Enlightenment Now

Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525427570
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR "My new favorite book of all time." --Bill Gates If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. By the author of the new book, Rationality. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.

The Power of Now

Author: Eckhart Tolle
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1577313119
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Celebrating 25 Years as a New York Times Bestseller — Over 16 Million Copies Sold It’s no wonder that The Power of Now has sold over 16 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 foreign languages. Much more than simple principles and platitudes, the book takes readers on an inspiring spiritual journey to find their true and deepest self and reach the ultimate in personal growth and spirituality: the discovery of truth and light. In the first chapter, Tolle introduces readers to enlightenment and its natural enemy, the mind. He awakens readers to their role as a creator of pain and shows them how to have a pain-free identity by living fully in the present. The journey is thrilling, and along the way, the author shows how to connect to the indestructible essence of our Being, “the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.” Featuring a new preface by the author, this paperback shows that only after regaining awareness of Being, liberated from Mind and intensely in the Now, is there Enlightenment.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143122010
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 834

Book Description
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.

How To Live In The Here And Now

Author: Paul Jones
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1846947499
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
Paul Jones rescues enlightenment from the specialists, the superstitious and the pious and makes it available to everyone and anyone through a simple step by step process. ,

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Author: Jack Kornfield
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553378295
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
“Enlightenment does exist,” internationally renowned author and meditation master Jack Kornfield assures us. “Unbounded freedom and joy, oneness with the divine . . . these experiences are more common than you know, and not far away.” But even after achieving such realization—after the ecstasy—we are faced with the day—to-day task of translating that freedom into our imperfect lives. We are faced with the laundry. Drawing on the experiences and insights of leaders and practitioners within the Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Sufi traditions, this book offers a uniquely intimate and honest understanding of how the modern spiritual journey unfolds—and how we can prepare our hearts for awakening. Through moving personal stories and traditional tales, we learn how the enlightened heart navigates the real world of family relationships, emotional pain, earning a living, sickness, loss, and death. Filled with “the laughter of the wise,” alive with compassion, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry is a gift to anyone who is seeking peace, wholeness, and inner happiness. It is sure to take its place next to A Path with Heart as a spiritual classic for our time.

Passionate Enlightenment

Author: Miranda Shaw
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691235597
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
The now-classic exploration of the role of women and the feminine in Buddhist Tantra The crowning cultural achievement of medieval India, Tantric Buddhism is known in the West primarily for the sexual practices of its adherents, who strive to transform erotic passion into spiritual bliss. Historians of religion have long held that this attempted enlightenment was for men only, and that women in the movement were at best marginal and subordinated and at worst degraded and exploited. In Passionate Enlightenment, Miranda Shaw argues to the contrary and presents extensive evidence of the outspoken and independent female founders of the Tantric movement and their creative role in shaping its distinctive vision of gender relations and sacred sexuality. Including a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics edition makes an essential work available for new audiences.

How the Mind Works

Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393334775
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 673

Book Description
Explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.

Enlightenment Now

Author: Jason Gregory
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1620555921
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
A guide to uncovering the enlightenment already within us • Builds on Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist wisdom to express the timeless and ever-present nature of enlightenment • Reveals the negative impact of social and cultural conditioning on our psyche and how to counteract this through meditation and reframing our understanding of time • Shows how to uncover the original spontaneous awareness we were born with In this philosophical, psychological, and spiritual exploration of enlightenment, Jason Gregory addresses how to access the original spontaneous awareness we all came into this world with. He exposes the illusion that we must strive to reach enlightenment, uncovering how our yearning for future accomplishments, attachment to the past, and reliance on authority outside the self are social constructs that distract us from the reality of the now. The author explains how our original enlightened nature has been obscured by social, cultural, religious, and egotistical conditioning of the mind caught in time. Building on knowledge from spiritual traditions including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, Gregory expresses the timeless and ever-present nature of enlightenment. He illustrates how rigid practices and initiations can become a form of spiritual postponement, continually putting off our enlightenment because we feel we are doing something good and noble. To chase enlightenment through spiritual practice is to assume it is a quality bound to time. The author helps us see that we are already what we are seeking--once we understand that existing in this world is itself a miracle beyond words, then the magic and beauty of our world will unfold. In the same way we remember someone’s name without thinking about it, we also remember that we are enlightened when we stop searching for the experience. Emerging from the Middle Way of the Buddha, Lao-tzu’s Way of the Tao, Yoga, the Great Work of Gnosticism, the Hermetic Art of Alchemy, and quantum physics, Gregory presents a way to the state of consciousness--enlightenment, nirvana, or samadhi--in which eternity and time are one. He shows us how to counteract the negative impact of social and cultural conditioning on our psyche through meditation and reframing our understanding of time. The author explains how meditation in its truest form takes our awareness of nowness from theory to practice. Guiding us away from a time-bound understanding of enlightenment, Gregory shows us how to find ourselves in the stillness of now where the peace you are is the peace you give to the world.

Tolerance

Author: Caroline Warman
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783742038
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
Inspired by Voltaire’s advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française d’étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University.

The Righteous Mind

Author: Jonathan Haidt
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307455777
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 530

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The acclaimed social psychologist challenges conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to conservatives and liberals alike—a “landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself” (The New York Times Book Review). Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.