Showing titles in Consciousness & Thought

Since the publication of The Prince five centuries ago, Machiavelli has been associated with political amorality. But that characterization is unfair. In Be Like the Fox, Erica Benner sets the record straight: far from the ruthless "Machiavellian" henchman that people think he was, Machiavelli emerges here as a profound ethical thinker who fought to uphold high moral standards and restore the democratic freedoms of his beloved Florence.

Sir Thomas More's Utopia has spurred debate, reflection, and critical thinking since its original publication in the 16th century. More's fictional island of Utopia provides an exploration of issues that shook him and his contemporaries and that continue to be problematic in the modern day.

Nacido a finales del siglo XIX en la Armenia rusa, su principal obra fue dar a conocer y transmitir las enseñanzas del misterioso "Cuarto Camino" en el mundo occidental. Una personalidad misteriosa y carismática, con un agudo sentido crítico, y una elevada cultura tradicional, acaparó la atención de muchos, guiándolos hacia una posible evolución espiritual y humanitaria.

As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way we think about the senses and put them to use has been rather different over the ages. Journeying through the past 300 years, Purnell explores how people used their senses in ways that might shock us now.

Why is thought divisive? The desire to change in a particular direction gives an energy that is divisive. Will you free the mind taking time, through analysis, or can you look totally and therefore be totally free? Does choiceless rejection of the false give a different kind of energy? Does a foundation give me direction or does it bring confusion? Is the operation of intelligence insight? Questions from the audience followed the talk.

Drawing on the wisdom of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and others, Nancy Sherman's Stoic Wisdom presents a compelling modern Stoicism that teaches grit, resilience, and the importance of close relationships in addressing life's biggest and smallest challenges.

The word chaste means pure, clean, untouched. Have we a chaste mind, a mind that has not been hurt, has no image, is free from the pleasure of yesterday and is innocent? Is chastity a quality of the mind? Can the mind be free of the word, symbols and the condemnation and approval of the word? What is the nature of the mind when there is no attempt through will or desire for any way out through the known? If you are really serious, not just with words but burning with responsibility, then you ask whether the mind can ever be free from the known.

Millions of Americans know yoga as a superb form of exercise and as a potent source of calm in the midst of our stress-filled lives. Far fewer are aware of the full promise of yoga as "the way of the fully alive human being" - a 4,000-year-old practical path of liberation that fits the needs of modern Western seekers with startling precision. Now Stephen Cope, a Western-trained psychotherapist who has lived and taught for more than 10 years at the largest yoga center in America, offers this marvelously lively and irreverent "pilgrim's progress" for today's world.

Imagine that tomorrow you woke up, went out and won the lottery. Now imagine that tomorrow you woke up, went out and lost a limb. Which would make you happier? Amazingly, science suggests that after both of these scenarios, you would most likely return to the same happiness level as before within a relatively short window of time. The Fun Habit shows that fun, unlike happiness, is an action you can take almost anywhere, anytime. Fun is connected to behaviour and habits rather than goals, which means it’s possible to get more fun into your life with intention.

Wisdom, intelligence and truth. If there is attention, is there choice? Why has man divided perception? What is wisdom which is not the movement of thought. What place has the man who perceives truth in this world of reality? Truth operating in one brain clears that brain. Mustn’t there be emptiness for the perception of truth? Consciousness.

We shall explore together into this life, existence, in which is included relationship, love and death, not merely as a phenomenon but as something tremendously significant, to be cherished, deeply lived. Meditation is the approach to this problem of living.

What is the relationship to society of a man who has insight? What is his action with regard to war and the whole world?

Do you ever feel like a failure? Enter widely acclaimed observer of daily life Professor Joe Moran, not to tell you that everything will be all right in the end, but to reassure you that failure is an occupational hazard of being human. It's the small print in life's terms and conditions. Covering everything from examination dreams to fourth-placed Olympians, If You Should Fail is about how modern life, in a world of self-advertised success, makes us feel like failures, frauds and imposters.

We feel, therefore we are. Conscious sensations ground our sense of self. They are crucial to our idea of ourselves as psychic beings: present, existent, and mattering. But is it only humans who feel this way? Do other animals? Will future machines? Weaving together intellectual adventure and cutting-edge science, Nicholas Humphrey describes in Sentience his quest for answers: from his discovery of blindsight in monkeys and his pioneering work on social intelligence to breakthroughs in the philosophy of mind.

On Inhumanity is bracing and vital listen in a world lurching towards authoritarian political regimes, resurgent white nationalism, refugee crises that breed nativist hostility, and fast-spreading racist rhetoric. The book will open your eyes to the pervasive dangers of dehumanization and the prejudices that can too easily take root within us, and resist them before they spread into the wider world. 

The problems of life do not demand a method, because they are so vital and alive that if we approach with a method we totally misunderstand and don’t adequately meet that problem. Where there is efficiency there is ruthlessness. The means and the end are not separate. Reality or God is something that cannot come by a technique, a means, or through a long determined practice and discipline. Aloneness implies no means. You are not alone when you have a means.

Being in flow is when you are “in the zone,” “on your game,” or even “on fire.” It is both a mental state and a physical one. You have a feeling of complete focus, full involvement, and deep enjoyment in whatever you are doing. You feel the activity takes no energy from you—indeed you feel that it is giving you energy. You barely notice the passage of time. You feel calm but almost ecstatic. Most of us have glimpsed being in this state. But what if you could be in your zone not just for a moment of flow, nor merely for a day, but always and forever? This book shows you how.

David Fajgenbaum, a former Georgetown quarterback, was nicknamed the Beast in medical school, where he was also known for his unmatched mental stamina. But things changed dramatically when he began suffering from inexplicable fatigue. In a matter of weeks, his organs were failing and he was read his last rites. Doctors were baffled by his condition, which they had yet to even diagnose. Floating in and out of consciousness, Fajgenbaum prayed for a second chance, the equivalent of a dramatic play to second the game into overtime.

Alva Noë is one of a new breed - part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist - who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the 200-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.

As a neuroscientist, Marjorie Woollacott had no doubts that the brain was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. When she experimented with meditation for the first time, however, her entire world changed. Woollacott's journey through years of meditation has made her question the reality she built her career upon and has forced her to ask what human consciousness really is.