As bold and ambitious as it is concise and inviting, this wide-ranging, crisply penned exploration of both the subconscious and the subatomic offers something rare: a vision of the human future that’s more hopeful than dystopian. Grunther acknowledges all the “fear and anxiety” of our moment of “cataclysmic turbulence,” especially as it relates to climate change and the upheaval of a global shift to digital connections. But, drawing from a host of scientists, thinkers, and archetypes, Grunther lays out an encouraging argument: that humanity is on the cusp of “transcendent change” that began a century ago, with the discovery and exploration of—as the title suggests—quantum uncertainty and the unconscious. Linking Einstein and Freud, Jung and Planck, Grunther makes the case for “a paradigm-shifting synchronicity” that is “creating evolutionary change which points … to a New Renaissance.”With brisk efficiency and a love for making surprising yet intuitive connections across disciplines, Grunther tours readers through breakthroughs in our understanding of the quantum and the collective unconscious, twinned realms we’re still coming to understand—realms as “uncertain, paradoxical, entangled” as L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz. (That’s one of those connections.) The jolting, ongoing discoveries within both realms, Grunther argues, demonstrate the urgency of humanity learning to embrace right-brained thinking that pushes “beyond the known boundaries.” Grunther posits “this opening of the doorway between the known and unknown” as determining our species’ “ability to navigate our future and the “potential collapse of the very biosphere.”
Surprises abound, such as Grunther’s call for a “more expansive vision of how to live within the seismic thrust of climate change” and his linking, with some persuasive power, of the development of the internet (including its “nightmarish, unintended consequences”) with the goddess Shiva and the dream-underground. It’s nothing less, he asserts, than “the key archetype of interconnected Wholeness.” Grunther’s sweeping consilience often operates at the metaphorical or unconscious level, but it’s nourishing, optimistic, and will set open minds reeling.
Takeaway: Optimistic vision of intuitive human consciousness in the quantum future.
Comparable Titles: David Eagleman’s Livewired, Imants Baruss and Julia Mossbridge’s Transcendent Mind.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
