Download or read book Knowing Illusion Bringing a Tibetan Debate Into Contemporary Discourse written by The Yakherds and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The two volumes of this study examine fundamental issues in Buddhist thought and practice, particularly the implications of the two truths (relative and ultimate). If, as Buddhist sources claim, all perceptions are overlaid with error, is it possible to have confidence in our knowledge of the world? If buddhas only perceive reality as it is, does this entail that they are incapable of relating to ordinary beings, who view their environment through a lens of false imaginings? Taktsang Sherap Rinchen, a 15th century Sakya scholar, explored the philosophical and practical ramifications of Madhyamaka antifoundationalism and accused Tsongkhapa, one of Tibet's most influential thinkers, of a fundamental incoherence that stems from an attempt to bring together the Epistemology tradition-which posits reliable epistemic instruments-and Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka-which rejects any attempt at foundationalism. Both Taktsang and Tsongkhapa claim to correctly interpret Nāgārjuna and Candrakīrti but draw vastly different conclusions from their respective readings. The controversy Taktsang sparked has its roots in Indian debates regarding the implications of the two truths. These were further developed in Tibet and engaged some of Tibet's best minds for centuries. Our study, the first book length discussion of this literature, situates it in philosophical perspective, drawing parallels with contemporary global philosophy, and it also draws out the implications of the debate for the entire Buddhist enterprise of making sense of the world and presenting a path capable of leading beings to buddhahood"--
Download or read book Knowing Illusion Bringing a Tibetan Debate into Contemporary Discourse written by The Yakherds and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tsongkhapa (1357-1419) is by any measure the single most influential philosopher in Tibetan history. His articulation of Prasangika Madhyamaka, and his interpretation of the 7th Century Indian philosopher Candrakirti's interpretation of Madhyamaka is the foundation for the understanding of that philosophical system in the Geluk school in Tibet. Tsongkhapa argues that Candrakirti shows that we can integrate the Madhyamaka doctrine of the two truths, and of the ultimate emptiness of all phenomena with a robust epistemology that explains how we can know both conventional and ultimate truth and distinguish truth from falsity within the conventional world. The Sakya scholar Taktsang Lotsawa (born 1405) published the first systematic critique of Tsongkhapa's system. In the fifth chapter of his Freedom from Extremes Accomplished through Comprehensive Knowledge of Philosophy, Taktsang attacks Tsongkhapa's understanding of Candrakirti and the cogency of integrating Prasangika Madhyamaka with any epistemology. This attack launches a debate between Geluk scholars on the one hand and Sakya and Kagyu scholars on the other regarding the proper understanding of this philosophical school and the place of epistemology in the Madhyamaka program. This debate raged with great ferocity from the 15th through the 18th centuries, and continues still today. These two volumes study that debate and present translations of the most important texts produced in that context. Volume I provides historical and philosophical background for this dispute and elucidates the philosophical issues at stake in the debate, exploring the principal arguments advanced by the principals on both sides, and setting them in historical context. This volume presents English translations of each of the most important texts in this debate.
Download or read book The Knowledge Illusion written by Steven Sloman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.
Download or read book Knowing Illusion written by Yakherds, The and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set examines the Tibetan debate regarding the possibility of knowledge in the context of Madhyamaka initiated by the 15th century philosopher Taktsang's attack on Tsongkhapa's presentation of epistemology and Madhyamaka. Volume I acts as a historical and philosophical study of the debate.
Download or read book Illusion of Separation written by Giles Hutchins and published by Floris Books. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our modern patterns of thinking and learning are all based on observing a world of 'things', which we think of as separate building blocks. This worldview allows us to count and measure objects without their having any innate value; it provides neat definitions and a sense of control over life. However, this approach also sets humans apart from each other, and from nature.In reality, in nature, everything is connected in a fluid, dynamic way. 'Separateness' is an illusion we have created -- and is fast becoming a dangerous delusion infecting how we relate to business, politi, and other key areas of our daily reality.Giles Hutchins argues that the source of our current social, economic and environmental issues springs from the misguided way we see and construct our world. With its roots in ancient wisdom, this insightful book sets out an accesssible, easy to follow exploration of the causes of our current crises, offering ways to rectify these issues at source and then pointing to a way ahead.
Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Download or read book The Illusion of Doubt written by Genia Schönbaumsfeld and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Illusion of Doubt confronts one of the most important questions in philosophy: what can we know? The radical sceptic's answer is 'not very much' if we cannot prove that we are not subject to (permanent) deception. This book shows that the radical sceptical problem is an illusion created by a mistaken picture of our evidential situation.
Download or read book The Illusion of God s Presence written by John C. Wathey and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential feature of religious experience across many cultures is the intuitive feeling of God's presence. More than any rituals or doctrines, it is this experience that anchors religious faith, yet it has been largely ignored in the scientific literature on religion.Starting with a vivid narrative account of the life-threatening hike that triggered his own mystical experience, biologist John Wathey takes the reader on a scientific journey to find the sources of religious feeling and the illusion of God's presence. His book delves into the biological origins of this compelling feeling, attributing it to innate neural circuitry that evolved to promote the mother-child bond. Dr. Wathey argues that evolution has programmed the infant brain to expect the presence of a loving being who responds to the child's needs. As the infant grows into adulthood, this innate feeling is eventually transferred to the realm of religion, where it is reactivated through the symbols, imagery, and rituals of worship. The author interprets our various conceptions of God in biological terms as illusory supernormal stimuli that fill an emotional and cognitive vacuum left over from infancy. These insights shed new light on some of the most vexing puzzles of religion, like the popular belief in a god who is judgmental and punishing, yet also unconditionally loving; the extraordinary tenacity of faith; the greater religiosity of women relative to men; religious obsessions with sex; the mysterious compulsion to pray; the seemingly irrepressible feminine attributes of God, even in traditionally patriarchal religions; and the strange allure of cults. Finally, Dr. Wathey considers the hypothesis that religion evolved to foster reproductive success, arguing that, in an age of potentially ruinous overpopulation, magical thinking has become a luxury we can no longer afford, one that distracts us from urgent threats to our planet.Deeply researched yet elegantly written in a jargon-free and accessible style, this book presents a compelling interpretation of the evolutionary origins of spirituality and religion.
Download or read book Knowing Illusion Bringing a Tibetan Debate into Contemporary Discourse written by The Yakherds and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tsongkhapa (1357-1419) is by any measure the single most influential philosopher in Tibetan history. His articulation of Prasangika Madhyamaka, and his interpretation of the 7th Century Indian philosopher Candrakirti's interpretation of Madhyamaka is the foundation for the understanding of that philosophical system in the Geluk school in Tibet. Tsongkhapa argues that Candrakirti shows that we can integrate the Madhyamaka doctrine of the two truths, and of the ultimate emptiness of all phenomena with a robust epistemology that explains how we can know both conventional and ultimate truth and distinguish truth from falsity within the conventional world. The Sakya scholar Taktsang Lotsawa (born 1405) published the first systematic critique of Tsongkhapa's system. In the fifth chapter of his Freedom from Extremes Accomplished through Comprehensive Knowledge of Philosophy, Taktsang attacks Tsongkhapa's understanding of Candrakirti and the cogency of integrating Prasangika Madhyamaka with any epistemology. This attack launches a debate between Geluk scholars on the one hand and Sakya and Kagyu scholars on the other regarding the proper understanding of this philosophical school and the place of epistemology in the Madhyamaka program. This debate raged with great ferocity from the 15th through the 18th centuries, and continues still today. The two volumes of Knowing Illusion study that debate and present translations of the most important texts produced in that context. Volume I: A Philosophical History of the Debate provides historical and philosophical background for this dispute and elucidates the philosophical issues at stake in the debate, exploring the principal arguments advanced by the principals on both sides, and setting them in historical context. This volume examines the ways in which the debate raises issues that are relevant to contemporary debates in epistemology, and concludes with two contributions by contemporary Tibetan scholars, one on each side of the debate.
Download or read book Free Will and Illusion written by Saul Smilansky and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-03-30 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saul Smilansky presents an original treatment of the problem of free will, which lies at the heart of morality and human self-understanding. He maintains that we have most of the resources we need for a proper understanding of the problem; and the key to it is the role played by illusion. The major traditional philosophical approaches are inadequate, Smilansky argues: their partial insights need to be integrated into a hybrid view, which he calls Fundamental Dualism. Common views about justice, responsibility, human worth, and related notions are radically misguided, and the absurd looms large. We do, however, find some justification for enlightened moral views, and grounding for some of our most cherished views of human nature. The bold and perhaps disturbing claim of Free Will and Illusion is that we could not live adequately with a complete awareness of the truth about human freedom: illusion lies at the centre of the human condition. The necessity of illusion is seen to follow from the basic elements of the free will issue, helping keep our moral and psychological worlds intact. Smilansky offers the challenge of recognizing the centrality of illusion and trying to free ourselves to some extent from it; this is not only a philosophical challenge, but a moral and psychological one as well.
Download or read book Stay Illusion written by Simon Critchley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of Hamlet haunts our culture like the Ghost haunts him. Arguably, no literary work, not even the Bible, is more familiar to us than Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Everyone knows at least six words from the play; often people know many more. Yet the play—Shakespeare’s longest—is more than “passing strange” and becomes deeply unfamiliar when considered closely. Reading Hamlet alongside other writers, philosophers, and psychoanalysts—Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Nietzsche, Melville, and Joyce—Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster consider the political context and stakes of Shakespeare’s play, its relation to religion, the movement of desire, and the incapacity to love.
Download or read book Make It Stick written by Peter C. Brown and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-14 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most of us, learning something "the hard way" implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners. Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned. Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.
Download or read book Free Will written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thought-provoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free will—and the implications that it is an illusion. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.
Download or read book Champions of Illusion written by Susana Martinez-Conde and published by Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of visual illusions with explanations of the science behind them, gathered from the Best Illusions of the Year contest. --
Download or read book An Intimate Note to the Sincere Seeker written by Sri Sri Ravishankar and published by Aslan Business Solutions. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weekly Knowledge Sheets given by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a practice which began from the year 1995 and now, have been compiled into Seven Volume Series of books. This book (Volume I) is a collection of weekly talks, conversations and messages that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar gave between June 21 1995 to June 13 1996. An Intimate Note to the Sincere Seeker is a compilation of excerpts of talks by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in the year 1995 - 1996. While these talks often discuss the state of the world at the time they were written, because they discuss human life on the most basic levels - love, hatred, trust, peace, silence, happiness, they are still valuable today. They give us an insight into this knowledge that is so deeply profound, yet so simple, knowledge that does not just remain in the intellect, but is beautifully and effortlessly integrated into daily life. Sri Sri avoids lengthy discussions about the deeper philosophy of life, yet his talks reflect these values to their very core. This book is specially compiled to help readers going through an emotional phase or who need a guidance in life. The reader can go through any one random page (365 chapters for 365 days) for help or can follow as per ones discretion
Download or read book Health Devoted to the Cause and Cure of Disease written by and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nothing Personal Seeing Beyond the Illusion of a Separate Self written by Nirmala and published by Endless Satsang Foundation. This book was released on 2010-01-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advaita and nondual teachings are about finding the Truth. This Truth is not a dogma that you study; it is the Truth about life †the Truth about who you really are. This Truth is discovered, not learned. It is discovered through sincerely inquiring, Who am I? What you discover is that who you are has nothing to do with self-images or roles and everything to do with what you experience when you ask this question. What you discover is that who you think of yourself as is just that †a thought! And beyond that thought is a great Mystery †an experience of nothingness, which is your true nature.Nothing Personal leads you to the experience of your true nature and helps you explore its depth. Through exposition, questions and dialogues, it brings you to a place of realization of the Truth: you are that spacious Awareness in which everything appears, including your thoughts and feelings. Your thoughts and feelings do not define you but merely appear within Consciousness along with everything else. This Consciousness is who you are.Nothing Personal offers a gentle and persistent guide to seeing the underlying truth of your ultimate nature. In this concisely edited collection of satsang talks and dialogues, you are invited to honor the limitless love that is your true nature and to enjoy the sweet richness that is revealed when you give this Truth your undivided attention.From the introduction:Unlike most books, this one is not meant to add to your knowledge or understanding. It is about the Truth that cannot be spoken or written. Although the Truth cannot be contained in this or any other book, each word written here is intended to point you toward that Truth. Many of the words and ideas may seem paradoxical or contradictory because what they point to is larger than our conceptual frameworks. Many questions are asked, which are not answered anywhere in the book. Find out what the experience is like to ask yourself these questions, even if they leave you emptier of knowledge and understanding. In this emptying, you just may discover what you are looking for.The Truth is revealed when we allow ourselves to not know, so I invite you to set aside all that you know for the time being and allow yourself to look with innocent eyes at what the words are attempting to unveil. Take the time to experience the unspoken truth in each section before moving on to the next. Resist the temptation to read these words with your mind, which is likely to rush right past the Truth. Allow the words to sink into your heart and reveal the truth of who you are.
