Growing Consciousness explores the links between spirituality and the garden with a focus on Ayurvedic techniques and meditation. Through simple daily meditation practices coupled with gardening, you can marry spiritual growth and plant-based consumption to cultivate a more gratifying existence. This book forges an accessible path to self-discovery and truth; one that can apply to a small herb garden on the windowsill just as well as it would to a Buddhist Zen garden. Growing Consciousness will outline simple practices and explorations into the spiritual qualities of gardening and how one can marry spiritual growth and plant-based consumption to cultivate a more conscious and satisfying existence.
Growing Consciousness explores the links between spirituality and the garden with a focus on Ayurvedic techniques and meditation. Through simple daily meditation practices coupled with gardening, you can marry spiritual growth and plant-based consumption to cultivate a more gratifying existence. This book forges an accessible path to self-discovery and truth; one that can apply to a small herb garden on the windowsill just as well as it would to a Buddhist Zen garden. Growing Consciousness will outline simple practices and explorations into the spiritual qualities of gardening and how one can marry spiritual growth and plant-based consumption to cultivate a more conscious and satisfying existence.
To meet the needs of the fast growing numbers of Latino/a English learners, this volume presents an approach to secondary education teacher preparation based on the work of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAP). Renowned scholar and educator Angela Valenzuela, together with an impressive roster of contributors, provides a critical framework for educating culturally responsive teachers. They examine the knowledge, skills, and predisposition required for higher education institutions to create curricula for educating Latino/a children, children of color, and language minority youth. Growing Critically Conscious Teachers illuminates why growing our own teachers makes sense as an approach for not only addressing the achievement gap, but for also enhancing the well-being of our communities as a whole. Book Features: A community-based, university- and district-connected partnership model that fosters students’ critical consciousness. A framework for participatory action research (PAR) within teacher preparation that promotes community and societal transformation. A curriculum premised on sociocultural and sociopolitical awareness. The wisdom, experiences, and lessons learned from educators who have been change agents in their own schools, communities, and college classrooms across the country. “An enormous contribution to the field. It will also be a cherished resource and guide for Latino/a and non-Latino/a teachers alike, and for the university faculty and school- and community-based facilitators who help prepare them.” —From the Foreword by Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, Language, Literacy, and Culture, College of Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst “Provides the elemental sparks for essential conversations about culturally responsive teaching and the well-being of youth in our communities. Through a variety of critical perspectives this volume raises significant questions that must be at the forefront of Latino/a education. This excellent volume is a must read for teachers truly committed to educational practices of social justice in schools today.” —Antonia Darder, Leavey Endowed Chair of Ethics and Moral Leadership, Loyola Marymount University
Do you want to be free of fear, confusion and suffering? Do you want to gain peace of mind, fulfillment and empowerment? Do you want to be able to give something positive back to this world as a part of expressing your unique potential? This book is designed to help you achieve these goals and to make a real difference to your life. It will do this by fundamentally changing the way you see yourself and the world around you. This change will both awaken and realign your consciousness to where it is in harmony with the Universal Laws of Consciousness. The Universal Laws of Consciousness determine the healing and enlightening of the human mind and its governing Soul. All that is needed is your desire to be free and a solid commitment to pursue the ideal of Love as a healing and awakening force in your life. Love, along with the limitless wisdom that it contains, is right with you, like your closest companion. You may not know this yet. You may not be able to feel it yet, but you will, so long as you don’t give up. You are on a quest to find your true Self, beyond what you can perhaps imagine right now. Just know that what you will inevitably find is beautiful beyond description, no matter what, in your present state of confusion, you think you are at this moment. The treasure of all treasures awaits you and it has your name on it. Real Healing, Real Awakening is forged from genuine experience and universal truth. It is a guide to awakening to new, more expansive levels of consciousness.
How do our unique conscious minds reflect and amplify nature’s vast evolutionary process? This book provides a scientifically informed, psychologically holistic approach to understanding and enhancing our future consciousness, serving as a guide for creating a realistic, constructive, and ethical future. Thomas Lombardo reveals how we can flourish in the flow of evolution and create a prosperous future for ourselves, human society and the planet.
An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develope self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation. In Our Own Minds, Radu Bogdan takes a developmental perspective on consciousness--its functional design in particular--and proposes that children's functional capacity for consciousness is assembled during development out of a variety of ontogenetic adaptations that respond mostly to sociocultural challenges specific to distinct stages of childhood. Young human minds develop self-consciousness--in the broad sense of being conscious of the self's mental and behavioral relatedness to the world--because they face extraordinary and escalating sociocultural pressures that cannot be handled without setting in motion a complex executive machinery of self-regulation under the guidance of an increasingly sophisticated intuitive psychology. Bogdan suggests that self-consciousness develops gradually during childhood. Children move from being oriented toward the outside world in early childhood to becoming (at about age four) oriented also toward their own minds. Bogdan argues that the sociocultural tasks and practices that children must assimilate and engage in competently demand the development of an intuitive psychology (also known as theory of mind or mind reading); the intuitive psychology assembles a suite of executive abilities (intending, controlling, monitoring, and so on) that install self-consciousness and drive its development. Understanding minds, first the minds of others and then our own, drives the development of self-consciousness, world-bound or extrovert at the beginning and later mind-bound or introvert. This asymmetric development of the intuitive psychology drives a commensurate asymmetric development of self-consciousness.
As revealed by the author's very personal journey, expanding consciousness can indeed be achieved through a dedicated sequence of mind/body/spirit modalities. Dr. Ralph Kilmann candidly shares his earliest traumas and how he then investigated his fears and anxieties by actively participating in a great variety of wellness and healing modalities--such as talk therapy (psychoanalysis), Holotropic Breathwork, Holosync meditation, Network Spinal Analysis (NSA), Neuro Emotional Technique (NET), Vipassana meditation, advanced structural alignment, electro-homeopathy, Pulsor chakra clearing, and many others. Through his intense experiences with all these mind/body/spirit modalities, Kilmann was able to resolve the unintended consequences that stem from specialized (and thus limited) efforts at living an examined life. Indeed, the author illuminates these fundamental lessons: Without already having a fairly conscious mind and a secure ego, you won't choose to work through the accumulated tension and painful memories in your body. And without maintaining an energetically flowing and feeling body, you won't have an easy time directly and continually experiencing the spiritual fabric of the universe. Stated differently, this book illustrates how participating in a sequence of mind/body/spirit modalities can transform childhood traumas into unique opportunities for awakening to your soul's purpose and then living your soul's purpose--which thereby sets you free. The Courageous Mosaic, however, also recognizes how the systems in society play a major role in either expanding or obstructing human consciousness. This book thus considers how organizations and institutions (including public schools, religious organizations, health-care organizations, governments, and workplaces) can be--must be--redesigned for conscious living. If this mission can be achieved, many more people (and not just a privileged few) will be able to achieve a higher level of human consciousness. Indeed, as Kilmann convincingly demonstrates, it's only by expanding consciousness in people--and their organizations--that humankind can wake up and stop war, violence, hatred, poverty, hunger, disease, hopelessness, and the destruction of our planet.
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Stretching the mind and heart to include more of the mind and heart of God. For all believers wishing to think thoughts and feel feelings never experienced before.
After publication of his first book, "What We Believe That Makes Us Different," Charles DeTurk uncovered a wealth of writings from his past, composed of articles, essays, transcripts of talks, the content of eLetters, and Weblog entries that few people have seen, heard or read. He realized that in the quarter of a million words in these documents that he potentially had another several books, to say the least, in exciting and provocative ideas and information. So he has sorted out a large part of these papers into what is, at present, 5 books that he is publishing as a Series entitled "Journeys In Consciousness," of which this book, "Growing In Consciousness," is Volume I. In addition, each chapter contains extensive commentary written just for this book. The original content is presented, as much as possible, in the same format in which it originally appeared, thereby giving insight into the setting from which these ideas originally sprang. In a day and age when we hear a lot about how people need to learn to "think outside of the box," Charles has been living a large part of his life outside of the box. And from that place of awareness, he has gathered together, over the years, some very interesting, meaningful, and insightful perspectives upon life and upon all of this stuff out here that we call reality. His goal, for decades, has been to discover ideas and principles that will help people to be able to rediscover the truths about who and what they are, and to thereby allow them to live more happy, healthy, successful and fulfilling lives. "Growing In Consciousness" contains about 20 earlier writings from 1974-75 that were published in what in those days was called an underground newspaper. And then there are about 20 motivating talks and eTalks presented in 2000 - 2001. Amazingly, many of these ideas and concepts are right on target for today's reality. But be forewarned, this is not just another self-help book. Charles tackles some ideas and concepts that just a short time ago would have been taboo in this field. However, he has a fervent belief in the ability of all people to ultimately understand the truths that underlie our very existence, and so he shares ideas that others only whisper about. He has always believed in open honesty and says that living that way "one has much less to hide." Scattered throughout these pages are several chapters dealing with the subjects of eternal life and resurrection. For more orthodox readers, some of these ideas that he presents may be something of a shock and maybe will even get this book banned from Texas schools. But Charles believes that we are dealing with ideas here that, for far too long, have been hidden from people in favor of ideas that are more supportive of the status quo. New ideas often have a difficult time being heard, much less being considered as valid. So this book is planting some seeds in the belief that they will latter bear the fruit of new, expanded awareness. Charles presents his information in a conversational way as though he was right there next to the reader. And he does it all with an understandable ease that will give one new insights about their life and ways to improve it. What he has to share is a comfortable mix of ageless metaphysics, cutting edge quantum physics, and practical ways of applying these engagingly compatible principles to one's own life. For the bottom liners out there, you will enjoy this book while learning something new in the process. The future titles in the "Journeys In Consciousness" Series will include "Roots Of Metaphysics and Quantum Physics," "Secular Issues From A Spiritual Perspective," "Beginning Explorations In Consciousness," and "Presidential Marathon." Keep an eye out, for Charles expects to have them all published by Summer 2011. After this Series is all published, Charles will be concentrating upon his long-awaited book, "Millennium Paradigm: Explorations in the Dynamics of Consciousness."
