The Stone Monkey: An Alternative, Chinese-Scientific, Reality

By Bruce Holbrook

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688006655
• ISBN13: 9780688006655
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful, eye-opening/mind-expanding book

Negative reviews on this book come from people with the standard and defunct Aristotlean/Absolutist mind-set. If you really want to understand this book, you need to acquaint yourself with "E Prime" and Count Alfred Korzybski's "Science and Sanity", which will allow you to take the English language and make it SENSIBLE - and a mirror to the way the Chinese language is structured and functions. Familiarize yourself with E Prime and you'll see how absolutely brilliant the perspective held by the traditional Chinese on "reality" actually happens to be. You can't go wrong with this book, or with SCIENCE AND SANITY and E PRIME either.

It's Time To Do Away With All The Monkey Business About Science

Every worldview is based on certain assumptions about reality, and the Western scientific paradigm is no exception. That paradigm is one of isolation--the belief that reality can only be grasped by isolating the parts from the whole. Those isolated fragments can then be understood by analyzing, breaking down, and testing the severed limbs of the tree of reality under a variety of conditions--then serving up the results in peer-reveiwed media as exhibits in a carnival show. As if to say, "Look at me! Look at how I amputated a living limb off of the Body of Nature, I beat it to death by a thousand scientific tests, and here is the gangrened, rigor-mortified, mummified results--aren't I a great man of science?" The Chinese science worldview sees all of reality as a whole. True, the Chinese embrace the concept of two aspects of reality--called "Yin" and "Yang"--but they are not part of a process of fragmenting nature into two parts. "Yin/Yang" refers to how the different aspects of how our universe works come together into one great whole--so recognizing "Yin/Yang" is a repudiation of how Western science rips reality to rags instead of a support to it. Bruce Holbrook offers us in the West a lifeline--to rescue us from how the fragmentary dynamics of Western Medicine is tearing us apart--from how Western science results in environment-destroying technology and industrial practices, to "wonder drugs" that have side effects that are worse than the original condition the drug was developed to relieve, to the way we as humans are becoming more and more alienated from nature (continued urbanization and infrequent contact with the outdoors), our fellow humans (compared to the close feeling of community our grandparents shared with their next-door neighbors and fellow townspeople), and our own inner selves (demonstrated by our retreat into drugs, alcohol, and escaping from ourselves into the virtual reality of video games, titillating media, and other distractions). In Chinese science lies the Road Map to Sanity--the Sanity of bringing ourselves--like Humpty Dumpty--back together again. "The Stone Monkey" will bring to life the stone-dead heart in our work in science--to give us a science with a living, beating heart--a science that contributes to the healing of nature and no longer contributes to the ripping apart of nature. Thank you, Mr. Holbrook.

A fascinating alternative view of western science

If you suspect that the results of modern science, technology, and medicine are in the long run harmful to the health of individuals and societies, this book is a glimpse into an alternative way of thinking which was tossed aside during the rush of scientific discovery and scholarship suffered over the last few centuries.Reviews of a book so revolutionary will tend to be either dismissive, or a bit passionate; written by those who either aren't capable of stepping aside mentally as the book requires, or who are angry at the damage done.I suspect that the author wrote under a pseudonym, and is actually a well-known figure, an expert in the field of human psychology and eastern teaching. I strongly recommend this book for readers conversant with the sciences, but dissatisfied with the uses and manners of modern science.