Why the World Around You Isn't As It Appears: A Study of Owen Barfield

"Mr. Linderman has the highly focused purpose of reaching out to those of us who are overly infected by Enlightenment thinking-and who isn't?-and providing the foundation for a mode of thinking that should engage everyone who reads about it and will astonish everyone who truly understands it." -Frederick Dennehy, honored New Jersey attorney "Linderman demonstrates how consciousness evolves…helping me understand the development work we do at Sekem." -Ibrahim Abouleish, Founder of Sekem and winner of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize), and the Nobel Laureate-led Oslo Business for Peace Award (2012) "A deftly guided and joyful journey…truly to reexamine everything we know as well as how we came to know it…. Not just some clever thought experiment; it is a matter of our survival. -Michael Metzler, Enrichment Instructor, Rochester Institute of Technology "A practical guidance to remedy the malaise of a society devoid of wonder." -Emily Ann Roy "Consider it a source for university courses in consciousness and culture, an excellent round-up of calls for 'reconnecting mind and matter,' or a lively tale of a man's victorious slaying of the old enlightenment and his wise welcome to the new, but read this timely book." -Gertrude Reif Hughes, Professor Emerita, Wesleyan University, Connecticut Empirical knowledge is only one side of "reality." Empirical knowledge is all about the "outside," the surfaces of objects, the matter we can see and touch. It does not speak to the "insides," the unconscious inner reality, subjectivity, feelings, and meaning that humans contribute to the world of objects we experience in our day-to-day lives. The New Enlightenment looks at the inside from that place phenomenologist Edmund Husserl termed "the great world of the interiority of consciousness." Using the insights of Owen Barfield (1898-1997) as his starting point, Linderman investigates the nature of consciousness, the Enlightenment, scientific thinking, belief, and the power of imagination. This book is for those who appreciate the insights of alternative thinkers but feel at the mercy of an engineer neighbor, an amateur science buff friend, or skeptical relatives. They confidently present clear, reasoned, scientific arguments to discredit, or at least bring considerable doubt to the veracity of the claims of the alternative thinkers you find compelling. Before you can explain why you find such alternative writers so helpful, you need to be able to articulate succinctly the theory of knowledge that undergirds their ideas. If you struggle to do so now, you will find help in this book.