Eastern Spirituality

Ramayana must rank as one of the most loved and revered books of all time. A part of India's ancient Vedas, it is a beautiful story of romance and adventure. It recounts the history of Rama, said be an incarnation of the Godhead, and his divine consort Sita. Filled with magic and mysticism, it entrances the listener and stirs deeply moving emotions. At the same time its profound spiritual messages leave one feeling uplifted and enriched. This is a novelization of the classic. It contains all the essential narrative of the original Sanskrit poem.

In this inspirational collection of stories, Swami Rama relates his experiences with the great teachers who guided his life, including Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, and Ramana Maharshi. It documents Swami Rama's spiritual quest, which showed him that direct experience is the source of real knowledge.

One of America’s most popular and beloved Buddhist teachers offers encouragement and inspiration for anyone on the spiritual path. In short sections that include many stories and anecdotes drawn from her years as a student and teacher of Buddhist meditation, Sharon Salzberg reveals how our own happiness is found in the capacity to open our hearts to others—and that this capacity is far vaster than we ever thought possible.

Written almost two millennia ago, Patañjali's work focuses on how to attain the direct experience and realization of the purusa: the innermost individual self, or soul. As the classical treatise on the Hindu understanding of mind and consciousness and on the technique of meditation, it has exerted immense influence over the religious practices of Hinduism in India and, more recently, in the West.

Alan Watts introduced millions of Western listeners to Zen and other Eastern philosophies, but he’s also recognized as a brilliant commentator on Judeo-Christian traditions as well as a celebrity philosopher who exemplified the ideas — and lifestyle — of the 1960s counterculture.

It is said that the practice of dream yoga deepens our awareness during all our experience: the dreams of the night; the dream-like experience of the day; and the bardo experiences after death. Indeed, the practice of dream yoga is a powerful tool of awakening, used for hundreds of years by the great masters of the Tibetan traditions. Unlike in the Western psychological approach to dreams, the ultimate goal of Tibetan dream yoga is the recognition of the nature of mind or enlightenment itself.

One thousand years ago in the valley of Kashmir, a great Tantric master named Ksemaraja wrote his masterpiece: the Pratyabhijna-hrdaya, which means "The Essence of the Recognition Philosophy" - recognition, that is, of oneself as a direct expression of the universal divine Consciousness. Recognition also that this Consciousness is, in truth, all that exists, and that its five fundamental powers of awareness, enjoyment, willing, knowing, and acting are the sacred endowments of every sentient being.

In this landmark modern-day rendition of the ancient Taoist classic, Ursula K. Le Guin presents Lao Tzu’s time-honored and astonishingly powerful philosophy like never before. Drawing on a lifetime of contemplation, she offers an unparalleled window into the text’s awe-inspiring, immediately relatable teachings and their inestimable value for our troubled world.

In this short, accessible account of the Eastern Orthodox Church, John McGuckin begins by tackling the question "What is the Church?" His answer is a clear, historically and theologically rooted portrait of what the Church is for Orthodox Christianity and how it differs from Western Christians' expectations.

The I Ching, or Book of Change, has been consulted through the ages, in both China and the West, for answers to fundamental questions about the world and our place in it. The oldest extant book of divination, it dates back 3,000 years to ancient shamanistic practices involving the ritual preparation of the shoulder bones of oxen. From this early form of communication with the other world, it has become the Chinese spiritual book par excellence.

Mindfulness doesn't have to be about complicated rituals, expensive retreats and difficult spiritual how-to manuals! It all comes down to diving deep, making friends with your emotions (both good and bad) and understanding your awareness. In this book you will find effective techniques to step out of your mindless, stressful thinking and allow your mind to finally embrace mindfulness so that you can achieve peace and happiness in all areas of your life.

Deep down, most people think that happiness comes from having or doing something. Here, in Alan Watts’s groundbreaking third book (originally published in 1940), he offers a more challenging thesis: authentic happiness comes from embracing life as a whole in all its contradictions and paradoxes, an attitude that Watts calls the “way of acceptance.” Drawing on Eastern philosophy, Western mysticism, and analytic psychology, Watts demonstrates that happiness comes from accepting both the outer world around us and the inner world inside us,

Before it was a religion, a culture, or even a system of meditation, what was Buddhism? On Buddhism Without Beliefs, celebrated teacher, translator, and former Buddhist monk Stephen Batchelor takes us back to the first years after the Buddha's awakening to reveal the root insights of Buddhism hidden beneath centuries of history and interpretation.

Written for those who were bewildered by the conflict between religion and scientific and philosophic ideas, The Guide for the Perplexed is concerned with finding a concord between the text of the Old Testament and its commentaries, and Aristotelian philosophy. After analyzing the ideas of the Old Testament, Maimonides examines other reconciliations of religion and philosophy like the Moslem rationalists and then offers his own resolution with Aristotelianism.

What would be the practical implications of caring more about others than about yourself? This is the radical theme of this extraordinary set of instructions, a training manual composed in the fourteenth century by the Buddhist hermit Ngulchu Thogme, here explained in detail by one of the great Tibetan Buddhist masters of the twentieth century, Dilgo Khyentse. In the Mahayana tradition, those who have the courage to undertake the profound change of attitude required to develop true compassion are called bodhisattvas.

The Living Gita is a translation of, and commentary on, the Bhagavad Gita by Sri Swami Satchidananda, one of the world’s most respected Yoga masters. The Gita is the summary and essence of Eastern spiritual wisdom, drawn from the Hindu tradition. When Swami Satchidananda arrived in the West in 1966, he recognized the need to make the teachings of Yoga and this classic text accessible to modern readers and listeners. He soon began giving talks on the Gita, which became the foundation for The Living Gita, first published in 1988.

Alan Watts examines the problem of humans in a seemingly hostile universe in ways that question the social norms and illusions that bind and constrict modern humans. Marking a groundbreaking synthesis, Watts asserts that the powerful insights of Freud and Jung, which had, indeed, brought psychiatry close to the edge of liberation, could, if melded with the hitherto secret wisdom of the Eastern traditions, free people from their battles with the self.

In this groundbreaking audiobook, neuropsychology professor Chris Niebauer explains how after decades of research on the brain, Western science may have inadvertently confirmed a fundamental tenet of Buddhism: anatta, or the doctrine of "no self". Niebauer shows how findings in neuropsychology suggest that our sense of self is actually an illusion created by the left side of the brain and that it exists in the same way a mirage in the middle of the desert exists: as a thought rather than a thing.

Based on Mark Williams's research into the therapeutic powers of mindfulness, and an extension of Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Deeper Mindfulness continues the story told by Mark Williams and Danny Penman's runaway success, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World. Where the author's previous book crafted the foundations necessary to live a happier and more fulfilling life, and has proven transformative for many people, many have asked whether there was anything more they could do to enhance their practice and resolve their remaining issues.

The inspirational teachings in this collection show that the real way of the warrior is based on compassion, wisdom, fearlessness, and love of nature. The teachings are drawn from the talks and writings of Morihei Ueshiba, founder of the popular Japanese martial art of Aikido, a mind-body discipline he called the "Art of Peace", which offers a nonviolent way to victory in the face of conflict. Ueshiba believed that Aikido principles could be applied to all the challenges we face in life.