A great many of you have heard of the author Michael Crichton. He wrote Jurassic Park, Coma, Airframe, Congo & a great many other bestsellers. I haven’t read a single one of them but I am going to recommend a non-fiction book written by him. The title is very simple: Travels. It is a series of related essays on travel -- external travel & internal travel. I cannot recommend the book highly enough. It is the best book I’ve read in the last thirty years.
The first sixty or so pages are autobiographical. I don’t know if any you know that Crichton studied to be a doctor. He acquired his degree & then never practiced medicine. He explains why. He thinks that perhaps psychological factors are the most important cause of disease. Or people might be “manifesting mental processes through their physical bodies.” If all this sounds confusing he sums it up by saying “mental states caused disease,” or, most simply “We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us.”
Long ago I heard that line & memorized that line & my wife told me over & over, don’t say that to people. Many people will get very angry if you say that. How can you say to an ill person that he, or she, is directly responsible for the illness. I’m sorry if I angered some of you, & Crichton does explain what he means. Read his book, Travels.
But the book is more, much-much more than a book on illness. as I said earlier, it is a series of essays on his travels. Some of the essays are just great essays about the places he’s traveled to but what makes the book outstanding, and again controversial, is the conclusions he arrives at.
He is a skeptic, a scientist, a believer in what he can see, feel, touch, smell. He does not believe in psychic phenomena, the paranormal, altered states of being. He voices every objection I would voice to such unverifiable data, but as he opens his mind more & more he comes to believe that “at least some psychic phenomena are real” and as I type these words I am skeptical and I know many of you doubt the reality of such out of body experiences.
Read Michael Crichton’s book Travels. He starts out doubting. He asks all the questions you would ask. He is highly intelligent, he doubts, he doesn’t want to believe, but by the end of the book, by the end of his travels, he believes & he makes me believe.
I have never ever wanted to go to one of those retreats where you get in touch with your other self, with the powers you supposedly posses but are unaware of. When I finished reading his book, Travels, I was ready to go on such a retreat. Someday I will go on such a retreat. I owe it to myself, and you owe it to yourself to read a highly entertaining, highly convincing book: Travels by Michael Crichton.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein