Social Consciousness

No matter where we are in our spiritual development, we all have questions about our practice and what we are experiencing - both the challenges and opportunities. How can I overcome my struggles to meditate more deeply? Is there a need for a guru, or can I rely on myself? Can I trust my intuition? Is it possible to hear the “Inner Word”, the voice of the soul, and how can I be sure that’s what I’m hearing? Is the Higher Self in the heart?

Written in clear, accessible language, this book seeks to free listeners from their suffering by drawing attention to the direct experience of self as abiding, loving, boundless awareness. Using practical exercises and meditations, the author guides listeners through a process of spiritual awakening, deconstructing self-delusions and integrating a new concept of existence that is free from the suffering of individual selfhood, but which acknowledges the attachments, traumatic experiences, and emotional pain of being human.

In 1968, two young medical students, Steve Biko and Mamphela Ramphele, fell in love while dreaming of a life free from oppression and racial discrimination. Their love story is also the story of the founding of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) by a group of 15 principled and ambitious students at the University of Natal in Durban in the early 1970s.

In this lively and entertaining introduction to the philosophy of mind, Edward Feser explores the questions central to the discipline, and relates them not only to the human brain and its capacity for thought, but also to the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence. This in-depth primer is an account of all the most important and significant attempts that have been made to answer the riddles of consciousness and thought.

Unveil the wisdom of antiquity with the immersive audiobook version of Manly P. Hall's magnum opus, The Secret Teachings of All Ages. This masterwork, expertly revised and narrated by Dennis Logan (producer of the Amazon Best-Seller The Books of Enoch: The Angels, Watchers and Nephilim) lets you engage with the wealth of knowledge that has been revered by truth seekers for nearly a century, all while you're on the move.

Today's computers are composing music that sounds "more Bach than Bach", turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative - or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from "the need for introspection" to "the ability to discover the key problem." He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence and explores the riches of computer-created art.

Learn how you can enhance your brain to take in more information and store it for a very long time, and how to retrieve information at any time no matter how long it has been stored. As you know, forgetting things can be really frustrating and embarrassing. No matter how much stored information you are unable to retrieve, this audiobook is sure to change all your frustrations and change your life forever. Imagine being able to remember anything you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste.

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.

Daniel Klein journeys to the Greek island Hydra to discover the secrets of aging happily. Drawing on the lives of his Greek friends, as well as philosophers ranging from Epicurus to Sartre, Klein learns to appreciate old age as a distinct and extraordinarily valuable stage of life. He uncovers simple pleasures that are uniquely available late in life, as well as headier pleasures that only a mature mind can fully appreciate.

Philosophy of Mind is the third and final part of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the collection in which Hegel (1730-1831) offered an overview of his life’s work. Though originally written in 1817, he revised it in 1830, thus providing a finished form the year before his death. Hegel used the three parts of the Encyclopaedia - Science of Logic, Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Mind - as a basis for lectures at the Universities of Heidelberg which he joined in 1816, and in Berlin in 1820.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet.

Imagination is a core aspect of being human. Our imagination allows us to fully experience ourselves in relation to the world and reality. Since the 17th century, however, imagination has been sidelined and dismissed as "make believe". Four centuries ago, a new way of knowing the world and ourselves emerged in the west and has gone on to dominate human life: science. Imagination has been marginalized - depicted as a way of escaping reality, rather than coming to grips with it - and its significance to our humanity has been downplayed.

What makes us who we are? Many think that we are just complicated machines, or animals that are different from machines only by being conscious. Richard Swinburne comes to the defense of the soul and presents new philosophical arguments that are supported by modern neuroscience. When scientific advances enable neuroscientists to transplant a part of brain into a new body, he reasons, no matter how much we can find out about their brain activity or conscious experiences, we will never know whether the resulting person is the same as before or somebody entirely new.

This is a new edition of the classic Colin Wilson collection The Essential Colin Wilson (first published in 1985), updated and introduced by Wilson's bibliographer Colin Stanley. It is the only book to contain extracts from Colin Wilson's most important work in one volume, including The Outsider, A Criminal History of Mankind, The New Existentialism, The Occult, New Pathways in Psychology, and Mysteries, as well as three of his novels and many other texts.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the leading French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century. Near the end of his life when he was forced to register with the police in Nazi occupied France he wrote: ‘Academic. Philosopher. Nobel prize winner. Jew.’ Time and Free Will, his doctoral thesis, was published as a book in 1889 and attacks and rejects the mechanistic view of causality described in Kant’s version of space and time and proceeds to attempt to define free-will and consciousness by separating space and time.

Shaun Gallagher offers an account of psychopathologies as disorders of the self. The Self and its Disorders develops an interdisciplinary approach to an "integrative" perspective in psychiatry. In contrast to some integrative approaches that focus on narrow brain-based conceptions, or on symptomology, this book takes its bearings from embodied and enactive conceptions of human experience.

As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "theory of everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are.

One of the greatest self-improvement books ever written and now available here in audio format. For anyone who wants an enriched life and an existence with meaning this is a must listen manuscript. Allen’s teachings make absolute sense: ‘A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts’.

Who has not found themselves scrolling endlessly on screens and wondered: Am I living or distracting myself from living? In Emergency, Break Glass adapts Friedrich Nietzsche’s passionate quest for meaning into a world overwhelmed by “content.” Written long before the advent of smartphones, Nietzsche’s aphoristic philosophy advocated a fierce mastery of attention, a strict information diet, and a powerful connection to the natural world.

First proposed more than 200 years ago, Schopenhauer's extraordinarily prescient metaphysics - if understood along the lines thoroughly elucidated and substantiated in this volume - offer powerful answers not only to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, but also to modern philosophical dilemmas such as the hard problem of consciousness - which plagues mainstream physicalism - and the subject combination problem - which plagues constitutive panpsychism