This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.
A deeply original exploration of the power of spontaneity—an ancient Chinese ideal that cognitive scientists are only now beginning to understand—and why it is so essential to our well-being Why is it always hard to fall asleep the night before an important meeting? Or be charming and relaxed on a first date? What is it about a politician who seems wooden or a comedian whose jokes fall flat or an athlete who chokes? In all of these cases, striving seems to backfire. In Trying Not To Try, Edward Slingerland explains why we find spontaneity so elusive, and shows how early Chinese thought points the way to happier, more authentic lives. We’ve long been told that the way to achieve our goals is through careful reasoning and conscious effort. But recent research suggests that many aspects of a satisfying life, like happiness and spontaneity, are best pursued indirectly. The early Chinese philosophers knew this, and they wrote extensively about an effortless way of being in the world, which they called wu-wei (ooo-way). They believed it was the source of all success in life, and they developed various strategies for getting it and hanging on to it. With clarity and wit, Slingerland introduces us to these thinkers and the marvelous characters in their texts, from the butcher whose blade glides effortlessly through an ox to the wood carver who sees his sculpture simply emerge from a solid block. Slingerland uncovers a direct line from wu-wei to the Force in Star Wars, explains why wu-wei is more powerful than flow, and tells us what it all means for getting a date. He also shows how new research reveals what’s happening in the brain when we’re in a state of wu-wei—why it makes us happy and effective and trustworthy, and how it might have even made civilization possible. Through stories of mythical creatures and drunken cart riders, jazz musicians and Japanese motorcycle gangs, Slingerland effortlessly blends Eastern thought and cutting-edge science to show us how we can live more fulfilling lives. Trying Not To Try is mind-expanding and deeply pleasurable, the perfect antidote to our striving modern culture.
The psychoanalytic process is characterized by a complex weave of interrelated polarities: transference and countertransference, repetition and new experience, enactment and interpretation, discipline and personal responsiveness, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal, construction and discovery. In Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process, Irwin Z. Hoffman, through compelling clinical accounts, demonstrates the great therapeutic potential that resides in the analyst's struggle to achieve a balance within each of these dialectics. According to Hoffman, the psychoanalytic modality implicates a dialectic tension between interpersonal influence and interpretive exploration, a tension in which noninterpretive and interpretive interactions continuously elicit one another. It follows that Hoffman's "dialectical constructivism" highlights the intrinsic ambiguity of experience, an ambiguity that coexists with the irrefutable facts of a person's life, including the fact of mortality. The analytic situation promotes awareness of the freedom to shape one's life story within the constraints of given realities. Hoffman deems it a special kind of crucible for the affirmation of worth and the construction of meaning in a highly uncertain world. The analyst, in turn, emerges as a moral influence with an ironic kind of authority, one that is enhanced by the ritualized aspects of the analytic process even as it is subjected to critical scrutiny. An intensely clinical work, Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process forges a new understanding of the curative possibilities that grow out of the tensions, the choices, and the constraints inhering in the intimate encounter of a psychoanalyst and a patient. Compelling reading for all analysts and analytic therapists, it will also be powerfully informative for scholars in the social sciences and the humanities.
"If it were once believed that the freedom of churches should be restricted to bring greater control to missions, Roland Allen sets out to overturn this conception. Warning against the danger of imposing greater limits on churches, the Author advocates that all members of the church, 'natives' and foreigners alike, must take an active role in its establishment and daily life. The study divides itself into nine chapters; the first, introducing Allen's standpoint, the second as an opening into thenature and character of Spontaneous Expression. The third chapter deals with modern attempts by 'natives' towards the liberty of their churches. The fear of the doctrine becoming weakened by natives taking it into their own hands is addressed by chapter four and this fear is widened into the realm of the Christian standard of morals in chapter five. Civilisation and enlightenment form the central themes of the sixth chapter. Chapters seven and eight tackle the distinction between the Church andmissionary societies. It is in the final chapter that the future of Spontaneous Expansion is investigated and Allen puts forward his ideas which, as he rightly predicted, were broadly accepted fifty years and longer still after their original publication."
Beginning with a brief account of Saraha's life from what little is known of it, the book surveys his major work, his trilogy of songs: the People, King and Queen Doha. The scarcity of indigenous Indian source material necessitates constant reference to the rich Tibetan tradition, in particular the nDzogs-chen/sNyingthig teaching.
Ruthy Alon's description of Feldenkrais work in Mindful Spontaneity is a favored text of a generation of Feldenkrais enthusiasts. Alon weaves experiential and theoretical information in a poetic yet pragmatic language. These simple and unexpected suggestions will help everyone who suffers from restricted movement or pain to find a new sense of freedom.
This book, the most comprehensive of its kind, surveys the history of the relief printing press and machine from its inception as an adaptation of a domestic screw press in the middle of the fifteenth century to the giant, fast rotary presses of today. It covers every type of press, including some to which, hitherto, little attention has been paid. Each group is described, together with information on performance and with specific examples of use. -- ǂc Book flap.
Freedom is one of the main issues of modern philosophy and Kant’s philosophy of freedom a major source for comprehending it. Whereas in contemporary debates Kant’s concept of practical freedom is addressed frequently, the cosmological foundation of it is much less discussed and even mostly taken for granted. In Metaphysics of Freedom?, by contrast, Kant’s concept of cosmological freedom is scrutinized both in a historical and a systematic perspective. As a result, a deeper and broader understanding of Kant’s conception of freedom, its presuppositions, and problems emerges.
