Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny. In his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved The Alchemist, Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he decides to begin again: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him. Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, he initiates a journey to revitalize his energy and passion. Even so, he never expects to meet Hilal. A gifted young violinist, she is the woman Paulo loved five hundred years before—and the woman he betrayed in an act of cowardice so far-reaching that it prevents him from finding real happiness in this life. Together they will initiate a mystical voyage through time and space, traveling a path that teaches love, forgiveness, and the courage to overcome life’s inevitable challenges. Beautiful and inspiring, Aleph invites us to consider the meaning of our own personal journeys: Are we where we want to be, doing what we want to do? Some books are read. Aleph is lived. This eBook edition includes an excerpt from Paulo Coelho's Manuscript Found in Accra and a Reading Group Guide!
“A captivating story, not just an intellectual quest but a personal one . . . gripping [and] filled with the passion and wonder of numbers.” —The New York Times Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. But the story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is the saga of Amir Aczel’s lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals, perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Aczel has doggedly crisscrossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, moldy texts, cross-examining so-called scholars who offered wildly differing sets of facts, and ultimately penetrating deep into a Cambodian jungle to find a definitive proof. Here, he takes the reader along for the ride. The history begins with Babylonian cuneiform numbers, followed by Greek and Roman letter numerals. Then Aczel asks: Where do the numbers we use today, the so-called Hindu-Arabic numerals, come from? It is this search that leads him to explore uncharted territory on a grand quest into India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and ultimately into the wilds of Cambodia. There he is blown away to find the earliest zero—the keystone of our entire system of numbers—on a crumbling, vine-covered wall of a seventh-century temple adorned with eaten-away erotic sculptures. While on this odyssey, Aczel meets a host of fascinating characters: academics in search of truth, jungle trekkers looking for adventure, surprisingly honest politicians, shameless smugglers, and treacherous archaeological thieves—who finally reveal where our numbers come from. “A historical adventure that doubles as a surprisingly engaging math lesson . . . rip-roaring exploits and escapades.” —Publishers Weekly
Nicolas Bourbaki, whose mathematical publications began to appear in the late 1930s and continued to be published through most of the twentieth century, was a direct product as well as a major force behind an important revolution that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century that completely changed Western culture. Pure mathematics, the area of Bourbaki's work, seems on the surface to be an abstract field of human study with no direct connection with the real world. In reality, however, it is closely intertwined with the general culture that surrounds it. Major developments in mathematics have often followed important trends in popular culture; developments in mathematics have acted as harbingers of change in the surrounding human culture. The seeds of change, the beginnings of the revolution that swept the Western world in the early decades of the twentieth century -- both in mathematics and in other areas -- were sown late in the previous century. This is the story both of Bourbaki and the world that created him in that time. It is the story of an elaborate intellectual joke -- because Bourbaki, one of the foremost mathematicians of his day -- never existed.
"Dazzling and unmistakable in style, resonant in meaning, Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Aleph and Other Stories' contains the best of Borges' fiction. Included also is a lengthy autobiographical essay written especially for this volume. The twenty stories in this book cover the whole span and all the various facets of Borges' forty-year career as a short story writer. The collection is the most definitive and comprehensive available in English."--Jacket.
Written in New York City at the end of the First World War, this has been described by Crowley as an extended and elaborate commentary on The Book of the law, in the form of a letter from the Master Therion to his magical son.
Most people will be shocked to know that Jesus appears ten times (1000%) more in the Old Testament than he does in the New Testament. In fact Jesus the Aleph-Tav appears 9612 times (uninterpreted) in the Old Testament but only 983 times in the New Testament. The Aleph-Tav is comprised of the first and last characters of the Hebrew language, just as the alpha and the omega are the first and last characters of the Greek language. The Aleph-Tav is also the Hebrew character symbol believed to be the signature of Christ found only in the Hebrew Bible, represented by the head of a bull and the sign of a cross. Both character symbols clearly point us to Christ, the Lamb of God who died for humanity on the cross of Calvary. I AM the Aleph-Tav unveils the presence of Jesus in the Old Testament, first by taking a deep dive into the mystery of the Aleph-Tav. Although this symbol appears almost ten thousand times in the Old Testament, it was never interpreted into any other language, and author Samuel Koiki shows how there are parallels between the Old Testament and the statements Jesus made to John in the book of Revelation, where Jesus proclaimed that he was the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the endor, in a different way, the Aleph-Tav. Was Jesus telling John that he was there all along when the universe was created in Genesis? Perhaps he was telling John that he indeed is the Creator. Was he the one who split the Red Sea, as told in Exodus? Was he the Passover lamb in Leviticus, the high priest in Numbers, the rock that brought forth water in Deuteronomy, or the commander of the Lords army in Judges? Was he telling John that he is on every page of the Old Testament, all the way to Malachi, where he is the Son of righteousness who brings healing? This book unlike any other will bless and enrich you abundantly . Sit back and embark on this incredible journey with me.
In 1851, struggling, self-taught physicist Léon Foucault performed a dramatic demonstration inside the Panthéon in Paris. By tracking a pendulum's path as it swung repeatedly across the interior of the large ceremonial hall, Foucault offered the first definitive proof -- before an audience that comprised the cream of Parisian society, including the future emperor, Napoleon III -- that the earth revolves on its axis. Through careful, primary research, world-renowned author Amir Aczel has revealed the life of a gifted physicist who had almost no formal education in science, and yet managed to succeed despite the adversity he suffered at the hands of his peers. The range and breadth of Foucault's discoveries is astonishing: He gave us the modern electric compass, devised an electric microscope, invented photographic technology, and made remarkable deductions about color theory, heat waves, and the speed of light. Yet until now so little has been known about his life. Richly detailed and evocative, Pendulum tells of the illustrious period in France during the Second Empire; of Foucault's relationship with Napoleon III, a colorful character in his own right; and -- most notably -- of the crucial triumph of science over religion. Dr. Aczel has crafted a fascinating narrative based on the life of this most astonishing and largely unrecognized scientist, whose findings answered many age-old scientific questions and posed new ones that are still relevant today.
Aleph Shin/Samson's Lion was one of the most spellbinding religious thriller books published in the past ten years. Ten Lost is its prequel. Since Aleph Shin is out of print, and must be read first, TMS Publishing has included the entire book in this volume with Ten Lost for no more than the cost of Ten Lost alone. Two-for-the-price-of-one. Ten Lost fills in the gaps in Aleph Shin that surely left the reader asking the question: What are the foundations of this amazing story? Ten Lost answers these questions and gives deep insights into conflict of religion and secularism in the State of Israel.
A text supplemented by more than a hundred illustrations of letters, art, and sculpture covers such topics as the four divine names and the five modalities of being, the life of infinity, and the significance of each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.