EHE Autobiographies Record Type: Review   ID: 100
The Eagle’s Quest: A Physicist’s Search for Truth in the Heart of the Shamanic World Wolf, Fred Alan
This is a form of EHE autobiography. It is a record of a journey a physicist, who also values exceptional experience, made to the Himalayas and South America and parts of the U.S. in an effort to become acquainted with shamans and their world, including experiencing what they experience. His motive is twofold: his own self-realization and his theoretical work as a physicist. Even when—especially when—he is experiencing deep dream, trance, out-of-body or other altered states and exceptional experiences he is weaving what he is learning into his quantum mechanical physical theory. He appears to be a scrupulously honest reporter of his experiences in that he describes some experiences and fleeting thoughts others might decide were not worth recording. Thus his shamanistic experiences enliven his physics. And his knowledge of physics—especially the role of the observer, quantum uncertainty, and the holographic universe—shed new light on shamanism. And whether he is in a sweat lodge or throwing up after taking Ayahuasca, he still asks penetrating questions. There are moments when his quest—shamanic experience and his work as a physicist—are so together that it is like describing a lucid dream. He is simultaneously the experience and his ideas about it, or maybe I should say from it. The book could be read simply as a very good travelogue and adventure story. But it is far more than that. It is even far more than an EHE autobiography, although it is that as well. What we have in this book is not only a person writing about how his exceptional experiences have taken him inside the Experiential Paradigm. We have a trained physicist who is making every effort to incorporate the noetic character of his experiences into the language of, if not ordinary physics, than at least extraordinary physics. Would that scholars, no matter what their field, would do the same!
Publisher Information:	New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1991. 320p. Bibl: 301-304; Index: 305-318

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