David Eagleman - Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlife (2009)

My one liner: These are extremely short stories, maximum 3 pages long, and hence very easy to read on the go. Hilarious, thought-provoking, moving, sad, and certainly not overtly religious. An experiment that went right.

 This is a book which makes us hold up a mirror at our own behaviour, our own existence, and our own values.  The method is ingenious.  By creating the trope
of the hypothetical afterlife, David Eagleman allows an observation of humanity from  outside the confines of the world we live in.  The tales, including some fables reminiscent of childhood readings of Aesop, are brief and colourful, some are morality stories, some motivational self-help guides, others just set off emotions of sadness or happiness.
 
Take for example our natural desire for familiarity. To be amongst people we know and care about, the communities we inhabit, the friends and colleagues we trust. In “Circle of Friends” you only gradually realise you are in an afterlife
after a certain period of time. Because initially everything looks like the world you lived in. You say goodbye to the wife and kids in the morning, leave for the office, where you spend the day working with your usual colleagues. But it does eventually dawn on you that you are in the afterlife. Why ? Because you come to realise that this world is populated only by people whom you’ve met before (whether friends, relations, colleagues, or fleeting acquaintances).  Although initially you like the attention you get from those around you, everybody is friendly, and you get to renew old acquaintances, you soon get depressed. 
Depressed because you come to notice an absence of crowds of unknown people, of new things to learn or explore. 
 
“You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting.  But no one listens or sympathises with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.”
 
Or why do we seek recognition, fame, our name in lights, the need to be the best-known fish in our particular pond ? Might there be a downside ? Well yes, a big one in the afterlife posited by “Metamorphosis”. You see, there are three deaths. And you have to wait in the waiting-room until the third death.  Death One is when the body ceases to function.  Death Two is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third death is some point in the future which is the last time on earth that your name is spoken.  Until then you stay in the waiting room, which basically resembles an airport departure lounge.  
  
“The gray-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history.  He waits with aching heart for his statue to fall.”

 In “Incentive” the incentive to constantly self improve and fulfil your potential during your life is clear.  Because you will have to spend your entire afterlife in the company of many many alternative versions of “You”.  But only the ones who in alternative parallel lives achieved greater success, for example because they reflect good decisions you should have made rather than bad decisions you actually made.  Or because of an instance where you didn’t fully motivate yourself to achieve a task, but did do so in a parallel life.  You will constantly be reminded of what might have been, so be motivated now, and you will have fewer “Yous” above you in the afterlife hierarchy.

 That’s three stories given away, but there are 37 more.  Eagleman is undoubtedly multi-talented; his professional speciality is neuroscience. And to cap it all I note from his Wikipedia entry that Italy's Style magazine named Eagleman one of the "Brainiest, Brightest Idea Guys for 2012" and featured him on the cover. Yeah, one of them.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the book.

My one liner: Some of the passages can be a little jarring. But you need to ignore that, as the author has attempted a remarkable feat here, in attempting to unify the karmic mysticism of Kabbalah with the undiscovered potential of quantum mechanics. With some substantial success. 

The author Jane Jensen is a computer scientist and computer games author, so I was optimistic that she would make a good stab at exploring, in fictional form, the possibility that future research in quantum physics will draw us to understand the past, present and future of human destiny.  And then I read the awful opening paragraph of the book. 

“Denton Wyle was seriously re-examining his choices...his back pressed hard against the cabin of the rescue ship as sea spray slapped him on the cheeks like an outraged Englishman...” Eh ? Come again.  But please, persevere with this, it really is worth it.

“One of the keys to deep wisdom is that there are only a few patterns in all of creation, and they are repeated over and over.  The planets revolve around the sun just as the electrons in an atom revolve around the nucleus.  The whorls of a seashell mirror those of galaxies.  ‘As above, so below.’  The Micro is a mirror image of the Macro....The physical world is made up of dualities: male / female, hot / cold, day / night, birth / death.  There is no ‘itness’, no ‘beingness’, which does not have an opposite.  Science has proven this true at every level of life: there is no particle without a corresponding antiparticle, no force without a counterbalance” From the Book of Torment by Josef Kobinski, Auschwitz 1943.

This duality forms the central thesis of the novel.  The heroine and hero are University of Washington Professor Jill Talcott, a young, driven quantum physics researcher of dysfunctional family provenance, and her loyal assistant Nate Andros (yes, an amorous interest does develop, sort of).  Talcott is secretively researching wave mechanics and energy pools (which the conventional scientific community finds laughable).  The Department of Defense (a non-public branch of the US military-government complex) is on to her. In the form of the equally dysfunctional Lt Calder Farris, who has almost super-human physical strength, and will stop at nothing to get hold of her research. 

Talcott has convinced her covetous and jealous departmental heads to let her test her wave equation on the department’s supercomputer. After the obligatory Eureka moment she and Nate discover the “One-Minus-One” wave theory which predicts the behaviour of all sub-atomic particles based on the interaction of wave-particles in higher dimensions.  Their insight is that space-time itself also has a particular type of wave pattern. It is rectangular rather than sine-wave (hence crests are “plus ones” and troughs are “minus ones”).  If radio waves are blasted out from an emitter in a form which exacerbates this wave pattern, in a way that makes both the crests and troughs more pronounced, then they can alter the nature of matter itself.  Their initial experiments are conducted in a basement lab on rats, fruits, cultures, and since they are both present in the lab, then by definition, themselves.  The results do indeed show behavioural changes in the subjects.  As the power of the emissions are increased on the plus side the subjects respond positively, becoming healthier and showing greater reproductive tendencies.  But increasing on the minus side has the opposite “evil effect”.  What if events, which are essentially groups of waves, also can also be similarly grouped into “good” and “evil”, and be manipulated accordingly ? The scientists start to grasp the fearsome possibilities that their research could unleash if it got into the wrong hands.

Aharon Handalman is an orthodox Rabbi in Jerusalem.  He has become obsessed with the life of Josef Kobinski, having found encrypted references to Kobinksi and to dangerous weapons in the ancient Torah Code.  Kobinski was a Kabbalist Rabbi sent to Auschwitz with his young son during the war. Acknowledged as a brilliant scientist, Kobinski had set out his scientific theories in a manuscript during the period of his incarceration.  “Kobinski believed that the highest spiritual path was to balance your sephirot [Tree of Life], to come into perfect alignment right down the center of the tree.  It is like a stick…which is all crooked.  It cannot go through a narrow hole.  In the case of the soul, there is also a narrow opening, at the navel, and the soul must be perfectly straight and smooth…to pass through…to escape the lower five dimensions…of good and evil.”  Handalman must make the journey to Poland to discover what actually happened to Kobinski in Auschwitz sixty years ago.  He now regrets having tipped off his friend at Mossad about his research.

Denton Wyle is a small-time Californian journalist, living off his trust fund money. A wayward, lucky, shallow womanizer.  He has drifted into writing articles on mysticism, strange occurrences, and particularly, strange disappearances. But now he thinks he has hit upon something big.  A Kabbalist Rabbi called Kobinski who seemed to have mysteriously disappeared from Auschwitz.  If he could just get his hands on Kobinski’s manuscript, whether by fair means or foul, he could really make a name for himself.

Farris, Talcott and Andros, Handalman, Wyle.  All are motivated by a different reason to understand the consequences of Dante’s Equation, and they all know that Kobinski’s papers hold the key.  And this is where the book really excels. It takes us into four parallel mini-stories, where each of the characters gets to experience those consequences first hand, to experience a world outside of his or her current existence, where the fundamental 50/50 equilibrium between good and evil of our earthly existence no longer holds.   

The author has attempted a grand project here.  She deserves congratulations for this effort.

This is the Wikipedia link for the book.