This ​Is It and ​Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami - Merging ​With Śiva
Merging ​with Siva, Hinduism's Contemporary Metaphysics is a guide for one who is ready to diligently walk the spiritual path. Great new vistas open up throughout its 365 daily lessons as Gurudeva shares, in the clearest terms, deep metaphysical insights into the nature of God, soul and world, mind, emotions, ultimate realizations, chakras, purpose of life on earth and much, much more. Simple but effective practices are taught: how to remould our nature and karmas, calm the mind, develop self-esteem, begin to meditate, clear up the past and create a bright future.

Susan Sontag - Against ​Interpretation and Other Essays
A ​series of provocative discussions on everything from individual authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontag's best known and important works published in Penguin Modern Classics. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field of cultural criticism, ever since. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels - The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 US National Book Award for fiction - a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. If you enjoyed Against Interpretation and Other Essays, you might like Sontag's On Photography, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

Christopher D. Wallis - Tantra ​Illuminated
Tantra ​Illuminated takes the reader on a fascinating journey to the very heart of Tantra: its key teachings, foundational lineages, and transformative practices. Since the West s discovery of Tantra 100 years ago, there has been considerable fascination, speculation, and more than a little misinformation about this spiritual movement. Now, for the first time in the English language, Tantra Illuminated presents an accessible introduction to this sacred tradition that began 1,500 years ago in the far north of India. Using translations from from primary Sanskrit sources and offering a profound look at spiritual practice, this book reveals Tantra s rich history and powerful teachings.

Simon Chokoisky - The ​Five Dharma Types
A ​handbook for unlocking the soul’s purpose and manifesting a fulfilling life • Reinterprets the traditional Dharma system of ancient India as a map for revealing one’s true purpose • Provides tests for determining one’s Dharma type • Explains the benefits, challenges, and social, interpersonal, and health dynamics associated with each of the 5 Dharma types Have you ever wondered why, despite great obstacles, some people achieve success, while others, though given everything, seem to squander it away? Or why some people, despite having very little, radiate joy, while others appear miserable though surrounded by opulence? The answer is Dharma: knowing your soul’s purpose and living it is the key to creating a fulfilling life. Built on a deep body of Vedic knowledge, the ancient system of social structure and spiritual duty known as Dharma has modern applications for people seeking their life’s purpose. Author Simon Chokoisky explains the five Dharma archetypes--Warrior, Educator, Merchant, Laborer, and Outsider--and how your life’s purpose goes hand-in-hand with your Dharma type. Providing tests to determine your type, he outlines the benefits, challenges, emotional and learning styles, and social, interpersonal, and health dynamics associated with each type. Chokoisky reveals how the Dharma types function as an operating system for your identity, helping you map your life and play to your innate strengths, whether in choosing a prosperous career or field of study or in facing health challenges and meeting fitness goals. By accepting and understanding the nature of your type, you begin to align with your true purpose and, regardless of fate, find joy and meaning in life.

Jacob Needleman - The ​Indestructible Question
In ​essays examining our technocratic world, philosophy, religion, medicine, and other fields, the author argues that what is missing in all of them today iscultivation of a power of awareness of ourselves.

Lex Hixon - Coming ​Home
“Coming ​Home is a simple, brilliant book. It explains and epitomizes the best of the world’s great mystical traditions. By centering on the heart of enlightenment, it blazes the path of no-path. In the traditional Tibetan gesture of welcome, gratitude, and deep appreciation, I touch my forehead to that of my friend Lex Hixon—he who is “rooted in the Divine,” as this book so eloquently testifies.” —Ken Wilber, from the foreword What is Enlightenment, the ultimate goal of all sacred traditions? How does it affect the lives of those who experience it? Is there a common ground to how various traditions approach it? What does it mean for us today? Coming Home is an unusually clear and readable exploration of these questions. Its experimental bent and spirit of universality have brought it wide recognition as a classic. Lex Hixon warmly guides the reader through an intriguing array of traditional teachings to the essential truth of all the world’s great religions, which is simply to come home. Invoking the essence and texture of different sacred paths, he presents Enlightenment as the full flowering of human nature, accessible to everyone. “Outstanding as an introduction to the world’s great mystical traditions, I have used Coming Home in my philosophy of religion course for over fifteen years. The book’s purpose is to point to similar patterns of thought and experience across those traditions, but it never does so my abstracting them out. Instead it thoroughly embeds them in the lives and voices of individual mystics. It is this that makes it accessible as well as personally and intellectually inspiring to students.” —Nancy Baker, Professor of Philosophy, Sarah Lawrence College

Jan Fries - Kali ​Kaula
Kali ​Kaula is a practical and experiential journey through the land of living magical art that is Tantra, guided by the incisive, inspired and multi-talented hands of Jan Fries. By stripping away the fantasies and exploring the roots, flowers and fruits of Tantra, the author provides an outstandingly effective and coherent manual of practices. Acknowledging the huge diversity of Tantric material produced over the centuries, Jan Fries draws on several decades of research and experience and focuses on the early traditions of Kula, Kaula and Krama, and the result is this inimitable work which shines with the light of possibility. Unique in style and content, this book is more than a manual of tantric magick, it is a guide to the exploration of the inner soul. It contains the most lucid discussions of how to achieve liberation in the company of numerous Indian goddesses and gods, each of whom brings their own lessons and gifts to the dedicated seeker. It is also an eloquent introduction to the mysteries of the great goddess Kali, providing numerous views of her manifold nature, and showing the immense but hidden role played throughout history by women in the development and dissemination of tantric practices and beliefs. Jan Fries explores the spectrum of techniques from mudra to mantra, pranayama to puja, from kundalini arousal to purification to sexual rites, and makes them both accessible and relevant, translating them out of the Twilight Language of old texts and setting them in the context of both personal transformation and the historical evolution of traditions. The web of connections between Tantra and Chinese Alchemy and Taoism are explored as the author weaves together many of the previously disparate strands of philosophies and practices. This book challenges the reader to dream, delight, and develop, and provides an illustrated guidebook on how to do so. Bliss awaits those who dare.

Dadi Janki - A ​Pocket Book on Virtue
Ehhez a könyvhöz nincs fülszöveg, de ettől függetlenül még rukkolható/happolható.

Danielle Föllmi - Olivier Föllmi - Awakenings
In ​this fifth installment in the Offerings for Humanity project, the authors invite the reader to travel to East Asia. Each photograph by Olivier is accompanied by the thoughts of great masters, including Confucius, Lao Tzu, Dogen Zenji, Shonin Shinran, D. T. Suzuki, Gao Xingjian, and the Buddha.

Jed McKenna - Spiritually ​Incorrect Enlightenment
THE ​MARK OF A TRUE MASTER is that he can express a subject of the utmost complexity with uncanny simplicity. Jed McKenna is such a master, and spiritual enlightenment is his subject. His first book, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, was an instant classic and established him as a spiritual teacher of startling depth and clarity. Now, his second book, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, takes us on a fascinating tour of the enlightened state — what it is and what it's not, who's there and who's not, how to get there and how to get somewhere better. Delightful surprises abound, including the dramatic unveiling of perhaps the greatest spiritual masterpiece of all time — long hidden in plain view and well known to all. Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain and U.G. Krishnamurti all appear, and a student from the first book returns to share her Spiritual Autolysis journals. Also surprising are the author's gentle efforts to guide the reader away from enlightenment toward a more desirable and accessible state. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged, Missing me one place, search another, I stop somewhere, waiting for you. — Walt Whitman — Jed McKenna's books aren't for everyone. They're for people who are tired of the spiritual merry-go-round and ready to confront the unadorned reality of the awakening process. If you like your teachers with all the spiritual trimmings and trappings, Jed may not be right for you, but when you're ready to jump off the merry-go-round and begin your journey, Jed McKenna is the guy you want to see standing there — waiting for you.

Gary Lachman - A ​Secret History of Consciousness
For ​the last four centuries, science has tried to account for everything in terms of atoms and molecules and the physical laws they adhere to. Recently, this effort was extended to try to include the inner world of human beings. Gary Lachman argues that this view of consciousness is misguided and unfounded. He points to another approach to the study and exploration of consciousness that erupted into public awareness in the late 1800s. In this "secret history of consciousness," consciousness is seen not as a result of neurons and molecules, but as responsible for them; meaning is not imported from the outer world, but rather creates it. In this view, consciousness is a living, evolving presence whose development can be traced through different historical periods, and which evolves along a path to a broader, more expansive state. What that consciousness may be like and how it may be achieved is a major concern of this book . Lachman concentrates on the period since the late 1800s, when Madame Blavatsky first brought the secret history out into the open. As this history unfolds, we encounter the ideas of many modern thinkers, from esotericists like P. D. Ouspensky, Rudolf Steiner, and Colin Wilson to more mainstream philosophers like Henri Bergson, William James, Owen Barfield and the psychologist Andreas Mavromatis. Two little known but important thinkers play a major role in his synthesis-Jurij Moskvitin, who showed how our consciousness relates to the mechanisms of perception and to the external world, and Jean Gebser, who presented perhaps the most impressive case for the evolution of consciousness. An important contribution to the study of consciousness ... a must-read.

Ismeretlen szerző - The ​Poetics of Transubstantiation
The ​essays in this collection explore the concept of 'transubstantiation,' its adaptations and transformations in English and European culture from the Elizabethans to the twentieth century. Favoring an interartistic and comparative perspective, a wide range of critical approaches, from the philosophical to the semiological, from cultural materialism to gender and queer studies, it is brought to bear on authors ranging from Descartes, Shakespeare, Joyce, to Macpherson, Madox Ford, and Winterson, as well as on contemporary sculpture and an Italian adaptation of Conrad for the screen in and unusually comic vein. The volume, edited by Douglas Burnham of Staffordshire University and by Enrico Giaccherini of Pisa University, will be of interest to those concerned with the cultural history of Christianity and with the remarkable critical and theoretical insights generated by contemporary approaches to this traditional theme.

Sheldon B. Kopp - If ​You Meet the Buddha on The Road, Kill Him!
"The ​most important things that each man must learn no one else can teach him. Once he accepts this disappointment, he will be able to stop depending on the therapist, the guru who turns out to be just another struggling human being.” Using the myths of Gilgamesh, Siddhartha, The Wife of Bath, Don Quixote ... the works of Buber, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Kafka, Nin, Dante and Jung ... a brilliant psychotherapist, guru and pilgrim shares the epic tales and intimate revelations that help to shape Everyman's journey through life

Ursula Groll - Swedenborg ​And New Paradigm Science
Ursula ​Groll relates the metaphysical thought of Emanuel Swedenborg to current New Paradigm science, especially to the interface of science and spirituality. By providing extensive excerpts from Swedenborg's works and drawing parallels between his visionary insights and the works of philosophers and physicists such as David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, Rupert Sheldrake, and Albert Einstein, Groll shows how Swedenborg's voyage of discovery led him increasingly from the great to the small, from the outer to the inner, until he discovered the mirror of the universe, the seat of the Divine as the source of truth.

Robert M. Pirsig - Zen ​and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
One ​of the most important and influential books written in the past half-century, Robert M. Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is a powerful, moving, and penetrating examination of how we live... and a breathtaking meditation on how to live better. Here is the book that transformed a generation: an unforgettable narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father and his young son. A story of love and fear - of growth, discovery, and acceptance - that becomes a profound personal and philosophical odyssey into life's fundamental questions, this uniquely exhilarating modern classic is both touching and transcendent, resonant with the myriad confusions of existence... and the small, essential triumphs that propel us forward.

Carl Gustav Jung - The ​undiscovered self
Written ​three years before his death, The Undiscovered Self combines acuity with concision in masterly fashion and is Jung at his very best. Offering clear and crisp insights into some of his major theories, such as the duality of human nature, the unconscious, human instinct and spirituality, Jung warns against the threats of totalitarianism and political and social propaganda to the free-thinking individual. As timely now as when it was first written, Jung's vision is a salutary reminder of why we should not become passive members of the herd.

Henry David Thoreau - Walden ​(angol)
Walden ​(first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau lived at Walden for two years, two months, and two days, but Walden was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau did not intend to live as a hermit, for he received visitors and returned their visits. Instead, he hoped to isolate himself from society in order to gain a more objective understanding of it. Simplicity and self-reliance were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy. As Thoreau made clear in the book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, not far from his family home.

Thomas Cleary - Unlocking ​the Zen Koan
Elusive ​and enigmatic, zen koans have long puzzled people with their surprise meanings hidden in simple tales. Now one of America's finest translators of Asian philosophy provides a brillian new translation of the 12th century Wumenguan, the most popular of Chinese Zen koans. In Unlocking the Zen Koan (originally published as No Boundary), Thomas Cleary translates directly from the Chinese and interprets Zen Master Wumen's text and commentaries in verse and prose on the inner meaning of the koans. Cleary then gives us other great Chinese Zen masters' comments in prose or verse on the same koan. Cleary's probing, analytic commentaries wrestle with meaning and shading, explaining principles and practices. Five different steps to follow in reading the koan being with its use as a single abrupt perception, and lead progressively to more intellectual readings, illustrating the fixations which stand in the way of a true Zen understanding.

Jane Roberts - The ​Magical Approach
The ​Seth books are world-renowned for comprising one of the most profound bodies of work ever written on the true nature of reality. In this brand new volume of original material, Seth invites us to look at the world through another lens #150;#150; a magical one. Seth reveals the true, magical nature of our deepest levels of being, and explains how we have allowed it to become inhibited by our own beliefs and conventional thinking. The Magical Approach teaches us how to live our lives spontaneously, creatively, and according to our own natural rhythms. It helps us to discover and tune into our natural, instinctive behavior. By applying the principles in this book, readers will learn to trust their impulses and discover the highest expression of their creativity. We are indeed dealing with two entirely different approaches to reality and to solving problems #150;#150; methods we will here call the rational method and the magical one. The rational approach works quite well in certain situations, such as mass production of goods, or in certain kinds of scientific measurements #150;#150; but all in all the rational method, as it is understood and used, does not work as an overall approach to life, or in the solving of problems that involve subjective rather than objective measurements or calculations. The magical approach has far greater weight, if you use it and allow yourselves to operate in that fashion, for it has the weight of your basic natural orientation.

Rajiv Malhotra - Indra's ​Net
Defending ​Hinduisms Philosophical Unity, it is fashionable among intellectuals to assert that dharma traditions lacked any semblance of unity before the British period and that the contours of contemporary Hinduism were bequeathed to us by our colonial masters. Such arguments routinely target Swami Vivekananda, a key interlocutor who shattered many deeply rooted prejudices against Indian civilization. They accuse him of having camouflaged various alleged contradictions within traditional Hinduism and charge him with having appropriated the principles of Western religion to manufacture a coherent and unified worldview and set of practices known today as Hinduism. Indras Net: Defending Hinduisms Philosophical Unity provides a foundation for theories that slander contemporary Hinduism as illegitimate, ascribing sinister motives to its existence and characterizing its fabric as oppressive. Rajiv Malhotra offers a detailed, systematic rejoinder to such views and articulates the multidimensional, holographic understanding of reality that grounds Hindu dharma. He also argues that Vivekanandas creative interpretations of Hindu dharma informed and influenced many Western intellectual movements of the post-modern era. Indeed, as he cites with many insightful examples, appropriations from Hinduism have provided a foundation for cutting-edge discoveries in several fields, including cognitive science and neuroscience.