Author: Astrid Fitzgerald
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 1584205369
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 658
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Book Description
Many people are looking for a deeper and richer spiritual life. They sense that there is more to their existence than the surface of life seems to offer, but they are confused and uncertain about where to look and how to begin. Being Consciousness Bliss is a rich, profound, and eminently accessible compendium of wisdom that will help orient people toward a more fruitful spiritual search. Drawing on a dazzling array of sources, including the insights of G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky as well as the spiritual traditions of the East, it gives a clear and compelling account of the true inner structure of the human being and how it may be developed to its full potential. Part One discusses the current human condition -- the "sleep" of ordinary life -- and how a person may begin to wake up from it. Part Two offers a feast of excerpts from the Perennial Philosophy -- the great wisdom tradition that underlies all cultures and religions -- to feed and nurture the growth of the soul. Part Three provides simple ways to put these insights into practice in daily life. Clear, sensible, and erudite, Being Consciousness Bliss is a resource, suitable for both beginners and advanced practitioners, to be used and treasured for many years. "This is a feast of a book, spread out like a banquet of the freshest foods, served wholesomely, and presented artfully. Starting from a premise that "the aim of human life is to know who we are - to realize our Self, our true nature, and our identity with the Universal Self...," Fitzgerald's poetic and passionate prose awakens consciousness on a deep level. She helps us feel the Self, so we can begin to work with the Self. To complement her own inspired writing, she includes a section with words of wisdom from other sources, grouped by such intent as to examine suffering or to explore aspiration. In addition, there is a cornucopia of suggestions for practice, such as how to focus attention on a task, or how to listen to the sound of your own voice. Dotted with illustrations and charts to further clarify the text, this work is an invitation to a nourishing meal of self-awareness." --S.J.A., Managing Editor, NAPRA Review "Following Aldous Huxley, Astrid Fitzgerald's tireless pursuit of an inner path is sure to awaken the heart to bliss and rouse spirit to behold." --David Appelbaum, editor of Parabola Magazine "This book is equal parts wisdom, beauty, and inspiration. Astrid Fitzgerald opens the insights of the ages for anyone to follow. Highly recommended." --Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Healing Beyond the Body, Reinventing Medicine, and Healing Words "Astrid Fitzgerald's Being Consciousness Bliss is a well-researched, clearly written account of the essential teachings given by all the major wisdom traditions, which all teach that we are one human family." -- Sri Swami Satchidananda, Founder & Spiritual Head, Integral Yoga International /Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville
Author: Dawson Church
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1401957773
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Award Winner in the Science category of the 2020 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest Award-winning author and thought leader Dawson Church, Ph.D., blends cutting-edge neuroscience with intense firsthand experience to show you how you can rewire your brain for happiness-starting right now. Neural plasticity-the discovery that the brain is capable of rewiring itself-is now widely understood. But what few people have grasped yet is how quickly this is happening, how extensive brain changes can be, and how much control each of us has over the process. In Bliss Brain, famed researcher Dawson Church digs deep into leading-edge science, and finds stunning evidence of rapid and radical brain change. In just eight weeks of practice, 12 minutes a day, using the right techniques, we can produce measurable changes in our brains. These make us calmer, happier, and more resilient. When we cultivate these pleasurable states over time, they become traits. We don't just feel more blissful as a temporary state; the changes are literally hard-wired into our brains, becoming stable and enduring personality traits. The startling conclusions of Church's research show that neural remodeling goes much farther than scientists have previously understood, with stress circuits shriveling over time. Simultaneously, "The Enlightenment Circuit"-associated with happiness, compassion, productivity, creativity, and resilience-expands. During deep meditation, Church shows how "the 7 neurochemicals of ecstasy" are released in our brains. These include anandamide, a neurotransmitter that's been named "the bliss molecule" because it mimics the effects of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. It boosts serotonin and dopamine; the first is an analog of psilocybin, the second of cocaine. He shows how cultivating these elevated emotional states literally produces a self-induced high. While writing Bliss Brain, Church went through a series of disasters, including escaping seconds ahead of a California wildfire that consumed his home and office and claimed 22 lives. The fire triggered a painful medical condition and a financial disaster. Through it all, Church steadily practiced the techniques of Bliss Brain while teaching them to thousands of other people. This book weaves his story of resilience into the fabric of neuroscience, producing a fascinating picture of just how happy we can make our brains, no matter what the odds.
Author: George M. Marsden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190073330
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 489
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Book Description
The Soul of the American University is a classic and much discussed account of the changing roles of Christianity in shaping American higher education, presented here in a newly revised edition to offer insights for a modern era. As late as the World War II era, it was not unusual even for state schools to offer chapel services or for leading universities to refer to themselves as “Christian” institutions. From the 1630s through the 1950s, when Protestantism provided an informal religious establishment, colleges were expected to offer religious and moral guidance. Following reactions in the 1960s against the WASP establishment and concerns for diversity, this specifically religious heritage quickly disappeared and various secular viewpoints predominated. In this updated edition of a landmark volume, George Marsden explores the history of the changing roles of Protestantism in relation to other cultural and intellectual factors shaping American higher education. Far from a lament for a lost golden age, Marsden offers a penetrating analysis of the changing ways in which Protestantism intersected with collegiate life, intellectual inquiry, and broader cultural developments. He tells the stories of many of the nation's pace-setting universities at defining moments in their histories. By the late nineteenth-century when modern universities emerged, debates over Darwinism and higher criticism of the Bible were reshaping conceptions of Protestantism; in the twentieth century important concerns regarding diversity and inclusion were leading toward ever-broader conceptions of Christianity; then followed attacks on the traditional WASP establishment which brought dramatic disestablishment of earlier religious privilege. By the late twentieth century, exclusive secular viewpoints had become the gold standard in higher education, while our current era is arguably “post-secular”. The Soul of the American University Revisited deftly examines American higher education as it exists in the twenty-first century.
Author: David Bentley Hart
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300155646
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Religious scholar Hart argues that contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history and provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheists' misrepresentations of the Christian past.
Author: David Bentley Hart
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268201951
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
David Bentley Hart offers an intense and thorough reflection upon the issue of the supernatural in Christian theology and doctrine. In recent years, the theological—and, more specifically, Roman Catholic—question of the supernatural has made an astonishing return from seeming oblivion. David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods presents a series of meditations on the vexed theological question of the relation of nature and supernature. In its merely controversial aspect, the book is intended most directly as a rejection of a certain Thomistic construal of that relation, as well as an argument in favor of a model of nature and supernature at once more Eastern and patristic, and also more in keeping with the healthier currents of mediaeval and modern Catholic thought. In its more constructive and confessedly radical aspects, the book makes a vigorous case for the all-but-complete eradication of every qualitative, ontological, or logical distinction between the natural and the supernatural in the life of spiritual creatures. It advances a radically monistic vision of Christian metaphysics but does so wholly on the basis of credal orthodoxy. Hart, one of the most widely read theologians in America today, presents a bold gesture of resistance to the recent revival of what used to be called “two-tier Thomism,” especially in the Anglophone theological world. In this astute exercise in classical Christian orthodoxy, Hart takes the metaphysics of participation, high Trinitarianism, Christology, and the soteriological language of theosis to their inevitable logical conclusions. You Are Gods will provoke many readers interested in theological metaphysics. The book also offers a vision of Christian thought that draws on traditions (such as Vedanta) from which Christian philosophers and theologians, biblical scholars, and religious studies scholars still have a great deal to learn.
Author: David Bentley Hart
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802866867
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
As news reports of the horrific December 2004 tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof of either God s power or God s nonexistence, asking over and over, How could a good and loving God if such exists allow such suffering? In The Doors of the Sea David Bentley Hart speaks at once to those skeptical of Christian faith and to those who use their Christian faith to rationalize senseless human suffering. He calls both to recognize in the worst catastrophes not the providential will of God but rather the ongoing struggle between the rebellious powers that enslave the world and the God who loves it wholly.
Author: Ivan Antic
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781986066075
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Samadhi is the goal and the peak of meditation. According to classical and contemporary interpreters of yoga and meditation, samadhi denotes the unity of the subject and the object, the inner and the outer world, our Self and Absolute. In other words, enlightenment. Here, this unity is described simply as the unity of consciousness and existence. In this book you will find much more details about this unity, it will be revealed in a completely new way, you will comprehend that unity of the conscious and the existence in a man is gradually achieved at all levels of consciousness and being, on which a man exists and works, in all dimensions, and which are expressed in chakras, psycho-energetic centers in a man. Each chakra represents a blend of consciousness and existence. This blend is also manifested through the human culture of life and civilization. Understanding the chakra is connected to the historical development of the man and the events in the world, not only to the personal states of consciousness. It is an old and universal story of understanding the meaning of existence. In fact, the entire cosmos and life represent a spectrum of merging and expressing of consciousness and existence. Consciousness is expressed as existence and existence is fundamentally conscious. Moreover, consciousness is here explained in the light of an understanding of the consciousness of a man's soul as well, which through intelligent design, thanks to the quantum field creates the whole reality and existence. This can be because the soul of the man comes from the same divine consciousness that allows the whole existence. A complete connection and the realization of both consciousness and existence occurs only in a man who reaches Samadhi through meditation. The whole other nature, all of the cosmos and all of our lives, are just a scenography in which the drama of this merging is occurring. Though, paradoxically, Samadhi always already happens as a mere existence. The only question is whether a person participates in it all the time, whether he/she is aware of it. This book will help you to see the existence in such a way.
Author: Ivan Antic
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781688799080
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
If the fundamental cosmic constants were any different, there would not be any conscious life, at all. The entire cosmos exists exactly the way it is so that conscious living beings, us, could exist. If we became fully aware of the fundamental constants the whole universe rests on, we would realize that cosmos could not exist if it were not exactly the way it is right now, in everything, in every, even the tiniest detail. If you were not reading these lines, and if you were not where you are now, in such an environment and life situation that you are, if every thing you see were not there where it is - this entire cosmos could not exist. Such is the nature of the perfection of existence. Existence cannot be any different than it already is at any given moment. The reason we do not see the perfection of reality is due to the fact that we do not see the entire reality, we do not see that existence extends across multiple dimensions. We do not see all the dimensions of nature, but only its roughest, physical appearance, we are able to perceive with our senses. All the dimensions are in us, we are made up of all the dimensions of nature. Only to the point we become conscious of the reality of our own being, can the reality of the overall existence become clear to us, with all its dimensions. Only then can we have the right perspective for the true awareness of the answers to all the big questions of existence: of the life and death, good and evil, justice and injustice, happiness and unhappiness, success and failure... When we are whole we are harmonized with the wholeness and we see that everything is positive which always inspires us to do the right thing. When we do and view something as negative, it means we are not whole and we fail to see the wholeness. We can always be whole and perfect. The outside world is not an obstacle toward this aim. It is already perfect and it is waiting for you to recognize it as such. The problem is only in our mind and the existing mindset. That is the only thing that is being perfected as we speak. Our mind is best perfected by perceiving the perfection of existence here and now, all round us. In this book, you will discover and learn about: Why Do We Not See Reality as Perfect Consciousness, Existence and the Man in Between Scientific Evidence of the Existence of Perfection Sin: the Perfect Reason for the Birth and Death Causality and Free Will are Connected Perfectly Karmic Maturity and the Circling of Divine Consciousness The Perfection of Spiritual Practice and much, much more! The perfection of the divine consciousness that enables everything is always there. We only need a little stirring up to remind ourselves of it, some detachment from illusions in order to be able to observe it in everything, at any given moment. Get it now. --- "This book was written to be read with pleasure as we get very logical answers to questions about events from our lives that go beyond logic." - 5-star Amazon Review "If you are troubled by the paradoxes of life, the mystery of death, reincarnation, good and evil, justice and injustice ... here the background of these issues is clearly revealed. Far more than you would have expected." - 5-star Amazon Review "A perfect synthesis of science and mysticism with personal experience." - 5-star Amazon Review
Author: Matthew Levering
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493403362
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
Leading theologian Matthew Levering presents a thoroughgoing critical survey of the proofs of God's existence for readers interested in traditional Christian responses to the problem of atheism. Beginning with Tertullian and ending with Karl Barth, Levering covers twenty-one theologians and philosophers from the early church to the modern period, examining how they answered the critics of their day. He also shows the relevance of the classical arguments to contemporary debates and challenges to Christianity. In addition to students, this book will appeal to readers of apologetics.
Author: Indar Krishan Raina
Publisher: Walnut Publication
ISBN: 9390785510
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 86
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Book Description
This book discusses in detail the importance of maintaining the God consciousness to achieve God realization. Without maintaining the God consciousness one may never touch the higher planes of self consciousness and at the end may land up disastrously nowhere. The book is divided in 5 topics of Consciousness, Spiritual Experiences and Miracles, Holy Path, Spiritual Quest and Renunciation. Saint Khemraja chief disciple of Sage Vasaguta has said that the aspirants who do upasana and meditation day and night do not achieve anything even after years of practice. These aspirants are ignorant in a way bound by worldly affairs and maya. The realization of self has not taken place. When full realization has not been achieved, that when consciousness has not been filled with independent state of supreme God consciousness. Till then everything is useless. There will be no results. There will be no progress on the path to God realization. So, it is very important to maintain Consciousness of Supreme God at all time for the real benefit of one’s efforts. The independent state of God consciousness is also found in each and every being. In accordance with Vijnan Bhirav one must find this God consciousness. To discover it one should concentrate on totality of individuality which is the state of universal consciousness. By doing this practice one will get differentiated state of universal consciousness above the individuality of consciousness. One has to be aware of God consciousness at all the times in true spirit with utmost love dedication and seriousness. This God consciousness is most intoxicating if cultivated in right and true manner. Without maintaining the consciousness the progress is hindered. This consciousness should be endeavored to hold it in all the three states.
