Books I've Read

1. The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin 

2. Lying, Sam Harris 

3. Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris 

4. End of Faith, Sam Harris 

5. Free Will, Sam Harris 

6. Arguably, Christopher Hitchens 

7. The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene 

8. Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene 

9. The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene 

10. The Self-Aware Universe, Amit Goswami 

11. Bursts:The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do, From Your E-mail to Bloody   Crusades, Albert-László Barabási 

12. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins 

13. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins 

14. The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins 

15. The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins 

16. River out of Eden, Richard Dawkins 

17. Climbing Mount Improbable, Richard Dawkins 

18. The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan 

19. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl Sagan 

20. God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens 

21. Mortality, Christopher Hitchens 

22. Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens 

23. Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke 

24. Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan 

25. Billions and Billions, Carl Sagan 

26. In Defense of Secular Humanism, Paul Kurtz 

27. The Turbulent Universe, Paul Kurtz 

28. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking 

29. The Theory of Everything, Stephen Hawking 

30. The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking 

31. The Illustrated Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking 

32. The Universe in a Nutshell, Stephen Hawking 

33. The Ouroboros Code: Reality's Digital Alchemy Self-Simulation Bridging Science and       Spirituality, Antonin Tuynman 

34. Gandhi: An Autobiography - The Story of My Experiments With Truth, Mohandas K. Gandhi 

35. The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle 

36. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, Eckhart Tolle 

37. Stillness Speaks, Eckhart Tolle 

38. Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life, Eric D. Schrodinger, Dorian Sagan 

39. Jonathan Livingston Seagul, Richard Bach

40. Bleak House, Charles Dickens 

41. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens 

42. The Wedding: Nicholas Sparks 

43. Our Song: Nicholas Sparks 

44. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, Stephen King 

45. The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King 

46. The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands, Stephen King 

47. The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, Stephen King 

48. The Dark Tower V: The Wind Through the Keyhole, Stephen King 

49. The Dark Tower VI: Wolves of the Calla, Stephen King 

50. The Dark Tower VII: Song of Sussanah, Stephen King 

51. The Dark Tower VIII: The Dark Tower, Stephen King 

52. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, Homeland, R.A. Salvatore 

53. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, The Exile, R.A. Salvatore 

54. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, Sojourn, R.A. Salvatore 

55. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, The Crystal Shard, R.A. Salvatore 

56. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, Streams of Silver, R.A. Salvatore 

57. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, The Halfling's Gem, R.A. Salvatore 

58. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, The Legacy, R.A. Salvatore 

59. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, Starless Night, R.A. Salvatore 

58. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, Siege of Darkness, R.A. Salvatore 

59. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, Passage to Dawn, R.A. Salvatore 

60. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, The Silent Blade, R.A. Salvatore 

61. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, The Spine of the World, R.A. Salvatore 

62. The Forgotten Realm: The Legend of Drizzt, Sea of Swords, R.A. Salvatore 

63. The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks 

64. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig 

65. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert 

66. The Sphere, Michael Chrichton 

67. The Andromeda Strain, Michael Chrichton 

68. Eaters of the Dead, Michael Chrichton 

69. Prey, Michael Chrichton 

70. Maya Cosmogenisis 2012: The True Meaning of the Maya Calandar End-Date, John Major   Jenkins 

71. Jurassic Park, Michael Chrichton 

72. The Lost World, Michael Chrichton 

73. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding 

74. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka 

75. The Myth of Democracy, Ferdinand Lundberg 

76. The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and           Liberation, by Thich Naht Hahn 

77. The Essence of the Heart Sutra, The Dalai Llama 

78. A Case of Need, Michael Chrichton 

79. The Terminal Man, Michael Chrichton 

80. The Great Train Robbery, Michael Chrichton 

81. Congo, Michael Chrichton 

82. State of Fear, Michael Chrichton 

83. The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, Ben Casnoch and Chris Yeh 

84. The Lucifer Effect, Dr. Phillip Zimbardo 

85. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky 

86. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri 

87. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand 

88. Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak 

89. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 

90. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

91. 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Vern 

92. The Coming War with Japan, George Friedman

93. Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett 

94. The Third Reich, Albert Spear 

95. The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler 

96. 1984, George Orwell 

97. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury 

98. Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan

99. Into the Cool: Thermodynamics, Energy Flow, and Life, Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan

100. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes Ph.D

101. The Greatest Miracle in the World, Og Mandino

102. Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, Alan Watts

103. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

104. The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck M.D.

105. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, Christopher Hitchens

106. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist

107. Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett

108. I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter

109. Making Sense, Sam Harris

110. Waking Up, Sam Harris

111. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

112. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell

113. Crucial Conversations, Kerry Patterson

114. Crucial Confrontations, Kerry Patterson

115. Consilience, Edward O. Wilson

116. The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

117. The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Dr. Mattias Desmet

118. Behold A Pale Horse, William Cooper

119. Your Brain is a Time Machine, Dean Duomonamo

120. The Story of the Last Trump, H.G. Wells

121. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

122. House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski

123. Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

124. Triple Your Reading Speed, Wade Cutler

The Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis

                                                          The Inner Ring

                                                              C.S. Lewis

 May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy's War and Peace? 

       When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. "Alright. Please wait!" he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent, which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood-what he had already guessed-that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and a more real system-the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris, Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system. 

 When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing. I shall do my best to gratify it. I shall in fact give you advice about the world in which you are going to live. I do not mean by this that I am going to attempt to talk on what are called current affairs. You probably know quite as much about them as I do. I am not going to tell you- except in a form so general that you will hardly recognize it-what part you ought to play in post-war reconstruction. It is not, in fact, very likely that any of you will be able, in the next ten years, to make any direct contribution to the peace or prosperity of Europe. You will be busy finding jobs, getting married, acquiring facts. I am going to do something more old-fashioned than you perhaps expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to issue warnings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial that no one calls them "current affairs." 

 And of course everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with today. The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realize the truth of the old proverb that he who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. As for the Flesh, you must be very abnormal young people if you do not know quite as much about it as I do. But on the World I think I have something to say. 

 In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organized secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. There are what correspond to passwords, but they too are spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the border-line. And if you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six weeks' absence, you may find this second hierarchy quite altered. There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called "You and Tony and me." When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself "we." When it has to be suddenly expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself "All the sensible people at this place." From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it, you call it "That gang" or "They" or "So-and-so and his set" or "the Caucus" or "the Inner Ring." If you are a candidate for admission, you probably don't call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention it in talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness. 

Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognized the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the Russian Army or perhaps in any army. But you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the Ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the School Ring was almost in touch with a Masters' Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of the onion. And here, too, at your university-shall I be wrong in assuming that at this very moment, invisible to me, there are several rings-independent systems or concentric rings-present in this room? And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Rings-what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems. 

All this is rather obvious. I wonder whether you will say the same of my next step, which is this. I believe that in all men's lives at certain periods, and in many men's lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that "Society," in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside. People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communist coterie. Poor man-it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we-we four or five all huddled beside this stove-are the people who know. Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers "Look here, we've got to get you in on this examination somehow" or "Charles and I saw at once that you've got to be on this committee." A terrible bore... ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don't matter, that is much worse. 

 Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot, I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large. 

 I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only not a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together. And it is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organization should quite coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people invariably held the highest posts, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. In that way the second, unwritten system is bound to grow up. It is necessary; and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous. As Byron has said:

Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet The unexpected death of some old lady. 

 The painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is not an evil. But an earnest desire for her death on the part of her heirs is not reckoned a proper feeling, and the law frowns on even the gentlest attempt to expedite her departure. Let Inner Rings be an unavoidable and even an innocent feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in? 

I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of you may already be compromised. I must not assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not ask whether you have ever derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable. I will ask only one question-and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. In the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most. 

 But I said I was going to give advice, and advice should deal with the future, not the past. I have hinted at the past only to awake you to what I believe to be the real nature of human life. I don't believe that the economic motive and the erotic motive account for everything that goes on in what we moralists call the World. Even if you add ambition I think the picture is still incomplete. The lust for the esoteric, the longing to be inside, take many forms which are not easily recognizable as Ambition. We hope, no doubt, for tangible profits from every Inner Ring we penetrate: power, money, liberty to break rules, avoidance of routine duties, evasion of discipline. But all these would not satisfy us if we did not get in addition the delicious sense of secret intimacy. It is no doubt a great convenience to know that we need fear no official reprimands from our official senior because he is old Percy, a fellow member of our ring. But we don't value the intimacy only for the sake of convenience; quite equally we value the convenience as a proof of the intimacy. 

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it-this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing-the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an "inner ringer." I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in-one way or the other you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. 

 But you may have an open mind on the question. I will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I do. 

 It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters. And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still-just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naif, or a prig-the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we"- and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure-something "we always do." And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man's face-that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face-turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel. 

That is my first reason. Of all the passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain. 

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason-if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music-then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short-lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic. Once the first novelty is worn off the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humor or learning or wit or any of the things that can be really enjoyed. You merely wanted to be "in." And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow's end will still be ahead of you. The old Ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one. 

And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well know. You yourself once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can't in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There'd be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident: it is the essence. 

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it. 

We are told in Scripture that those who ask, get. That is true, in senses I can't now explore. But in another sense, there is much truth in the schoolboy's principle "them as asks shan't have." To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of insides," full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire, he will reach no "inside" that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. It is like the house in Alice Through the Looking Glass.