Indian Philosophy and Meditation: Perspectives on Consciousness
Author: Rahul Banerjee File Type: pdf India has a rich tradition of meditative practices designed to study the phenomenon of consciousness. From the distant past to the present, India has evolved a unique psychological culture with grand unifying themes and universal modes of meditative practice. This book provides a detailed analysis of classical and modern Indian views on consciousness along with their related meditative methods. It offers a critical analysis of three distinct trends of Indian thought, viz., a dualistic mode of understanding and realizing consciousness in Hindu S??khya, an interactive mode in early Buddhist abhidhamma, and the evolutionary transformational mode in the teachings of the twentieth-century sage Sri Aurobindo. This book explores the unifying features in Indian first person practices with regard to consciousness and the importance of these applied psychological practices and their associated understanding of our conscious inner lives. The most striking feature of the work is that side by side theoretical exposition of consciousness, it includes a number of worksheets which explain how to use meditation to achieve relaxation as well as cognitive maps of the different levels of conscious states and instruction and how one can traverse from one state to another. The final chapter explores Sri Aurobindo who introduced new and decisive Indian spiritual thought and practice to India in the form of Integral Yoga. This innovative book will be of interest to scholars studying Indian philosophy, Indian religion and the emerging field of contemplation studies. **About the Author Rahul Banerjee is Professor, Crystallography & Molecular Biology Division, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, India. hr Amita Chatterjee is Professor Emerita, Department of Philosophy and School of Cognitive Science, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
Author: Tamar Aylat-Yaguri
File Type: pdf
When he heard the voice that ordered him to sacrifice his son, was Abraham deluded? When is faith merely a form of self-deception? The existential challenge of attaining and preserving faith is as difficult today as ever before and perhaps even more so in a scientifically, technologically oriented culture. Faith can turn into inauthenticity as easily today as in Kierkegaards era. This book presents Kierkegaards illuminating responses to the existentially haunting questions of faith and authenticity.**
Author: Rosina Buckland
File Type: pdf
In Painting Nature for the Nation Taki Katei and the Challenges to Sinophile Culture in Meiji Japan, Rosina Buckland offers an account of the career of the painter Taki Katei (1830 1901). Drawing on a large body of previously unpublished paintings, collaborative works and book illustrations by this highly successful, yet neglected, figure, Buckland traces how Katei transformed his art and practice based in modes derived from China in order to fulfil the needs of the modern nation-state at large-scale exhibitions and at the imperial court. She provides a rare examination of the vibrant world of Chinese-inspired culture during the 1880s, and the hostility which it faced in the following decade. **
Author: Bo Karen Lee
File Type: pdf
In this compelling study of two seventeenth-century female mystics, Bo Karen Lee examines the writings of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon, who, despite different religious formations, came to similar conclusions about the experience of God in contemplative prayer. Van Schurman was born into a Dutch Calvinist family and became a superb scriptural commentator before undergoing a dramatic religious conversion and joining the Labadist community, a Pietistic movement. Guyon was a French layperson whose thought would be identified with Quietisma spiritual path that was looked upon with suspicion both by the French Catholic Church and by Rome. Lee analyzes and compares the themes of self-denial and self-annihilation in the writings of these two mystics. In van Schurmans case, the focus is on the distinction between scholastic knowledge of God and the intima notitia Dei accessible only by radical self-denial. In Guyons case, it is on the union with God that is accessible only through a painful self-annihilation. For both authors, Lee demonstrates that the desire for enjoyment of God plays an important role as the engine of the souls progress away from self-centeredness. The appendices offer facing Latin and English translations of two letters by van Schurman and a selection from her Eukleria.
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
File Type: epub
Twilight of the Idols, an attack on all the prevalent ideas of his time, offers a lightning tour of his whole philosophy. It also prepares the way for The Anti-Christ, a final assault on institutional Christianity. Both works show Nietzsche lashing out at self-deception, astounded at how often morality is based on vengefulness and resentment. Both reveal a profound understanding of human mean-spiritedness which still cannot destroy the underlying optimism of Nietzsche, the supreme affirmer among the great philosophers. **
Author: Antonin Artaud
File Type: pdf
Set in a big Dublin hotel of the mid-nineteenth century, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs is a total theatre creation. In it, we discover that Albert, the perfect waiter who never drinks, smokes or flirts with the chambermaids is in fact a woman who once dressed as a man to avoid poverty and is now trapped in the role. Based on a short story by George Moore, which was recently adapted into a major Hollywood film starring Glenn Close, Benmussas story releases a string of disturbing questions about the nature of women and society, and is one of the most powerful and groundbreaking plays of the 1970s.
Author: Fereshteh Molavi
File Type: epub
In January 2017, President Trump signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the United States, effectively slamming the door on refugees seeking safety and tearing families apart. Mass protests followed, and although the order has since been blocked, amended and challenged by judges, it still stands as one of the most discriminatory laws to be passed in the US in modern times. Banthology brings together specially commissioned stories from the original seven banned nations. Covering a range of approaches from satire, to allegory, to literary realism it explores the emotional and personal impact of all restrictions on movement, and offers a platform to voices the White House would rather remained silent. **