Awakening the Luminous Mind is the third book of guided meditation practices in a series by the acclaimed author and teacher, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Tenzin Rinpoche will guide you to bring these simple practices into your everyday life by turning inward and finding what he calls your "inner refuge." By this he means boundless space, infinite awareness, and the qualities that arise that have the power to transform your life. As you follow the principles in this book and complimentary (...) CD, you will discover greater creativity and intelligence, liberation from suffering, understanding and connectivity, and freedom from the ego that strives to control our life experiences. (shrink)

As Vuzamazulu Credo Mutwa, a South African sangoma, gave his message to the world, he urged human beings to awaken the mother mind within them. He pleaded with human beings to let go of the warrior mind and start thinking like mothers and grandmothers. This article aimed to elaborate on Credo’s short and mystical message. The article interprets the warrior mind to be the masculine mind, while the mother mind is perceived as representing the feminine mind. Ego works well with (...) the warrior or masculine mind, and is not so compatible with the feminine mind. The argument is that ego and the climate crisis are inextricably linked, and that diminishing the ego will leave the Earth and its inhabitants with a high chance of survival. Furthermore, it is illustrated how colonialism and institutions like religion exacerbate egoism in the world. The ego is defined, its growth origins traced, and its effects on the Earth highlighted. Finally, the article concludes by suggesting how to diminish ego and awaken the mother mind within every one of us. Secondary data analysis method is used throughout the article. Contribution: This article applies existing and timeless ideas to figure out solutions to the climate crisis. It also analyses gender issues through the lenses of analytical psychology. Different disciplines are applied to explore the concept of the ‘mother mind’. It is unique in that it places the burden on the individual, stressing that the solutions are found within an individual. (shrink)

Physical literacy, a concept introduced by Britain’s physical education and phenomenological scholar, Margaret Whitehead, who aligned the term with her monist view of the human condition and emphasis that we are essentially embodied beings in-the-world, is a foundational hub of recent physical education curricular revision. The adoption of the term serves a political purpose as it helps stakeholders advocate for the educational, specifically literacy, rights of the whole child. Yet, one might wonder what impact conceptual shifts of becoming “physically literate” (...) in lieu of becoming “physically educated” have on physical education research and practice. Terms such as “reading” the game and metaphors that describe the body as an “instrument of expression” are entering the lexicon of physical education but from a seemingly cognitive frame of reference. Arguably, the extent to which the adoption of physical literacy has on dissolving Cartesian views of the body and the mechanization of movement it performs has yet to be questioned. This article thus acts as an invitation to explore physical literacy in a Merleau-Pontian inspired act of inscribing the world through movement and how a reading of a reversible imprint might awaken a more fluent sense of what it means to become physically literate as new curricular pathways in the field of physical education emerge. (shrink)

Nietzsche Awakens! is a philosophical work, written entirely in aphorisms. It is an analytical way to trigger readers to think; to negate the "common sense" notions; to re-question the raison d'être of principles and elements; to refuse the "absolutes"; to criticize the epistemology and the methodology of sciences; and to wonder about the ontology of the human being and his teleology. The first part of the book consists of "modifying" Nietzsche's aphorisms, either to contradict his sayings or to be even (...) more cynical than he is, or to explore new dimensions to his thinking. The second part consists of persuading him, to accept the author's refutation. Indeed, the main concept of the book is to concretize "The Eternal Recurrence." Rather than being influenced by Nietzsche, the author is bringing Nietzsche alive. Rather than saying the author is influenced by Nietzsche, can't we say that the author enables Nietzsche's aphorisms to expand, innovate, and enrich themselves? (shrink)

In this inspiring and practical book, Andrew Seaton guides us to our true nature, the peace-filled observing awareness beyond the mind. The book explains how, beginning in our infancy, we experience a spiritual forgetting. The mind creates abstract interpretations of the world and who we are. These conditioned interpretations become self-fulfilling and create our life experience, our karma. Learn how to see the world as it is in reality, rather than through the distorting filters of the conditioned mind. Discover how (...) simple it is to clear away the mist of the conditioned mind and instantly drop into the awareness Self, which is who you really are. Importantly, this book shows the reader how to avoid some of the common frustrations and traps in spiritual awakening. Perhaps best of all, it offers a simple strategy for holding in focus the ways of experiencing everyday life as the awareness Self: a simple strategy for spiritual awakening. Spiritual Awakening Made Simple offers a concise, unified and practical formulation that will help you to awaken to your own true nature as peace, contentment and connectedness with all life. (shrink)

In his engaging volume on fairytales, George MacDonald wrote that the purpose of a fairytale is “not to give the reader things to think about, but to wake up things that are in him." By contrast, many works of art, including contemporary musical compositions, are accompanied by statements of “things to think about,” such as didactic program notes by the composer on pet social justice issues. This essay explores what can be done in a piece of music to “wake up (...) things” already in the listener. These include invoking something familiar in the musical style, using essential building blocks of beauty in constructing the music, and providing a teleology of purpose and narrative flow in the music, in contrast to modernist trends that eschew these things. The essay explores also how and why these “awakening things” can and should be accomplished. (shrink)

This volume sets out the arguments and evidence needed to explain how the _Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith_ features in the constitution of New Confucian philosophy, as evidenced in the writings of Xiong Shili, Ma Yifu, Tang Junyi and Mou Zongsan.

Awakening engages beginning students by discussing personal experience, employing a winning writing style, and approaching the subject from an historical perspective. Awakening is an excellent introduction to comparative Eastern philosophic and religious thought. Awakening provides an engaging historical overview of the major philosophical and spiritual traditions of India, China, and Japan. Patrick Bresnan ties the past to the present and shows the relationships that exist between Eastern and Western traditions.

Shows how we must make deep changes to complete our paradigm shift from the old mechanistic worldview to the new organic worldview • Reveals the distinct stages of paradigm shifts through the ages, including the 18th-century Enlightenment and the critical stage of our current shift • Explains how the new organic worldview began with Goethe and Kant • Offers solutions for each of us to be able to realize and make the deep changes needed for global regeneration In Global (...) class='Hi'>Awakening, Michael Schacker shows that hidden within our global crises is a positive future for the planet. Sharing his 30 years of intensive research into the history of change as well as the evolution of consciousness and regenerative science, Schacker explains how our current shift from the old mechanistic worldview to a new organic worldview based on biological models follows the same pattern as other paradigm shifts across history, including the 18th-century Enlightenment and the American Revolution. He reveals the creative geniuses who have contributed to the birth of the organic worldview, beginning with Goethe, Kant, and Hahnemann. Exposing the scientific and social forces that drive paradigm shifts, he details the stages every paradigm shift progresses through: the early Enlightenment, the conservative backlash, the intensive phase, and and the transformational phase leading to the Organic Shift. Explaining that we are currently in the throes of the paradigm flip, the critical last phase of our paradigm shift, Schacker shows how the mechanistic worldview is crumbling around us and nothing but a complete transformation in the way we think will keep us from the path of total self-destruction. Providing a map to overcome the allure of the simplistic mechanical model that has spawned countless unsustainable practices and problems--from global warming to intense economic disparities--the author offers concrete solutions showing how each of us can use our talents, skills, and time to make the deep changes needed for global regeneration. (shrink)

This article suggests that we are in the midst of a profound dimensional shift in our rational capacity to process reality, and seeks to articulate the implications of this evolutionary shift to global reason for our scientific enterprise. As we enter the 21st century it is unmistakably clear that we are in the midst of an unprecedented shift in the human condition - a global renaissance that affects every aspect of our cultural lives, our self-understanding, and, of course, our rational (...) enterprise. This evolutionary transformation, when seen through the expanded global lens, has been emerging through the ages on a global scale. In this brief reflection I suggest that this advance in our technology of mind is of an order of magnitude that is so radical and comprehensive that the very concept of a person, of what it means to be human, of our encounter with Reality and all our hermeneutical arts, including the sciences, are likewise taken to a higher global dimension. I suggest that the diverse voices included in this special edition are best situated in the context of this global awakening of reason, scientific knowing, and the holistic worldview. (shrink)

For some, ‘transformation’ is the new non-reductive and non-normative ‘development’, attracting attention from interdisciplinary array, but of particular theoretical and practical interest to Spirituality scholars. In philosophical context, transformation theory has suffered greatly from ’agency-structure’ dualism and suspension of ontology in body-mind dualism and rationalist virtue controversy. Drawing on the work of Bhaskar, Segal and Slote, a renegotiated and more meaningful sense of transformation emerges from their cumulative analytical and conceptual enrichment. In the complexity of possible relations between self, self-concept (...) and society, lies the traditionally neglected transformative middle of sui-generis human depth. In redress, arguably, Bhaskar’s meta-philosophy accommodates Segal’s experiential depth analysis and Slote’s understanding of empathy and receptivity as valuable insights for ’awakening’ to transformative process. (shrink)

“The Awakening of Character as an Image of Enlightenment” describes in some detail two unforgettable characters in the Korean Buddhist film Mandala in order to consider the range of diversity that enlightenment can encompass. Two very different Buddhist monks are presented in the film as both deeply enveloped in ordinary human suffering and as breaking through that suffering to experience a transformation of character that we can only understand as enlightenment. While the kinds of character that emerge in each (...) case are quite distinct, viewers are left to puzzle over how these entirely different paths through human life could both be legitimate instances of enlightenment. While each character in the film provides an image of the Buddhist path, readers are presented with the task of sorting out how their own paths align or contrast with the two provided. (shrink)

The Awakening of Osiris and the Transit of the Solar Barques: Royal Apotheosis in a Most Concise Book of the Underworld and Sky. By Joshua Aaron Roberson. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, vol. 262. Fribourg: Academic Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 175, illus. FS 57.

The article presents a new view on the problem of educating the spiritual security of the personality from the positions of axiological, culturological, civilizational, systemic, and anthropological approaches, on which the research methodology is based. The article describes the basic concepts of research: spirituality, culture, spiritual awakening, spiritual security, and presents the author’s definition of the concept of spiritual security of the personality. The article describes the cultural ideals of coziness in different countries of the world, which allowed us (...) to highlight the features and prove the importance of leading a spiritual way of life, the essence of which is a person’s acquiring of a state of inner peace, coziness, security and which is accompanied by the achievement of pleasure from life. The principles of educating the spiritual security of the personality have been defined. They include the principle of spiritualization, the principle of cooperation, the principle of “live” dialogue based on spiritual and cultural values. The authors have identified the main threats to the spiritual security of the personality and described the ways to overcome them, among which special attention is paid to the importance of reviving the spiritual and cultural educational component, which will be the first step towards educating a positive personality with a human face, the humane, altruistic, creative personality focused on creation, not destruction. (shrink)

This is the second of four volumes in the CARE-ing for Integral Development series, focused on CARE: Community activation, Awakening consciousness, innovation driven institutionalized Research and transformative Education. In this book, the author focuses on ways and means of developing, in an explicitly integral way, a particular organization or society, one in relation to another, locally-globally, building on prior, local community activation. He draws on two decades of experience and illustrates how such an awakening of integral consciousness can (...) run alongside innovation driven institutionalized research and transformative education, as well as community activation, at undergraduate and post-graduate levels. In the process he addresses such topics as how to embed development in a particular society locally, how in relation to the rest of the world globally, as well as how to consciously evolve as an individual, organization or society, as such, from one particular developmental perspective - southern (relational), eastern (renewal) or north/western (reasoned/realization) - or another. The overall integral approach, or rhythm that the author draws upon, and has used in the field for the past decade, is that of recognizing and releasing what he terms GENE-ius, through local Grounding, local-global Emergence, newly global Navigation and ultimately global-local Effect, encompassing nature, culture, technology and enterprise. Moreover, he offers a body of integral theory that has been developed in twelve separate volumes, related to different aspects of integral development. This book on awakening integral and developmental consciousness - from an African, Asian or Euro/American perspective - is unique. Moreover, and specifically as such, the author offers an alternately relational ("southern"), renewal ("eastern") and reasoned ("north-western") perspective on such development. (shrink)

The Dutch Reformed Church had a strong missionary DNA since the planting of the church. This missionary focus and fervour, however, ebbed and flowed during the history of the church. Saayman described that the mission upsurges in the DRC in four waves or 'periods of extraordinary mission endeavour'. The current research aimed to develop this theory through a literature study on the sociopolitical context and the developments in the ecclesiology and missiology of the DRC since the planting of the church (...) up to 2013. The research found strong evidence to define a fifth wave. The fifth wave was influenced by contextual changes and loss of influence and money by the DRC. Furthermore, the growth in the church's missional identity can be seen in the following aspects: the influence of theologians like Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch; a belief that mission is not something the church does but something the church is; a shift from a Christocentric theology to a Trinitarian theology; a holistic view of salvation; a commitment to the local context of the congregation and a focus on bringing healing to their local communities; and lastly, the success of the Gestuurde Gemeentes network and, more recently, the Mission Shaped Ministry training. (shrink)

“The sleeper awakes” is a convention of many literary utopias from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The plots of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and H. G. Wells’sWhen the Sleeper Wakes all famously involve a sleeping modern everyman who awakens to a future where the conflicts and contradictions of the burgeoning capitalist society have been resolved. The Bleilers identify dozens of other speculative novels from the same period employing this very device, such as William (...) Hudson’s A Crystal Age and Alvarado Fuller’s A.D. 2000.1 Chris Ferns has argued that this trope constitutes something of a “consoling... (shrink)

This book is about higher yoga, as practiced by the sages who composed the ancient scriptures of India. Learn to achieve, eternally, liberation from the limitations of time and space; unlimited divine powers; and an immortal, physically perfect divine body. Surrender the body and mind to the spontaneous workings of the awakened life force (prana), and practice pure conscious living.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America by Jack TurnerShannon SullivanJack Turner Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. xv + 199pp, incl. index.Don’t let the size of this slim volume fool you: Awakening to Race is chock-full of fresh insights and original arguments regarding individualism and race in the American democratic tradition. Individualism (...) in America often takes atomistic forms that are antithetical to a rich sense of the social constitution of the self. For that reason, individualism often is viewed as antithetical to a critical consciousness of how race and white racism operate. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner boldly takes the bull of American individualism by its horns. He argues that the rhetoric of individualism can be used against, rather than in service of an allegedly colorblind society in which independent, post-racial individuals pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The result of Turner’s skillful intervention into American political philosophy is to take back individualism from conservative forces and refashion it into a progressive tool for racial justice movements.Turner sets the stage for his intervention in chapter one, which provides an overview of the book. Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Awakening to Race proceeds to focus on Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison and concludes with James Baldwin. One of the primary tasks of chapter one is to outline the book’s major Emersonian theme, which is that an individualist notion of self-reliance should lead a person to become more, rather than less aware of structural and social injustices. Properly understood, individualism should lead to an awakening to race, as Turner’s book is aptly titled, not to ignoring or failing to see it. An individual who wishes to be self-reliant should be wary and watchful of the ways in which she depends on social structures, including those of social injustice. An atomistic notion of the individual is not adequate to this task; an Emersonian democratic individual is needed instead. As Turner explains with reference to adherents of atomistic individualism, “their failure to awaken to the socially indebted nature of the self desensitizes them to structural—and thus racial—injustice” (11).Chapter two turns to Tocqueville, Emerson, and (to a lesser extent) Thoreau to flesh out this idea. In this chapter, Turner develops [End Page 170] Emerson’s notion of self-reliance as “a politically dynamic ethical ideal, one that can motivate and energize democratic political action” rather than withdrawal from society (29). To do so, Turner references Tocqueville’s analysis of race in the United States, which reveals an affinity between white individualism and white supremacy. White individuals could contrast themselves with black slaves to reassure themselves that they were free while simultaneously ignoring their dependence on social and legal structures of white supremacy to ensure their psychological and personal sense of personhood. Individual self-sufficiency can operate as a racialized marker of freedom that is in bad faith because it evades its dependence on race and racism. With Emerson, Turner argues that genuine self-sufficiency requires reckoning with all sorts of ways that one is dependent on and complicit with societal structures, including those of white supremacy. Drawing on Emerson’s anti-slavery addresses, Turner develops a theory of democratic individual responsibility that requires of genuine self-reliance that it not interfere with the self-reliance of others. This requirement obligates the individual to take political and other forms of action to ensure that his or her free, self-reliant life is not dependent on the exploitation of others (45).In addition to its nonexploitation obligation, democratic individualist responsibility includes a democratic egalitarian obligation. Turner develops the latter idea in chapter three through the work of Frederick Douglas. While Douglas’s notion of self-help often is read as atomistically individualist, Turner shows how it is instead tied to social responsibility. In the case of Douglasian self-help, “ought implies can” and so requiring of people that they help themselves means ensuring that they have the resources available to do so (62). While dominant notions of self-help have been used in the United States... (shrink)

What if you could, like a diamond forged through heat and pressure, transform every painful, scary, and stressful experience in your life into one that is meaningful, courageous, and inspiring? What if you were provided with the tools that allow you to tap and manifest the true power that exists within you--the power to shine? Are you ready to discover your path to peace? In this fascinating book, Dr. Darren Weissman shares ancient spiritual wisdom fused with a modern-day understanding of (...) the mind's relationship to biology and behavior that has implications not only for your health, but for the well-being of the entire planet. You'll learn how to use The LifeLine Technique Ô --a philosophy and technology for awakening your infinite potential for healing and wholeness--and share the experiences of scores of people whose lives have been forever changed as a result. Conscious visionaries pronounced more than 40 years ago that the road to peace is paved with the power of love. Dr. Weissman's book provides the steps you can use to learn to walk that path, and it will help you understand why it is your moral imperative to choose love over fear. (shrink)

Awakening the Mind of Enlightenment. Meditations on the Buddhist Path. Geshe Namgyal Wangchen. Wisdom Publications, London 1987. 284pp. £6.95.

The Awakening of the West. The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture: 543 BCE - 1992. Stephen Batchelor. Aquarian, London 1994. xvi, 416 pp. £12.99.

Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War HIRATA Seiko IN ORDER FULLY TO UNDERSTAND the standpoint of Zen on the question of nationalism, one must first consider the ...

The conference where this article was originally presented solicited recommendations for the “right questions” to ask regarding education and technology. The author of this article suggests that we already know what the right questions are for illuminating technology and its social meaning. What the author wants to know is why those questions in fact are not being asked more widely—why is widespread disinclination to enter explicit deliberation on the proper place of technology so resilient? Langdon Winner uses the term “technological (...) somnambulism” to describe the predominant stance toward technology in our culture, that “we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” via the adoption of new technologies. The basic institutional and ideological forces shaping the development and use of technology are not mysterious. But, scrutiny of those forces remains limited to a relative handful of academics and activists. How can technological somnambulism be countered? (shrink)

Buddhism first came to the West many centuries ago through the Greeks, who also influenced some of the culture and practices of Indian Buddhism. As Buddhism has spread beyond India, it has always been affected by the indigenous traditions of its new homes. When Buddhism appeared in America and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, it encountered contemporary psychology and psychotherapy, rather than religious traditions. Since the 1990s, many efforts have been made by Westerners to analyze and integrate the similarities (...) and differences between Buddhism and it therapeutic ancestors, particularly Jungian psychology. Taking Japanese Zen-Buddhism as its starting point, this volume is a collection of critiques, commentaries, and histories about a particular meeting of Buddhism and psychology. It is based on the Zen Buddhism and Psychotherapy conference that took place in Kyoto, Japan, in 1999, expanded by additional papers, and includes: new perspectives on Buddhism and psychology, East and West cautions and insights about potential confusions traditional ideas in a new light. It also features a new translation of the conversation between Schin'ichi Hisamatsu and Carl Jung which took place in 1958. _Awakening and Insight_ expresses a meeting of minds, Japanese and Western, in a way that opens new questions about and sheds new light on our subjective lives. It will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and analytical psychology, as well as anyone involved in Zen Buddhism. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenology of awakening in Chinese Zen Buddhism. In this tradition, to awaken is to ‘see your true nature’. In particular, the two aspects of awakening are: (1) seeing that the nature of one’s self or mind is empty or void and (2) an erasing of the usual (though merely apparent) boundary between subject and object. In the early Zen tradition, there are many references to awakening as chopping off your head, not (...) having eyes, nose and tongue, and seeing your ‘Original Face’. These references bear a remarkable resemblance to an approach to awakening developed by Douglas Harding. I will guide the reader through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments which investigate the gap where you cannot see your own head. I will endeavour to show that these methods, although radically different from traditional meditation techniques, result in an experience with striking similarities to Zen accounts of awakening, in particular, as experiencing oneself as empty or void and yet totally united with the given world. The repeatability and apparent reliability of these first-person methods opens up a class of awakening experience to empirical investigation and has the potential to provide new insights into nondual traditions. (shrink)

Explores moral progress in the American military.

This comprehensive record of Krishnamurti's teachings is an excellent, wide-ranging introduction to the great philosopher's thought. With among others, Jacob Needleman, Alain Naude, and Swami Venkatasananda, Krishnamurti examines such issues as the role of the teacher and tradition the need for awareness of ‘cosmic consciousness the problem of good and evil and traditional Vedanta methods of help for different levels of seekers.

Ralph Ellison offers crucial insight into the meaning of conscientious citizenship in American democracy. In doing so, he follows his nineteenth-century Transcendentalist forebears--Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman--who have become key figures in contemporary efforts to theorize liberal democratic character. At the center of Emersonian ethics is the idea of " awakening." " Awakening " is the Emersonians' name for honest and courageous confrontation with reality. Ellison broadens the Emersonians' vision by insisting that one cannot be "well awake" in America (...) without confronting the ways historical white supremacy shapes one's identity and chances in life. Political theorists who draw inspiration from the Emersonians in theorizing democratic individuality need to pay attention to Ellison--for he demonstrates that one cannot achieve democratic individuality without awakening to race. (shrink)

If, as Buddhism claims, the potential for awakening exists in all human beings, we should be able to map the phenomenon with the same science we apply to other forms of consciousness. A student of cognitive social science and a Zen practitioner for more than forty years, Richard P. Boyle brings his sophisticated perspective to bear on the development of a theoretical model for both ordinary and awakened consciousness. Boyle conducts probing interviews with eleven prominent Western Buddhist teachers and (...) one scientist who have experienced awakening. From the paths they traveled to enlightenment and their descriptions of the experience, he derives three fundamental properties of awakened consciousness. He then constructs an overarching model that explains how Buddhist practices help free the mind from attachments to reality and the self and make possible the three properties of awakening. Specifically, these teachers describe how they worked to control attention and quiet the mind, detach from ideas and habits, and open themselves to compassion. Boyle's account incorporates current theories of consciousness, sociological insights, and research in neuroscience to advance the study of awakened consciousness and help an even greater number of people to realize it. (shrink)

What transformation would happen if we could combine the best of liberal politics with psychology? _Awakening our Faith in the Future_ investigates the avenues for creating a new branch of psychology, a transformative political psychology. In the past, political psychology has focused directly on analysis and knowledge acquisition, rather than on interventions that transform self and culture. A transformative political psychology combines the best of traditional social science with the transformative intent of clinical psychology in order to create a new (...) political culture. Peter T. Dunlap suggests that while liberals focus intently outside of themselves on changing the world, those with psychological interests focus much more internally on changing themselves. In this book, he argues that by combining political liberalism and psychology, and encouraging psychologists to develop cultural learning practices based on ideas of self- knowledge, there is opportunity to transform our political culture. Divided into five parts, this book explores: stories of political destiny questions of development opportunities for political development a speculative theory of cultural evolution practices of a political psychologist. This scholarly text uses personal experiences and the stories of progressive political leaders as pathways for addressing political problems, making it ideal reading for professionals and students in the fields of both politics and psychology as well as for activists interested in the future of liberalism. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin is discussed in this article to speak to the character of our experiences in the world as we try to animate our freedom in the midst of phantasmagoria. While we may indeed be trapped in the slumber of phantasmagoria and its many nightmares of despair, it is still possible to blast away the sands of sleep and awaken to a morally redeemed world fashioned through our engagement with various dreams of freedom. First, this article will explore the concept (...) of phantasmagoria, which is a symbolically rich term used by Benjamin to speak to the complex ways in which we are mired within the combined material and aesthetic trappings of an advanced capitalist world. Such an exploration will consider three archetypes of character (the gambler, the flâneur and the collector) and their corresponding experiences (fashion, boredom and interiority) in an attempt to unite various convolutes from The Arcades Project to consider freedom in a world spectrally haunted by such phantasmagoria. Second, we will consider the possibility of becoming dialectically startled before the angel of history and its potential to animate our weak Messianic power. Such an act must involve the building-up of a redemptive imagination as a means to speak the truth of our place as the makers of value in the world challenged to destine our own journey in the ongoing project of justice. (shrink)

The idea that Buddhism played a key role in the development of New Confucianism has long prevailed in academia, but it is not until recent years that such an idea has been critically studied through a series of monographs, mainly published by Brill. This book is one of the excellent works concerning such an important topic. Unlike other works which focus on the possible influence of specific Buddhist schools on individual New Confucian thinkers, The Awakening of Faith and New (...) Confucian Philosophy stresses the relationship between a specific Buddhist 'classic,' the Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith or Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論, and New Confucianism as a whole. This makes for a very in-depth discussion.Including the... (shrink)

This interactive book is designed to help readers deepen their relationship with the Divine by connecting to the vibrancy of life. This cosmic message of hope is meant to be read without hurry, while taking time to ponder and absorb the wisdom of these great mystics.