"I laughed my head off!" - Marie Antoinette "Utterly sacrilegious! Whens Book Two?" - Sister Mary BEYOND ISNESS is CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD - if channeled through Tom Robbins. A profound but wacky perspective that demystifies our dark side. Spiced by odysseys in Bali, the Inner World, the Pleiades, and the Chinese takeaway on Percy Street, this eclectic smorgasbord is all chucked in the wok and stir-fried with a pinch of sex, a dash of humour, and a liberal sprinkling of spirituality.

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seem obvious or right at all—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.

A compendium of the Advaitic songs and teachings from the Indian guru known by his disciples as Papaji. A collection of spontaneous “satsangs,” or truths, spoken from Sri H. W. L. Poonja’s experience of the highest and yet simplest truth: that we are pure love and consciousness, the totality of existence. Reveals thousands of ways to help us inquire into who we really are, to bring our awareness into the infinity of the moment, and surrender to the wisdom of our Truth.

There are no beings, there are only divine thoughts that appear as beings. Shapes constantly transform, manifest, and dissolve, while essential being is forever. Essential Being is the One Being, the that permeates the Cosmos. No being was ever created by anyone, for being is forever in the past, present and future. Being is One. The Ocean of being permeates all beings. Brahma, the Creator is not needed in an eternal cosmos. Vishnu, the Preserver is not needed in an ever transforming cosmos Shiva, the Destroyer is not possible in an eternal cosmos, for all things transform into other things. Although shapes appear and dissolve forever, being never dies nor is being destroyed.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book collects the posts of a blog that Chris Clarke maintained from summer 2016 until his death in March 2019, in which he set out to explore the themes of 'Wisdom' and 'Isness'. What he meant by 'isness' is the theme that is expanded throughout the book, but a thing's isness is the essence of what it is for itself. As his health failed, what became very profound about these reflections is the way he reflected on each moment and experience for itself, searching deeply for the isness of each moment with no quest for a connecting narrative.

Meister Eckhart on Divine Knowledge is not only the most profound study of the core theological and philosophical themes of Christianity’s greatest mystic ever written. It is also the greatest exegesis of Christian non-dualism ever published. Of all Christian mystical teachings, those of the Dominican theologian Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328) are increasingly recognized as the most compatible with the non-dualistic traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. Based on the author’s three decades of formal study and spiritual practice, this book offers a clear path to understanding the breadth and depth of Eckhart’s unique achievement. C.F. Kelley argues that the fundamental principle that elevates Eckhart above all other Western mystics, and links him to Eastern spiritual approaches, is his insistence that we “think principally” in divinis—that is, from within the mind or orientation of the Godhead or “Divine Knowledge” itself. “What is here presented to the reader supersedes all former interpretations of Eckhart’s teaching. It refuses to ignore what he precisely and repeatedly says cannot be ignored, that is, his exposition of the doctrine of Divine Knowledge in terms of the highest and most essential of all possible considerations.” —C.F. Kelley, from the Preface

The task before us, in a nutshell, my fellow humans, is the clear and present danger of finding out, who we really are. That is the impossible feat I have given this poor creature, V. Virom, and each of us with him. The proof of the pasta is always in the tasting. So says the author at the beginning of his book as he invites the reader on a detective story, offering a beautifully written book with a rather remarkable synthesis of modern thinking, one that builds from the ground of existence alone, to a spirituality both secular and sacred. That single paragraph on the cover of the book says what needs to be said it seems to me. When I thought about this further and longer requested description of the book for the web site, T. S. Eliot came to mind. I am referring to the time when he was asked what his poem Prufrock was about and kindly replied, Read the poem. I do think he made a valid point, because asking for a description of a book is the same when you think about it. Shouldnt a person rather be reading the book itself? At the same time, I certainly can understand a person wanting to get a feel for the book before purchasing it, and since you dont have the book to handle and page through to do that (which I myself always do to see if there is going to be a love affair between the book and me), I will give the viewer some of the Overture at the beginning of my book as an overture here as well, hopefully to help accomplish the tangential absence. Call it virtual foreplay if you want. First Review From the Free Venice Beachhead News June 2004 Book Review QUEST: A SEARCH FOR A SOUL MODERNKIND, by Vincent Coppola Reviewed by Steve Goldman (a former editor for Encyclopedia Britannica) With great passion, yet without a scintilla of mawkish sentimentality, Coppola here makes the strong compelling case for love as the direct and primary implication of human consciousness. That would be laudable by itself, but these are not merely the pleasant musings of a decent well-intentioned person. This is (and it is astounding) tightly reasoned philosophy, based on acute, astute observation and profound and powerful argument. Building on Descartes (whom he explicitly reverses on the fundamental matter of proof of personal experience) and Kant, who seems indispensable to all who came after, Coppola emerges with a distinctive and compassionate American existentialism that is unlike anything heretofore. With strongly grounded links to modern cosmology, evolutionary theory and sheer phenomenology of consciousness in space/time, Coppola delivers a ringing statement of free will, so sorely needed in this era of burgeoning biological reductionist determinism. This in turn yields a ringing adduction of the ontological primacy of self, with commensurately devastating attacks on any variety of teeny-bopping reductionism, chemical, biological, physical or psychological: and as well on any religio-philosophical tradition (usually Asian), which explicitly denies or tries to eradicate the self. I myself exist, and I can love is the rigorously derived, powerfully demonstrated theorem, which is the first principal here. What is more, the revolutionary optional theology Quest proposes seems to at last settle that huge and perennial question for contemporary times. Additionally and astonishingly, and with philosophical deftness and gracious style, Coppolas secular Christology evinces sacred humanitarian values, again so needed in this era. Coppola is a highly trained professional philosopher, a prodigiously well-read and deeply thoughtful theorist and analyst, whose similarity to the preponderant mentality in his field is only superficial. That is because Vincent (V. Virom) is a philosopher in the all but abandoned grand tr