A Cosmic Book
Bentov is a standup cosmic comedian, an extragalactic Jokester quipping at the edge of the void, delivering a one-man monologue about the Mystery at the end of the universe. It happens to be ourselves. In 1979 the wisecracking scientist-meditator departed for a closer look at the Mystery, but from the other side of his early death we lesser intellects in the last decade have felt metaphysically bereft. In this posthumous work (edited and completed by his wife, the Boston sculptor, Mirtala), with its comic-book sketches, light-hearted irreverence, and magisterial spiritual penetration, Bentov explains more about the world in fewer pages and in simpler, more entertaining images than does a roster of prolix astronomer-philosophers in six lifetimes. Bentov regards himself as an inventor, a mechanical engineer, a plumber, a visionary who requests his revelations in the form of structures. In A Cosmic Book, Bentov distills with characteristic precision and impertinence his holistic model of cosmos and consciousness which, he's delighted to tell us, has a "happy ending."  The Creation, says Bentov, is a big hologram in the shape of an elongated torus, or smoke-ring doughnut. Its holographic nature guarantees that all information about itself is distributed uniformly throughout, which means the human, embedded in this matrix, has full access in consciousness to knowledge of the entire Creation. Vibration is a central concept to Bentov's model. Consciousness in a vibratory state manifests as our familiar matter. When the Absolute (or void or pure consciousness) begins to vibrate, manifest creation arises. Bentov describes a holographic series of systems beginning with a cosmos made of forty-nine universes (the observable circumference of each universe is twenty-billion light years) arranged in a helical coil; one-half million of these make up one super-cosmos, and this complexity continues upwards for seven levels. The summation is Manifest Creation. One reasonably wonders, as did our intrepid cosmic voyager, Bentov, who's running the show? The surprise Bentov finds at the end of the universe was himself. "It is yourself! It is your SELF, the supreme SELF that has been guiding you through the long and eventful trip back to itself." Bentov's exquisite paean to cosmic creation is most profitably read as the more esoteric postscript to his earlier, longer text, Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1978, reprinted 1988, Destiny Books). This review is only an inadequate precis of the vast riches in Bentov's modest and mind-ballooning work, itself only a humorous and tentative precis of the "absolute paradox" of creation. --FromIndependent Publisher