‘There is a physical world, which we all accept as real, but there is also a spiritual world, which interpenetrates this material world and is its cause and foundation. Between these two worlds exists a threshold that can be felt, seen clairvoyantly, traversed and passed through by anyone with a real desire to do so... At this threshold there is a guardian, whose task is to stop humans from passing across it unprepared...’ – From the Introduction Based on first-hand knowledge, Are Thoresen offers insights into the meaning of the threshold to the spiritual world. He describes his own experiences in encountering this threshold and going beyond it. But there are many thresholds to the spiritual world, he says, and many ways to pass them – as there are many aspects to the ‘guardian of the threshold’ and versions of the so-called ‘animals at the threshold’. The worlds beyond, too, have a variety of different constructions – or, as the Bible says: ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’. The author describes the methods and techniques for opening the spiritual sense organs required to cross the threshold, and clarifies the differences between Imagination (seeing spiritual ‘pictures’), Inspiration (understanding those pictures) and Intuition (living ‘inside’ the spiritual reality). Structuring the book on his own biography, Thoresen conveys many of the lessons he has learnt through decades of familiarity with the invisible dimensions. However, he warns that there is only one good reason to attempt to cross the threshold, and that is to serve God and humanity in the name of love. If we do it out of curiosity, or to enhance our personal development, it would be better not to try.

What happens when we cross a significant boundary? We step into an unsettling in-between zone, where we have to abandon accepted structures and truths. Yet this liminal zone can also open up possibilities for inner transformation, leading to the birth of a new sense of fellowship. Since 1994, South Africans have been experiencing the anxieties of old structures breaking down and of new ones being built - a process that South African authors have been powerfully representing and questioning. Beyond the Threshold analyzes the transformative powers of liminal states and hybridizing processes in literature. Its authors discuss a wide range of intriguing liminal characters, dangerous liminal situations, and unique transformations in recent books mainly from South Africa. These books tell the compelling stories of marginal characters, giving their stories moral authority while exploring their transformative possibilities.

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. In any discipline, there are certain concepts – the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ – whose acquisition is akin to passing through a portal. Learners enter new conceptual (and often affective) territory. Previously inaccessible ways of thinking or practising come into view, without which they cannot progress, and which offer a transformed internal view of subject landscape, or even world view. These conceptual gateways are integrative, exposing the previously hidden interrelatedness of ideas, and are irreversible. However they frequently present troublesome knowledge and are often points at which students become stuck. Difficulty in understanding may leave the learner in a ‘liminal’ state of transition, a ‘betwixt and between’ space of knowing and not knowing, where understanding can approximate to a form of mimicry. Learners navigating such spaces report a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, anxiety, even chaos. The liminal space may equally be one of awe and wonderment. Thresholds research identifies these spaces as key transformational points, crucial to the learner’s development but where they can oscillate and remain for considerable periods. These spaces require not only conceptual but ontological and discursive shifts. This volume, the fourth in a tetralogy on Threshold Concepts, discusses student experiences, and the curriculum interventions of their teachers, in a range of disciplines and professional practices including medicine, law, engineering, architecture and military education. Cover image: Detail from ‘Eve offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden and the serpent’ c.1520–25. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved.

Waldenfels (philosophy, Ruhr U., Bochum, Germany) explores the problem of the nature of order after the loss of the idea of a universal or fundamental order. He combines phenomenological methodology with recent work on the theory of order, normativity, dialogue, structuralism, and Gestalt theory. His attitude is more optimistic than deconstructionism and many other modern approaches. Originally published as Ordnung in Zwilicht by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfort am Main, in 1987. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Immersion is the new orthodoxy. Within the production, curation and critique of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which is inherent yet strengthened through dubious metaphysical oppositions to the visual. Yet even within the visual arts an acoustic condition grounded in Marshall McLuhan's metaphorical notion of acoustic space underwrites predispositions towards immersion. This broad conception of an acoustic condition in contemporary art identifies the envelopment of audiences and spectators who no longer perceive from a distance but immanently experience immersive artworks and environments. Immanence and Immersion takes a critical approach to the figures of immersion and interiority describing an acoustic condition in contemporary art. It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the marginalisation and disempowerment of practices and discourses concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological, correlational and mystical positions that support the predominance of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a stronger distinction between the often confused concepts of immersion and the immanence might serve as a means of breaking with the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy within the sonic arts.

Over the last decade the notion of ‘threshold concepts’ has proved influential around the world as a powerful means of exploring and discussing the key points of transformation that students experience in their higher education courses and the ‘troublesome knowledge’ that these often present.

In Thresholds, Marcel Cobussen rethinks the relationship between music and spirituality. The book presents an idea of spirituality in and through music that counters strategies of exclusion and mastering of alterity and connects it to wandering, erring, and roving. Cobussen regards spirituality as a (non)concept that escapes categorization, classification, and linguistic descriptions. Spirituality is a-topological, non-discursive and a manifestation of 'otherness'. And it is precisely music (or better: listening to music) that induces these thoughts. By carefully encountering, analysing, and evaluating certain examples from classical, jazz, pop and world music it is possible to detach spirituality from concepts of otherworldliness and transcendentalism.

Econophysics research studies, which apply methods developed by physicists to solve problems in economics, enable you to deepen your understanding of what financial systems are and how they operate. Articles in this book identify and explain the statistical behavior of the underlying networks in trading, banking, and stock markets as well as other financial systems. Authors also debate the latest issues arising from these econophysics studies.

This is a compelling exploration of the transformative power of art education through the personal journeys of several students. The book provides a complex theoretical explanation and insight that inspires personal reflection upon art pedagogy.

This book analyses the development of Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour.