Chapters Include: Recipe for Failure, 3 Interviews with Jed, Impersonating Jed McKenna, Blues for Buddha, Zen and the Art of Self-Mutilation, Mannahatta (The Journey to the Shaman, Kill the Swiss, Improbability, My Uncle the Vampire, Bookstore Guru, City Lights, Death & Discrimination) I, Witness, The New World, The Golden Door, Visionary Goofballs, Nothing Forever: A Post-Apocalyptic Lightmare
A MASTERPIECE of illuminative writing, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing is mandatory reading for anyone following a spiritual path. Part exposé and part how-to manual, this is the first book to explain why failure seems to be the rule in the search for enlightenment, and how the rule can be broken. :: Book One of Jed McKenna's Enlightenment Trilogy. Contains Bonus Material.
Jed McKenna is the author of The Enlightenment Trilogy and The Dreamstate Trilogy. The Jed Talks series continues to provide the same combination of humor, charm, and unparalleled mastery that has made Jed McKenna the clearest and most unique voice in human spirituality.
We are programmed from birth to believe that our existence is an unsolvable riddle, but if we make an honest effort, we discover that mystery itself is the riddle. Not just what is the big mystery, but why is there any mystery at all? And what if there isn’t? What if the Mysterium Tremendum is just an internal belief without any external counterpart? What if the answers to life’s biggest questions were all hidden in plain sight? “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” Herman Melville Those interested in striking through the mask will welcome a theory of everything that makes sense, doesn’t rely on religious or scientific chicanery, and can be easily understood. And those familiar with Jed McKenna and the Enlightenment Trilogy will know that it’s not just a theory.
Renowned for exploring the social implications of modern technology, Howard Rheingold has been dubbed by MIT "the first citizen of the Internet." In this collection of funny, prescient, thought-provoking essays, originally published during the 1970s and 1980s, he offers a glimpse into the changes wrought during that explosive period. From the effects of the graphic user interface (GUI) not only on how we work but how we think, to "technarchist" movements that presaged both the hacker mentality and the anarchist idealism of Burning Man today, to a ground-floor view of the very earliest of what Rheingold was the first to dub virtual communities, his Excursions run the gamut from the silly to the profound. These essays remain fascinating, amusing, and relevant. "Most of my work in recent decades," Rheingold says, "has focused on the consequences of digital media and networked publics. Before the digital wave came along, I wrote about a more diverse range of subjects: What causes anger? What’s it like to be in a car crash? What’s insect sex like? Do invisible airborne chemicals affect behavior? Can we control our dreams? How will people get high in the future? Will money evolve into new forms? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, these short pieces re-present my explorations during my think about anything years to a wider public who may be familiar with my work on digital culture."
Includes Deception: Your Mind is the Scene of the Crime, a play in 5 acts. ContentsThe Power of DevotionGenuine LearningDeception I: Opium DenMarichelle 4: Maps of IdeasA Filmmaker’s ApocalypseUnlearn EverythingDeception II: Loading ProgramDiamond BulletsThe Old Pond RoadMarichelle 5: The I-PartThe Tyranny of DelusionThe Allopathic MechanicDeception III: Dream FactoryA Life of Constant DuplicityIs Pubasyl Right for You?In the Land of the Slow-Cooked FrogDeception IV: The Help WizardMarichelle 6: Go Hack YourselfTake me to the volcano!A Long Time on a Crooked RoadDeception V: Asshole, KansasAway from the Things of Man
A guide to the science of prophecy, why so many predictions never come to pass, and the Golden Age ahead • Presents a mathematical means of divining the future, revealed in the Oahspe Bible, using the Egyptian Tables of Destiny, a 12,000-year-old system so exact it can foretell every day of the year • Reveals that we are not headed for Rapture and the Apocalypse but for “the Quickening,” the embryonic stage of a Utopian Age • Examines the cycles of history and explains why many prophecies have not come true Reviewing the cycles of history from biblical times to the present and prophecies of the future from Nostradamus to Edgar Cayce and Jeane Dixon, Susan B. Martinez reveals that our current “time of troubles” is not the beginning of Rapture, the Apocalypse, or Armageddon, but of the embryonic stage of a Utopian Age--the “Quickening” of the human race. Reviving the lost science of prophecy, Martinez explains why so many “great prophecies” have failed and presents the 12,000-year-old Egyptian system of prediction so exact it can foretell every day of the year, a method based not on the planets, astrology, or intuition but on Earth’s magnetic rhythms. Using Earth science, historical research, religious texts, spiritualism, and patterns within the cycles of war and political milestones, she demonstrates that the past is the hidden key to the future and uncovers the prophetic numbers of Earth’s cycles--11, 33, 99, and 363--as set forth in the Egyptian Tables of Destiny, ancient texts brought to light by the 19th-century Oahspe Bible. Explaining how readers can use the Tables of Destiny to make their own predictions of the future, she presents her own forecasts of the risks and costs of technological progress, the destiny of America, the up-and-coming global religion, the truth behind climate change and the cause of earthquakes, and the true life expectancy of planet Earth as well as offering a preview of the Paradigm Shift and Golden Age ahead, a time of global unity and awakening of the soul of the world.
If life is but a dream, to what do we awake? The central premise of Dreamstate: A Conspiracy Theory, is the admittedly ridiculous but incontrovertibly true assertion that the universe does not exist. This is something you can understand conceptually, like watching a documentary about Antarctica, or experientially, like moving to Antarctica. There’s also a related phenomenon where you fall asleep watching the documentary and wake up in the frozen wasteland. That’s gotta be weird, but the truth is that you’re asleep in a barren wasteland dreaming that you’re not, so that’s where waking up gets you.
Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment Isn't One Kind of Enlightenment - It's the Only Kind THE MARK OF A TRUE MASTER is that he can express a subject of the utmost complexity with uncanny simplicity. Jed McKenna is such a master, and spiritual enlightenment is his subject. His first book, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, was an instant classic and established him as a spiritual teacher of startling depth and clarity. Now, his second book, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, takes us on a fascinating tour of the enlightened state - what it is and what it's not, who's there and who's not, how to get there and how to get somewhere better. Delightful surprises abound, including the dramatic unveiling of perhaps the greatest spiritual masterpiece of all time - long hidden in plain view and well known to all. Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain and U.G. Krishnamurti all appear, and a student from the first book returns to share her Spiritual Autolysis journals. Also surprising are the author's gentle efforts to guide the reader away from enlightenment toward a more desirable and accessible state. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged, Missing me one place, search another, I stop somewhere, waiting for you. - Walt Whitman Jed McKenna's books aren't for everyone. They're for people who are tired of the spiritual merry-go-round and ready to confront the unadorned reality of the awakening process. If you like your teachers with all the spiritual trimmings and trappings, Jed may not be right for you, but when you're ready to jump off the merry-go-round and begin your journey, Jed McKenna is the guy you want to see standing there, waiting for you.
Employing the deconstructive literary theories of Jacques Derrida, McHoul (communications, Murdoch U., Australia) and Wills (French and literary and film theory, LSU) write about reading in general, and in particular about Pynchon's three novels and his early stories. The book itself was manufactured in Hong Kong, presumably the source of the acidic paper. Vargas Llosa reflects on six of his own novels and discusses the importance to him of the fiction of Borges, how his method of writing has evolved, his attraction to Sartre's work, days at military school, and the process of changing the dead language of the living language of serious art. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
