Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spirituality. Show all posts
Jun 8, 2019
Jul 1, 2016
Sep 1, 2014
Buddhist Boot Camp - Timber Hawkeye
Buddhist Boot Camp - Hawkeye, TimberSummary: Brief chapters introduce mindfulness-enhancing techniques that draw from Buddhist philosophies and practices to help improve aspects of life ranging from love, relationships, and success to understanding, fear, and gratitude.
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Mar 1, 2014
The second half of life - Angeles Arrien
Summary: When you find the courage to change at midlife," Angeles Arrien teaches, "a miracle happens." Your character is opened, deepened, strengthened, softened. You return to your soul's highest values. You are now prepared to create your legacy: an imprint of your dream for our world-a dream that can fully come true in The Second Half of Life. Working with images, poetry, metaphors, and other forms of symbolic language from diverse world cultures, Dr. Arrien introduces us to the Eight Gates of Initiation. By mastering their lessons and gifts, you harvest the meaning and purpose of your life, and come into spiritual maturity. With The Second Half of Life, she takes you step-by-step through each gate to deepen your most valuable relationships, reclaim your untended creative talents, and shift your focus from ambition to meaning to grow into the exceptional elder you've always imagined you would one day become. Book jacket. - (Soundstrue)
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Oct 1, 2012
The open road - Pico Iyer
Summary: An illuminating account of the Dalai Lama explores his diverse roles as a politician, scientist, philosopher, and religious leader; discusses his ideas about religion, Tibet, peace, and world events; and examines his hidden life, often pragmatic messages, and the daily challenges he confronts. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* A mindful world wanderer and renowned travel writer, Iyer has a 30-year connection to the Dalai Lama stemming from a meeting between Iyer's philosopher father and the Dalai Lama shortly after his dramatic escape from Tibet in the wake of the Chinese invasion. Iyer has often arranged to be in the same place at the same time as the Dalai Lama, and he now reports on the beloved "spiritual celebrity" in action. His coverage includes vivid descriptions of the highly charged atmosphere of Dharamsala, the capital of Tibet-in-exile; surreal aspects of the Dalai Lama's ecstatic reception at his numerous appearances; and the profoundly mysterious elements of the Dalai Lama's "private and almost unimaginable Tibetan world," the realm of oracles and reincarnation. In the book's most inquisitive passages, Iyer offers rare insights into contradictory roles the Dalai Lama plays as a monk with a passion for science; a philosophic, exiled leader of an occupied nation that is threatened with extinction; and an icon espousing "global ethics." The combination of Iyer's exacting observations, incisive analysis, and frank respect for the unknowable results in a uniquely internalized, even empathic portrait of one of the world's most embraced and least understood guiding lights. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.
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Jul 1, 2011
Journey to the east - Herman Hesse
Summary: In simple, mesmerizing prose, Hermann Hesse tells of a journey both geographic and spiritual. H.H., a German choirmaster, is invited on an expedition with the League, a secret society whose members include Paul Klee, Mozart, and Albertus Magnus. The participants traverse both space and time, encountering Noah’s Ark in Zurich and Don Quixote at Bremgarten. The pilgrims’ ultimate destination is the East, the “Home of the Light,” where they expect to find spiritual renewal. Yet the harmony that ruled at the outset of the trip soon degenerates into open conflict. Each traveler finds the rest of the group intolerable and heads off in his own direction, with H.H. bitterly blaming the others for the failure of the journey. It is only long after the trip, while poring over records in the League archives, that H.H. discovers his own role in the dissolution of the group, and the ominous significance of the journey itself.
Kirkus Reviews
The story is really an inconsequential element of this dissertation. The author's membership in an organization called The League has been rescinded and he is seeking reentry. A loss of faith and vision is responsible for the subtle ostracism from the League and corresponds to the loss of a raison d'etre on the part of the erstwhile member. Coming across Leo, a member who had accompanied the League on the journey - an integral part of their lives - Hesse realizes that the journey which he had imagined terminated was going on all around him. The lack of faith had blinded his perception of it. Through a mortification of his ego, he is again accepted into the League. This mystical structure, the League, represents the spiritual community through which one gains happiness. Isolation, our common denominator, will never germinate into the fruits of a full life. One must join the brotherhood of man in their faith - not necessarily in God, or science - more appropriately, in their faith in each other. Only through involvement with others in a common vision can the solitude of a man be comforted and controlled. The vision while it is collective and, therefore, anonymous, still preserves the unique and precious design of the individual. Membership in the League will give meaning to his personal predispositions as well as comfort his isolation. This novel, written several years after Steppenwolf, has a market among intellectuals and college students.
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Feb 1, 2011
Twelve steps to a compassionate life - Karen Armstrong
Summary: Taking as her starting point the teachings of the great world religions, Karen Armstrong demonstrates in twelve practical steps how we can bring compassion to the forefront of our lives. Armstrong argues that compassion is inseparable from humanity, and by transcending the limitations of selfishness on a daily basis we will not only make a difference in the world but also lead happier, more fulfilled, lives.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* It takes courage for a religious historian and writer of Armstrong's stature to step out from behind the scrim of scholarship and analysis to offer guidelines for a spiritual practice designed to make humanity a kinder and saner species. With the boon of the prestigious TED Prize, Armstrong (The Case for God, 2009) worked with "leading thinkers from a variety of major faiths" to compose a Charter for Compassion, which calls for the restoration of "compassion to the heart of religious and moral life" in a "dangerously polarized" world. Not content with merely stating lofty goals, however, Armstrong, a revered genius of elucidation and synthesis, now tells the full and profound story of altruism throughout human history. She turns to neuroscience and tracks the evolution of our brains and our natural capacity for empathy, and performs her signature mode of beautifully clarifying interpretation in a mind-expanding discussion of the history of the Golden Rule ("Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself"), the essence of compassion and the kernel of every religious tradition. Exquisite and affecting explications of Buddhist, Confucian, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic commentary prepare the ground for meditation exercises meant to engender "open-mindedness" and the cultivation of compassion, making for the most sagacious and far-reaching 12-step program ever. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A hefty print run is planned for renowned religious thinker Armstrong's bold approach to teaching the compassionate ethos. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.
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Oct 1, 2010
If God is love: rediscovering grace in an ungracious world - Philip Gulley
Summary: Argues that one's beliefs play a key role in how one lives and interacts in the world, inviting readers to envision a world where everyone shares a belief that God loves every person and proposing world transformation through spiritual change.
Booklist Reviews
Gulley, a minister, and Mulholland, a theologian, turn the popular slogan "God is love" into a question that opens a Pandora's box of unanswered queries that some prefer remain unanswerable. If God is love, how are those who profess belief in God to act? If God is love, how does Christianity explain the vastly accepted dualistic theology of heaven and hell? If God is love, how can Christians live in God's grace? How can we continue to hate, slander, murder, and condemn our neighbors? If God is love, and God commands us to love our enemies, how can we justify war? Gently taking organized religion to task for perpetuating its power to control people, and only slightly lacing their discussion with their personal political opinions, the two Quakers propose ways to live, work, play, and be in a state of grace. Many may fault their approach for seeming overly simple at times. Yet anyone searching for a "graciousness primer" might look on this book as a commonsense example of such a manual. ((Reviewed October 1, 2004)) Copyright 2004 Booklist Reviews.
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Sep 1, 2010
That's funny you don't look Buddhist - Sylvia Boorstein
Summary: Explores the intriguing relationship between Jewish and Buddhist traditions and discusses the reasons why so many Jews are drawn to Buddhism and become practicing Buddhists. 50,000 first printing. $40,000 ad/promo. Tour. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
Boorstein, author of It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness (1995), is a wonderfully commonsensical Buddhist teacher and an observant Jew. This combination of faiths is not uncommon; in fact, so many Jews are drawn to Buddhism, it is becoming a genuine spiritual movement. Rodger Kamenetz examined this phenomena in The Jew and the Lotus (1994), and now Boorstein devotes her newest book to answering the question, "How is it possible to be both a Jew and a Buddhist?" Warm and direct, she expresses her gratitude for knowing "two vocabularies" of faith: Buddhism is her "voice of understanding," and Judaism is the voice of her heart. Uneasy, at first, about this unsought "dual citizenship," Boorstein slowly realized that she became a more observant Jew because she has a meditation practice, that meditation brought her closer to her spiritual essence, which is, by birth, Jewish. Boorstein's mindful elucidation of her balance of faiths is inspiring and enriching. When it comes to spirituality, more is more. ((Reviewed February 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews
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Aug 3, 2010
The biology of belief: unleashing the power of consciousness, matter, and miracles - Bruce H. Lipton
The biology of belief: unleashing the power of consciousness, matter, and miracles - Lipton, Bruce H.
Summary: Author Lipton is a former medical school professor and research scientist. His experiments, and those of other leading-edge scientists, have examined in great detail the processes by which cells receive information. The implications of this research radically change our understanding of life. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Dr. Lipton's profoundly hopeful synthesis of the latest and best research in cell biology and quantum physics is being hailed as a breakthrough, showing that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking.--From publisher description. - (Baker & Taylor)
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