The Participatory Mind: A New Theory of Knowledge and of the Universe

by Henryk Skolimowski

We have taken IQ tests but, strangely, no Compassion Aptitude Tests (CATs). Yet mind and emotions need to be seen as two different parts of the same spectrum, says holistic thinker Henryk Skolimowski, if the human psyche, having taken an unprecedented battering this century, is to be mended. This cannot be accomplished, however, either through the offices of dusty philosophical treatises or popular psychological fixes, only by our arriving at a new way of looking at the world.
In a Grand Theory of participatory mind that builds on the insights of such thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin and Bergson as well as contemporaries Dobzhansky and Bateson, Skolimowski points to a new order, one brought about by a Western mind returning to, then reintegrating, the spiritual. This quest for fresh perspectives, as we approach the twenty-first century, has now become 'the hallmark of our times'.

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Rauros Ammonoidea · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a book of sad naïveté and alarming short-sightedness. Despondency underlies its synthetic endeavour, lacklustre as it ebbs in a maze of contradictions, utopian postcards and an excess of positivity (in the worst sense of the word) which disregards both science and religion, both history and culture and the history of culture(s) —they are sacrificed, dessicated, subordinated to a Golden image of evolution —evolution, that in which everything is interwoven, a linear display, a monolith of thought and timeless sensitivity steadily spiraling through consciousness and towards divinity.

A myth (instrument of salvation as he explicitly puts it) not only articulated in sterile, overly redundant prose; but bland, superficial and beyond all levels of terrible. Perhaps I would have appreciated his ignorance and itchy rambling if he wasn't so authoritative, so dismissive of other gnoseological traditions and frameworks. Like an inebriated loudmouth casting a turd on all that is subtle and beautiful in this world.

I can't still wrap my head around how I brought myself to finish this dreadful, dreadful tome. Must be some latent masochism.