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Part travel guide, part illuminating how-to manual for a more fulfilling, connected life, Accidental Enlightenment is an absorbing look into the adventures and insights of Stephen Banick, an inveterate wanderer, observer, and chronicler of the world at large. Banick recounts mishaps, bummed rides, quirky friendships and riveting personal epiphanies spanning nearly twenty years of exploration into far-flung places - some out of this world. With stunning imagery and impressive political and cultural trivia, Banick offers frank and humorous insight into his travels, which encompass more than just where to find cheap lodging and cheaper beer. [i]Accidental Enlightenment[/i] is the author's personal Gulliver story as he seeks to both connect with the great tapestry of human culture as well as discover his own 'Landscapes, Mindscapes, and Soulscapes.' Throughout the book, Banick encourages readers to s-t-r-e-t-c-h their own perception of Self through immersion in as many cultures and ideas as possible: The end result hopefully being that we can all 'step into our latent magnificence.'
THE ACCIDENTAL BUDDHIST is the funny, provocative story of how Dinty Moore went looking for the faith he'd lost in what might seem the most unlikely of places: the ancient Eastern tradition of Buddhism. Moore demystifies and explains the contradictions and concepts of this most mystic-seeming of religious traditions. This plain-spoken, insightful look at the dharma in America will fascinate anyone curious about the wisdom of other cultures and other religions. "Sure of foot in complex terrain, and packing a blessedly down-to-earth sense of humor, Dinty Moore is the perfect scout for the new frontiers of American Buddhism."--Rodger Kamenetz, author of THE JEW IN THE LOTUS and STALKING ELIJAH.
In many ways, Buddhism has become the global religion of the modern world. For its contemporary followers, the ideal of enlightenment promises inner peace and worldly harmony. And whereas other philosophies feel abstract and disembodied, Buddhism offers meditation as a means to realize this ideal. If we could all be as enlightened as Buddhists, some imagine, we could live in a much better world. For some time now, however, this beatific image of Buddhism has been under attack. Scholars and practitioners have criticized it as a Western fantasy that has nothing to do with the actual experiences of Buddhists. Avram Alpert combines personal experience and readings of modern novels to offer another way to understand modern Buddhism. He argues that it represents a rich resource not for attaining perfection but rather for finding meaning and purpose in a chaotic world. Finding unexpected affinities across world literature—Rudyard Kipling in colonial India, Yukio Mishima in postwar Japan, Bessie Head escaping apartheid South Africa—as well as in his own experiences living with Tibetan exiles, Alpert shows how these stories illuminate a world in which suffering is inevitable and total enlightenment is impossible. Yet they also give us access to partial enlightenments: powerful insights that become available when we come to terms with imperfection and stop looking for wholeness. A Partial Enlightenment reveals the moments of personal and social transformation that the inventions of modern Buddhism help make possible.
The Accidental Buddhist is the funny, provocative story of how Dinty Moore went looking for the faith he'd lost in what might seem the most unlikely of places: the ancient Eastern tradition of Buddhism. Moore demystifies and explains the contradictions and concepts of this most mystic-seeming of religious traditions. This plain-spoken, insightful look at the dharma in America will fascinate anyone curious about the wisdom of other cultures and other religions. Cutting through religious jargon and abstract concepts, Moore explains in clear terms why Buddhism is becoming part of popular culture. He has the rare ability to be at once sincere about religion and good-humored about the human condition. The Accidental Buddhist never takes itself too seriously—which, as Moore discovers, Buddhists aren’t supposed to do, even when they are mindful, enlightened, and sitting perfectly still. “Moore’s hilarious and sometimes irreverent look at Buddhism is a perfect primer for the budding Buddhist.”—Publishers Weekly “[Moore’s] witty and candid ‘regular guy’ approach to these experiences is entertaining and comforting, and his conclusions are right on target.”—Booklist
All near-death experiences (NDEs) change people’s lives for the better. Those affected became enlightened. Humanity worldwide thirsts for spiritualism to become enlightened. It is written in our DNA; it is mankind’s birthright and the next evolution of mankind. Enlightenment can be achieved by all who wish to experience the exhilarating intoxication of being one with the universe. NDE is not necessary to become enlightened. Practicing the principles of the right path with trance meditation activates intuition, causing enlightenment by the superconscious mind to know and be guided through our mission in life. In the past, this was called the flash of genius responsible for the advancement of the sciences and math. Today strife reigns on Earth. Our civilization must evolve to overcome extinctions and escape the fate of previous civilizations. Technology has caught up with spiritualism, and quantum physics has objectively documented global EM bio-rhythmic changes, during global events such as 9/11 and Princess Dianna’s death. This is the global consciousness compiled by the 7.4 billion people on Earth. Global change is inevitable, as is the next human evolution, and the new era of enlightenment is now. This guide offers individual, inspirational, spiritual and thought-provoking concepts for the global citizen.
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.
A major study of modern culture, Dialectic of Enlightenment for many years led an underground existence among the homeless Left of the German Federal Republic until its definitive publication in West Germany in 1969. Originally composed by its two distinguished authors during their Californian exile in 1944, the book can stand as a monument of classic German progressive social theory in the twentieth century.>
In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, "culture."
As Robert Burns poem, To a Mouse, reminds us, "The best laid plans of mice and men / Often go awry."Anyone who has ever suffered a great loss, whether relational, financial, career, health, spiritual or otherwise, knows all to well the depths of despair and the anguish that arise in what Saint John of the Cross referred to as The Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night of the Soul is all about pain, suffering and loss. Yet, like the phoenix, out of all of that, hopefully, we emerge more than we were when we started.On this journey to "accidental enlightenment," it is common to experience the complete decimation of any pre-conceived notions, roles and identities we have grown accustomed to identifying ourselves by. During this traumatic destruction of our EGO, it can seem as though God is reducing our very existence to absolute zero. This is the "Zero's Journey!"
Why spiritual and supernatural yearnings, even investigations into the occult, flourished in the era of rationalist philosophy. In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment—generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion—were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the “darker” pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy. Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is more important for understanding the strange and fascinating figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned men of the age. Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of the “Age of Lights” into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro, the “Egyptian” freemason, unconventional healer, and alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krüdener, the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic who would later become notorious as a prophet. Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered either in history or fiction.