You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This collection of essays delves into some of the strangest and most profound aspects of the psychedelic experience, such as seeing the self as an illusion, feelings of deep insight, the sublime (fear mixed with wonder), encounters with DMT entities, déjà vu, and existential joy. Drawing on research and theories from a variety of disciplines, Sam Woolfe reflects on the ways that altered states may inform our understanding of consciousness, the self, and reality. Particular attention is paid to the philosophy of psychedelics, with the aim of clarifying altered states through the lenses of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, aesthetics, existentialism, and Buddhism. In these essays, Woolfe balances open-mindedness with a critical and sceptical perspective - he believes that this approach is necessary when examining psychedelic consciousness.
None
“We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”
In both clinical and informal settings, psychedelics users often report they have undergone something profound and even life-altering. Yet there persists a confounding inability to articulate just what has been imparted. Informed by multidisciplinary emerging research, this book provides an account of the specifically educational aspects of psychedelics and how they can render us ready to learn. Drawing from indigenous peoples worldwide who typically revere these substances as "plant teachers" and from canonical thinkers in the western tradition such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Heidegger, the author proposes an original set of categories through which to understand the educational capabilities of "entheogens" (psychedelics with visionary qualities). It emerges that entheogens' real power lies not in destabilizing and decentering—"turning on and dropping out"—but as powerful aids in restoring and reenchanting our shared worlds.
A washer and dryer provide gateways to higher levels of reality and psychedelic weirdness for a group of neighbourhood children.
A wonderful novel and perfect book club choice, The Right Stuff is a wildly vivid and entertaining chronicle of America's early space programme. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY US ASTRONAUT SCOTT KELLY 'What is it,' asks Tom Wolfe, 'that makes a man willing to sit on top of an enormous Roman Candle...and wait for someone to light the fuse?' Arrogance? Stupidity? Courage? Or, simply, that quality we call 'the right stuff'? A monument to the men who battled to beat the Russians into space, The Right Stuff is a voyage into the mythology of the American space programme, and a dizzying dive into the sweat, fear, beauty and danger of being on the white-hot edge of history in the making. 'Tom Wolfe at his very best... Learned, cheeky, risky, touching, tough, compassionate, nostalgic, worshipful, jingoistic...The Right Stuff is superb' New York Times Book Review
"Report of the Dominion fishery commission on the fisheries of the province of Ontario, 1893", issued as vol. 26, no. 7, supplement.
Fractal dynamics provide an unparalleled tool for understanding the evolution of natural complexity throughout physical, biological, and psychological realms. This book’s conceptual framework helps to reconcile several persistent dichotomies in the natural sciences, including mind-brain, linear-nonlinear, subjective-objective, and even personal-transpersonal processes. A fractal approach is especially useful when applied to recursive processes of consciousness, both within their ordinary and anomalous manifestations. This novel way to study the interconnection of seemingly divided wholes encompasses multiple dimensions of experience and being. It brings together experts in diverse fields—neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, physicists, physiologists, psychoanalysts, mathematicians, and professors of religion and music composition—to demonstrate the value of fractals as model, method, and metaphor within psychology and related social and physical sciences. The result is a new perspective for understanding what has often been dismissed as too subjective, idiosyncratic, and ineffably beyond the scope of science, bringing these areas back into a natural-scientific framework.