First Enlightenment

A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the...

What is enlightenment? Is it a myth or is it real? On The Science of Enlightenment, you will learn that the liberated state is as real as the sensations you are having right now. For it is through the investigation of your own thoughts and feelings that you can awaken to clear insight and a...

Angeline Sims is no shrinking violet. She’s tough, opinionated, bossy, and she’s got a bone to pick with nearly everyone in her life. Set in the fictitious Eastern North Carolina small town of Shelbington, Angeline has been given a terminal diagnosis, with mere months left to live. Upon learning of this news, her adult children and grandchildren come home for one last visit.

Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects.

From a spiritual master unlike any, a spiritual masterpiece like no other. AUTHOR, TEACHER AND SPIRITUAL MASTER Jed McKenna tells it like it's never been told before. A true American original, Jed succeeds where countless others have failed by reducing this highest of attainments — Spiritual Enlightenment — to the simplest of terms. Effectively demystifying the mystical, Jed astonishes the reader not by adding to the world's collected spiritual wisdom, but by taking the spirituality out of spiritual enlightenment. Never before has this elusive topic been treated in so engaging and ...

In England in the 1700s, a woman who was an intellectual, spoke out, or wrote professionally was considered unnatural. After all, as the wisdom of the era dictated, a clever woman—if there were such a thing—would never make a good wife. But a circle of women called the Bluestockings did something extraordinary: Coming together in glittering salons to discuss and debate as intellectual equals with men, they fought for women to be educated and to have a public role in society. In this intimate and revelatory history, Susannah Gibson delves into the lives of these pioneering women.

For decades, one of the most engaging teachers of our time has illuminated the many dimensions of awakening - but solely at his live retreats and on audio recordings. Now, with The Science of Enlightenment, Shinzen Young brings to listeners an uncommonly lucid guide to mindfulness meditation for the first time: how it works and how to use it to enhance your cognitive capacities, your kindness and connection with the world, and the richness of all your experiences. As thousands of his students and listeners will confirm, Shinzen is like no other teacher you’ve ever encountered.

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Telegraph, Washington Post, The New Yorker. LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE. “Like A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Enlightenment is a baroque, genre-bending novel of ideas, ghosts and hidden histories. A richly layered epic....a heartfelt paean to the consolations of...

This course is not to be treated as a novel and listened to in a week or a few weeks. Each lesson should be heard and heard again until it becomes second nature, only then should you move onto the next lesson. If you fail it is not the fault of the author or the course, it is your fault for not applying and utilizing the exercise and directions in each lesson. The author spent over 25 years and interviewed over 16,000 in the development of this course. You will not find even a semblance of this focus and determination in today's world.

The First Principle: Unlock the Hidden Power Behind All Creation What if everything you’ve ever been told about reality was only part of the story? What if the true power to create wealth, love, health, and happiness has always been within you—waiting to be awakened? The First Principle is a ground-breaking spiritual manifesto that reveals the core truth beneath all manifestation teachings, religious traditions, and metaphysical systems: the universe is mental, and your consciousness is the creative force behind everything. In this thought-provoking and deeply transformative book, Rand ...

Long have the Lumineth Realm-lords held themselves aloof from the troubles of the Mortal Realms. But now, as Nagash asserts his dominion over the living and the dead, the Lumineth must strike back. For Carreth Y’gethin, a legendary warrior and powerful Stonemage, the war against Nagash is merely a distraction from the Lumineth’s true purpose - to hone their spiritual equilibrium and prevent their realm falling back into the madness that once plagued it. But when Carreth’s sister is horrifically killed fighting the undead, he finds himself inexorably drawn back into the struggle.

A newer, expanded Second Edition is now available.** Click the author name or search title to find it. https://a.co/d/32uURs1 🎙️ "From Consumer of Information to Curator of Knowledge" – A Philosophical and Practical Manifesto Hello, fellow seekers of understanding. We are swimming in information. Every day, we're bombarded by headlines, tweets, videos, memes, emails, notifications, ads — a never-ending stream of digital noise. And for a while, we were content to just consume it all. Passively. Endlessly. Mindlessly. But that’s no longer enough. The next leap — the one that ...

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world. Liberty and equality. Human rights. Freedom of thought and expression. Belief in reason and progress. The value of scientific inquiry. These are just some of the ideas that were conceived and developed during the Enlightenment, and which changed forever the intellectual landscape of the Western world.

The Bible teaches a divine law and how you can make it work. It teaches two things: Obedience to the law brings reward; disobedience to the law brings punishment. The Good Book does not say that you have to wait until after death to receive a reward. What people want is health, happiness, and prosperity here and now on this Earth, not a promise of something after they are dead. This is a practical religion, and The Magic Word, Jehovah, will teach you how to get what you need, here and now!

A global history of free speech, from the ancient world to today Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the...

Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.

The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History provides a critical historical analysis of the Enlightenment in England, Scotland, France, Germany, and the United States from c. 1650 to the present. It argues that the degree of commonality between social and intellectual movements in each—and, more broadly, between the five societies—has been overstated for polemical purposes. Clark shows that the concept of 'the Enlightenment' was not widely adopted in those societies until the mid-twentieth century; indeed, that it was unknown in the eighteenth.

The End of Enlightenment offers a radical re-evaluation of one of the most important moments in human history. Tracing around the world the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians and polemicists, historian Richard Whatmore argues that, for figures as diverse as David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft, the Enlightenment was a profound failure. They had strived to replace superstition with reason, fanaticism with toleration, but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess and the continued growth of violent empire.

From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world. Using reason as its core value, the Enlightenment believed that progress and the betterment of the human condition was inevitable.