For more than sixty years, Huston Smith has not only written and taught about the world’s religions, he has lived them. This Reader presents a rich selection of Smith’s writings, covering six decades of inquiry and exploration, and ranging from scholarship to memoir. Over his long academic career, Smith’s tireless enthusiasm for religious ideas has offered readers both in and outside the academy a fresh understanding of what religion is and what makes it meaningful. The Huston Smith Reader offers a comprehensive guide to understanding religion and spirituality as well as a memorable record of Huston Smith’s lifelong endeavor to enrich the inner lives of his fellow humans.

The art of living the "good life" requires skilful attunement to the lovely presences in everyday life. Lodged in a psychoanalytic sensibility, and drawing from ancient and modern religious and spiritual wisdom, this book provides the details, conceptual structures, and inner meanings of a number of easily accessible, everyday activities, including gardening, sport, drinking coffee, storytelling, and listening to music. It also suggests how to best engage these activities, to consecrate the ordinary in a way that points to experiential transcendence, or what the author calls "glimpsing immortality", a core component of the art of living the "good life".

Robert Crumb (b. 1943) read widely and deeply a long roster of authors including Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as religious classics including biblical, Buddhist, Hindu, and Gnostic texts. Crumb’s genius, according to author David Stephen Calonne, lies in his ability to absorb a variety of literary, artistic, and spiritual traditions and incorporate them within an original, American mode of discourse that seeks to reveal his personal search for the meaning of life. R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self contains six chapters that chart Crumb’s intellectual trajectory and explore the recurring philosophical themes that permeate his depictions of literary and biographical works and the ways he responds to them through innovative, dazzling compositional techniques. Calonne explores the ways Crumb develops concepts of solitude, despair, desire, and conflict as aspects of the quest for self in his engagement with the book of Genesis and works by Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Beats, Charles Bukowski, and Philip K. Dick, as well as Crumb’s illustrations of biographies of musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton. Calonne demonstrates how Crumb’s love for literature led him to attempt an extremely faithful rendering of the texts he admired while at the same time highlighting for his readers the particular hidden philosophical meanings he found most significant in his own autobiographical quest for identity and his authentic self.

In Bob Dylan: Prophet Without God, Jeffrey Edward Green defends the idea of Bob Dylan as a modern-day prophet, albeit a prophet of an unprecedented type. Placing Dylan into conversation with a wide array of intellectual figures, Green argues that Dylan is not a prophet of salvation, but rather a "prophet without God." Dylan speaks to the ideals that have animated earlier prophets but breaks from past tradition by testifying to the conflicts between these ideals, leading him to make novel contributions to the meaning of self-reliance, the quest for rapprochement between the religious and non-religious, and the problem of how ordinary people might operate in a fallen political world.

Concerned with scholarly, popular, and religious backdrops that understand the connection between psychedelics and mystical experiences to be devoid of moral concerns and ethical dimensions—a position supported empirically by the rise of acid fascism and psychedelic cults by the late 1960s—Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America traces the development of sixties psychedelic mysticism from the deconditioned mind and perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley, to the sacramental ethics of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, to the altruistic religiosity practiced by Stephen Gaskin and The Farm. Building directly off the pioneering psychedelic writing of Huxley, these psychedelic mystics understood the height of psychedelic consciousness as an existential awareness of unitive oneness, a position that offered worldly alternatives to the maladies associated with the postwar moment (e.g., vapid consumerism and materialism, lifeless conformity, unremitting racism, heightened militarism). In opening a doorway to a common world, Morgan Shipley locates how psychedelics challenged the coherency of Western modernity by fundamentally reorienting postwar society away from neoliberal ideologies and toward a sacred understanding of reality defined by mutual coexistence and responsible interdependence. In 1960s America, psychedelics catalyzed a religious awakening defined by compassion, expressed through altruism, and actualized in projects that sought to ameliorate the conditions of the least advantaged among us. In the exact moments that historians and cultural critics often locate as signaling the death knell of the counterculture, Gaskin and The Farm emerged, not as a response to the perceived failures of the hippies, nor as an alternative to sixties politicos, but in an effort to fulfill the religious obligation to help teach the world how to live more harmoniously. Today, as we continue to confront issues of socioeconomic inequality, entrenched differences, widespread violence, and the limits of religious pluralism, Psychedelic Mysticism serves as a timely reminder of how religion in America can operate as a tool for destabilization and as a means to actively reimagine the very basis of how people relate—such a legacy can aid in our own efforts to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and compassionate world.

The Light Within: My Life Journey as a Social Entrepreneur is the life story of a successful social entrepreneur and what it means to follow your bliss. The Light Within traces the maturation of a change-maker’s identity from birth through retirement and the evolution of his thinking and engagement in large-scale systems change. It outlines his real-world experiences of working with government, business, and other power brokers, with insights on difference making and life itself.

The first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of major Beat authors.

The definitive story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, acclaimed today as one of the greatest films ever made, and of director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke—“a tremendous explication of a tremendous film….Breathtaking” (The Washington Post). Fifty years ago a strikingly original film had its premiere. Still acclaimed as one of the most remarkable and important motion pictures ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey depicted the first contacts between humanity and extraterrestrial intelligence. The movie was the product of a singular collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and science fiction visionary Arthur C. Clarke. Fresh off the success of his cold war satire Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick wanted to make the first truly first-rate science fiction film. Drawing from Clarke’s ideas and with one of the author’s short stories as the initial inspiration, their bold vision benefited from pioneering special effects that still look extraordinary today, even in an age of computer-generated images. In Space Odyssey, author, artist, and award-winning filmmaker Michael Benson “delivers expert inside stuff” (San Francisco Chronicle) from his extensive research of Kubrick’s and Clarke’s archives. He has had the cooperation of Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, and interviewed most of the key people still alive who worked on the film. Drawing also from other previously unpublished interviews, Space Odyssey provides a 360-degree view of the film from its genesis to its legacy, including many previously untold stories. And it features dozens of photos from the making of the film, most never previously published. “At last! The dense, intense, detailed, and authoritative saga of the making of the greatest motion picture I’ve ever seen…Michael Benson has done the Cosmos a great service” (Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks).

THE NO. 1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, NOW A MAJOR NEW NETFLIX SERIES 'Reminds us that the mind is the greatest mystery in the universe' Yuval Noah Harari, Guardian, Books of the Year Could psychedelic drugs change our worldview? One of America's most admired writers takes us on a mind-altering journey to the frontiers of human consciousness When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forwardas a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinatedby the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness. 'His approach is steeped in honesty and self-awareness. His cause is just, his thinking is clear, and his writing is compelling' - Washington Post 'An easy-going humane generosity ... mischievous self-regard ... as if Henry David Thoreau had had an encounter with Woody Allen and never been quite the same since' - Simon Schama

Adult Development applies the concept of complex postformal thought in order to explore how certain cognitive processes support individuals' close relationships such that those relationships grow stronger and richer over time.