In this engaging and mind-stretching book, Vlatko Vedral explores the nature of information and looks at quantum computing, discussing the bizarre effects that arise from the quantum world. He concludes by asking the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from?
Is Your Self-Esteem Other-Dependent? Are you unhappy and don't know why or how to fix it? Do you compare yourself to others and end up feeling bad about yourself? Do you worry about what others think about you? Is being successful and having it all not enough? Have you given up on yourself? If your answer is yes to any of the above, you may have other-dependent esteem. According to licensed counselor and self-esteem expert Patricia Noll, other-dependent esteem means that our happiness and self-worth depend upon something outside of ourselves, such as: what we have, do, and know what others think about us looking good being right achievements and accomplishments being the best and more. The problem is that nothing outside of ourselves can truly make us happy-at least not for long. Other-dependent esteem creates a cycle of stress, addictive behavior, dependency, and ultimately deep unhappiness. In Good With Me, Noll presents the same revolutionary approach that has helped her clients at Focus One shift from other-dependent esteem to true, self-dependent esteem-and experience freedom from crippling effects of other-dependency. This simple, practical, step-by-step solution will also help you finally achieve lasting happiness from the inside out, regardless of circumstances. Patricia Noll is a licensed mental health counselor, certified addictions professional, and acupuncture physician. As the founder of Focus One, an outpatient substance abuse program licensed by the stat e of Florida since 1989, Noll specializes in addressing self-esteem as the root of all addiction. She has appeared on television as an addictions expert, and her addiction treatment manual has received endorsements from Deepak Chopra, Larry Dossey, Jack Kornfield, and Jacquelyn Small. Her mission is to help build a society based on true self-esteem, solving the global challenges created by our other-dependent society one person at a time.
Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples' responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as a process of mediation between representation and reality, this book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern world.
Here Grof presents a useful model of the psychea model extended by his thirty years of studying non-ordinary states of consciousness. It is useful for understanding such phenomena as shamanism, mysticism, psychedelic states, spontaneous visionary experiences, and psychotic episodes. The model is also useful in explaining the dynamics of experiential psychotherapies and a variety of sociopolitical manifestations such as war and revolution. This book might have been entitled Beyond Drugs. The second part describes the principles and process of the non-pharmacological technique developed by the author and his wife, Christina, for self-exploration and for psychotherapy. Grof explores in detail the components of this technique. He describes its method, its effective mechanisms, as well as its goals and potential. Its practice is simple, since it utilizes the natural healing capacity of the psyche.
In the fall of 2014, educators Eric and Rixa Freeze moved with their young family to Old Nice, a medieval town-within-a-city on the famed Côte d'Azur. They'd bought a 700-square-foot dive, an apartment in need of renovation just a couple blocks from the Mediterranean. They were a family with a plan: to live differently. No home in the suburbs with a two-car garage, no bedroom for every child, no 24-hour Walmart. Carefully researched and vividly written, French Dive chronicles the Freeze family's integration into a culture where large families aren't all treated alike. What they find--spearfishing for food, renting their car to strangers, fixing and selling old furniture from the garbage depot--is that a city gives back the more you give to it. Morally complex and unflinching in its analysis of contemporary life and the things that keep human beings apart, Freeze tackles racism, homelessness, art, reality TV, social media, and parenting with wit and humor. Along the way he and his family learn what it means to be a neighbor, a member of a community, and a global citizen, how to treat others with empathy and understanding as they try to carve out a place in this world.
This book is about the theology of Jean Vanier. Drawing from Vanier's writings, it situates Vanier's theological thinking on community, care, and what it means to be and become human in the context of "welcome." This book draws attention to how welcome, for Vanier, is a visible expression of genuine hospitality, friendship, and human growth, offering an alternative way of conceiving and naming the social forming dynamics within Christian community, with special attention given to how welcome occurs within the communities of L'Arche. At a deeper level, this book assesses Vanier's thinking on the place and role both the self and community play in welcoming the truth of reality as it is revealed and given within community in order to prepare the way for exploring how welcome is a sign of community life, the visible expression of individual and communal trust in God's providence, and a conduit of God's presence in the world.
Science fact and science fiction collide in this new story from Rick Loverd, Program Director for The Science and Entertainment Exchange, an organization that pairs expert scientists with storytellers. In 2150, Earth's resources have been depleted and countries race to outer space to mine what they need from other planets. A group of Americans making its way to Venus crash-lands on the planet, forcing them to do whatever it takes to navigate the harsh landscape in their journey to find the science base they were flying toward. In the vein of great adventure survival stories like Lost and The Martian, there's only one reality on Venus - adapt or die. Collects the complete limited series.
Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table. According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory—generally referred to as “complexity science.” Thanks to a new understanding of evolution, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the phenomenon known as emergence, a new cosmic narrative is taking shape: Nature’s simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. In The Romance of Reality, cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian explains the science behind this new view of reality and explores what it means for all of us. In engaging, accessible prose, Azarian outlines the fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics at the heart of the old assumptions about the universe’s evolution, and shows us the evidence that suggests that the universe is a “self-organizing” system, one that is moving toward increasing complexity and awareness. Cosmologist and science communicator Carl Sagan once said of humanity that “we are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The Romance of Reality shows that this poetic statement in fact rests on a scientific foundation and gives us a new way to know the cosmos, along with a riveting vision of life that imbues existence with meaning—nothing supernatural required.