Download or read book The Varieties of Scientific Experience written by Carl Sagan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-11-02 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Ann Druyan has unearthed a treasure. It is a treasure of reason, compassion, and scientific awe. It should be the next book you read.” —Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith “A stunningly valuable legacy left to all of us by a great human being. I miss him so.” —Kurt Vonnegut Carl Sagan's prophetic vision of the tragic resurgence of fundamentalism and the hope-filled potential of the next great development in human spirituality The late great astronomer and astrophysicist describes his personal search to understand the nature of the sacred in the vastness of the cosmos. Exhibiting a breadth of intellect nothing short of astounding, Sagan presents his views on a wide range of topics, including the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, creationism and so-called intelligent design, and a new concept of science as "informed worship." Originally presented at the centennial celebration of the famous Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 1985 but never published, this book offers a unique encounter with one of the most remarkable minds of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Universe of Experience written by Lancelot Law Whyte and published by Transaction Pub. This book was released on 2003 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this volume, Whyte addresses the problems of despair and fanatical religious or political reactions that arise from despair."-back cover.
Download or read book The Universe of Experience written by Lancelot Whyte and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern experience forces philosophy and social thought to confront the basic problems of value. Is this life worth caring about? How can we find a way between the deceit of fanatical belief and despair? In the view of Lancelot Law Whyte, the essential challenge to mankind today is an underlying nihilism promoting violence and frustrating sane policies on major social issues. Avoiding the seductive trap of utopianism, Whyte approaches this challenge by defining the terms of a potentially worldwide consensus of heart, mind, and will.In this volume, Whyte addresses the problems of despair and fanatical religious or political reactions that arise from despair. He begins with the basic problem of nihilism, or the tendency toward pessimism and self/other destruction that faces us at this point in human development. Rejecting all forms of religious sectarianism as separating God from the individual and people from each other, he discerns, as well, a fundamental disunity and incompleteness among the sciences that render them incapable of supplying a guide to social order. Whyte sees the universe as an arena of conflict between tendencies toward order and disorder with the former dominating and containing the latter. In place of science and traditional religion, Whyte draws upon what he sees as the unconscious tradition, a genius of the community, shared in degrees by all its members, that points mankind toward a better way of living.Whyte does not posit a state of perfection, nor does he suggest the end of human suffering. Instead he suggests that an integrated state of being, freed from the old mind-body dualism will be a new starting point in human evolution. Accessibly written and firmly rooted in science, philosophy, and history, The Universe of Experience will be of interest to sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers.
Download or read book The Universe of Experience written by Lancelot Law Whyte and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1974 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book See You in the Cosmos written by Jack Cheng and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I haven't read anything that has moved me this much since Wonder.” —Jennifer Niven, author of All the Bright Places A space-obsessed boy and his dog, Carl Sagan, take a journey toward family, love, hope, and awe in this funny and moving novel for fans of Counting by 7s, Walk Two Moons, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. 11-year-old Alex Petroski loves space and rockets, his mom, his brother, and his dog Carl Sagan—named for his hero, the real-life astronomer. All he wants is to launch his golden iPod into space the way Carl Sagan (the man, not the dog) launched his Golden Record on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. From Colorado to New Mexico, Las Vegas to L.A., Alex records a journey on his iPod to show other lifeforms what life on earth, his earth, is like. But his destination keeps changing. And the funny, lost, remarkable people he meets along the way can only partially prepare him for the secrets he’ll uncover—from the truth about his long-dead dad to the fact that, for a kid with a troubled mom and a mostly not-around brother, he has way more family than he ever knew. Jack Cheng’s debut is full of joy, optimism, determination, and unbelievable heart. To read the first page is to fall in love with Alex and his view of our big, beautiful, complicated world. To read the last is to know he and his story will stay with you a long, long time. "Stellar." —Entertainment Weekly “Life-embracing.” —The Wall Street Journal "Works beautifully." —The New York Times Book Review “Irresistible.” —The Chicago Tribune “The best I've read in a long, long time.” —Holly Goldberg Sloan, author of Counting by 7s “Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious.” —Kirkus, starred review “A propulsive stream-of-conscious dive.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “A gift—a miracle.” —Paul Griffin, author When Friendship Followed Me Home “Exuberant.” —Booklist "Full of the real kind of magic." —Ally Condie, author of Matched "Absorbing, irresistible." —Common Sense Media “Incredible.” —BookRiot "Full of innocence and unwavering optimism." —SLC "Inspiring." —Time for Kids “Powerfully affirms our human capacity for grace and love and understanding.” —Gary D. Schmidt, author of Okay for Now
Download or read book The Wisdom of the World written by Rémi Brague and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2004-11 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the ancient Greeks looked up into the heavens, they saw not just sun and moon, stars and planets, but a complete, coherent universe, a model of the Good that could serve as a guide to a better life. How this view of the world came to be, and how we lost it (or turned away from it) on the way to becoming modern, make for a fascinating story, told in a highly accessible manner by Rémi Brague in this wide-ranging cultural history. Before the Greeks, people thought human action was required to maintain the order of the universe and so conducted rituals and sacrifices to renew and restore it. But beginning with the Hellenic Age, the universe came to be seen as existing quite apart from human action and possessing, therefore, a kind of wisdom that humanity did not. Wearing his remarkable erudition lightly, Brague traces the many ways this universal wisdom has been interpreted over the centuries, from the time of ancient Egypt to the modern era. Socratic and Muslim philosophers, Christian theologians and Jewish Kabbalists all believed that questions about the workings of the world and the meaning of life were closely intertwined and that an understanding of cosmology was crucial to making sense of human ethics. Exploring the fate of this concept in the modern day, Brague shows how modernity stripped the universe of its sacred and philosophical wisdom, transforming it into an ethically indifferent entity that no longer serves as a model for human morality. Encyclopedic and yet intimate, The Wisdom of the World offers the best sort of history: broad, learned, and completely compelling. Brague opens a window onto systems of thought radically different from our own.
Download or read book Beyond the Dynamical Universe written by Michael Silberstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theoretical physics and foundations of physics have not made much progress in the last few decades. Whether we are talking about unifying general relativity and quantum field theory (quantum gravity), explaining so-called dark energy and dark matter (cosmology), or the interpretation and implications of quantum mechanics and relativity, there is no consensus in sight. In addition, both enterprises are deeply puzzled about various facets of time including above all, time as experienced. The authors argue that, across the board, this impasse is the result of the "dynamical universe paradigm," the idea that reality is fundamentally made up of physical entities that evolve in time from some initial state according to dynamical laws. Thus, in the dynamical universe, the initial conditions plus the dynamical laws explain everything else going exclusively forward in time. In cosmology, for example, the initial conditions reside in the Big Bang and the dynamical law is supplied by general relativity. Accordingly, the present state of the universe is explained exclusively by its past. This book offers a completely new paradigm (called Relational Blockworld), whereby the past, present and future co-determine each other via "adynamical global constraints," such as the least action principle. Accordingly, the future is just as important for explaining the present as is the past. Most of the book is devoted to showing how Relational Blockworld resolves many of the current conundrums of both theoretical physics and foundations of physics, including the mystery of time as experienced and how that experience relates to the block universe.
Download or read book Your Ticket to the Universe written by Kimberly K. Arcand and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Easy-to-read guide to the universe. Includes information on the planets, and other astrological entities"--
Download or read book The Subject of Experience written by Galen Strawson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the conscious subject, the subject of experience, in particular the human subject-the self, the person. Galen Strawson examines the phenomenology of the self-he asks what is it like to have or be a self or to feel that one is or has a self-and the metaphysics of the self-Is there really such a thing as the self? If so, what is its nature? He develops a novel approach to the metaphysical questions out of the results of the phenomenological investigation, and argues, against those who say that the self is just the human being, that we can legitimately distinguish self and human being. At the same time he raises doubts about how long selves can be supposed to last, insofar as they are distinct from human beings. Moving on to the ethics and moral psychology of the self, Strawson asks whether we can really be said to lose anything in dying. He criticizes the popular notion of the narrative self, and emphasizes the differences between 'Endurers' or 'Diachronics'-people who feel that they are the same person when they consider their past and future-and 'Transients' or 'Episodics'-people who do not feel this. Strawson also considers the logic of the word T, the first-person pronoun, and the reflexive structure of conscious awareness, before examining Locke's, Humes and Kant's accounts of the mind and personal identity, and arguing that Locke and Hume have been badly mi sunder stood. The fourteen essays draw on literature and psychology as well as philosophy. Book jacket.
Download or read book Probable Impossibilities written by Alan Lightman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams tackles "big questions like the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness ... in an entertaining and easily digestible way” (Wall Street Journal) with a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between. Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called “the poet laureate of science writers,” explores these questions and more—from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.
Download or read book Journey of the Universe written by Brian Thomas Swimme and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors tell the epic story of the universe from an inspired new perspective, weaving the findings of modern science together with enduring wisdom found in the humanistic traditions of the West, China, India, and indigenous peoples. This book is part of a larger project that includes a documentary film, educational DVD series, and Web site.
Download or read book The Sacred Universe written by Thomas Berry and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading scholar, cultural historian, and Catholic priest who spent more than fifty years writing about our engagement with the Earth, Thomas Berry possessed prophetic insight into the rampant destruction of ecosystems and the extinction of species. In this book he makes a persuasive case for an interreligious dialogue that can better confront the environmental problems of the twenty-first century. These erudite and keenly sympathetic essays represent Berry's best work, covering such issues as human beings' modern alienation from nature and the possibilities of future, regenerative forms of religious experience. Asking that we create a new story of the universe and the emergence of the Earth within it, Berry resituates the human spirit within a sacred totality.
Download or read book VideoHound s Sci fi Experience written by Carol A. Schwartz and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to 1,200 science fiction films from the "Amazing Colossal Man" to "Zardoz," with reviews and credits for each film
Download or read book The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature written by William James and published by Xist Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Best Nonfiction Masterpiece of the 20th Century? “There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.” - William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is not a book about a specific religion. The author, psychologist Williams James does not try to convince the reader one religion is better than the other. He doesn’t even make a case for atheism and the scientific approach. The book is in fact about human nature and how we experience religion at a psychological level. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes
Download or read book The Stuff of Stars written by Marion Dane Bauer and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an astonishing unfurling of our universe, Newbery Honor winner Marion Dane Bauer and Caldecott Honor winner Ekua Holmes celebrate the birth of every child. Before the universe was formed, before time and space existed, there was . . . nothing. But then . . . BANG! Stars caught fire and burned so long that they exploded, flinging stardust everywhere. And the ash of those stars turned into planets. Into our Earth. And into us. In a poetic text, Marion Dane Bauer takes readers from the trillionth of a second when our universe was born to the singularities that became each one of us, while vivid illustrations by Ekua Holmes capture the void before the Big Bang and the ensuing life that burst across galaxies. A seamless blend of science and art, this picture book reveals the composition of our world and beyond — and how we are all the stuff of stars.
Download or read book Temple of the Cosmos written by Jeremy Naydler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996-04-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this guide to the cosmology of ancient Egypt, Jeremy Naydler recreates the experience of living in another time and place. Temple of the Cosmos explores Egypt's sacred geography and mythology; but more importantly, it reveals with unprecedented clarity an ancient consciousness in tune with the rhythms of the earth. The ancient Egyptians experienced their gods not as remote beings but rather as psychic and natural forces, transpersonal energies that played a part in everyday life. This direct experience of the gods shaped the Egyptian concepts of human development, healing, magic, and the soul's journey through the Underworld as described in the Books of the Dead. While building on the pioneering efforts of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz and others, Temple of the Cosmos is much more than a recapitulation of previous theories of Egyptian spirituality. Rather, this book breaks new ground by placing the work of other Egyptologists in an original, magical context. The result is a brilliant reimagining of the Egyptian worldview and its sacred path of spiritual unfolding.
Download or read book Conversations with the Universe written by Simran Singh and published by SelectBooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversations with the Universe: How the World Speaks to Us by Simran Singh is the wake up call that we all need in order to listen to and understand what the Universe is saying to us. These signs and signals are all around us, but often we are unable to translate them without a guide. Simran has made it her life’s work to help us to become aware of the language of the Universe so we don’t miss out on much of the beauty and richness of our experience. Simran is a wonderful storyteller and she takes her message of consciousness to unexpected places, such as her spiritual stand-up comedy and humorous writing. Her light engaging voice paints a colorful picture as she advocates for us to expand our awareness of the signs that the Universe places clearly before us as it helps to guide us down the right path. Simran Singh is a visionary, spiritual healer. She is the publisher of the Nautilus Award Winning 11:11 Magazine, the only publication to given this distinguished honor. She also is the host of 11:11 Talk Radio, which is the #1 rated program on the largest online radio network, Voice America 7th Wave. Conversations with the Universe is a life changing book that delivers all the wit and wisdom of this amazing and unpredictable woman.
