Bill Meacham Ph.d.

How to Be an Excellent Human: Mysticism, Evolutionary Psychology and the Good Life Bill Meacham Ph.d.

How can we live good, fulfilling lives? How can we be happy? These questions have been at the forefront of philosophy ever since Socrates, and this engaging book attempts an answer. It addresses the big questions of life:

• How should we live our lives?
• How should we decide how to live our lives? How should we even frame the question in the first place?
• What is it to be human? What are we like, how do we function?
• What is our place in universe? How do we fit into the bigger picture? What is the bigger picture, the basic nature of all of reality?

The book is exciting and wide-ranging. It is incisive philosophy made accessible to the general reader. The author is equally at home lucidly explaining how mystics make sense when they say that all is one and how evolution has provided us with powerful but fallible mental capacities. The book offers an exhilarating journey with stops along the way to consider consciousness, panpsychism, brain science, quantum physics, how we are like and unlike chimpanzees and bonobos, where morality comes from, how our emotions both guide us and trip us up, how our thinking works, how it sometimes fails and what we can do to fix it. Throughout, it recommends an approach to life that maximizes well-being, leading to the possibility of happiness and abundance for all.

The book covers a lot of ground, but it is quite approachable. You can read it straight through as an intellectually exciting story. Or you can dive in anywhere, dipping into chapters that pique your interest. In either case you will have fun reading it, and you will be rewarded with insights and ideas that will stimulate and delight your thinking.