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" A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as...
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Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data. In seventy-five graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force....
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Caution Spiritual Seekers: You Might Just Find What You're Looking For!
Underneath the turmoil of thought, emotion, and personal will, there is a flow. If you're reading these words, you've probably felt it-the natural movement of life, the truth that beckons below the surface of things. What would happen if you were to stop avoiding this universal energy, and instead completely embrace it?
According to author and teacher Adyashanti, herein lies the...
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Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning...
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"One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother, a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial, Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center. Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia...
6) Candide
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Candide is about a man who believes in the philosophy that: "what happens, happens for the best in the end." that was taught to him by his personal philosopher Dr. Panlosss. Candide goes through many, many trials and everyone he meets has had something terrible happen to them. He searches the world over for his love Cundgonde. And in the end finds that the simplest things in life: love, friends, and health are all that matters.
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The Enlightenment stands at the threshold of the modern age. It elevated the natural sciences to the preeminent position they enjoy in modern culture. It inaugurated a skepticism toward tradition and authority that decisively shaped modern attitudes in religion, morality, and politics. And it gave birth to a vision of history that saw man, through the unfettered use of his own reason, at last escaping that state of ""immaturity"" to which superstition,...
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Matthieu Ricard trained as a molecular biologist, working in the lab of a Nobel prize-winning scientist, but when he read some Buddhist philosophy, he became drawn to Buddhism. Eventually he left his life in science to study with Tibetan teachers, and he is now a Buddhist monk and translator for the Dalai Lama, living in the Shechen monastery near Kathmandu in Nepal. Trinh Thuan was born into a Buddhist family in Vietnam but became intrigued by the...
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Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As historian and author Arthur Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics, contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since. This book is not just about Scotland: it is an exciting...
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"A warm-hearted guide to Buddhist practice for those ready to contend with the reality that enlightenment-the realization of non-self-can't be achieved by the self. A well-known spiritual saying goes, "Enlightenment is an accident. But we can make ourselves more accident-prone." As an authentic American Zen takes shape, enlightenment continues to be misunderstood as a project to be completed, a goal to be achieved, or a prize to be awarded. Tim Burkett's...
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Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing "flea"-colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense. As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the way...
12) A revolution of the mind: Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy
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Jonathan Israel is professor of modern history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is in the process of finishing a monumental three-volume history of the Radical Enlightenment, the first two volumes of which, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested, have already been published.
A leading historian reveals the radical origins of humanity's most cherished secular values
Democracy, free thought and expression, religious...
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Includes a bonus track of Tenzin Palmo introducing a retreat.
This is the story of Tenzin Palmo, the daughter of a fishmonger from London's East End who became a Tibetan nun. After meditating for 12 years in a cave 13,000 feet up in the Himalayas, she became a world-renowned spiritual leader and champion of the right of women to achieve spiritual enlightenment.
Diane Perry grew up in London's East End. At the age of 18, however, she read a book...
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"When Claire Hoffman's alcoholic father abandons his family, his struggling wife, Liz, tells five-year-old Claire and her seven-year-old brother, Stacey, that they are going to heaven--Iowa--to live in Maharishi's national headquarters for Heaven on Earth. For Claire's mother, Transcendental Meditation--Maharishi's method of meditation and his approach to living the fullest possible life--promises world peace and Enlightenment just as their family...
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A groundbreaking exploration of the "science of enlightenment," told through the lens of the journey of Siddhartha (better known as Buddha), by Guardian science editor James Kingsland.
In a lush grove on the banks of the Neranjara in northern India-400 years before the birth of Christ, when the foundations of western science and philosophy were being laid by the great minds of Ancient Greece-a prince turned ascetic wanderer sat beneath a fig tree....
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"We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning--cost-benefit analysis--to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older normative systems of Aristotelian...
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[2021]
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English
Description
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness... One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three...
Series
Publisher
Recorded Books
Pub. Date
p2008
Language
English
Description
The Odyssey of the West series addresses in chronological sequence the works that have shaped the ongoing development of Western thought both in its own right and in cultural dialogue with other traditions. Part five weaves together the varied and interrelated strands of eighteenth- and nineteenth century discourse and events, focusing on the contributions to Western history that bear the most responsibility for shaping the world of today.
Author
Series
Publisher
Recorded Books
Pub. Date
p2008
Language
English
Description
The Odyssey of the West series addresses in chronological sequence the works that have shaped the ongoing development of Western thought both in its own right and in cultural dialogue with other traditions. Part four provides a close look at the period from the Renaissance to the scientific revolution and into the early Enlightenment. These lectures take in the immense variety and singular achievements that have helped mold our present societies.
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