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Author: Peter Ralston
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1583948732
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Building on his previous groundbreaking work, Peter Ralston once again proves to be a sure-footed guide for readers seeking to negotiate the challenging terrain of personal and spiritual growth. In accessible language, Ralston demonstrates how the lofty goals of self-transformation and enlightenment can be achieved with a no-nonsense approach available to anyone willing to reach beyond their current experience of self and reality. Pursuing Consciousness is a down-to-earth handbook for staying focused on the work at hand, even while tackling such unsettling tasks as investigating deeply ingrained psychological beliefs and identifying common areas of misunderstanding that hamper transformative growth. Ralston explains that deeper levels of consciousness aren't just for monks—anyone can have an enlightenment experience. He shows that enlightenment does not transform the self, and transforming the self does not produce enlightenment. Once we grasp that these two pursuits take place in entirely different domains of consciousness, we can use each to empower the other. Ralston provides specific tools for changing the very person that we experience being. His work has been acclaimed by people from a diverse range of disciplines—including spiritual teachers, psychiatrists, cognitive scientists, physicists, and artists. As with Ralston’s previous works, this book points the way to a direct encounter with the true nature of Being and the possibility of real personal change.
Author: Peter Ralston
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1583948732
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
Building on his previous groundbreaking work, Peter Ralston once again proves to be a sure-footed guide for readers seeking to negotiate the challenging terrain of personal and spiritual growth. In accessible language, Ralston demonstrates how the lofty goals of self-transformation and enlightenment can be achieved with a no-nonsense approach available to anyone willing to reach beyond their current experience of self and reality. Pursuing Consciousness is a down-to-earth handbook for staying focused on the work at hand, even while tackling such unsettling tasks as investigating deeply ingrained psychological beliefs and identifying common areas of misunderstanding that hamper transformative growth. Ralston explains that deeper levels of consciousness aren't just for monks—anyone can have an enlightenment experience. He shows that enlightenment does not transform the self, and transforming the self does not produce enlightenment. Once we grasp that these two pursuits take place in entirely different domains of consciousness, we can use each to empower the other. Ralston provides specific tools for changing the very person that we experience being. His work has been acclaimed by people from a diverse range of disciplines—including spiritual teachers, psychiatrists, cognitive scientists, physicists, and artists. As with Ralston’s previous works, this book points the way to a direct encounter with the true nature of Being and the possibility of real personal change.
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580
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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Author: Michael Trask
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501752448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
Following the 1960s, that decade's focus on consciousness-raising transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of movement politics. The mind's powers came to preoccupy a range of thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain, seventies cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age persuasions. In Ideal Minds, Michael Trask presents a boldly revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the seventies intellectual landscape who share a commitment to what he calls "neo-idealism" as a weapon in the struggle against discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews. In a heterodox intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, Ideal Minds mixes ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical economics, and the sociology of religion. Trask also delves into the decade's more esoteric branches of learning, including Scientology, anarchist theory, rapture prophesies, psychic channeling, and neo-Malthusianism. Through this investigation, Trask argues that a dramatic inflation in the value of consciousness and autonomy beginning in the 1970s accompanied a growing argument about the state's inability to safeguard such values. Ultimately, the thinkers Trask analyzes—John Rawls, Arne Naess, L. Ron Hubbard, Hal Lindsey, Philip Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Edward Abbey, William Burroughs, John Irving, and James Merrill—found alternatives to statism in conditions that would lend intellectual support to the consolidation of these concepts in the radical free market ideologies of the 1980s.
Author: Nicholas Humphrey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674038908
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
“A brilliantly inventive account of the evolution of consciousness, the best yet” (Paul Broks, Prospect). “Consciousness matters. Arguably it matters more than anything. The purpose of this book is to build towards an explanation of just what the matter is.” Nicholas Humphrey begins this compelling exploration of the biggest of big questions with a challenge to the reader, and himself. What’s involved in “seeing red”? What is it like for us to see someone else seeing something red? Seeing a red screen tells us a fact about something in the world. But it also creates a new fact—a sensation in each of our minds, the feeling of redness. And that’s the mystery. Conventional science so far hasn’t told us what conscious sensations are made of, or how we get access to them, or why we have them at all. From an evolutionary perspective, what’s the point of consciousness? Humphrey offers a daring and novel solution, arguing that sensations are not things that happen to us, they are things we do—originating in our primordial ancestors’ expressions of liking or disgust. Tracing the evolutionary trajectory through to human beings, he shows how this has led to sensations playing the key role in the human sense of Self. The Self, as we now know it from within, seems to have fascinating other-worldly properties. It leads us to believe in mind-body duality and the existence of a soul. And such beliefs—even if mistaken—can be highly adaptive, because they increase the value we place on our own and others’ lives. “Consciousness matters,” Humphrey concludes with striking paradox, “because it is its function to matter. It has been designed to create in human beings a Self whose life is worth pursuing.” Praise for Seeing Red “A wonderful amalgam of science, philosophy, and art. [Seeing Red] is based on deep knowledge of visual processing by the brain and poetic understanding of human experience. This is a remarkable achievement.” —Richard Gregory, Emeritus Professor of Neuropsychology, University of Bristol, and editor of The Oxford Companion to the Mind “A brief, brilliant, and wonderfully lucid contribution to consciousness studies. By combining empirical scientific method, evolutionary theory, and a sensitive appreciation of the arts, Nicholas Humphrey argues plausibly that the “hard problem” of consciousness—the difficulty of explaining the connection between the material brain and the phenomenon of individual selfhood—may itself be the answer to a bigger question: what makes us human?”—David Lodge, author of Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays “Illustrating his argument with the musings of poets and painters, Humphrey stylishly inspires curiosity about consciousness.” —Gilbert Taylor, Booklist
Author: Nicholas Humphrey
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156379
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
A radically new view of the nature and purpose of consciousness How is consciousness possible? What biological purpose does it serve? And why do we value it so highly? In Soul Dust, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, a leading figure in consciousness research, proposes a startling new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the "soul niche." Tightly argued, intellectually gripping, and a joy to read, Soul Dust provides answers to the deepest questions. It shows how the problem of consciousness merges with questions that obsess us all—how life should be lived and the fear of death. Resting firmly on neuroscience and evolutionary theory, and drawing a wealth of insights from philosophy and literature, Soul Dust is an uncompromising yet life-affirming work—one that never loses sight of the majesty and wonder of consciousness.
Author: Peter Ralston
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1623171121
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Peter Ralston’s exceptionally lucid trilogy on the nature of human consciousness culminates here in The Genius of Being, a book of deep contemplations on the unseen elements that create our world. The first volume, The Book of Not Knowing, garnered much praise as a comprehensive exploration of the depths of self and consciousness. The second volume, Pursuing Consciousness, clarifies the difference between enlightenment and self-transformation, and then pairs these two goals in a strikingly effective way. This third book is both shorter and more complex, taking us straight to the heart of the origins of our experience. In a progression of illuminating assertions, Ralston shows us how human consciousness carves out distinctions from whatever is absolutely true. This dynamic not only generates both self and reality from nothing, it imbues them with the quality of objective truth. From the time we first distinguish between self and not-self as infants, we begin making a sequence of existential assumptions that result in the illusion that a self is some ethereal “object” within. This universally accepted assumption persists despite the failure of exhaustive investigations to locate this inner self. This book is not for the faint of heart or the casual seeker, but contemplating the assertions here empowers you to personally and experientially grasp what is rarely even glimpsed: a profound consciousness of the genesis of human experience.
Author: Gary S. Selby
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830872779
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Engaging the writings of C. S. Lewis, Gary Selby contends that spiritual formation comes about not by retreating from the physical world but through deeper engagement with it. By considering themes such as our human embodiment, our sense of awareness in our everyday experiences, and the role of our human agency, Selby demonstrates that an earthy spirituality can be a robust spirituality.
Author: Peter Ralston
Publisher: Frog Books
ISBN: 9781583941591
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
A Zen-inspired “physical education” program for martial arts practitioners and anyone interested in mind-body transformation Using simple, clear language to demystify the Zen mindset, Ralston draws on more than three decades of experience teaching students and apprentices worldwide who have applied his body-being approach. More of a transformative guide than a specific list of exercises devoted to any particular physical approach, Zen Body-Being explains how to create a state of mental control, enhanced feeling-awareness, correct structural alignment, increased spatial acuity, and even a greater interactive presence. Exercises are simple, often involving feeling-imagery and meditative awareness, which have a profound and sometimes instant effect. Areas of exploration include: • Beginner’s Body-Being • Three aspects of body awareness • Five principles for an effortlessly effective body • Opening a door--five steps to transformation • Fourteen points on structural alignment Where similar guides teach readers what to do, this book teaches readers how to be.
Author:
Publisher: The Study Society
ISBN: 9780954793968
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Author: Richard Dien Winfield
Publisher: AltaMira Press
ISBN: 1442223383
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures provides a clear and philosophically engaging investigation of Hegel’s first masterpiece, perhaps the most revolutionary work of modern philosophy. The book guides the reader on an intellectual adventure that takes up Hegel’s revolutionary strategy of paving the way for doing philosophy without presuppositions by first engaging in a phenomenological investigation of knowing as it appears.
