Commune with these thirty-four unique stories of the moment of enlightenment from ancient and modern masters, and find oneness and absolute freedom.From the Buddha's experience under the Bodhi tree to Eckhart Tolle's realization of the "power of now," Mystics, Masters, Saints, and Sages brings together stories and writings on moments of spiritual enlightenment by ancient and modern masters. With selections from religious traditions including Christianity, I...

Mystics, Masters, Saints, and Sages is a compilation of more than thirty unique stories in the lives of ancient and modern saints and masters—from the Buddha to Rumi, from St. John of the Cross to Eckhart Tolle. Regardless of religious traditions, these stories focus on moments of profound spiritual enlightenment. With selections from religious traditions including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Bahá'i, and Sufism, this collection provides a broad spectrum of sp...

Why does the Bible depict a world in which humans, with surprising regularity, encounter the divine—wrestling an angel, addressing a burning bush, issuing forth prophecy without any choice in the matter? These stories spoke very differently to their original audience than they do to us, and they reflect a radically distinct understanding of reality and the human mind. Yet over the course of the thousand-year Biblical Era, encounters with God changed dramatically. As James Kugel argues, thi...

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) is one of the most beloved of the Catholic saints. In 1562, during the era of the Spanish Inquisition, Teresa sat down to write an account of the mystical experiences for which she had become famous. The result was this book, one of the great classics of spiritual autobiography. With this fresh translation of The Book of My Life, Mirabai Starr brings the inimitable Spanish mystic to life for a new generation, with contemporary English that mirrors Teres...

abc

Discover your unique pathFor thousands of years, practitioners of shamanism have found healing and wisdom by connecting to their own spirits and the spirit that lives in all things. Shamanism can be practiced by anyone. Wherever we are, the powers within theweb of life and the keys to our personal evolution are available. In these pages, longtime shamanic practitioner and intuitive consultant Mara Bishop introduces the simple yet profound method of shamanic journeying.

Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody—it was supposed to be an answer to the dreams of Muslims and Hindus who had been ruled by the British for centuries. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's protégé and the political leader of India, believed that Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand. But in August 1946, exactly a year before Independence, Calcutta erupted in str...

Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, the author, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, she describes her time in the barn as well as an extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France.

There's a precise moment that falls between working enough hours to be productive and working too many hours, yielding a diminishing marginal return. The difference between the person able to master this and most Americans that fail miserably at it is quality of life! If one continues to work past this moment, a negative return will ensue, and that negative return produces guilt. It lowers the amount of time for recreational activities and spending time with family.An alarming 39% ...

A “profound and inspiring” collection of Indigenous wisdom for “anyone wanting the healing of self, society, and of our shared planet” (Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma).Penobscot leader, lawyer, and activist Sherri Mitchell offers enduring lessons rooted in powerful First Nations cosmologies and timeless universal insights. She speaks directly into the crises of our time—environmental injustice, colonial extraction, and profound di...

A historical tour de force that demolishes the myths and taboos that have surrounded Jewish and Israeli history, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a new account of both that demands to be reckoned with. Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland?Shlomo Sand argues that mo...

Powerful and riveting, this Newbery Honor–winning narrative describes the illness known as yellow fever, the toll it took on the nation’s capital—and the eventual triumph over the disease.Long before Covid and the West Nile virus, yellow fever was a medical mystery that forced thousands in Philadelphia, the nation’s temporary capital, to flee and brought the workings of the federal government to a virtual halt. An American Plague is a riveting account of t...