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Saved From Enlightenment

Author : Tarini Bauliya

Publisher : SCB Distributors

Page : 181 pages

File Size : 29,28 MB

Release : 2015-10-05

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1942493169

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Book Description

A memoir of one woman’s life viewed through the lens of her relationship with her spiritual teacher of over 20 years. Her candid, touching & humorous stories are told in a voice that is authentic, wry & irreverent, yet always colored with the note of longing for God that characterized her quest for something “real” from earliest childhood. As she elaborates on various stepping stones and stumbling blocks encountered on her journey―including the birth of her son, several failed relationships and her wild and highly successful ride as a national sales executive―her stories uniquely parallel the steps of any traditional spiritual path aimed at human transformation. They also help to dispel the myths and expose the assumptions about “enlightenment” ―and other fantasy solutions to the hard work of simply being human―that are so common on “the Path.” She does this by shedding an honest, heartfelt light on the real gifts & graces of her soul’s journey―a teaching of profound wisdom, a community of other dedicated devotees, and a guru who would not let her settle for less than her own intrinsic goodness. The author received this spiritual name from her guru―the American Baul master Lee Lozowick―at her own request. A few years into her 20+-year apprenticeship with him, she was ready to make a serious break with her past and to enter into a relationship of dedicated spiritual practice and service. Her request for a new name (it translates loosely as “Mad Wind Friend”) was symbolic of that transformational leap of faith. In his company, she candidly admits, she found an access point toward fulfillment of her hunger for God. Lee Lozowick (1943-2010) was an iconoclast and founder of the Western Baul path. He was the lyricist and lead singer in a rock band and a blues band, and led his troupe all over the States, Europe & India, sharing his “work-rock” music in street festivals and concert halls for over 20 years. When Tarini stumbled into his company, his effect on her life was both confronting & transformational. In the end, she reports, she was “saved from enlightenment” among other invaluable treasures, by the grace of God and skillful means of a worthy teacher. Other seekers, on any spiritual path, will find here a story that can leave a smile, a question, and a small wound on a tender heart. Her words will rekindle the longing that so many feel for a connection to their own deepest truth.



The Power of Now

Author : Eckhart Tolle

Publisher : New World Library

Page : 258 pages

File Size : 24,26 MB

Release : 2010-10-06

Category : Body, Mind & Spirit

ISBN : 1577313119

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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 Enlightenment and the Book

Author : Richard B. Sher

Publisher : University of Chicago Press

Page : 842 pages

File Size : 10,80 MB

Release : 2008-09-15

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0226752542

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Book Description

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.



God in the Enlightenment

Author : William J. Bulman

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 337 pages

File Size : 20,50 MB

Release : 2016-04-25

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0190267097

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Book Description

We have long been taught that the Enlightenment was an attempt to free the world from the clutches of Christian civilization and make it safe for philosophy. The lesson has been well learned. In today's culture wars, both liberals and their conservative enemies, inside and outside the academy, rest their claims about the present on the notion that the Enlightenment was a secularist movement of philosophically driven emancipation. Historians have had doubts about the accuracy of this portrait for some time, but they have never managed to furnish a viable alternative to it-for themselves, for scholars interested in matters of church and state, or for the public at large. In this book, William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram bring together recent scholarship from distinguished experts in history, theology, and literature to make clear that God not only survived the Enlightenment but thrived within it as well. The Enlightenment was not a radical break from the past in which Europeans jettisoned their intellectual and institutional inheritance. It was, to be sure, a moment of great change, but one in which the characteristic convictions and traditions of the Renaissance and Reformation were perpetuated to the point of transformation, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and during the early phases of globalization. The Enlightenment's primary imperatives were not freedom and irreligion but peace and prosperity. As a result, Enlightenment could be Christian, communitarian, or authoritarian as easily as it could be atheistic, individualistic, or libertarian. Honing in on the intellectual crisis of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while moving from Spinoza to Kant and from India to Peru, God in the Enlightenment takes a prism to the age of lights.



Enlightenment Now

Author : Steven Pinker

Publisher : Penguin

Page : 578 pages

File Size : 26,93 MB

Release : 2018-02-13

Category : Psychology

ISBN : 0698177886

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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 Mystique of Enlightenment

Author : U. G. Krishnamurti

Publisher : e-artnow

Page : 155 pages

File Size : 36,30 MB

Release : 2022-01-04

Category : Self-Help

ISBN :

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Book Description

"People call me an 'enlightened man' — I detest that term — they can't find any other word to describe the way I am functioning. At the same time, I point out that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all. I say that because all my life I've searched and wanted to be an enlightened man, and I discovered that there is no such thing as enlightenment at all, and so the question whether a particular person is enlightened or not doesn't arise. I don't give a hoot for a sixth-century-BC Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. They are a bunch of exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people. There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God."



Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment

Author : Nicholas Maxwell

Publisher : UCL Press

Page : 392 pages

File Size : 17,77 MB

Release : 2017-09-26

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 178735041X

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Book Description

Here is an idea that just might save the world. It is that science, properly understood, provides us with the methodological key to the salvation of humanity. A version of this idea can be found in the works of Karl Popper. Famously, Popper argued that science cannot verify theories but can only refute them, and this is how science makes progress. Scientists are forced to think up something better, and it is this, according to Popper, that drives science forward.But Nicholas Maxwell finds a flaw in this line of argument. Physicists only ever accept theories that are unified – theories that depict the same laws applying to the range of phenomena to which the theory applies – even though many other empirically more successful disunified theories are always available. This means that science makes a questionable assumption about the universe, namely that all disunified theories are false. Without some such presupposition as this, the whole empirical method of science breaks down.By proposing a new conception of scientific methodology, which can be applied to all worthwhile human endeavours with problematic aims, Maxwell argues for a revolution in academic inquiry to help humanity make progress towards a better, more civilized and enlightened world.



The Enlightenment

Author : Ritchie Robertson

Publisher : HarperCollins

Page : 1008 pages

File Size : 24,38 MB

Release : 2021-02-23

Category : History

ISBN : 0062410679

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Book Description

A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the “long eighteenth century,” from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about. Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment. In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect”. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.



The Enlightenment in France

Author : Frederick Binkerd Artz

Publisher : Kent State University Press

Page : 180 pages

File Size : 17,84 MB

Release : 1968

Category : History

ISBN : 9780873380324

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Book Description

The founders of the Enlightenment in France are presented in this volume. The author emphasizes the practice as well as practical humanism and examines their fascination with science.



Lost Enlightenment

Author : S. Frederick Starr

Publisher : Princeton University Press

Page : 694 pages

File Size : 23,45 MB

Release : 2015-06-02

Category : History

ISBN : 0691165858

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Book Description

The forgotten story of Central Asia's enlightenment—its rise, fall, and enduring legacy In this sweeping and richly illustrated history, S. Frederick Starr tells the fascinating but largely unknown story of Central Asia's medieval enlightenment through the eventful lives and astonishing accomplishments of its greatest minds—remarkable figures who built a bridge to the modern world. Because nearly all of these figures wrote in Arabic, they were long assumed to have been Arabs. In fact, they were from Central Asia—drawn from the Persianate and Turkic peoples of a region that today extends from Kazakhstan southward through Afghanistan, and from the easternmost province of Iran through Xinjiang, China. Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects. They gave algebra its name, calculated the earth's diameter with unprecedented precision, wrote the books that later defined European medicine, and penned some of the world's greatest poetry. One scholar, working in Afghanistan, even predicted the existence of North and South America—five centuries before Columbus. Rarely in history has a more impressive group of polymaths appeared at one place and time. No wonder that their writings influenced European culture from the time of St. Thomas Aquinas down to the scientific revolution, and had a similarly deep impact in India and much of Asia. Lost Enlightenment chronicles this forgotten age of achievement, seeks to explain its rise, and explores the competing theories about the cause of its eventual demise. Informed by the latest scholarship yet written in a lively and accessible style, this is a book that will surprise general readers and specialists alike.