirating process of awakening to awareness of what I can think of to refer to only as "more", the ideas George Leonard captured in this outside-the-box book are a helpful, extremely engaging perspective on and proposed explanation of what all the drumming and pounding and agony of civilized life might be about. He says, "The impassioned thesis of [the book] is that beyond the dying of our present culture lies the possibility of a new and better culture ... leading to greater development of human resources, and that fascinating adventures await us in a transformed world." "Someday," he says, "we may gain eyes to see it full face: the radiant and terrible beauty of humankind transformed." George Leonard is a war veteran, a former senior writer for Look magazine writing first-hand accounts of American life through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and a scholar of the first degree. The contents of his book range from allusians to Hans Christian Anderson to Newtonian Physics and Magick, and his arguments are about as well supported as something as unprovable as the mega-transformation of human life can possibly be (especially given the microscopic number of answers all of modern knowledge provides for just about anything). Articulate, highly ordered, clear stream-of-consciousness style takes you to places like this: "This planet does not weigh six thousand million, million, million tons. It does not weigh an ounce. It floats lighter than a feather along a perfect curve of space-time..." And "We fear, perhaps more than anything else, to give up our neuroses, our discontents, our dis-eases. Simply to be at ease fills us with fear. We rush for the sanctuary of our sickness, the safety of the morning news, the stock market, the pennant. We reach for chemical drugs or consumerism. We plunge into education and culture, and then go on trying to change everything except ourselves." And "...humans ... have to be afflicted with dis-ease (discontent) in order for Civilization's work to be done." What if it were true, as he argues, that "...our national goals are difficult to attain - perhaps unattainable - because we have set them too low." What if civilized culture's MYTHS include: Politics. Old Age. Drugs as pleasure. Necessity of war. Disease (dis-ease). Even death. A bit annoying are occasional wanderings into the complaining, negative drone so common at the time the book was written - the early 1970s. But he knew, even back then, that "the flow of information in a human society is regulated by information. Information is also energy, if only a fraction of that which it regulates." On some of the book's pages more than others, he achieved the remarkable feat of recording in language those ineffable moments rarely glimpsed, even describing those moments in a kind of self-reflective ripple from which he was at those moments writing: "...certain days of freakish weather..., when time and place play tricks on us, when old loves rise up to mock our unresolve, when our secure faith in the impossible shifts, leaving us no steady place on which to stand. On such a day" we may be summoned "back again to our wildest dreams and darkest fears. To understand the Transformation, pay attention." What if peace, joy, compassion, health, the capacity and talent of each person fulfilled -- are not merely possible, but inevitable. Definitely something to think about next time you're sitting in a traffic jam on your way to another day of Kafkaesque work, wondering what -- in the world -- we're doing all this for.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book that was ahead of its time,
By Casca (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Transformation: A Guide to the Inevitable Changes in Humankind (Paperback)
This book was first published in 1972.Leonard states at the beginning of this book "It is my thesis that the current period is indeed unique in history and that it represents the beginning of the most thorough change in the quality of human existence since the creation of an agricultural surplus brought about the birth of civilized states some 5,000 years ago.""I believe that the time is overdue for the emergence of a new vision of human and social destiny and being." His intention is not to "fabricate a new organizing myth",but to contribute to an understanding of changes that are happening, and to "attempt a few glimpses at transformed behavior and being."Leonard shows how a dis-eased state of being is the normal lot for the individual in Civilization.Being expansionist,the system needs aggressive and frustrated males.The feeling nature and wide ranging sensory pleasures are discouraged, with a focus on "specialized genital activity."Civilization inflames lust but denies real sensual satisfaction.Civilization cannot go on forever, because the earth is a limited system. Leonard outlines various myths which civilization promotes to justify itself, such as the myth of unlimited growth,the myth of the limited good,the myth of inevitable competition,the myth of a separate species, and the myth of glory, honor and duty.The book is full of insights into the dis-ease that is called Civilization.He says that a major portion of what is called education is actually the training of our screening devices, to screen out perception of our own biofields and those of others.Leonard is not in the business of providing some slick instant fix.He knows that lasting transformation takes time, and is largely a matter of awareness, especially awareness of what life should really be about."The most radical act of this age is perhaps to experience four straight days of joy, without anxiety or guilt or regret.Civilization cannot survive very many such days."
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