The View from Cassiopeia

The recent death of Henryk Skolimowski makes this engaging book written by an engineer and gardener all the more timely in articulating a simple and popular explanation of his worldview based on the centrality of light. The book is written as a series of letters reflecting on the state of the world and what we can do about it, at least in terms of sowing seeds. The title may be related to Voltaire's brilliant satire in Zadig, a giant who looks incredulously down at the follies of humanity in the process of destroying our life-support system. Voltaire also recommended at the end of Candide that the best thing we could do was to cultivate our gardens, advice which the author is certainly following himself. The topics covered are those that concern us all, including the climate of fear in which we live and the domination of mechanistic science, which he controversially argues has done more harm than good. In the later part of the book he explains how light is related to consciousness in a panpsychic view, and how light is also highly significant in physics and biology. Like Henryk, John sees us as cosmic beings in a friendly living universe, which he distinguishes from the mechanistic and religious views. His message can be summed up in his quotation from Teilhard that a change in seeing should result in a change of being.