The fifteen million Americans who do crossword puzzles know that it’s far more than just a hobby. Zen and the Art of Crossword Puzzles is a fun and philosophical look at this beloved pastime—from why we love crossword puzzles and how they benefit us in unexpected ways, to puzzle solving as a spiritual practice and how that practice contributes to our self-awareness and personal growth. Each chapter opens with a puzzle, luring puzzle fans into a crossword journey rich with meaning and magic. The first book of its kind, Zen and the Art of Crossword Puzzles is sure to be a hit with crossword puzzle lovers everywhere.
Draws on Zen philosophies to counsel runners on how to achieve better results by aligning the body and mind for success, providing case testimonials while providing coverage of topics ranging from staying committed and training mindfully to visualizing goals and accepting limitations. Original.
The writers and artists described in this book are joined by a desire to embrace 'Eastern' aesthetics as a means of redeeming 'Western' technoculture. The assumption they all share is that at the core of modern Western culture there lies an originary and all-encompassing philosophical error - and that Asian art offers a way out of that awful matrix. That desire, this book attempts to demonstrate, has informed Anglo- and even Asian-American debates about technology and art since the late nineteenth century and continues to skew our responses to our own technocultural environment.
Introduces a method for test taking, showing readers how to learn to let go of worries and fears, calm the mind, and bring one's attention to the present moment.
This book brings together the papers written by the authors over the last fifteen years on the historical and philosophical foundations of Albert Ellis' Rational Psychotherapy (later Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, REBT) and its relationship to Stoicism, especially the later practical form represented by Epictetus. It goes beneath the well known similarities between Stoic "spiritual exercises" and modern psychotherapy, to look at the cause of these similarities. These lie in the conceptual continuities that connect the Stoics and other ancient philosophies with the modern cultural framework underlying psychotherapy.
Long Strange Journey presents the first critical analysis of visual objects and discourses that animate Zen art modernism and its legacies, with particular emphasis on the postwar “Zen boom.” Since the late nineteenth century, Zen and Zen art have emerged as globally familiar terms associated with a spectrum of practices, beliefs, works of visual art, aesthetic concepts, commercial products, and modes of self-fashioning. They have also been at the center of fiery public disputes that have erupted along national, denominational, racial-ethnic, class, and intellectual lines. Neither stable nor strictly a matter of euphoric religious or intercultural exchange, Zen and Zen art are best approached as productive predicaments in the study of religion, spirituality, art, and consumer culture, especially within the frame of Buddhist modernism. Long Strange Journey’s modern-contemporary emphasis sets it off from most writing on Zen art, which focuses on masterworks by premodern Chinese and Japanese artists, gushes over “timeless” visual qualities as indicative of metaphysical states, or promotes with ahistorical, trend-spotting flair Zen art’s design appeal and therapeutic values. In contrast, the present work plots a methodological through line distinguished by “discourse analysis,” moving from the first contacts between Europe and Japanese Zen in the sixteenth century to late nineteenth–early twentieth-century transnational exchanges driven by Japanese Buddhists and intellectuals and the formation of a Zen art canon; to postwar Zen transformations of practice and avant-garde expressions; to popular embodiments of our “Zenny zeitgeist,” such as Zen cartoons. The book presents an alternative history of modern-contemporary Zen and Zen art that emphasizes their unruly and polythetic-prototypical natures, taking into consideration serious religious practice and spiritual and creative discovery as well as conflicts over Zen’s value amid the convolutions of global modernity, squabbles over authenticity, resistance against the notion of “Zen influence,” and competing claims to speak for Zen art made by monastics, lay advocates, artists, and others.
The only Sunday crosswords with a" Far Side" sense of humor. Of the top 15 crossword books in the country overall, including The New York Times, five of them are by Merl Reagle. Appearing in newspapers with a total circulation of more than 10 million readers, Merl Reagle's Sunday Crosswords is quickly becoming the most popular Sunday puzzle in America. Called" the best Sunday crossword creator in America" by Games magazine, Merl Reagle has been making crossword puzzles since age six. He had his first crossword for The San Francisco Examiner in 1985. "For freshness, humor and quality of construction, crossword just don't get any better than this." -Will Shortz, Crossword Puzzle Editor, The New York Times "Smart, funny, and challenging! I wish he made more of them for me!" -Erica Rothstein, former Editor-in-Chief, Dell Crossword Magazines
