The inspirational messages collected in this book speak directly to the concerns of contemporary men and women and also form a concise introduction to Vedanta, a philosophy of India.
Presented for the first time in book form, the source principles breathe energy, clarity and creativity into the development of every project. The source person is someone who gets an idea and then takes initiatives and risks to realize it. The source person's main task is clarifying what the next step in the development of the project should be. When she needs support, she invites other people to participate; they in turn become source of specific parts of the project. This is the way all our collectives are born. In life, people take on several source roles: the manager is invited to become the source of a team, the employee to be the source of her tasks, the musician to be the source of his performance, the sportswoman to be the source of her good condition. Wherever there's a project, there's a source. The source principles shine a light on the way we engage with our own initiatives. The clarity they offer boosts our dedication and our capacity to encourage those around us to embark on their own source itinerary. Source principles invite us to live out a more inspired management style, they stimulate our creative involvement, and they give new meaning to our professional and personal alliances.
The Vedanta was an inseparable part of Swami Vivekananda’s personality. He lived and breathed this philosophy while preaching it to India and the west. While Vivekananda’s landmark address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 established him as modern India’s great spiritual leader, his popularity and appeal is attributed to his ability to integrate his human side with his profound spiritual side. In this beautifully written biography, Chaturvedi Badrinath liberates Vivekananda from the confines of the worship room and offers an unforgettable insight into the life of a man who was the very embodiment of the Vedanta that he preached.
In Power, Freedom, and Grace, Deepak Chopra considers the mystery of our existence and its significance in our eternal quest for happiness. Who am I? Where did I come from? Where do I go when I die? Chopra draws upon the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the findings of modern science to help us understand and experience our true nature, which is a field of pure consciousness. When we understand our true nature, we begin to live from the source of lasting happiness, which is not mere happiness for this or that reason, but true inner joy. By knowing who we are, we no longer interfere with the innate intelligence of the cosmos. Instead, we allow the universe to flow through us with effortless ease, and our lives are infused with power, freedom, and grace. “This book captures the essence of all of my talks over the last 20 years. It is the distillation of almost everything I have taught up to now.” — Deepak Chopra
Handle With Prayer is a definitive guide to the power and practice of prayer. This modern-day classic is a must-read for anyone craving a rich, intimate prayer life that produces results. God longs to communicate with His children. He desires to move in our lives, help us through difficulties, and unveil the unseen. Yet few of us would claim to have a satisfying prayer life. So why is it that so many Christians struggle to open God’s precious gift of prayer? This revised and refreshed edition features new artwork, an enhanced study guide, and updated content to connect with today’s readers. With over 250,000 copies sold, Handle With Prayer continues to inspire believers of all backgrounds to revive their time of prayer with God.
Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.
NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity” “A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich and others don’t.”—The New York Times FINALIST: Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, The Plain Dealer Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, or geography that determines prosperity or poverty? As Why Nations Fail shows, none of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Drawing on fifteen years of original research, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is our man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it). Korea, to take just one example, is a remarkably homogenous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created those two different institutional trajectories. Acemoglu and Robinson marshal extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, among them: • Will China’s economy continue to grow at such a high speed and ultimately overwhelm the West? • Are America’s best days behind it? Are we creating a vicious cycle that enriches and empowers a small minority? “This book will change the way people think about the wealth and poverty of nations . . . as ambitious as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.”—BusinessWeek
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.
Life in Norway, based on tradition and simplicity, on quality and authenticity, parallels today's trends. Ecologically conscious, Norwegians are experts at living off the land's bounty and are envied by many other European countries. Increasingly numerous visitors travel north, and most of them choose Norway as their destination. Nature is so powerful here that it dictates the Norwegian way of life. This is why Sølvi Dos Santos and Elisabeth Holte have chosen the rhythm of the seasons to reveal the country's diversity and richness. We are invited into Norwegian homes at the most pleasant time of year and we discover the charming hotels, traditional restaurants, and delightful house-museums that are all listed in the Visitor's Guide at the end of this book. In the winter, residents unite in the warmth of farms located in the grand valleys at the interior of the country, which reveal the splendor of their rose-painting decorations, their traditional built-in beds, and their large ballrooms. Spring is celebrated all along the breath-taking western fjords covered with blossoming fruit trees and in white-painted manor houses. In summertime, Norwegians spread out to the southern coasts with their small houses built just next to the water's edge, or travel to the north of the Arctic Circle where the Midnight Sun lights up continuous outdoor life. Autumn brings Norwegians back to hunting pavilions nestled deep within the forests to the fireside, and to wild berry collecting. Edvard Grieg's voice mixes with those of Henrik Ibsen, Edvard Munch, Knut Hamsen, Sigrid Undset, Tarjei Vesaas, and Liv Ullmann to affirm the Norwegian's deep love for their homes and their regions. As Knut Faldbakken explains in his preface: "The art of that people, our original traditions, have always existed side by side with more sophisticated currents, demanded their due respect and flaunted their quality with a vitality and a self-awareness which is still found today in the countless villages and hamlets tucked away in remote corners of our country." These representatives of Norway's distinctive culture invite you to discover a fascinating country, considered to be the best kept secret in Europe. Stunning color photography and lively, insightful texts capture the real essence of this beautiful country. In this huge country of contrast and change, Norwegians bring the intimate lifestyle of their comfortable homes into harmony with Nature's majestic grandiosity in a natural and unpretentiously graceful way. For them, nothing counts as much as life in the fresh air and the warmth of their homes, the passage from one to the other constituting an exceptional lifestyle that this book invites you to discover. This is a lifestyle marked by a love for natural materials, by the genius of Viking carpenters, and by a powerful tradition that can be brilliantly allied with the contemporary. Colour reveals and illuminates the smallest decorative elements, it literally bursts from walls, furniture, panelling and objects, all of which are harmonized or contrasted with particular aesthetic talent in the houses presented to us here: Grieg's and Munch's houses, Lofoten island's fisherman's cabins, and hunting pavilions--stopping places for royal families--homes of the descendants of great explorers, artisan's homes, and the country inns hidden deep in the valleys. These remarkable houses share a magnificent folk art tradition that distinguishes them from those of their Scandinavian neighbours. Living in Norway offers a privileged journey throughout this unique country. Two extremely talented Norwegians will be your guides: thanks to them, the visitor will no longer feel like a tourist, but like a native, and will discover with amazement the beauty and exoticism of this little-known country.
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.