There exists a world much like our own, one parallel to the spirit world. People much like ourselves fight every day to keep both worlds from plummeting into darkness. They are called defenders. The spirit realm is divided into many smaller worlds, like shards of a once-complete painting. They follow their own paths and are vastly different from one another. But time reveals that these worlds have a limited existence, one which appears to be running out. The mission of getting to the bottom of these lands is for a defender. Ryoku Dragontalen has only a matter of days to complete his goal. After a harrying encounter with the fearsome emperor of Orden, Ryoku must recuperate and gather his strength for a second and final showdown with the young emperor, Lars Ordenstraum, an encounter the entire spirit realm has been waiting for. Follow Ryoku Dragontalen once more on his mission to meet a looming deadline as he journeys through new worlds, meeting friends old and new, as he gathers his strength to face what the very gods fear.

Leading scholars respond to the famous proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that cognition and mind are not located exclusively in the head.

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

This book is a scientifically current, integrative, and practical guide for understanding clinical hypnosis and its place within a new health care paradigm. Blending four original short stories with a treatise, it alternates narrative prose with health science discourse to create a framework for embracing systemic emotional and relational elements that lie beyond diagnosis, medication, surgery, and psychotherapy. Following the stories of four characters, the authors establish an empirically-grounded conceptualization of the mind, then demonstrate how practical applications of therapeutic hypnosis can help readers use individual and family resources in health and healing. Clinicians will learn to improve their care by embracing emotional, relational, and narrative elements that powerfully affect health beyond diagnosis, medication, surgery, and psychotherapy. Further, health care educators and policy makers will find inspiration that enriches professional training.

Plato is one of the most widely read and studied philosophers of all time. A pivotal figure in the history of philosophy, his work is foundational to the Western philosophical tradition. The Platonic Mind provides an extensive survey of his work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising over 30 specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into three clear parts: Reading Plato’s Dialogues Themes From Plato Plato’s Influences and Significance Within these sections key topics are addressed including the nature of reality and the physical world; human cognition, including knowledge, sense perception, and affective states; society, politics, and law; his method of inquiry and literary style; his influence on subsequent thinkers and traditions; and studies on a wide range of individual Platonic dialogues. Plato’s work is central to the study of ancient philosophy, Greek philosophy, history of philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, philosophy of language, legal philosophy, and philosophy of religion. As such The Platonic Mind is essential reading for all students and researchers in philosophy. It will also be of interest to those studying Plato in related disciplines such as politics, law, ancient history, literature, and religious studies.

Mind Your Own Life: The Journey Back to Love At last! An authentic message of love and acceptance! Life-enhancing semi-autobiography. Raised a devout Christian in the South and endeavoring to uphold indoctrinated beliefs, Anson struggled to find true affirmation amongst the ambiguity of being gay with religious beliefs that espoused intolerance. After a brief military stint, he married and fathered two children, simultaneously battling depression, anger and fear before finally accepting that he was inherently a gay man. This book deals head on with the divisive issues of religion and politics that have for centuries caused rifts between, countries, families, and facilitated a recent spate of bullying and suicide among teens and gays. He secretly harbored for many years his struggle to suppress his nascent sexuality in hopes of escaping the paradox of being gay with Christian beliefs, hopeful that being gay would vanish and relieve this tremendous burden. Anson sought validation from a religion that despised him wholly. This book; targeting parents, adults, and teens; chronicles Ansons struggles with depression, denial, and acceptance in the face of extreme homophobia perpetuated by religion, politics and false beliefs. Anson assertively portrays an uncorrupted universal love and acceptance as our inherent birthright and explores the connection with our spirituality, sexuality, and morality. Anson tell his story with sublime prose and grace with inquisitive insight of our human experience. His story is beautifully rendered in a way that is challenging, thought-provoking and inspirational. It hits home for many and told in a way that you will not soon forget.

The central contention of The Implicit Mind is that understanding the two faces of spontaneity-its virtues and vices-requires understanding the "implicit mind." In turn, Michael Brownstein maintains that understanding the implicit mind requires the consideration of three sets of questions. First, what are implicit mental states? What kind of cognitive structure do they have? Second, how should we relate to our implicit attitudes? Are we responsible for them? Third, how can we improve the ethics of our implicit minds?

"Readers create a continuing consciousness out of scattered references to a particular character and read this consciousness as an "embedded narrative" within the whole narrative of the novel. The combination of these embedded narratives forms the plot. This perspective on narrative enables us to explore hitherto neglected aspects of fictional minds such as dispositions, emotions, and action. It also highlights the social public and dialogic mind and the "mind beyond the skin." For example much of our thought is intermental, or joint, group or shared; even our identity is to an extent socially distributed.".

To imagine—to see what is not there—is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds. Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, and history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps—from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fernández-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing glimpse into who we are and what we might yet accomplish. Unearthing and historical evidence, he begins by reconstructing the thoughts of our Paleolithic ancestors to reveal the subtlety and profundity of the thinking of early humans. A masterful paean to the human imagination from a wonderfully elegant thinker, Out of Our Minds shows that bad ideas are often more influential than good ones; that the oldest recoverable thoughts include some of the best; that ideas of Western origin often issued from exchanges with the wider world; and that the pace of innovative thinking is under threat.