Are you seeking Enlightenment? Can you be Enlightened? Is Enlightenment a gift for a select few - for intellectual saints and sages? No, we have been gifted with a human birth so that we all can attain Enlightenment. Unfortunately we are not able to be enlightened because we are living with the myth and we do not Realize the Truth. To Realize the Truth, to be Enlightened, we have to unlearn the lies and bust the myth that we have lived with. This book will help you be enlightened with the Truth as it discriminates the Truth from the Myth associated with life, religion, God and spirituality.
Whether you meet Karl Renz in person or through this book, the encounter will leave you with a radically different sense of yourself. Karl's unique ability lies in exposing the beliefs we've built our lives on, beginning with our root sense of individuality. Our current predicament is the result of believing ourselves to be something other than what we really are. This self-imposed limitation causes our incessant searching and suffering.Throughout these dialogues Karl unceasingly brings us back to the truth of our real nature by helping us recognize the fleeting and impermanent nature of the self we've come to believe in. Even momentarily seeing the truth of who we really are immediately frees us, if only temporarily, from these self-imposed limitations.Karl's purpose-if we can say he even has one-is to reflect our own divinity, which he skillfully and uncompromisingly expresses throughout the pages of this book. By realizing the implication of his words, we can live life to its fullest and experience the boundless freedom that is our essence. The most detailed and authoritive text on the true meaning of the Taylors Masonic rituals! The principal contents of this book are the Official Taylors Lectures on the Three Degrees of Craft Freemasonry. These lectures deal with the description of the ritual of those Degrees along with their moral and symbolic significance and are of a formal nature, arranged as catechisms - that is by question and answer form. The text can be studied at home or can be preformed by two or more brethren in open lodge. Much evidence suggests that many sections of these lectures are as old as the degrees themselves. This book adds much to ones enjoyment and understanding of Freemasonry. The most detailed and authoritive text on the true meaning of the Taylors Masonic rituals! The principal contents of this book are the Official Taylors Lectures on the Three Degrees of Craft Freemasonry. These lectures deal with the description of the ritual
Spiritual enlightenment is becoming a buzzword. Enlightenment is a popular niche for people who write or read about self-help, meditation, healing, psychology and more. But do you really understand what enlightenment is? Is it some kind of altered state of consciousness, a solution to get high without drugs, a way to live life in 24/7 bliss, a myth or a complete scam? Is there any scientific basis to enlightenment or spiritual awakenings? This book has the answer for these questions.This book attempts to bridge spiritual teachings of Vedanta and Buddhism with science. It gives you a practical and reasonable path to end your suffering and live a peaceful, satisfied and happy life. Above all, it will help you to find your own way and follow your own light. The book will also introduce you to some important concepts in psychology, which are related to spiritual awakening.The concepts and solution presented in this book are based on the author's own experience. It also has a chapter that narrates author's own spiritual journey which led to a complete spiritual transformation. The book also has a separate chapter which talks about scientific research done on spiritual enlightenment.
One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.
So many myths and stories occur about enlightenment that we can find ourselves chasing after an impossible goal. We may waste years along the pathway to enlightenment pursuing what we think it is and not what it actually is. This book is unique and original in that it offers readers the chance to navigate through the stories, myths and legends without getting trapped. Find out the pitfalls and traps along the way and stop trying to reach some ideal that probably dos not exist. Awakened beings have kept to a very simple path which is described for you here. Each time you read the next myth you will feel more empowered to wake up fully to the truth of what you are. You will begin to see that the great beings of the past and present that have transcended the mind were just ordinary human beings. They had no superhuman abilities or powers but simply worked with what they had. Each myth is clearly explained and clear guidance is given as to how to navigate around it. Never before has enlightenment been so clearly and simply described and available for everyone.
Our Ego makes us suffer. It creates anger, hate, jealousy and vengeance. It screams, ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. People often say, 'Kill your Ego!' While we cannot annihilate the Ego, we can transcend it and have an Enlightened Ego. And an Enlightened Ego is free from all misery, agony and anguish. This book will help you understand what an Enlightened Ego is and show you how to Enlighten your Ego.
In Embodied Enlightenment, contemporary spiritual teacher Amoda Maa Jeevan dispels the outdated view of a transcendent enlightenment and instead presents a new, feminine expression of awakened consciousness for all—one that is felt and known through what our everyday lives are made of: our emotions, bodies, intimate relationships, work, and life’s purpose. This book is a direct invitation to awaken in a profound, embodied way, and to participate in a collective evolution that can create a new world. When many of us think of enlightenment, we may envision a life of seclusion and contemplation, transcending the body and worldly attachments, or the achievement of karmic perfection. But what if, rather than something reserved for the mountaintop meditator or sage, the call to awaken is meant for us all? And how can we consciously live that awakening in the midst of our complex, messy, modern lives? Speaking from her own awakened experience, Amoda Maa Jeevan offers a timeless wisdom, busting some of the common myths about enlightenment and addressing topics often excluded from more traditional spiritual conversations—from the connection between consciousness and the body to relationships to planetary health. In addition, she covers the unfamiliar territory of what happens after enlightenment, delving into awakened action, creative expression, and more. There’s an urgency today to evolve beyond humanity’s current ego-based paradigm, and along with it, a unique expression of enlightenment is emerging. With clarity, passion, and grace, Embodied Enlightenment invites you on an exploration of consciousness that embraces both the messiness of your earthly experience and the non-duality of pure awareness, offering guidance on how your daily life can bring you into alignment with a divine destiny of individual and collective awakening.
Theoretical Anthropology is a major contribution to the historical and critical study of the assumptions underlying the development of modern cultural anthropology. In the new introduction, Martin Bidney discusses the present state of anthropology and contrasts it with the scene surveyed in Theoretical Anthropology. He discusses the relevance of David Bidney's work to our present concerns. Also included in this work is the second edition's introductory essay by David Bidney, written fifteen years after the first edition of Theoretical Anthropology. Here the author examines his original aims in writing this book. Theoretical Anthropology has helped to create among anthropologists the present climate of theoretical self-awareness and broad humanistic concerns. It has become a standard reference work for anthropologists as well as sociologists.
"Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich L. Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time. Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda. In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again. Ulrich L. Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading.
Ends of Enlightenment explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy. The European Enlightenment was a state of being, a personal stance, and an orientation to the world. Ways of probing experience and knowledge in the novel and in the visual arts were interleaved with methods of experimentation in science and philosophy. This book's fresh perspective considers the novel as an art but also as a force in thinking. The critical distance afforded by a view back across the centuries allows Bender to redefine such novelists as Defoe, Fielding, Goldsmith, Godwin, and Laclos by placing them along philosophers and scientists like Newton, Locke, and Hume but also alongside engravings by Hogarth and by anatomist William Hunter. His book probes the kinship among realism, hypothesis, and scientific fact, defining in the process the rhetorical basis of public communication during the Enlightenment.
