The inner world needs its own vocabulary, and Osho is a master of creating a language to describe experiences of the inner world that is simple, unpretentious and clear. 'The ABC of Enlightenment' is not just a dictionary but a book on life itself. It contains concise quotes by Osho on a large variety of topics. For those who are unfamiliar with him, this is an easy introduction to his way of life and also an entertaining reference book. From 'Absolute' to 'Zen' Osho is never at lack of profoundness and both traditional and contemporary issues are redefined and reinterpreted for a contemporary understanding.
In these rich and incisive essays, Robert Day reveals how his "learning" as a student defined his "teaching" at Washington College, the University of Kansas, the Iowa Writers Workshop and other colleges and universities. He learned because his best teachers included him into their intellectual lives, and it seemed natural for him to do the same for his students. The first part of this collection contains tributes to his teachers, and the second part tells how he followed their examples in his own teaching.
Enlightenment isn't a mystical state that requires years of effort to achieve. It is a practical lifestyle that you can have right now. In Practical Enlightenment, Ariel & Shya Kane share a refreshing approach to living life without worry, stress or anxiety - a way of living where your past no longer dictates your present or future and you experience your own perfection. Through humorous and touching stories of real people in real life situations, the Kanes show you the easy way to live an enlightened life - no effort required!
The ABC's of Intuition & Spiritual Growth speaks of transforming one's life with positive thinking, right attitude and understanding energy, vibration and the use of the Creator's "light." The book was inspired by the angels and ascended beings who watch over us and everyone reading it will receive a blessing and/or healing. Beginners on a path of self-mastery and enlightenment, as well as, seasoned spiritual/metaphysical aficianados will find something that will appeal. The words are kind, uplifting, empowering, with an occasional touch of humor. The visualizations and meditations in the book are guaranteed to transform the individual, if practiced regularly and with intention.
'This book presents a rigorous, hugely informative analysis of the early history of Dutch children’s literature, pedagogical developments and emerging family formations. Thoroughly researched, Dietz’s study will be essential for historians of eighteenth-century childhood, education and children’s books, both in the Dutch context and more widely.’ — Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University, UK. ‘A rich, informative, well-documented and effectively illustrated discussion of the ways Dutch eighteenth-century educators tried to transform youth into responsible readers. It does so in a wide international context and masterfully connects this process to the radical politicization and de-politicization of Dutch society in the revolutionary period.’ —Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, formerly of Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and the University of California at Los Angeles, USA. This book explores how children’s literature and literacy could at once regulate and empower young people in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Rather than presenting the history of childhood as a linear story of increasing agency, it suggests that we view it as a continuous struggle with the impossibility of full agency for young people. This volume demonstrates how this struggle informed the production of books in a historical context in which the development of independent youths was high on the political agenda. In close interaction with international children’s literature markets, Dutch authors developed new strategies to make the members of young generations into capable readers and writers, equipped to organize their own minds and bodies properly, and to support a supposedly declining fatherland.
In this comprehensive book, Lama Surya Das provides a bridge between East and West, past, present and future, making sacred and profound Tibetan teachings clear and easily accessible for anyone who wants to lead a more enlightened and sane life. Utilizing the unique Buddhist guidelines embodied in the Noble Eight Fold Path and the traditional Three Enlightenment Trainings of Virtue, Meditation and Wisdom, he elucidates the tried and true path of spiritual transformation - including key principles such as karma, rebirth and mind-training, as well as the highest, most secret teaching of Tibet, Dzogchen. In this wonderful marriage of the practical and the profound, Lama Surya Das reveals how sacred wisdom can be integrated into our busy lives. He offers a unique approach to the comprehensive wisdom of ancient Tibetan teachings on conscious living and dying and shows that the power of the Buddha is resting within us all. Drawing on Buddhist spirituality and wisdom, this is a view of the world written for Western seekers.
Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance. Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the "republic of ABC" a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the "republic of letters," while shaping its child-readers into consumers. As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature. In the nineteenth century, literacy became a crucial aspect of American middle-class personality and subjectivity. Furnishing the readers and writers needed for a national literature, the alphabetization of America between 1800 and 1850 informed the sentimental-reform novel as well as the self-consciously aesthetic novel of the 1850s. Through readings of conduct manuals, reading primers, and a sentimental bestseller, the author shows how the alphabet became embedded in a maternal narrative, which organized the world through domestic affections. Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, insisted on the artificiality of the alphabet and its practices in his antimimetic, hermetic The Scarlet Letter, with its insistent focus on the letter A. By understanding this novel as part of the network of alphabetization, The Story of A accounts for its uniquely persistent cultural role. The author concludes, in an epilogue, with a reading of postmodern alphabets and their implications for the future of literacy.
First published in 1925, Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity was considered a masterwork of its time, contributing significantly to the mass popularisation of science. Authoritative and accessible, it provides a remarkable introductory guide to Einstein’s theory of Relativity to a general readership. One of the most definitive reference guides of its kind, and written by one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers, ABC of Relativity continues to be as relevant today as it was on first publication.
Blamed for the bloody disasters of the 20th century: Auschwitz, the Gulags, globalisation, Islamic terrorism; heralded as the harbinger of reason, equality, and the end of arbitrary rule, the Enlightenment has been nothing if not divisive. To this day historians disagree over when it was, where it was, and what it was (and sometimes, still is). Kieron O'Hara deftly traverses these conflicts, presenting the history, politics, science, religion, arts, and social life of the Enlightenment not as a simple set of easily enumerated ideas, but an evolving conglomerate that spawned a very diverse set of thinkers, from the radical Rousseau to the conservative Burke.
