MIND FLIGHT:
Wisdom, Enlightenment, and the Journey of Life

by Thomas Lombardo and Jeanne Belisle Lombardo

A book that is appearing in serial form on The Wisdom Page

About two years ago Thomas Lombardo sent me an essay for possible inclusion in The Wisdom Page.  I liked the essay very much, but it was  highly personal, and I could see no category into which it would fit.  In an email I told him that. 

But thoughts began to churn, and the next day I wrote him back saying "yesterday...my thinking was inside the box of my self-created Wisdom Page structure.  Your comments have made a convincing case that the box needs expanding!  Personal stories have inspired and taught all of us, so I've decided to create a new Wisdom Page section tentatively titled Personal Quests for Wisdom."  Soon after, I created the new section — and there Tom's essay, The Time of Your Life: Personal Responsibility, Wisdom, and the Future, found its rightful home.  That essay has since become one of the most popular documents on the website.

Tom has a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, is Faculty Chair in Psychology, Philosophy, Religion, and Future Studies at Rio Salado College in Arizona, and is Executive Director of the Center for Future Consciousness.  He is also a superb writer.  Thoughts began to churn for Tom too.  The essay, yes, but there was a larger, much more complex story to be told, much more to say.  So Tom and his wife Jeanne Belisle Lombardo, also an educator and writer, decided to tell that story in a book titled MIND FLIGHT: Wisdom, Enlightenment, and the Journey of Life.  Not only am I delighted that they have done this, I am also extremely pleased that the Lombardos have decided to make the book's first presentation to the world via The Wisdom Page.  It will appear in serial fashion, with the next of the book's twelve chapters added each month.  The first installment went up in July 2009 with Table of Contents, Prologue, and Chapter 1.

So much for my (Cop Macdonald's) take on all this.  Here, Tom and Jeanne describe the book:

Mind Flight is a personal and philosophical narrative, from time past to time present and into time future. It is a story about the quest for wisdom, the pursuit of enlightenment, the search for love, and the aspiration toward a positive vision of the future. It is an encyclopedia of ideas, a weaving together of a personal narrative with an intellectual odyssey that explores a multitude of theories and philosophies from across the great panorama of history.

Why search for wisdom and enlightenment? The pursuit of wisdom and enlightenment is critically important to living the good life - to realizing what is best in us, to giving meaning and purpose to our existence. Wisdom and enlightenment bring quality to life. Wisdom answers the question of how to live; enlightenment answers the question of what to live for. They are the key to a preferable future and the realization of love. This main argument and central stream of thought evolves through the book.

The autobiographical narrative spans over forty years and moves from an old industrial town in the wooded hills of New England, where weightlifting and fist fighting define human virtue and value, to the great sunlit expanse of the southwest, scene of the author’s personal recreation of the Garden of Eden and the Library of Babel.

Beginning with the youthful stirrings of philosophical enlightenment during the era of the Hippie Revolution – of sexual and spiritual freedom, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix, and the evolutionary metaphysics of 2001: A Space Odyssey – the storyline moves to the icy lands of the Midwest and the myriad assaults on the author’s sense of reality. There is the explosive emergence of Beethoven in the young man’s life; his embrace of the fantastical realities of science fiction that unsettle everything; several ill-fated excursions to the Rockies; an unnerving experience with sensory isolation tanks that leads to a collapse into near oblivion; the discovery of the Taoist Yin-Yang - the grand pattern to it all; and encounters with madness and God, both in and out of a mental hospital. The journey eventually leads to the mystical deserts of Arizona, a strange new land of intense heat, surrealistic blue skies, and cosmic starry nights, where the significance of the future and wisdom are revealed, giving meaning and direction to life. The quest is not, however, without disruptive though ultimately creative jolts of anguish and despair, villainy and betrayal, that energize and transform reality. 

Order and chaos; good and evil; truth and beauty; passion and reason; eternity and time; creation and destruction: all these archetypal themes of life and existence are explored and engaged. Philosophy, science, psychology, myth and religion, music and art, the value and meaning of education: all form major areas of inquiry within the book. Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Wells, Freud, Sartre, and Borges, among many other significant writers and thinkers, are examined and debated.

Mind Flight passionately delves into the nature of knowledge and reality, freedom and personal responsibility, evolution and reciprocity, the meaning of the good life, and the great puzzles of mind, self, and consciousness. Grounded in the wisdom of the past and the new insights and ideas of contemporary thought, Mind Flight reaches out into the dazzling possibilities of the future. It sets sail into outer space, contemplates robots, androids, and aliens, travels to multiple ends of time, and jumps into alternate realities to resonate and connect with a Neanderthal man. All of this is part of the story, part of the quest for wisdom and enlightenment.

Tom and Jeanne Lombardo, July 2009