Download or read book Our Ecstatic Days written by Steve Erickson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Ecstatic Days begins as the memoir of a young mother desperate to forget a single act, committed out of love and fear, that has changed forever the world around her. In the waning days of summer, a lake appears, almost overnight, in the middle of Los Angeles. In an instant of either madness or revelation, convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, Kristin becomes determined to stop it. Three thousand miles away, on the eve of a momentous event, another young woman -- with a bond to Kristin that she can't even know -- meets a mysterious figure who announces in the dark, "The Age of Chaos is here." Against a forbidden landscape that shimmers with destiny and yearning, Our Ecstatic Days finally takes place on the terrain of a defiant heart. Human connections multiply into astonishing twists of fate -- by which the wrongs of an obsolete century may be set right -- and parallel lives spin faster toward the possibility that they will once again unite, electrifying a vision of the century to come.
Download or read book The Sea Came in at Midnight written by Steve Erickson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIV“If you read one philosophical-doomsday kinky-sex road-trip novel this year, make it this one.” —Salon/divDIV It’s New Year’s Eve 1999, and the members of a powerful cult are about to commit ritual suicide. Fleeing their ranks at the final moment, teenager Kristin lands in Tokyo, where she gains employment listening to clients’ stories in a “memory hotel” designed to address the decay of Japanese collective memory after the Second World War. But Kristin herself has a startling odyssey: Among other things, it involves answering a personal ad only to wind up imprisoned, naked, in an empty house presided over by a man known as the Occupant, hard at work on a millennial calendar that has serious implications for the future. The Sea Came in at Midnight is a breathtaking fable of redemption and one of Erickson’s most impressive visions to date. /div/div
Download or read book Zeroville written by Steve Erickson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel that inspired the film starring James Franco and Seth Rogen: “One of a kind . . . a funny, unnervingly surreal page turner” (Newsweek). Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post Book World, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review Zeroville centers on the story of Vikar, a young architecture student so enthralled with the movies that his friends call him “cinéautistic.” With an intensely religious childhood behind him, and tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, he arrives in Hollywood—where he’s mistaken for a member of the Manson family and eventually scores a job as a film editor. Vikar discovers the frames of a secret film within the reels of every movie ever made, and sets about splicing them together—a task that takes on frightening theological dimensions. Electrifying and “darkly funny,” Zeroville dives into the renegade American cinema of the 1970s and ’80s and emerges into an era for which we have no name (Publishers Weekly). “Funny, disturbing, daring . . . dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish.” —The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent.” —The Believer “[A] writer who has been compared to Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon.” —Bookmarks Magazine “Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced.” —Jonathan Lethem
Download or read book Days Between Stations written by Steve Erickson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVIn what the Guardian recently named one of the best literary debuts ever, a love triangle intersects with a lost film masterpiece and weather as turbulent as the heart/divDIV Life stories converge and break away in Days Between Stations, Steve Erickson’s searing first novel. At the center is the tumultuous union between Jason and Lauren, who fall in love as youths in Kansas, and later relocate to San Francisco. A cyclist training for the Olympics, Jason is often abroad and unfaithful; Lauren, in turn, finds solace in Michel, a nightclub manager trying to reconnect with his past. Michel’s journey leads to The Death of Marat, a recovered lost masterwork of silent film directed by his grandfather, whose extraordinary life includes having grown up as an orphaned twin in a Parisian brothel. In a world shaped by sensuality and trauma, where sandstorms invade Los Angeles, the Seine freezes, bike racers vanish in Venice, and relationships are warped by amnesia, geological chaos and personal upheaval each wrenchingly reflect the other. /div/div
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World written by Diana Stein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For millennia, people have universally engaged in ecstatic experience as an essential element in ritual practice, spiritual belief and cultural identification. This volume offers the first systematic investigation of its myriad roles and manifestations in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The twenty-nine contributors represent a broad range of scholarly disciplines, seeking answers to fundamental questions regarding the patterns and commonalities of this vital aspect of the past. How was the experience construed and by what means was it achieved? Who was involved? Where and when were rites carried out? How was it reflected in pictorial arts and written records? What was its relation to other components of the sociocultural compact? In proposing responses, the authors draw upon a wealth of original research in many fields, generating new perspectives and thought-provoking, often surprising, conclusions. With their abundant cross-cultural and cross-temporal references, the chapters mutually enrich each other and collectively deepen our understanding of ecstatic phenomena thousands of years ago. Another noteworthy feature of the book is its illustrative content, including commissioned reconstructions of ecstatic scenarios and pairings of works of Bronze Age and modern psychedelic art. Scholars, students and other readers interested in antiquity, comparative religion and the social and cognitive sciences will find much to explore in the fascinating realm of ecstatic experience in the ancient world.
Download or read book Ecstatic Healing written by Margaret De Wys and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding ecstatic spirit possession for physical and spiritual healing • Details the author’s direct experiences working with Brazilian miracle healer John of God (João de Deus) and African high shaman Credo Mutwa • Includes stories of psychic surgery, spirit possession, and shamanic healing rituals • Explains how each of us is capable of miraculous healing Margaret De Wys first became aware of ecstatic trance healing when she was a young girl fascinated by the rapture of the Holy Rollers. However, it would be decades before she would be called to explore that early fascination. At a gathering in Upstate New York thirty years later she was spontaneously possessed by a sacred Zulu necklace--a gift from one of the most powerful shamans in Africa, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa. Frightening yet exhilarating, the experience set her on a search to understand the depths of ecstatic healing. Margaret journeys to Brazil to work with famous healer John of God (João de Deus), where she witnesses hundreds of miraculous healings through psychic surgery. During her years of spiritual service at John’s Casa, she experiences ecstatic visions, which increase her hunger for more knowledge. She begins to attend possession rituals held by Pai Lazaro, an Umbanda priest, and finds she is a natural medium to the African gods. Called through her dreams to work with Credo Mutwa, she travels to Credo’s Healing Village in Africa, where she discovers her gift as an ecstatic healer and the meaning of true faith. In sharing her journey to reach a profound understanding of ecstatic states and shamanic healing, Margaret De Wys not only gives the reader a direct experience of holiness but also reveals the potential each of us has for miraculous healing.
Download or read book Tours of the Black Clock written by Steve Erickson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVThe course of a century is rewritten in this fabulously warped odyssey, named a best book of the year by the New York Times/divDIV Tours of the Black Clock is a wild dream of the twentieth century as told by the ghost of Banning Jainlight. After a disturbing family secret is unearthed, Jainlight throws his father out of a window and burns down the Pennsylvania ranch where he grew up. He escapes to Vienna where he is commissioned to write pornography for a single customer identified as “Client X,” which alters the trajectory of World War II. Eventually Jainlight is accompanied by an aged and senile Adolf Hitler back to America, where both men pursue the same lover. Tours of the Black Clock is a story in which history and the laws of space and time are unforgettably transformed. /div/div
Download or read book The Quest for Ecstatic Morality in Early China written by Kenneth W. Holloway and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are accustomed to the idea that emotions need to be controlled, but the Chinese text "Xing zi mingchu" (300 B.C.E) argues that setting them free allows us to develop our qing. Although the development is completed with the help of the classics, the result is a personal connection to the Dao.
Download or read book Mast The Ecstatic written by Mohanji and published by Gurulight. This book was released on 2020-09-19 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Marx spoke about the have and the have nots. A third kind always existed in Bharat (ancient India) since time immemorial and continues to this day - those who could have anything but wanted nothing. The Məsts. Remaining always in inner ecstasy and living in complete freedom and abandon, they walk the earth to remind you of your lost glory. To go within. To be in ecstasy within yourself. To be You. To be a Məst. Learn about these amazing Məsts and the grand Tradition that they represent, through the fascinating life of Atmananda Chaitanya. Atmananda is not just a person. He is a wake-up call. This book may awaken people from the illusions of activities into the lap of beingness, totality and completion. This is the story of a possible journey of an ordinary man from a unit to the Universe. He is everybody. He is everything. He is YOU.
Download or read book The Ecstatic Or Homunculus written by Victor D. LaValle and published by Crown. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something is wrong with Anthony, and it's getting worse. Schizophrenia runs in his family's blood, picking off an uncle here, a mother there, and has now found a home in Anthony's mind. The women in his life -- his mother, sister, and grandmother -- bring him home to Queens and try to fix him, but his presence slowly turns their home into a semi-suburban asylum.Anthony narrates the skewed story of his family's surreal adventures in an exploitative world, from black-market employers and neighborhood loansharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. In the tradition of misfit picaresques from The World According to Garp to Confederacy of Dunces, this is the story of a family trying to save themselves from the ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.
Download or read book These Dreams of You written by Steve Erickson and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Set against the backdrop of Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency . . . A complex and imaginative literary tapestry about family and identity” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Shadowbahn is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory. One November night in a canyon outside Los Angeles, Zan Nordhoc—a failed novelist turned pirate radio DJ—sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country’s first black president, Barack Obama. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife, and their son set out to solve the enigma of the little girl’s life. When they find themselves scattered and strewn across two continents, a mysterious stranger with a secret appears, who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past. Sweeping from 1960s London and ’70s Berlin to twenty-first-century California, and the beginning-of-civilization Ethiopia, These Dreams of You chronicles not only a family struggling to salvage its bonds but a twelve-year-old boy readying himself for what the years to come hold. “Truly electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times.” —The Boston Globe “Drama filled with exuberance.” —The Washington Post “The four Nordhocs who provide the messy, vibrant heart of These Dreams of You make up a representative tableau for the new millennium: the American family as mash-up.” —The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Ecstatic Confessions written by Martin Buber and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecstatic Confessions is Martin Buber's unique, personal gathering of the testimonies of mystics throughout the centuries expressing their encounters with the divine. It features the author's seminal introduction to mysticism, "Ecstasy and Confession," which probes the nature of what Buber terms the "most inward of all experiences. . . . God's highest gift." Buber sifted through texts from oriental, pagan, Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim sources down the centuries to cull those moving records that manage to convey some quality of an experience that is essentially beyond the power of words to capture. Ecstatic Confessions orchestrates these reports from the edge of human experience into a revealing look at the nature of the ecstatic experience itself and the tension arising from the mystic's compelling need to give witness to an event that can never truly be verbalized. Ecstatic Confessions illuminates the intellectual development of its author even as it probes the almost insurmountable barrier between language and authentic mystical experience, which is, in essence, beyond the grasp of rational constructs.
Download or read book Flow State written by Freiheit Jetzt! and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-29 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dear Reader, It is said that every exceptional accomplishment in human history has been performed in the state of flow. "Being in the Zone" or "in the flow" describe the condition of absolute mastery. Being one with life, fully immersed in the activity you are doing, purposefully driven in alignment with your life's legacy - this is the flow state. Read in this book further what it is and how you can easily get into flow, to make all your projects flourish in absolute mastery now.
Download or read book The Art of Losing Control written by Jules Evans and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have always sought ecstatic experiences - moments where they go beyond their ordinary self and feel connected to something greater than them. Such moments are fundamental to human flourishing, but they can also be dangerous. Beginning around the Enlightenment, western intellectual culture has written off ecstasy as ignorance or delusion. But philosopher Jules Evans argues that this diminishes our reality and denies us the healing, connection and meaning that ecstasy can bring. He sets out to discover how people find ecstasy in a post-religious culture, how it can be good for us, and also harmful. Along the way, he explores the growing science of ecstasy, to help the reader - and himself - learn the art of losing control. Jules' exploration of ecstasy is an intellectual and emotional odyssey balancing personal experience, interviews and readings from ancient and modern philosophers that will change the way you think about how you feel. From Aristotle and Plato, via the Bishop of London and Sister Bliss, radical jihadis and Silicon Valley transhumanists, The Art of Losing Control is a funny and life-enhancing journey through under-explored terrain.
Download or read book Amnesiascope written by Steve Erickson and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVDIVA washed-up novelist navigates the dreamscape of a cataclysm-ravaged Los Angeles /divDIV In the apocalyptic Los Angeles of Amnesiascope, time zones multiply freely, spectral figures roam the streets, and rings of fire separate the city from the rest of the country. The narrator, a former novelist, lives in a hotel and writes film criticism for a newspaper whose offices are located in a bombed-out theater. Viv, his girlfriend, is a sexually voracious artist, and together the two are collaborating on an avant-garde pornographic film. But in this world, what’s real and what’s merely the conjuring of the protagonist’s imagination—obsessed with dreams, movies, sex, and remembrance—is far from clear. At once outrageous and hypnotically lyrical, Amnesiascope enflames the reader’s memory. /div/div
Download or read book The Ecstacy of Loving God written by John Crowder and published by Destiny Image Publishers. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecstasy, or extasis, is the Greek term for trance, and is linked with a pleasurable, God-given state of out-of-body experience recorded throughout the New Testament and the church age. Starting with the apostles ecstatic experiences on Pentecost, the Book of Acts further records trances in the lives of Peter and Paul. From the early church to the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages and the famous revivalists of centuries present, God s movements on the earth have always been marked by these supernatural experiences. In this book, John Crowder takes us on a journey from Old Testament ecstatic prophets such as Samuel and Elijah, to the future ecstatics who will usher in a massive wave of harvest Glory to the streets in these last days. God has always wanted a people who live in the Heavens, even as they walk on the Earth. And the world is hungry for the demonstration of a gospel of supernatural power that flows from a life of divine pleasure. More than a state of mind, you will see how the nature of God s ecstasy is found in the joy, bliss and inner raptures of His presence. In this book, you will be encouraged to drink from the river of His pleasure! (Ps. 36:8)
Download or read book Advanced Yoga Practices Easy Lessons for Ecstatic Living written by Yogani and published by AYP Publishing. This book was released on 2004-12 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The premise of Yoga is simple. There is an outer reality and an inner one, and our nervous system is the doorway between them. Effective Yoga practices stimulate and open that doorway. The result? Peace, creativity, happiness, and a steady rise of ecstatic bliss radiating from within us. Advanced Yoga Practices (AYP) brings together the most effective methods of Yoga in a flexible integrated system that anyone can use. Instructions are given in plain English for deep meditation, spinal breathing pranayama, bodily manipulations (asanas, mudras and bandhas), tantric sexual practices, and other methods that are systematically applied to swing open the door of our nervous system to permanent higher experience. This is a non-sectarian approach that is compatible with any belief system or religious background. There are over 240 easy-to-follow lessons here, including many hands-on questions and answers between Yoga practitioners and the author. Whether you are a beginner or a veteran in Yoga, the AYP lessons can serve as a useful resource as you travel along your chosen path. What readers are saying about the AYP lessons: "I searched for years to find a method of meditation that I can do. This is do-able." - AN "I've learned more about yoga in 4 months than in the previous 30 years of study." - SL" This is a very valuable inspiration for people taking up and maintaining meditation." - DB "Spinal breathing pranayama makes me feel so ecstatic, I want to do it all the time." - YM "After my first meditation session, I never felt so relaxed. You made me a believer." - JF "You make everything seem so simple, yet the practices are profound and dynamic." - SS "I wish I had this kind of informationwhen I started some 15 years back." - AD "I love the way you explain everything. So simple, logical, and so safe." - RY "These are the best lessons I have read on yoga anywhere." - RD Additional reader feedback is included in the last section of the book.
