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Written specifically for the Western practitioner, Taijiquan: Through the Western Gate blends modern science and philosophy with the traditional wisdoms—drawn from classic t'ai chi literature—that underlie Chinese martial arts. Author Rick Barrett authoritatively describes a wide range of movements, practices, and positions in the context of such topics as being in the zone, effortless power and force versus power, the whole-body energetic connection, instant meditation, and energetic coherence. Step-by-step exercises help make this sometimes daunting discipline simple and accessible.
The first edition of A Symphony of Silence: An Enlightened Vision was inspired by the desire to share with humanity, through multiple voices, the ineffable beauty we experience in our lives when the veil of ignorance is pulled back and the wonder of our essential nature is revealed.. The voices emerging from these pages add vitality and validity to our shared experience of the silence of the transcendent. It is not something beyond our reach, but a reality that has always been with us, quietly awaiting an opportunity to unfold. In this second edition of A Symphony of Silence, several new voices are added to the chorus of the first edition. A Catholic priest tells us of using TM as part of hi...
This book identifies, in contemporary fiction, a new type of novel at the interface of science and the humanities, working from the premise that a shift has taken place in the relations between the two cultures in the last two or three decades. As popular science comes to assume an ever greater cultural significance, contemporary authors are engaging in new ways with ideas that it disseminates. A new literary phenomenon is emerging, in which the focus on language-based theories of the self and the world that has been predominant in the latter half of the previous century is making way for a renewed commitment to the material facts, both of human existence and the universe beyond subjectivity. The book analyses the work of Martin Amis, William Boyd, David Lodge, Richard Powers, Michel Houellebecq, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, and Ian McEwan, revealing the ways in which these ‘third culture novels’ negotiate the relationship between literature and science.
Exploring the religious category of dying to self, this book aims to resolve contemporary issues that relate to detachment. Beginning with an examination of humility in its general notion and as a religious virtue that detachment presupposes, Kellenberger draws on a range of ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary sources that address the main characteristics of detachment, including the work of Meister Eckhart, St. Teresa, and Simone Weil, as well as writers as varied as Gregory of Nyssa, Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, Søren Kierkegaard, Andrew Newberg, John Hick and Keiji Nishitani. Kellenberger explores the key issues that arise for detachment, including the place of the individual's will in detachment, the relationship of detachment to desire, to attachment to persons, and to self-love and self-respect, and issues of contemporary secular detachment such as inducement via chemicals. This book heeds the relevance of the religious virtue of detachment for those living in the twenty-first century.
Challenging a prevalent Western idea of the self as a discrete, interior consciousness, Scott L. Marratto argues instead that subjectivity is a characteristic of the living, expressive movement establishing a dynamic intertwining between a sentient body and its environment. He draws on the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, contemporary European philosophy, and research in cognitive science and development to offer a compelling investigation into what it means to be a self.
Since the dawn of science, ideas about the relation between science and religion have always depended on what else is going on in a society. During the twentieth century, daily life changed dramatically. Technology revolutionized transportation, agriculture, communications, and housework. People came to rely on scientific predictability in their technology. Many wondered whether God's supposed actions were consistent with scientific knowledge. The twenty-first century is bringing new scientific research capabilities. They are revealing that scientific results are not totally predictable after all. Certain types of interaction lead to outcomes that are unpredictable, in principle. These in tu...
The Inner Dimension examines the philosophical significance of a remarkable family of experiences central to Eastern philosophical and meditation traditions, and reported by creative geniuses in the West from Plato through Einstein. Empirical research on ordinary people practicing traditional Eastern meditation techniques now indicates that these otherwise rarely encountered experiences actually reflect widely accessible universal potentials of ordinary human awareness. The Inner Dimension responds to this research by exploring the significance of these experiences for a wide range of philosophical issues - self, knowledge, mind-and-matter, creativity, values, and human potential - as articulated by major Western philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Wittgenstein. Its analyses and approach throughout are straightforwardly empirical and non-metaphysical. Its implications, however, are revolutionary.