It's Cool to be Conscious

Author: Harry O'Brien
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1401933815
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 101

Book Description
Harry O’Brien is widely recognised as an elite professional football player in the AFL. Less known is the fact that ... deep down ... Harry is a philosopher at heart. There have been many obstacles in Harry’s personal life. In dealing with these, Harry has developed an appreciation that his story may inspire others to overcome their own challenges. It’s Cool to be Conscious includes personal stories from Harry’s life, both on and off the field. He shares the four pillars that he believes can help anyone to achieve their very best: • Seek a wide range of experiences • Believe you can control the outcomes in your life • Be open to the potential that life has to offer • Meditate to clear the mind and calm your thoughts With the same passion that he applies to AFL football, Harry now wants to help others. His frank and engaging story just may be the inspiration you need you to follow your dreams, forge your own path and kick some goals!

The Conscious Closet

Author: Elizabeth L. Cline
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 152474431X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
From journalist, fashionista, and clothing resale expert Elizabeth L. Cline, “the Michael Pollan of fashion,”* comes the definitive guide to building an ethical, sustainable wardrobe you'll love. Clothing is one of the most personal expressions of who we are. In her landmark investigation Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline first revealed fast fashion’s hidden toll on the environment, garment workers, and even our own satisfaction with our clothes. The Conscious Closet shows exactly what we can do about it. Whether your goal is to build an effortless capsule wardrobe, keep up with trends without harming the environment, buy better quality, seek out ethical brands, or all of the above, The Conscious Closet is packed with the vital tools you need. Elizabeth delves into fresh research on fashion’s impacts and shows how we can leverage our everyday fashion choices to change the world through style. Inspired by her own revelatory journey getting off the fast-fashion treadmill, Elizabeth shares exactly how to build a more ethical wardrobe, starting with a mindful closet clean-out and donating, swapping, or selling the clothes you don't love to make way for the closet of your dreams. The Conscious Closet is not just a style guide. It is a call to action to transform one of the most polluting industries on earth—fashion—into a force for good. Readers will learn where our clothes are made and how they’re made, before connecting to a global and impassioned community of stylish fashion revolutionaries. In The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth shows us how we can start to truly love and understand our clothes again—without sacrificing the environment, our morals, or our style in the process. *Michelle Goldberg, Newsweek/The Daily Beast

The Book of Highs

Author: Edward Rosenfeld
Publisher: Workman Publishing
ISBN: 152350384X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Blow Your Mindfulness An encyclopedia for the curious and courageous, The Book of Highs catalogs the hundreds of ways humans can alter consciousness, minus drugs and alcohol. Drawn from cultures around the world, here are positive techniques—Self-Hypnosis, Alterations of Breathing, Fervent Prayer, Spinning. And here are “negative” techniques—Self-Flagellation, Sleep Deprivation, Fire Walking. Methods derived from religious and mystic traditions—Transcendental Meditation, Tea Ceremony, Tantric Sex. Methods that use devices, from the domestic Metronome Watching, to the state-of-the-art Brain-Wave Biofeedback, Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Ganzfeld Effect, and Psychedelic Bathtub. Whether you’re looking for a life-changing adventure—like Skydiving—or something to do every day, just to change things up—like Zen Morning Laugh—The Book of Highs will get you there.

Seeing Myself

Author: Susan Blackmore
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 9781472137364
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand their own mind and to find a spiritual path that is compatible with science As an impressionable young student, Susan Blackmore had an intense, dramatic and life-changing experience, seeming to leave her body and travel the world. With no rational explanation for her out-of-body experience (OBE) she turned to astral projection and the paranormal, but soon despaired of finding answers. Decades later, a Swiss neurosurgeon accidentally discovered the spot in the brain that can induce OBEs and everything changed; this crucial spot is part of the brain's self-system and when disturbed so is our experience of self. Blackmore leaped back into OBE research and at last began to unravel what had happened to her. Seeing Myself describes her long quest for answers through spirituality, religion, drugs, meditation, philosophy and neuroscience. Anyone can have an OBE, indeed 15 per cent of us have. Even more have experienced sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming and the creepy sense of an invisible presence. At last, with the advent of brain stimulation, fMRI scanning and virtual reality, all these phenomena are beginning to make sense. Long relegated to the very fringes of research, the new science of out-of-body experiences is now contributing to our understanding of consciousness and our very selves.

Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings

Author: Clinton Callahan
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1942493002
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 490

Book Description
This book is about feelings, and the ways that we, as individuals and as a culture, have numbed ourselves against them. It is about unleashing the possibility of conscious feelings to re-make our lives into what really matters to us. The Power of Conscious Feelings introduces readers to the concept of the "personal numbness bar"--a measure set high by modern culture as a way of keeping everything "cool," under control, and consequently out of touch. This book provides the insight and the means for lowering that numbness bar. "You can feel more," the author asserts. You can regain the intelligence and energy of your feelings, so long denied and dressed up to appear acceptable. "Being cool," Callahan states, "allows you to look the other way about torture, invasion, pollution and injustice," and to accept the generic malaise that characterizes so many relationships. The central framework of the book is built with the Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling, including: * Learning the potent difference between thoughts and feelings, which most people confuse * Sorting out feelings (based in present) from emotions (based in the past or in somebody else's life) * Fully allowing that feelings are absolutely-neutral energy and information, neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative. Each chapter is enriched with THOUGHTMAPS-clear diagrams of ways we presently think and ways we could possibly think-and supported by an abundance of practical experiments to try. The Power of Conscious Feelings is so much more than a book of self-help or inspiration. Ultimately, it is about our connection with and responsibility for the fate of the Earth. When we are no longer numb, we are freed from solitary confinement in our private world of thoughts and beliefs. We emerge, already connected with other human beings, connected in the world of feelings we all have in common. This book actually guides the reader through four distinct evolutionary stages: from Personal, to Relational, to Transformational, to Cultural, in showing us how to use our adult feelings as the fuel for living our destiny as creators of sustainable culture. Choosing numbness was probably unconscious for most of us. But, Callahan is committed to showing us, step by step, in this moment, how we can change the mind and learn to consciously feel.

Breath

Author: James Nestor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735213631
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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

Consciousness Is the Only Reality.

Author: Neville Goddard
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781523856480
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 54

Book Description
Whilst modern day thinkers believe the events of life to be a haphazard collection of causes and effects, Neville Goddard, from his own experience, demonstrates that our lives are the results of our deepest thoughts and feelings. Furthermore, in these two lessons, he instructs us on how to achieve our deepest desires.

The Feeling of Life Itself

Author: Christof Koch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262042819
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
A thought-provoking argument that consciousness—more widespread than previously assumed—is the feeling of being alive, not a type of computation or a clever hack In The Feeling of Life Itself, Christof Koch offers a straightforward definition of consciousness as any subjective experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted—the feeling of being alive. Psychologists study which cognitive operations underpin a given conscious perception. Neuroscientists track the neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the organ of the mind. But why the brain and not, say, the liver? How can the brain—three pounds of highly excitable matter, a piece of furniture in the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as any other piece—give rise to subjective experience? Koch argues that what is needed to answer these questions is a quantitative theory that starts with experience and proceeds to the brain. In The Feeling of Life Itself, Koch outlines such a theory, based on integrated information. Koch describes how the theory explains many facts about the neurology of consciousness and how it has been used to build a clinically useful consciousness meter. The theory predicts that many, and perhaps all, animals experience the sights and sounds of life; consciousness is much more widespread than conventionally assumed. Contrary to received wisdom, however, Koch argues that programmable computers will not have consciousness. Even a perfect software model of the brain is not conscious. Its simulation is fake consciousness. Consciousness is not a special type of computation—it is not a clever hack. Consciousness is about being.

Consciousness

Author: Christof Koch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262301032
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Book Description
A fascinating exploration of the human brain that combines “the leading edge of consciousness science with surprisingly personal and philosophical reflection . . . shedding light on how scientists really think”—this is “science writing at its best” (Times Higher Education). In which a scientist searches for an empirical explanation for phenomenal experience, spurred by his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book—part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation—describes Koch’s search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest—his instinctual (if “romantic”) belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a “fringy” subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work—to uncover the roots of consciousness.