The Third Age of the World: Lore

I’ve been doing it for years.
My goal is moving near.
It says, “Look! I’m over here.”
Then it up and disappears.
Kate Bush, “Sat In Your Lap”

Part of The Third Age of the World — return to the main guide for the full series and chapter index.

People who find this book interesting sometimes ask what to read next. This page collects works that resonate with the themes of The Third Age of the World: social ritual, attention, inside-out thinking, and the search for structure beneath appearances.

Some entries are here for clarity. Others are useful even when you disagree with them. A few are included simply because they influenced the development of the ideas discussed on this site.

Lore

Scott Adams — The Dilbert Future

A funny but accurate record of workplace ritual, status theatre, and what happens when organisations optimise for appearance instead of reality.

Alice A. Bailey — Telepathy

An example of how esoteric traditions describe perception as convergence toward objective reality and pattern recognition.

J. S. Bell — Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics

Clear and intellectually honest discussions of unresolved problems in physics. Valuable for its refusal to pretend difficult questions are settled.

J. G. Bennett — Gurdjieff: Making a New World

A historical and interpretive account of Gurdjieff’s teaching and the traditions behind it.

Eric Berne — Games People Play

Introduces the idea that much of social behaviour is structured interaction. Shows how repeated social “games” become self-defeating habits.

Frederick P. Brooks — The Mythical Man-Month

A realistic description of competent project work and why organisations so often replace it with procedure and ceremony.

Paul Davies — The Cosmic Blueprint

Readable discussion of order and structure in a universe that may be self-organising.

Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister — Peopleware

Explains why productive teams depend on trust, attention and shared understanding rather than management ritual.

Daniel Dennett — Consciousness Explained

An influential introduction to modern consciousness debates, useful whether you agree with its conclusions or not.

David Deutsch — The Fabric of Reality

An ambitious attempt to connect physics, computation, knowledge and evolution into a single explanatory framework.

Richard P. Feynman — The Character of Physical Law

Shows how scientific understanding works, and how it differs from explanation by authority.

Richard P. Feynman — The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Builds intuition from motion and process rather than static definitions. A reminder that the order of explanation shapes belief.

Kahlil Gibran — The Prophet

A quieter set of priorities and observations about human life, included as a counterbalance to modern haste.

Eliyahu Goldratt — The Goal

A systems-thinking story showing how clear observation solves problems that procedure cannot.

Robert Graves — Seven Days in New Crete

A novel exploring imagination, symbolism and the transformation of perception.

John & Mary Gribbin — Richard Feynman: A Life in Science

A biography illustrating how curiosity and independence operate in practice.

G. I. Gurdjieff — Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson

Difficult reading intended to force attention rather than passive consumption.

R. D. Laing — The Politics of Experience

A critique of social normality and how societies suppress direct perception.

Steven Levy — Hackers

Describes the culture of early computing communities and how cooperation can exist without hierarchy.

James Lovelock — Gaia

Introduces the idea of Earth as a self-regulating system.

Benoit Mandelbrot — The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Demonstrates that natural forms often share repeating structure across different scales.

P. D. Ouspensky — In Search of the Miraculous

Accounts of attention, consciousness and deliberate awareness practices.

Erwin Schrödinger — What Is Life?

A physicist’s careful reasoning about biology, order and explanation.

George Spencer-Brown — Laws of Form

A logical system showing how perception changes when a distinction is drawn.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — The Phenomenon of Man

An evolutionary view oriented toward increasing integration and complexity.

Kip Thorne — Black Holes and Time Warps

Explains relativity and the structure of time in a rigorous but readable way.

Gerald Weinberg — The Psychology of Computer Programming

Shows that technical work is inseparable from human attention and communication.

Isaac Newton — Principia

A historical reminder that earlier thinkers did not separate science and philosophy as sharply as modern culture does.

Discussion

This list crosses physics, psychology, computing, and older philosophical traditions. The point is not that these authors agree. The point is that similar patterns appear in many fields.

Across disciplines the same problems recur: ritual replacing observation, certainty replacing understanding, and authority replacing attention. The useful reader notices the pattern rather than choosing a single authority.

Future pages on this site will treat each theme separately and update the references with modern work, while keeping the core question unchanged: how do people move from passive belief to direct understanding?

Originally written in the early 2000s and refreshed for publication in 2026. Companion pages for each section expand the discussion and provide modern context.