A Book for Life | The Seven Mysteries of Life

Simply one of the greatest books ever written on the interbeing of science, philosophy, and spirit | The Seven Mysteries of Life | Guy Murchie

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	• The Seven Mysteries of Life Guy Murchie Mariner Books, 1999 - 704 pages average customer review:based on 35 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Seven Mysteries of Life

A different cover, but the same text and drawings I remember from the 70's. It's great to be rereading it again.

A Book for Life

This marvelous book came into my life almost twenty years ago and remains my favorite book to this day. I have reread many sections many times, and even with the advances in science that have arisen since the publication of this book, it remains deeply informative and philosophically rewarding. For all those who seek to investigate life on earth from its many facets, this is a book to treasure. I only wish Guy Murchie had lived long enough for me to thank him personally!

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Simply one of the greatest books ever written on the interbeing of science, philosophy, and spirit

The Seven Mysteries of Life is one of the most memorable and thought-provoking books I've ever read, and while science continues it halting march toward greater insight and knowledge about the universe, this book feels a fresh and timely as when I first read it in the early 1980s. I'm a science writer/editor, and every year I read dozens of popular books in the various fields that Murchie covers, and yet the breadth, scope, and depth of The Seven Mysteries of Life still amaze me. I think this book will be read hundreds of years from now, while perhaps most popular science books from the 20th century will be as much read as 19th century science books are read now.

To read this book is to embark on an amazing journey that will (or should!) change forever the way one looks at the world. Murchie's book perfectly captures what Einstein points to when he said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." Here is a book to open one's eyes to this very mystery, which is alive all around us, if we just have eyes to see.

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Desert Island Material

I can't remember how I first heard of this book--probably from reading book reviews on Amazon. I must have been impressed with the reviews because I bought one but when I received my first copy I was disappointed to find that the copyright was dated 1978 and every third or fourth page was illustrated with detailed, hand-drawn sketches that reminded me of my high school Biology class where I made similar drawings of cells and plants. My first reaction was that the book was a little less than cutting-edge. Nevertheless it was a new book and I started to read it.

After several nights of reading the book in bed, I distinctly remember that one night I stopped reading, opened my eyes wider, looked at the cover of the book, and I said out loud, very slowly and deliberately, "This is a good book." The next night I said to myself, "Every single page of this book is full of interesting ideas. I could pick any page of this book at random and really enjoy reading each page." There was no filler in the book at all. Every page, even every sentence was a work of art, thought provoking, and delicious. I reconsidered my opinion of the hand-made illustrations and instead of seeing them as low-tech productions I saw them as the careful drawings of a masterful philosopher, scientist, poet, or artist--I wasn't sure which.

Guy Murchie began his book's preface with these words: "When I undertook this work in the spring of 1961, I was quite aware that I would almost certainly be thought presumptuous in attempting to write about all of life in one book. But I have to go ahead in the faith that any such seemingly impossible, if not harebrained, project on such a universal theme could hardly help being worthwhile--largely because of its rarity."

Rarity is an understatement. Murchie's book is more densely packed with great ideas than anything I had ever read before. Unlike many popular science books that spend 300 pages restating the same three ideas, or unlike other science books that are impenetrable because of a masochistic writing style that heaps abuse upon any would-be reader, Murchie's book is a sheer delight to read and constantly surprises the reader with insights about life, the universe, and what it all means--insights that are expressed so freshly that they seem knew. Murchie took seventeen years to write this magnum opus and "averaged less than one finished sentence a day during all this time," he said in his preface. He called his writing, "painstaking" which must be true because I can't imagine any poet laboring more over word choices than Murchie obviously did. His writing flows, is enchanting and reveals a universe that is more beautiful, rational, and caring than anything I had ever heard from science before--although later I would discover similar joy from guys like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.

Unlike a magician who astounds by what he does not reveal, Guy Murchie astounds by what he does reveal that we have not been seeing but which has always been in plain sight. Murchie is, then, in this sense, a revelator.

Toward the end of his book, on page 614, Murchie wrote some kind words about the prophet Baha'u'llah. I immediately started to worry that the author of this great book that I had been falling in love with would suddenly reveal himself to be an unbalanced follower of yet another cult leader. I researched the Baha'i Faith religion that Baha'u'llah founded and encountered what seemed to be a peace-loving-enough community. After reading a list of their core beliefs (and after reading Murchie's book), I honestly felt that I had never read a one-page list of beliefs written by someone else that I could agree with more than this one. Nevertheless, I knew that what looks good on paper may not necessarily be so beautiful when practiced as an institutional religion. So I haven't attempted to learn much more about the Baha'is except to find out they conduct meetings in San Diego that I would like to attend once just to get an idea about how successful they have been at putting their wonderful ideas into the messy realm of organized religion. I wish them well.

I searched for "Guy Murchie" on the internet and learned that he was a tall man and just as gracious and charming, by others' accounts, as I had imagined him to be. Although I would love to read a little biography about him, it is not really necessary for his writing sufficiently reveals the man Murchie to be one of my all-time favorite human beings whose hand I would be honored to shake while expressing a little gratitude for creating a work so beautiful that I can only describe it as art, an odd choice of words for the book that I would most like to take to a desert island.

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desert island book

This is a book to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island. Basically it is about everything in the material world with a good dose of spirituality added.

"All life in all worlds" -this was the object of the author's seventeen-year quest for knowledge and discovery, culminating in this book. In a manner unmistakably his own, Murchie delves into the interconnectedness of all life on the planet and of such fields as biology, geology, sociology, mathematics, and physics. He offers us what the poet May Sarton has called "a good book to take to a desert island as sole companion, so rich is it in knowledge and insight."

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