Download or read book The Dice Game of Shiva written by Richard Smoley and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Richard Smoley examines the roles God has played for us and reconciles them with what we today know through science and reason. In the process, he shows that consciousness is the underlying reality beneath everything in the universe. In one of Hinduism’s great myths, Shiva plays a dice game with his consort, Parvati, and loses consistently. If he is the greatest god, why does he lose? Through this story, Richard Smoley explores the interplay between consciousness, represented by Shiva, and experience, exemplified by Parvati. He draws on numerous disciplines to offer an illuminating exploration of mind and matter and a provocative understanding of consciousness, the self, and the world.
Download or read book God Inside Out written by Don Handelman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new exploration of the mythology of the Hindu god Siva, who spends his time playing dice with his wife, to whom he habitually loses. The result of the game is our world, which turns the god inside-out and changes his internal composition. Hindus maintain that Siva is perpetually absorbed in this game, which is recreated in innumerable stories, poems, paintings, and sculptural carvings. This notion of the god at play, arguee Handelman and Shulman, is one of the most central and expressive veins in the metaphysics elaborated through the centuries, in many idioms and modes, around the god. The book comprises three interlocking essays; the first presents the dice-game proper, in the light of the texts and visual depictions the authors have collected. The second and third chapters take up two mythic "sequels" to the game. Based on their analysis of these sequels, the authors argue that notions of "asceticism" so frequently associated with Siva, with Yoga, and with Hindu religion are, in fact, foreign to Hinduism's inherent logic as reflected in Siva's game of dice. They suggest an alternative reading of this set of practices and ideas, providing startling new insights into Hindu mythology and the major poetic texts from the classical Sanskrit tradition.
Download or read book The Vedic Core of Human History written by M. K. Agarwal and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origin of world civilization can be traced to the Indus Valley cradle, where brilliant and original thinkers made groundbreaking discoveries. The history of these discoveries is recorded in the vast Sanskrit literature. In this study, author M. K. Agarwal explores the cultural and historical significance of the region. He explores Indus Valley culture, which encouraged creative thought as opposed to the Abrahamic faiths, which herded followers into dogmatic thinking. He holds that these religions prospered because of their unfettered hatred of the Vedic-Hindu-Buddhist peoples, who were demonized as pagans to be murdered, tortured, raped, enslaved, and robbed. He also considers the achievements of that culture, such as the creation of the most affluent, most scientifically advanced, and most spiritual of all societies, with archeological moorings that can be traced back to 8000 BC. No other region can even come close to transforming people and culture like the Indus Valley, but the world's Vedic roots have been ignored, shunned, and covered up. Uncover the history that has been lost and develop a deeper appreciation for the true cradle of human civilization with The Vedic Core of Human History.
Download or read book From Bharata to India written by M. K. Agarwal and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origin of world civilization can be traced to the Sindhu and Sarasvati river valleys (located in present-day Pakistan) as early as 8,000 BC. Here, innovation and originality in every aspect of human endeavor, from mathematics and science to art and sports, flourished. Yet the importance of this civilization, known as the Vedic period, has been deliberately downplayed. Thoroughly researched and including an extensive bibliography, From Bharata to India rectifies this mistake in the perspective of world history and seeks to offer a comprehensive reference source. Author M. K. Agarwal shows how this early culture, where ideation by enlightened philosopher Brahmin kings, brought material and spiritual wealth that was to remain unchallenged until the colonial era. This Vedic-Hindu-Buddhist legacy subsequently influenced peoples and paradigms around the globe, ushering in an era of peace and plenty thousands of years before the Europeans. By using original sources in Sanskirt as well as regional literature, Agarwal compares corresponding situations in other civilizations within the context of their own literary traditions and records to prove that Bharata forms the basis of world civilization. This is in direct contrast to the Greek or Arab miracle hypothesis put forth by numerous scholars. The first of two volumes in this series, From Bharata to India offers a fascinating, in-depth glimpse into ancient Indias contribution to the modern world.
Download or read book The Pocket Guide to Dice Dice Games written by Keith Souter and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-01-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dice games have been played for centuries and are a staple of the playground, board games, and casinos alike. This pocket guide spans the history of dice and offers clear explanations of popular dice games, including farkle (played since the Middle Ages), Gluckhaus (a German game of fortune, played since the medieval era), craps, and Jacks! This guide also includes tips on winning and how to avoid being tricked by loaded or “crooked” dice. Famous dice players, such as the Roman emperors Augustus and Caligula, lost money playing dice and quickly stole other people’s to continue their gaming sprees. In the early nineteenth century, fortunes could be won and lost at the roll of a die and it was not only money which was gambled away, but estates and even marriages. Full of fascinating facts and useful tips, this is a must-read book for everyone interested in family fun, games, gambling, or social history. Did you know? • Dice derives from the Latin datum, meaning “ought to be played” • The black marks showing the numbers are called pips • Dice were first played in India around 3000 bc • Dice were originally made from bones, including knuckle and ankle bones • Traditionally cubed, dice also come in other geometric shapes, incuding the zocchihedron, the 100-sided die, and the deltoidal icositetrahedron, where each side is shaped like a kite
Download or read book Ayana written by Mekala S Rao and published by MEKALA S RAO. This book was released on with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: i have run an experiment, where i could see the god in different human beings and i identified which Hindu gods/goddesses did i meet everyday. - Sai Baba
Download or read book The Force Is With Us written by Thomas Walker and published by Quest Books. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by encounters with his son from beyond the grave, Tom Walker went searching for answers. He discovered that paranormal phenomena have not only been exhaustively studied, but that scientific evidence exists to support it. He uncovered numerous scientific studies involving telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis, as well as government-funded scientists who proved their validity. Through his research, Walker eventually came to the belief that there is a force in the world that makes things happen. The force, an energy field that permeates the universe, forms and sustains all things, and is the basis behind paranormal phenomena and alternative forms of healing. He describes his provocative conclusions in this book. Making compelling connections between ideas like the Great Void and “dark matter,” between Ch’i and quantum fields, Walker argues that it is our connection with the higher planes of consciousness — the fundamental quantum reality— that truly makes up the world.
Download or read book AJAYA written by Anand Neelakantan and published by One Point Six Technology Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 2013-12-26 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE MAHABHARATA ENDURES AS THE GREAT EPIC OF INDIA. But while Jaya is the story of the Pandavas, told from the perspective of the victors of Kurukshetra; Ajaya is the narrative of the ÔunconquerableÕ Kauravas, who were decimated to the last man. At the heart of IndiaÕs most powerful empire, a revolution is brewing. Bhishma, the noble patriarch of Hastinapura, is struggling to maintain the unity of his empire. On the throne sits Dhritarashtra, the blind King, and his foreign-born Queen Ð Gandhari. In the shadow of the throne stands Kunti, the Dowager-Queen, burning with ambition to see her firstborn become the ruler, acknowledged by all. And in the wings: Parashurama, the enigmatic Guru of the powerful Southern Confederate, bides his time to take over and impose his will from mountains to ocean. Ekalavya, a young Nishada, yearns to break free of caste restrictions and become a warrior. Karna, son of a humble charioteer, travels to the South to study under the foremost Guru of the day and become the greatest archer in the land. Balarama, the charismatic leader of the Yadavas, dreams of building the perfect city by the sea and seeing his people prosperous and proud once more. Takshaka, guerilla leader of the Nagas, foments a revolution by the downtrodden as he lies in wait in the jungles of India, where survival is the only dharma. Jara, the beggar, and his blind dog Dharma, walk the dusty streets of India, witness to people and events far greater than they, as the Pandavas and the Kauravas confront their searing destinies. Amidst the chaos, Prince Suyodhana, heir of Hastinapura, stands tall, determined to claim his birthright and act according to his conscience. He is the maker of his own destiny Ð or so he believes. While in the corridors of the Hastinapura palace, a foreign Prince plots to destroy India. And the dice fallsÉ
Download or read book Guests at God s Wedding written by Tracy Pintchman and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at women’s rituals honoring the god Krishna.
Download or read book When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish written by Martin Gardner and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known as the longtime writer of the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American—which introduced generations of readers to the joys of recreational mathematics—Martin Gardner has for decades pursued a parallel career as a devastatingly effective debunker of what he once famously dubbed "fads and fallacies in the name of science." It is mainly in this latter role that he is onstage in this collection of choice essays. When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish takes aim at a gallery of amusing targets, ranging from Ann Coulter's qualifications as an evolutionary biologist to the logical fallacies of precognition and extrasensory perception, from Santa Claus to The Wizard of Oz, from mutilated chessboards to the little-known "one-poem poet" Langdon Smith (the original author of this volume's title line). The writings assembled here fall naturally into seven broad categories: Science, Bogus Science, Mathematics, Logic, Literature, Religion and Philosophy, and Politics. Under each heading, Gardner displays an awesome level of erudition combined with a wicked sense of humor.
Download or read book The Deal written by Richard Smoley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the greatest “deal” you will ever find: This concise, deeply practical guide shows how to forgive anyone who has ever hurt you and to receive a payback of enormous personal satisfaction and inner peace. “What I am offering you in this book is the best deal you have ever gotten in your life, or ever will. Even though I know nothing about you, I’m willing to make this claim with complete certainty.” With elegance and absolute persuasiveness The Deal explains how forgiveness – rather than being a squishy, eat-your-vegetables virtue – is actually the key, perhaps the sole key, to a happy life. If you perform the one simple but vital forgiveness exercise in The Deal, you will forgive and be forgiven. You will be free. You will enter a new phase of life. A widely respected spiritual writer and thinker, Richard Smoley doesn’t hand you the standard promise that this book will change your life. When you finish it, he concludes: “It already has changed your life.” This is the simple, radical truth of The Deal.
Download or read book The Eternal Quest written by Mukund D. Gangal and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2024-10-18 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the prehistoric times, humans have wondered about the world around us. Ancients thought that the universe consisted of heaven and earth. With scientific knowledge, we know that the portion of the universe we can see has billions of galaxies. The great Maharishi scholars of the past and the brilliant scientists of our time pondered the key issues about the creator and the creation of this majestic universe. Modern science has been able to describe the development of our universe in great detail from just after the big-bang to the present time. The science of cosmology behind the understanding of the growth of the universe is very elegant and beautiful. There is simplicity behind the bewildering complexity of the scientific theories. Still, there are some important issues to be resolved. Many scientists are working to develop a theory of everything to address these deficits. This book describes the related scientific ideas at the conceptual level. Unfortunately, some of the key issues cannot be resolved by current science. This places us at the boundary between science and philosophy. One of the two key issues is how reality immerged out of the metaverse, an environment that did not have the elements of reality. The other issue is that the science can describe the laws of nature accurately but not how those were built into everything in reality. The ancient scholars also pondered about the creation issue and faced the same problems. They developed philosophical models based on creator centric ideas to explain creation. This book considers the ancient philosophical models and modern science of creation as a continuum of human thought. The philosophical models provide possible ideas that are beyond the scientific method. The four ancient models presented in this book are relevant in the modern times.
Download or read book Peter Brook and the Mahabharata written by David Williams and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1991, Peter Brook and the Mahabharata is a collection of essays which contextualizes the production of Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata. Written by both scholars and collaborators on Brook’s production, these essays seek not only to discuss such issues as the politics of theatre interculturalism, but to describe the nature of the working process, and detail the technical problems engendered by touring a production of this size and complexity. Furnished with a new preface by the editor, the book continues to be crucial research work devoted to unravelling the mesmerising as well as the polarising enigma known as Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata. Thoroughly heterogenous and controversially irreverent, this book will be of interest to students of theatre, performance art, literature, South Asian studies and media studies.
Download or read book Nietzsche s Epic of the Soul written by T. K. Seung and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche's most problematic text. There appears to be no thematic connection between its four Parts and numerous sections. To make it even worse, the book contains a number of thematic contradictions. The standard approach has been a method of selective reading, that is, most critics select a few brilliant passages for edification and ignore the rest. This approach has turned Nietzsche's text into a collection of disjointed fragments. Going against this prevalent approach, T.K. Seung presents the first unified reading of the whole book. He reads it as the record of Zarathustra's epic journey to find spiritual values in the secular world. The alleged thematic contradictions of the text are shown to indicate the turns and twists that are dictated by the hero's epic battle against his formidable opponent. His heroic struggle is eventually resolved by the power of a pantheistic nature-religion. Thus Nietzsche's ostensibly atheistic work turns out to be a highly religious text. The author uncovers this epic plot by reading Nietzsche's text as a baffling series of riddles and puzzles. Hence his reading is not only edifying but also breathtaking. In this unprecedented enterprise, the author takes a complex interdisciplinary approach, engaging the five disciplines of philosophy, psychology, religious studies, literary analysis, and cultural history.
Download or read book On Hinduism written by Wendy Doniger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this magisterial volume of essays, Wendy Doniger enhances our understanding of the ancient and complex religion to which she has devoted herself for half a century. This series of interconnected essays and lectures surveys the most critically important and hotly contested issues in Hinduism over 3,500 years, from the ancient time of the Vedas to the present day. The essays contemplate the nature of Hinduism; Hindu concepts of divinity; attitudes concerning gender, control, and desire; the question of reality and illusion; and the impermanent and the eternal in the two great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Among the questions Doniger considers are: Are Hindus monotheists or polytheists? How can atheists be Hindu, and how can unrepentant Hindu sinners find salvation? Why have Hindus devoted so much attention to the psychology of addiction? What does the significance of dogs and cows tell us about Hinduism? How have Hindu concepts of death, rebirth, and karma changed over the course of history? How and why does a pluralistic faith, remarkable for its intellectual tolerance, foster religious intolerance? Doniger concludes with four concise autobiographical essays in which she reflects on her lifetime of scholarship, Hindu criticism of her work, and the influence of Hinduism on her own philosophy of life. On Hinduism is the culmination of over forty years of scholarship from a renowned expert on one of the world's great faiths.
Download or read book Creating Places of Power written by Nigel Pennick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the traditional rites of auspicious building and crafting • Explains the ceremonial beginnings and Hermetic principles in the laying out of foundations not only for sacred buildings like temples but also for homes and barns • Examines the principles and ceremonies of electional astrology and details how to compute natural time, as opposed to clock time • Shares examples from ancient Egypt, Iran, India, and Europe that range from the Stone Age to the Renaissance and include secret societies When we make things--whether a building, a sacred space, or a magical object--there is a precise moment when the artifact comes into being as a separate entity. That moment in time possesses its own unique quality, and because of this, there is a right time to do something and a wrong time. And, as Nigel Pennick reveals, we have the power to select favorable moments for our creations, just as our ancestors did. Illustrating ancient principles of divination, chronomancy, and electional astrology, Pennick examines all the factors behind the ancestral art of geomancy: the auspicious creation and alignment of sacred buildings as places of power. Sharing examples from ancient Egypt, Iran, India, and Europe that range from the Stone Age to the modern day, including secret societies like the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons, he explains how many cities were constructed on specially selected sites and founded ritually at precise, predetermined moments. Looking at the traditional rites of creating places of power, Pennick explains the ceremonial beginnings and Hermetic principles in the laying out of foundations as well as the use of sacrifice in the building of many notable structures. Examining the role of sacred geometry in geomancy, Pennick explains the Hermetic meaning assigned to each direction in traditional European cultures as well as the principles of natural measures and the science of understanding lucky and unlucky days. Revealing how geomantic principles are rooted in the structure of the world and the cosmic patterns of space and time, the author shows how they transcend the ages and are just as meaningful today as they were to our ancestors.
Download or read book Introduction To The Occult written by Richard Smoley and published by Gildan Media LLC aka G&D Media. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic, the occult, the mystical—is there anything behind those words apart from horror-movie clichés? People the world over have always known and interacted with these hid¬den forces. But today there are very few ways to sort out truth from nonsense. In this book, Richard Smoley, an expert on the occult, delves into mind power, magic, suggestion, and the realms of the unseen. He speaks simply and clearly, in common-sense terms, about these mysterious forces, how they can work for you, and what you need to avoid. This trip through unseen worlds could be the most exciting adventure of your life as you learn about: Life after Death Evil Witchcraft and Satanism Atlantis and Lost Civilizations The Last Judgment The Kingdom of God Healing Reincarnation The Brotherhood Psychedelics and Spirituality Richard Smoley is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophi¬cal Society and former editor of Gnosis: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions. He has published eleven books, including For¬bidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Traditions; and Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History. He has spent more than forty-five years studying the world’s mystical traditions.
